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rjhackin

31 karma · joined January 24, 2011

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rjhackin··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
Built a single page website - https://whythink.org. Nothing fancy, just a simple qotd app
rjhackin··on Ask HN: How do you start contracting?
If you are in the US, take a look at Dice and Indeed to get a sense of where the market is and what is the rate per hour. As others have said, networking helps but I started my contracting journey through Dice and Indeed. Good luck.
rjhackin··on Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps
Do you think npm is a flawed design ?
rjhackin··on Why have I failed?
"Should take the money when a beta user offered to pay"

Not sure about this point. Why would we take money if we knew the product is not in a working condition. And what if, the product doesn't get to a stage where we feel the fee justifies.

rjhackin··on Good Developer, Bad Developer
I am sure every good developer should have crossed bad developer phase at some point in his life as a developer. Here is a different take on some of the points (sorry if you find offensive) -

Bad developer considers himself as a programmer, responsible for generating lines of code

Generating lines of code that still works is not bad and it’s not uncommon. As long as the developer knows the language and makes something work, it’s not a bad thing.

Bad developer understands only the technical problem at hand.

Bad developer is focused on building classes and methods and configuration files, but does not get the big picture.

Bad developer knows only the components he’s written.

It’s fairly common to have a workplace where the developer doesn’t get to know all the details because of restriction but as long as he codes the problem to spec and gets everything correct, he is not a bad developer.

Bad developer only sticks to what he knows.

Bad developer does not have time to learn.

Developers cannot be tagged bad just because they don’t learn technologies apart from what they are using. Some stick to one technology and they are pro in that.

Good developer pushes himself to create bug-free code; bad developer leaves it to QA to find bugs to fix.

Even developers termed good tend to let QA find bugs.

Bad developer completes tasks.

What more is required other than getting the task complete.

Bad developer will wait until the finest details are available.

Without proper specs defined, even a good developer will have a hard time finishing a task. The more you think and question upfront, the better it is to code.

Bad developer thinks only about the elegance of his code and leave the job of delivering value to others.

True, he did his part and now it’s up to other teams from the chain to carry forward.

A developer who can solve a complex problem in a code that is easier for any developer to read and understand is a good developer. A developer termed good who writes code that is harder to read and understand by any other programmer is bad.

rjhackin··on Ask HN: Why not Java for web development?
Java is a good language for web development. It's mature and most of the big companies use java. Java in terms of popularity might have slowed down but JVM as a platform will stay for a longer time. I use java for my day job, but I did learn php, python and ruby on the side just to build some small apps as part of learning. It's fun to learn additional languages and to know where each language shine.

I haven't worked on Play that much so I'll let others who have used talk about it. Spring framework is another really good one you can give a try.

The reasons why startups prefer anything other than java might be rapid prototyping, bleeding edge and probably hosting costs.

rjhackin··on Making Use of HTML5 Storage
This is a good start, but I would like to see more real world experience on 1) How will this benefit w.r.t replacing or using alongside Sessions (HttpSession in java for example) 2) Size limits - 5mb and 1mb for IE7, storages different per scheme/domains 3) Data Security
rjhackin··on New iPad is unbeatable
There is another thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3684624
rjhackin··on New Reddit CEO reporting for duty
As long as they don't become more like conventional CEO's and forget they were once writing code having lot of fun building applications and solving issues on day to day basis. Now that they are CEO's asking questions which makes you think..were they engineers before? I hope he doesn't turn to conventional.
rjhackin··on Ask HN: How many hours do you sit in front of a computer per day?
Around 10 hours during week days and 3 - 4 hours during weekends. Curious to know why this question? do you plan on doing any kind of research based on the data or is it just a random question. I would be rather interested how productive people are in those hours that we spend...
rjhackin··on Show HN: A way for entrepreneurs to connect with business problems to work on
Clickable - http://repp.herokuapp.com
rjhackin··on Combinator - A simple Hacker News client for Windows Phone
I get this message "Hacker News API access request exceeded. Please try again later." Initially i was able to see the "new" items but not anymore.

Edit: I was able to view the "top" items. When i tried to view the comments,app took me to the actual article instead of comments. Looks simple and neat. This is a good start, I like this so far.

rjhackin··on Fighting to Shut Out the Real India
I really cannot undertand what you are trying to express. I really don't see how 'caste' is linked to the article and your initial comment "80% Indians are willing to migrate to USA...". Please try to understand what the problem is and post comments on how that can be solved, that will make the conversation interesting and live. I am not trying to suppress anything and i see most of the comments here have gone in different directions.
rjhackin··on Ask HN: What makes a good API presentation?
Joshua Bloch gave a good presentation on API design, you might have seen this before. Here is the link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw

Mostly along those lines will make a presentation useful and interesting. Not sure whats the time limit for your presentation but real life example would keep the audience more interactive or building something on the fly from ground up.

rjhackin··on Fighting to Shut Out the Real India
The only place where 'India' was mentioned for the link you provided is at the last section towards the end of the page. It just talks about technological advances and how people are related to that, but it doesn't say people are migrating countries because of that.
rjhackin··on Fighting to Shut Out the Real India
I don't think so, can you prove your little secret and what social reasons would that be? just curious to know.
rjhackin··on India's skewed sex ratio
Interesting..even i was observing, within an hour this thread got carried away into different directions even though the article and some of the comments were good.
rjhackin··on Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing
I am not sure about the death of Bing, Bing has momentum and they should take it forward and not lose ground. Competition is important to bring the best out of technology.
rjhackin··on India's skewed sex ratio
The law of not revealing gender before birth has been there for a while, doesn't seem to work all the time and moreover the perception/acceptance towards girl child should change which is slowly happening due to people getting educated.
rjhackin··on Indian entrepreneurs in US stuck with temporary, non-immigrant work visas
This is true, I have known few engineers who were really good but being treated differently by their employers once they know they are close to their 6 year limit on H1, meaning they cannot move anywhere, people who were single took their chances and people who had family and other commitments couldn't. Its really hard to be in their shoes. Not many are willing speak outside but this is the reality.
rjhackin··on Ask HN: Why does Chrome use IE's proxy settings?
True, they could have provided a setting that you can enable/disable/override within their options page instead of using a switch. May be there is design decision behind this.
rjhackin··on Ask HN: Why does Chrome use IE's proxy settings?
This is a useful link, this should come up on the top of search results, this never came up for some reason.
rjhackin··on China’s Facebook counterpart creates a LinkedIn clone with a Quora twist
The current trend is to clone websites using startup as the keyword.
rjhackin··on How to convince my friend that open source is good?
Just ask your friend what all websites/web applications does he use on a daily basis, there should be something from open source out of that set. I believe many websites make money using open source technologies and many companies/startups release their technologies as open source helping others benefit out of it. Current tech scene would never have improved without open source community and collaboration.
rjhackin··on Reddit Is Down To One Developer
This is not good given that they just had a recent 6 hour downtime. Why would folks at Conde let this happen ?
rjhackin··on Ask HN: Tips for a new dad?
Take a short break from hacker news..seriously..it pulls you :) congratulations
rjhackin··on How do programmers in the west see programmers in the east?
this was posted 4 days back.. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2256774
rjhackin··on Ask HN: Karma, how does it work.
why worry about karma if your comment is honest, useful and decent enough