Dec. 13, 2006, SAN FRANCISCO, CA — An unexpected outage at social news site Reddit today is having unintended consequences. At tech companies around the world, morning productivity has surged as geeks habituated to a morning of reddit-inspired web browsing find themselves utterly undistracted, with nothing to do but their jobs.

At Renesys, a company that delivers Internet Intelligence data for competitive intelligence, a hush has fallen over the virtual office. Normally, an IRC (chat) session used by employees echoes reddit, as individuals arrive for work and– choosing the instant reward of procrastination over advancing their personal and corporate success– call out links to wacky videos, stories of technical feats, and pictures of a VW Beetle with a jet engine. Without the fodder of reddit, however, this gang of introverts is compelled to speak mostly of their work.

And how little there is to say. “There’s a big list of links on the bug tracker front page,” said programmer Don Weiden. “I guess I’ll middle-click all the interesting ones so they open in tabs… heh, here’s a good one: clicking ‘Cancel’ causes a core dump. Oh shit, I programmed that. Excuse me for an hour.”

Asked if a competitor news site such as Slashdot or Digg could supplant reddit today, reactions were mixed. “I can’t wait 10 to 14 seconds for a page to load,” said Renesys COO Todd Underwood about Digg, which has a reputation of suffering poor performance due to its popularity. “I’d rather spend 90 seconds bitching about it in IRC.” For software developer BJ Premore, however, the downtime is scarcely an issue. “In all honestly, I check reddit every day or two, and hadn’t noticed the outage yet,” he wrote. BJ is regarded as one of Renesys’ most efficient workers.

EMPLOYEES SHARE THEIR LOSS

United by the disappointment of repeated, unsuccessful reload attempts, workers attempted to cope with their loss by analyzing it. “Look at the dns right now,” typed Underwood. “There are not even any NS records for the reddit.com zone on the servers pointed to by the authoritative .com servers. It’s going to be a long day.”

“I’m shaking a little,” added Premore.

Though reddit continues to be inaccessible as noon approaches, workers are
confident a solution will be found. “In the worst case, it wouldn’t take long to program a brand new reddit,” said Weiden. “I mean, I’ve been dying for an excuse to learn Erlang.”

Renesys is a real company where this blog’s author works. Most– but not all– of the employees quoted here are real, too.

Kudos to the MIT student who wrote the Technology Review's order processing system at 4am after finishing a monster programming project.

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Found in the comments on a post about choosing a college by Philip Greenspun:

Ersatz intellectuals in fields other than biology read The Selfish Gene or equivalent popular biology book and imagine biological research as witty British academes exchanging verbal jabs, unlocking the mysteries of life, and receiving millions of royalty pounds from their cloned maize patents . In reality biology is a windowless lab above the food court in Longwood, with 3 chinese guys, an indian, and a russian, packed into a 6×8 space, trying to do just enough work so that they don't lose funding and get deported. One autistic asian girl does all the wet lab for the entire department and a team of shell-shocked dot com losers are responsible for absorbing all the grant money still being allocated to various dead-end "informatics" programmes. The female doctoral candidates all decide to abandon ship and go to optometry school or manage a pet shop after their thesis defense whilst the male PhDs seem more inclined to waste even more life with endless journal clubs, data sharing, journal sharing, data clubs, and so forth for the rest of $20K/yr post-doc eternity.

Medical school is a (not much) duller , but far more fiscally sensible. If you get bored making $300K a year prescribing acne cream, you could always use your income to set up a lab in your basement. Even post docs have to figure out how to pay rent, so a lot of prime equipment ends up on ebay.

comment by half empty ⋅ 12/24/04; 12:28:44 AM

If you're under 60 and have problems mustering sufficient bitterness
in a variety of social situations, a Ph.D. may be the way to go.

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I think I saw this site's mention of frassle a couple of months ago, but I didn't see Google's goofy attempt at translation:

The egg-laying woolly milch sow wants to be Frassle this service falls therefore here rather from the row. Beside a feed Aggregator (similar as Bloglines) a Blog and a link collection (with RSS feed) are ordered for free organization. The project still is in the alpha stage.

What is this, Google funny mistakes day or something?

I've been working on frassle a lot. One of the major things I need to wrap up is a new backend for the aggregator. This sounds important but isn't much fun; I basically just want to do the bare minimum needed to make it work. I was going to work on it tonight but instead I procrastinated. Here's how I summed it up in an IM conversation:

It's like I went and painted racing stripes on my car instead of replacing a cracked exhaust manifold. Sure, a cracked exhaust manifold means you are more likely to die from carbon monoxide poisoning, but who wants to spend an evening replacing an exhaust manifold when you could have *racing stripes*!?

Dedicated frassle fans, see if you can pick out the racing stripes in alpha 8 when it is released in the next few days!

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An excellent parody to the tune of American Pie.

Bye, Bye Mr. CIO-Guy, Gonna outsource every resource `til the business runs dry.

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Features buried much deeper
Average menu depth has been increased to 7.4/item across the entire Office 2003 line making sure you don't accidentally select something you didn't want to.

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Here's a tip: If the building you are currently in is burning to the ground, go find the person with NADD on your floor. Not only will they know where the fire escape is, they'll probably have some helpful tips about how to avoid smoke inhalation as well likely probabilities regarding the likelihood you'll survive. How is it this Jr. Software Engineer knows all this? Who knows, maybe he read it on a weblog two years ago. Perhaps a close virtual friend of his in New York is a fire fighter. Does it matter? He may save your life or, better yet, keep you well informed with useless facts before you are burnt to a crisp.

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Some internet trends are still funny a year later. Like when they show up in the "real world"…

Update: this is part of a rather hilarious series of hacks.