Hacker News Reader

cygwin98on Water seems to flow freely on Mars

The pdf was a fun read. Thanks. Don't know where did you get the figure of 35kg though. The article talked about a payload of 12kg if the balloon is filled with NH3. My estimation is that the payload can be increased to about 60kg if hydrogen is used instead, assuming the Mars does have plenty of water. With a bit of more creativity, that figure can be improved even further.

cygwin98on Water seems to flow freely on Mars

Thanks for the detailed explanation, very informative. Could a big Zeppelin-like airship filled with hydrogen make more sense on Mars?

cygwin98on Water seems to flow freely on Mars

The pressure on the surface of Mars (0.6 kilopascals or 0.087 psi) is about one tenth of the pressure at the height of 20KM from surface of Earth (Armstrong limit 6.25 kilopascals or 0.906 psi). Of course, the structure of the "Martian" plane has to be designed accordingly. But definitely not impossible though.

cygwin98on Water seems to flow freely on Mars

Why not send a drone plane together with the Curiosity? It sounds more efficient doing exploration from sky than land. I get that the weather could be a problem. Anyway, just food for thought.

cygwin98on First, Let's Fire All The Managers

Umm, my take is that developers are taking over the world, in term of duties. We don't need BA, since we do agile development and talk directly to customers. We don't need DBA now that we have ORM and NOSQL. We don't need sys-admin/sysops because we are devops now. Now, no managers. Next, no VC or no boss?

cygwin98on China lands Jade Rabbit robot rover on Moon

For a second, I thought you're talking about THE Armstrong who landed on the Moon. I have to blame the context of the conversation here.

cygwin98on China lands Jade Rabbit robot rover on Moon

That's understandable. You know even the fact that America's moon-landing has been challenged for a long while. I was hoping China to land their rover to exactly where Armstrong landed on the Moon. Supposedly, the USA flag and the rover should be still there, which would make a conclusion and silence the debate.

cygwin98on The Database Administrator is dead

Most DBAs these days are grown internally from developers or system administrators who decide to (or are forced to) specialize while on the job.

I agree with you on above statement. Though my conclusion is different from yours. I think in the future the line among DBA/SysAdmin/Developers will become even more blurred , developers will be trained/required to take over more and more work from DBA and sysadmin (DevOps anyone?); consequently, the demand for dedicated roles such as DBA and sysadmins will diminish. Hope I am wrong though.

cygwin98on Another Scala rant on HN

If you spent some time to learn Scala and tried it on a project, and still prefer using Clojure, I'll believe you. if you say you prefer Scala over Java, I will force myself to respect you and avoid being accused of an ad hominem attack :)

Thanks for the detailed reply. You're one of the HNers whose opinions I highly respect. Wish HN had the following features like Twitter.

My understanding of Scala is very superficial. So my opinion is obviously very biased at this moment. I've been immersing myself in Clojure and ClojureScript on and off for most of this year. Learning Scala will be on my todo list for the new year. Hope I will have something to share then. I may change my opinion though, should the new version of Scala rectify most of the flaws, given the fact that Rod Johnson joined TypeSafe, who tends to have the gift to simplify complexities.

And no, I don't like Java either and consider that it's reasonable that the community needs a more expressive language on JVM and leave Java as a supporting role to write underlying performance-critial JVM libraries just like C to the native libs.

cygwin98on Another Scala rant on HN

I think we share a similar background. I was coming from Ruby on Rails and C# background, and now am spreading into JVM via Clojure. Before C#, I did everything in C++, which I don't like. The past few years has seen a turmoil of battles on the web frontend, which caused a huge number of churning without much progress technically, totally waste of time and efforts in the web community.

Now, it seems to me that that turmoil is inching into the backend and JVM. A wrong selection of technology stack would cause a huge waste of time investment. That's why some of us stand up and say no to Scala, which has been aggressively marketed as Java++ for the past few years, and seems to gain some momentum. I personally consider that's a dangerous sign, as the objective of Scala (IMHO) is to replace Java as the mainstream industry language. With the complexity of Scala, can you imagine the average Java programmer starts to write libraries in Scala? That would be disastrous to the whole JVM eco system. We all know what happened to C++.

I personally would go with Clojure, which is at least philosophically coherent. I feel comfortable working in it. Even it may not become mainstream, I am OK with that. Life is short, be happy.

cygwin98on Another Scala rant on HN

It seems to me that what you want is a CoffeeScript for JVM, a language that is much more expressive and concise and at the same time can compile to JVM and utilize the aplenty Java libraries.

Like CoffeeScript, this language should mainly follow OOP paradigm, while allows certain kinds of FP features, such as first class functions, seq, etc. Immutability is not forced. Basically, a Scala-minus -- Scala without Haskell stuffs, and much reduced FP features.

cygwin98on Another Scala rant on HN

Basically, you're describing C++. That's the reason why I upvoted that rant post, as I share the same opinion with that author that we don't want another complex industry-grade language.

cygwin98on Why China is fixated on the Moon

This scene somehow reminds me of one of my favorite old DOS games -- Civilization I. Ａ lot of you may share the same good memory. In the game a number (up to six) of civilizations/nations compete, you control one while the computer AI takes care of the rest. The game would end should one of the two goals achieved:

1. One civilization/nation conquered/destroyed all others

2. One civilization/nation managed to assembly a spaceship and launched it to fly to the closest Solaris -- Alpha Centauri

The first goal seems easy and tempting to follow, but turns out very difficult. In the end, to win the wars over those nations that often have huge cities (20plus) and perfectly armed with numerous tanks and battleships, you often resort to nukes to take them over. In more difficult levels such as deity level, it's very likely your populous cities get nuked. After a short while, I started focusing on building spaceships instead and had a few wins and felt better that way.

In retrospect, it may reflect the believing of the designer Sid Mier's, whom I totally agree with and respect for. Following the same spirit, we as human beings might as well put our inner conflicts aside and target the space instead.

cygwin98on What I’ve learned in 5 years of running a SaaS

In a dull corporate environment, the equivalent is "No ETA yet".

cygwin98on Rails 3.2 Performance: Another Step Slower

Javascript is also a dynamically typed script language, which Google managed to make at least one order of magnitude faster with V8. It's likely same tricks can be applied to Ruby.

cygwin98on Rails 3.2 Performance: Another Step Slower

Didn't watch this video. But as far as I recalled back then, the guys at Twitter was complaining about the slowness of Rails and MRI, as Rails was not asynchronous and MRI was CPU-bound, so instead of fixing this root cause to apply the tricks from V8 to Javascript to improve Ruby，they chose the more "pragmatic" way to use Netty that is asynchronous and Scala that is way faster.

I don't accuse them of not saving the world, but Ruby and Rails lost a great opportunity to dominate the web community. If Rails were as performant as Node.js, I doubt lots of companies would change gears.

cygwin98on Rails 3.2 Performance: Another Step Slower

Twitter was in a nice position to better Ruby in terms of performance, though they chickened out and escaped to Scala.

Even Twitter went public recently and posed to challenge big guys such as Google, Facebook, they've lost my respect as a technology company.

cygwin98on Sudden Progress on Prime Number Problem Has Mathematicians Buzzing

He was a lecturer, not a professor. In universities, lecturers are considered at the bottom of the totem pole, probably even lower than those desktop support staffs as the latter are often unionized.

cygwin98on Stephen Elop said to consider selling Xbox business, killing Bing

One comment from sdrawkcab on that page seems to resonate with my opinion very well:

Microsoft is the only major technology/software company that thrives well in both the consumer and enterprise space, giving up Bing and Xbox is giving up a huge part of the consumer space, which Microsoft have said they intend to hold on to. Selling Bing and Xbox is incredibly short-sighted as well. Doing so will almost instantly guarantee that Google will dominate search and maybe even media, and I’d hate for that to happen. Google is already making some very monopolistic moves these days, and if they get more opportunity to do so, I doubt they’ll stop. The market needs options, and Microsoft’s offerings are a very good option.

cygwin98on Show HN: Open-sourcing my rejected iOS app, In-Stock

Nice app. It reminds me of http://www.refurb.me, which is to track the stock of refurbished Apple devices.

cygwin98on iPad from T-Mobile with free monthly 200MB data for life

Wish T-Mobile came over to Canada and take Wind Mobile.

cygwin98on Devops Horror Stories

Are there any open source load balancing solutions like what Amazon ELB does? Say, install the load balancer on to one or two Amazon VPS, proxy traffic to third party VPS/dedicated servers, Linode, OVH, etc. Wonder how feasible this approach is?

cygwin98on Note to recruiters

Not really. If they execute their rules faithfully and efficiently, the bad ones will be blacklisted and filtered out. That might be doable if they can program their VOIP phones and automatically block whoever violate their rules.

cygwin98on Adobe hack: At least 38 million accounts breached

Not sure if Instagram is a competitor to Adobe though, maybe over their low-end mobile apps. I was thinking of Adobe's cashcow -- Creative Suite. That could be a good niche market for C++ programmers from game companies to build their startups on.

Adobe of today is like RIMM in 2007 before the original iPhone was announced.

cygwin98on Adobe hack: At least 38 million accounts breached

PR damage control.

BTW, Adobe seems to be a vulnerable giant to be taken over. Not sure why no startups target them.

cygwin98on Why We Think GoLang Is Ready For Early Stage Startups

>We haven't really ruled out any of the common stack tech choices. They are all good in their own ways, and have their own tradeoffs - and the intention here was not to spark wars about which tool is the best.

This is way diplomatic. Though for me your article has no beef, the Pros and Cons of Go has been repeated here for so many times. I was expecting to see the v.s. stuffs, why this, why that, your thought process and experiments. Right, those are the beefs I wanted from your article but didn't find.

>I think the choice was much more of a proactive choice - we liked Go, we like the way it fitted us - good for fast iterative development upfront, good for the long term, fun to write code in and with a lot of advantages that come with the fact that it's a language designed today - with a lot of lessons learned from the past.

This is not convincing though. As much as I admire Ken Thompson and Rob Pike, I tend to agree with the perspective that Go to C is like Plan9 to Unix. Of course, I could be wrong and am glad to be corrected by insightful comparisons and opinions.

cygwin98on Why We Think GoLang Is Ready For Early Stage Startups

I would like to know the reasons why they rules out Java and the gangs on the JVM such as Scala, Clojure.

cygwin98on For modern development, Javascript is just something you need to learn

Stockholm syndrome? You have to use/write Javascript doesn't mean it isn't bad.

cygwin98on Snapchat Is Mulling Another Huge Round at a $3.5 Billion Valuation

Now I got the social piece. Thanks for the explanation.

cygwin98on Snapchat Is Mulling Another Huge Round at a $3.5 Billion Valuation

One thing I don't get Snapchat is that if I use an iPhone (Android probably has other way to do so), I can always make a screenshot whenever I open your naughty pictures, right? So what's the point even if the naughties get deleted in a few seconds, if I have a local copy anyway?

I know I don't belong to the targeted demographics, just out of curiosity.