I find flash-based ads extremely frustrating (and that's why I installed flashblock). Many of my friends did the same, so I guess that besides annoying, they are not effective.
Since I managed to run GNU/Linux properly, I thought that software can also be good. Grewing I started to put my hands in software development, and now I'm aware that everything sucks. I realized this by myself, than I read this article and ...well, I totally agree.
There's no good software out there. There's just software that sucks less.
Good point. Also how can you measure this speed when talking about C? First of all there's not only one single implementation of the compiler, and second thing for available architecture you may have different performances basing on the quality of the backend...
Awesome... a professor told me about this too... I was wondering why this story appeared only today in ycombinator, since this is an old stuff... not so weird: I've noticed that the mail has been sent in 1997... :)