Hacker News Reader

cygwin98on Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'

I don't know why Japan can get away with this for so long. I remember when the Chernobyl disaster happened, Soviet Union was shamed to death by all western media for years. I had high respect for the Russians for their great efforts to contain the damage. A great many of red army soldiers died when building a concrete substrate underneath the ruined reactor, which prevented the underground water from being contaminated by radioactive pollution. In contrast, the Japan government hasn't been capable to do this for the past two years, which is apparently irresponsible and shockingly incompetent.

cygwin98on On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

Sounds like communist countries used to be.

cygwin98on Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

Does it mean that we reach peak Google now?

cygwin98on The limits of Google’s openness

GOOG is the new bully.

cygwin98on The entrepreneurial adventures of a coder living in a tent in the forest

So instead of ramen profitable, we have tent profitable now.

cygwin98on Android Will Become The Most Popular App Platform within Months

Your link is broken. Here is the one that works and is print-friendly:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/192935/revisiting_andr...

cygwin98on The dying platform: .Net

It's coming, with the head of ChromeOS taking over Android now.

cygwin98on The dying platform: .Net

I always wonder if it's a better strategy for Microsoft to introduce the Windows AppStore in Windows 7 first and grow the eco-system there, just like what Apple did MacAppStore to Lion, heck, even 10.6.6 (Snow Leopard) has access to it.

Oh, well, perhaps the higher-ups in MSFT need to have a clue first.

cygwin98on 15 GB now shared between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos

No, thanks. Bring back the Reader so we can talk.

cygwin98on My last Android app sales figures and why it's still great to start a mobile app

Notification messages?

cygwin98on Flat design is great for mediocre designers like me

<rant> I thought programming community is so bad for being trend-chasing, UI designing is even worse, which is basically a fashion industry. Come on, why does everything has to be flat, it's not the DOS era in 80's, you have access to gigabytes of video memory and extremely powerful graphics cards.

Can't stand the group-thinking of designers. Where is your creativity? </rant>

cygwin98on My last Android app sales figures and why it's still great to start a mobile app

Surprisingly, that one has been making lots of money though. That fact changed my impression that Android users don't pay much for non-game apps.

cygwin98on Reddit co-founder calls out Google, Twitter, Facebook over CISPA

No problem. Maybe just me (perhaps quite some people here as well) had a high expectation over Google. I thought Google pulled off that stunt from a human right stand, rather than from simply being patriotic to the USA. GOOG has much more resources than Elon Musk to do lots of stuffs meaningful for the greater good of human being.

cygwin98on Reddit co-founder calls out Google, Twitter, Facebook over CISPA

Do you see the contradiction here? Google pulled out of China a few years ago because Chinese government was supposedly doing shits like this. Google followed its unofficial "Do not Evil" motto. That's cool. Then this time it is OK for the US to do the same?

cygwin98on How We Bootstrapped a $20K Website into a $4M/year Business

Though I would disagree on the roles and power of politicians. I appreciate your inputs and some of them are quite insightful.

cygwin98on How We Bootstrapped a $20K Website into a $4M/year Business

For me...my MBA taught me how the world works. It is surprising how few people understand how it truly works - yet they speak as if they know. For that single achievement alone, I would encourage everyone to get an MBA.

That sounds like quite a claim. Can you shed some lights on how the world works from an MBA's perspective?

cygwin98on Exposed Webcam Viewer

For those are curious about how the guy found all these webcams. Here is the answer from his FAQ:

Various techniques. A lot of cameras can be found using Google if you know which search string to use (and you have a lot of patience). I also used Shodan (a search engine created by John Matherly) to get a large number of potential webcam feeds. If you've never heard of Shodan before, I recommend watching these videos by Dan Tentler. Whilst I'm hat-tipping people, I should also give a shout-out to the /r/controllablewebcams community on reddit who helped promote this viewer.

cygwin98on The Selection of Go at Apcera

I think they a lot of developers that didn't start with front-end work find Javascript disgusting, maybe this team is in that group.

I am not a Javascript fanboy, but the syntax of GoLang is not better either.

cygwin98on Security Notice: Linode Manager Password Reset

That's lots of money nowadays.

cygwin98on Computerists

Don't disagree with what you said.

Maybe I didn't put it clear. But I wasn't referring to apprenticeship, trade union or anything relevant to them, I was simply joking about the "plumbing" factor of any computer-related jobs/roles, the majority of them are as boring as "plumbing".

cygwin98on Computerists

How about Computer Plumber, Network Plumber, System Plumber, Data Plumber?

cygwin98on Google Paid This Man $100 Million

What kind of trade secrets this guy could possess that made GOOG feel so threatened to make this offer, since nobody is indispensable, right? Care to shed some lights on this?

I know GOOG has been dominating the search market for more than a decade, does it also have the same position in the ad market?

cygwin98on The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame

Agreed on the link-bait factor. Though the perfect timing of these two stories got me think why so many great programmers go indie: if you are great at building stuff, try to be next Persson, or if you have great vision, PG will be your model. Otherwise, you're screwed.

cygwin98on The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame

How so? The GOOG exec story is about how to get rich by climbing the "Corporate Ladder", while Persson's way is to become successful by going indie and producing games people want. The interesting fact is that their wealth are comparable number-wise.

cygwin98on Google Paid This Man $100 Million

Not really. I have been curious on what kind of compensation Paul Buchheit obtained for his creation of gmail and adsense, the former being the one of the two GOOG services I depend on daily, the latter built the empire financially. I am pretty sure that that amount could be far lower than $100M, which is a very depressive fact for our programmers.

cygwin98on The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame

Compared to the other story of a $100M GOOG Exec, this is a story I really like, as a programmer.

cygwin98on Heroku 2X Dynos in Public Beta

Not so fast though. This might just be a quick fix. Any high-traffic sites might still see the same results as the routing alg is still random. Probably the guy who wrote the routing alg simulation can re-run his tests to see what kind of improvements this 2X can make.

cygwin98on Web Framework Benchmarks Round 2

The performance of Compojure was really impressive, which was almost three times as fast as play-scala. I was expecting the opposite, considering that Scala is generally a bit faster than Clojure.

cygwin98on I worked on an idea for 4 months, found out it already exists

So what? We have 7Billion people on this globe, every niche you can think of probably already has tons of folks there.

Find your unique selling point and COMPETE with them!

cygwin98on My Interview Questions for Potential Employers

I agree you do have a point. Though that's the nature of running a business: people do take days/vacations off, so prepare for that.