Hacker News Reader

edwardwon China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve

Yes, indeed. It would be very convenient to substitute an issue of double standard with of rhetoric.

edwardwon China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve

Does anyone else feel sick about a title like this as I did? A nation can't do things; a government can.

edwardwon China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article

You are such an acute observer, sir. This is the most accurate description about the matter by someone not Chinese I ever read. For that you have my respect.

edwardwon Larry Page on Charlie Rose

Goodhearted? Why this looks like merely a calculated PR move for me?

edwardwon Why I Don't Want to Learn Go

> but simple malloc/free are much faster and more predictable than what you see in GC'd languages

More predictable, very likely. Much faster, this is simply not true. E.g., quotes from an article by Brian Goetz[1]:

  The common code path for new Object() in HotSpot 1.4.2 and later is
  approximately 10 machine instructions, whereas the best performing
  malloc implementations in C require on average between 60 and 100
  instructions per call. ... "Garbage collection will never be as efficient
  as direct memory management." And, in a way, those statements are right
  -- dynamic memory management is not as fast -- it's often considerably faster.

> allocation to the stack, something that effectively ceases to exist in GC'd languages.*

Not true, either. With escape analysis, Hotspot JVM can do stack allocation. The flag of doing escape analysis is actually turned on by default now.

[1] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp09275/in...

edwardwon Why I Don't Want to Learn Go

> Maybe the big companies like Google and Facebook are approaching a new meaning of a “large codebase”.

If codebase is that large, language alone can't solve all the problems. Be it compiling time, testing time, or whatever problems large codebase may have. I guess that's exactly what Steve Yegge tried to say in his famous Platform Rant blog post.

edwardwon Poll: Do you test your code?

This is against HN guideline[1]:"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

edwardwon Python becomes a platform. Thoughts on the release of clojure-py.

What would that two books be? I'm reading the joy of clojure myself now. So far so good.

edwardwon Why I Left Google

Those are mostly irrelevant to this thread. Except as a matter of fact I was an employee. A googler, you say.

edwardwon Why I Left Google

Personal attacks and a sorry attitude

How come? Your interpretation of what I said amuses me, sir. And the way you do it, quoting single sentence without context, seriously?

edwardwon Corporations: Just Reptiles

Since there are two 'why I left' in a row:

    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3702253
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700277

I'd like to share this essay from Simon Phipps that has enlightened me from time to time on such matters.

edwardwon Why I Left Google

1. Of course. Otherwise what I submitted ticket for? 2. I said I didn't pay attention to the links if there were no emails to remind me.

Please, at least read what you reply to.

edwardwon Why I Left Google

The only reason I visited my personal profile was to write weekly snippet. So no, I didn't pay attention to the links you mentioned if there were no Perf emails to remind me.

I submitted a ticket from outside as an alumnus. It is a fact. Credit to Google for setting this up. That being said, if there is anyone gets delusional, it is you.

I'm an engineer and used to work for Sun Microsystems. It was awesome. So I have pretty good idea about what it takes and what to expect working for a good silicon valley company in general, including Google. It just didn't apply to what happened to me in Google.

edwardwon Why I Left Google

@anthonydchang No, I never received such emails. My manager and / or HR never bother. When I discovered this accidently after I left, I complained by submitting a ticket. But you know what, almost whole managements at that subsidiary (read: Google China) has been sacked. So nobody could care less about it. I must say working for Google is THE worst working experience for me.

edwardwon Why I Left Google

> Your comment is a case in point. Anyone familiar with your story (at Google and, as you know, there are many of us who are) knows how totally skewed your perception is.

Speak for yourself, would you? I'm myself a victim, unfortunately. I never even knew my Perf when I was with the company, only discovered it accidentally after I left. The process is very broken for me. Thanks @michaelochurch, I now know better about what had happened.

edwardwon Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

The tech exists, which is called fully homomorphic encryption scheme. But I concur in what olalonde says, average people simply don't care that much about privacy.

edwardwon Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com

Get from server through network, of course. In the meantime, peers cache "facts" using LRU replacement policy.

edwardwon Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com

From FAQ:

Is Datomic just for JVM languages? At the moment, yes. We have ideas for how to enable Datomic on non-JVM languages while preserving as much of the embedded power as possible.

edwardwon Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com

I noticed that in FAQ, too. Since read is relatively easy to scale (simple master / slave setup), I wonder how to scale datomic on write side.

edwardwon Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com

Damn, I misread webdev as webdav.