Hacker News Reader

sdizdaron Why there are so many engineers in India

Interesting. I was always under impression that Jawaharlal Nehru's reforms (pretty much socialism) were the key. His policies and reforms were key in establishing India education system. Without him and his reforms there will be no path for better quality of life for many Indians.

How much of credit should be given to Jawaharlal Nehru's reforms?

I'm not Indian, so please excuse my ignorance.

sdizdaron Netflix CEO: In Ten Years, “We Will All Have A Gigabit To The Home”

Maybe if Comcast goes bankrupt and gets replaced with set of small companies. Otherwise, I doubt it is in business interest for large cable and teleco companies to increase bandwidth. Profit and increasing bandwidth don't go together when you have monopoly.

sdizdaron Tumblr "Disappears" Microsoft's Danah Boyd

Could it be that Tumblr handles are actually owned by Tumblr, thus it is Tumblr which was "infringing on trademark" and needed to act on Demand Letter? I would love if you or somebody else with more legal knowledge than me (which is not hard :)) can explain this.

sdizdaron Tumblr "Disappears" Microsoft's Danah Boyd

I understand frustration but Zephoria is trademarked from 2002. http://www.trademarkia.com/zephoria-78132833.html

So my question is following: when trademark should be enforced and when not? If a company X is an internet consulting company and somebody has a blog talking about internet using the same name, is that trademark infringement? Does Tumblr (or any blog operator) need to contact user to explain if they get Demand Letter from lawyer representing the trademark owner and Tumblr's legal department determines it is valid?

I'm not trying to defend anybody but just want to understand how trademark can be enforced.

sdizdaron Dropbox Hits 25 Millions Users, 200 Million Files Per Day

Amazing... One thing I would like to point that even though people claim that systems such as Dropbox are "simple" it is really not so simple to implement. Just ensuring that Windows piece does not mess up your computer (eat all your CPU, bandwidth etc.) is really hard. There are a lot of not-so-sexy work behind the curtains.

BTW, we just started private beta for cloudHQ for Dropbox (http://www.cloudHQ.net/dropbox). Basically this service provides synchronization of Google Docs and Dropbox files and backup of Google Docs to Dropbox. And we have a cool thing that you can edit Dropbox files directly with Google docs (you need to install our Google Chrome extension). We need some beta testers ....

sdizdaron Why no company that values their data should ever "Go Google"

Of course, simplistic mirroring solutions will have these problems. However, the right mirroring solution for syncing information (documents, presentations, etc.), should provide auditing, providence of created documents, and rewind for all actions.

sdizdaron Why no company that values their data should ever "Go Google"

100% agree. We are developing service which tries to solve some of these problems, so I'll do a shameless plug here.

One way to address these kind of problems is to use cloudHQ to synchronize your Google Docs with SugarSync (clickable: http://cloudHQ.net/sugarsync). (We are releasing dropbox this weekend).

Here is our idea: there are many different cloud storage services and each of them is very good for a particular use case but not so good for other use cases. For example, Google Docs service is excellent for collaboration but not so good for storage. On the other hand, Dropbox or Sugarsync service is excellent for storage but not so for collaboration.

So if data is continuously synchronized between Google Docs and lets say SugarSync storage, then you can always fall back to SugarSync when Google Docs becomes unavailable and vice versa. In order words, you can use other service as a standby site in case of service unavailability, malicious or accidental deletion of files, etc.

sdizdaron Peter Thiel: We’re in a Higher Education Bubble

The problem with credentials you get from some universities (even elite ones) is that they are of much less value than you paid for it. It like buying house in San Francisco Sunset district ("elite" town) for 2M and saying it is a great deal. No. It is great deal for 500K but not for 2M since max rent was is 4K.

sdizdaron Scott Adams on How to Get a Real Education

I think that education is continuous. We are trying to squeeze all learning, all education, and all wisdom in first 25 years of life. That is just wrong.

sdizdaron On the web server scalability and speed are almost the same thing

When you become profitable, it easy to optimize/fix CPU usage and speed (or at least it is not disruptive for your entire product) - it very hard to fix scalability part (including optimizing for memory usage).

sdizdaron How to damage your brand in one smooth shot - Way to GoDaddy

So it is ok to have show on cable TV where people shoot animals for fun (or our politicians doing that) and but we are disgusted of killing animal for food and protect the crops.

This is good very PR move because it hits the center of hypocrisy in wester societies: our "love" of animals.

sdizdaron Patio11 says Hello Ladies

Excellent presentation. Brilliant. I'm always told that sell process is actually selling one of these four things: fear, greed, vanity, or insecurity.

But that is easier said than done. I have no clue how to achieve that (I'm still in "sell features" mindset). I would like to hear is there are any good examples of software product or server which does that well.

sdizdaron 41,000,006 reasons why I think we're in a bubble

Not sure if this particular investment can be called as a sign of a bubble. Social networks, locality, mobile, and things are still new and unknown. But there is a huge potential. There will be soon 2B people on the earth with constant (mobile) connection to the internet.

In order to make FourSquare clone, you don't need a lot of investment for development but you need a LOT of money to acquire users and become a player in that space.

However, the assumption is that there will be only few players and that is why there is a need for these kind of bold investment moves. I disagree. The system will become even more fragmented, democratized, and complex with many unknowns, so classical ways of getting market share will not work. In other words, even with 41M of investment, the company will not be able to fight against some weird and original apps / social network or even coupon buying system.

sdizdaron Paul Graham spills: Why some companies get his cash and others don't

Not necessary - by using this rule you might miss a lot of truly brilliant people (I know a couple of them: they just mumble about things and you understand what they were saying only after you see their design and code). This again tries to equate somebody being able to express something using English (in other words, being a good communicator) and ability to really understand the nature and working of a very complex system or idea.

But each startup must have at least one founder which has this capability.

sdizdaron Why you should never ask permission to clean up code.

Simple rule of development: You should always leave code in better shape than you find it.

sdizdaron Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned

You are wrong. This is called "war on talents".

OK. I'm not adding anything to discussion and my post should be down-voted, but I agree with comment that the main problem of finding a good engineer is salary offered.

sdizdaron The War For Talent

It is probably just me and my overly pessimistic and cynical point of view, but sometimes I think this "war for talent" is basically synonym for "search for very good engineers willing to work 70 hours a week for less than 100K" (or something like that). I do understand the need to for these creative idea (good setup, etc.), but unfortunately these tweks and ideas work only and only after salary is good, challenge is there, and team is great.

And there is one more problem: some of startups struggling to hire very good engineers are not aiming big - the prevalent business model is: we hope to be acquired by Google/Apple/Facebook/Intuit etc. Stories of Digg, Reddit, and Delicous don't inspire a lot confidence for engineers to join these companies.

sdizdaron What it's like to start work at Quora

They have code review post-commit? It seems like a very dangerous practice. How do you guys feel about it?

sdizdaron Facebook bans Adsense in all applications, driving Google out of Facebook.com

We did some market research using Facebook ads and we were super satisfied. In this particular case, we were interested in a specific customer segment (what they like, location, status, etc.) and Facebook ads did a great job. Google ads and other services were useless.

If other words, it is mistake to equate Google AdWords with Facebook Ads platform. They should be used differently.

sdizdaron Libya turns off its internet: this time it's a flatline

I have to answer to this comment since this is the same argument governments had back in social and communist countries in Eastern Europe.

It is not about whether majority of people approve government or think their government is a "brutal dictatorship". It is about what that government does with people who doesn't approve the government.

sdizdaron Republicans: No compromise possible on net neutrality

But we vote and elect our government. Don't we?

sdizdaron JSend: a specification for how JSON responses should be formatted

I'm not sure but there is difference between: 1) an application server accepts client request but fails to execute it, so client gets an error via JSON and 2) something on server side (HTTP server or application server or firewall) fails to receiver/accept client's request thus client gets back some HTTP error code. Maybe people like this way becasue in complex systems there is always difference between failure to deliver and understand the request and error during execution of the request.

sdizdaron Poll: Tech Bubble?

We are not in bubble - this is refection of our monetary policy. Look at commodity prices. Look at stock market.

I think the real bubble is bond market - which is causing froth all over the market.

sdizdaron On Premature Optimization

I would like just to add that sometimes "premature optimization" is confused with "performance decoration". Performance decoration is process in which you make software to look fast but without any positive impact on actual delivered performance.

Also, there are two ways to make software go faster: do what you’re doing quicker or make it do less stuff. It is nearly always better to go "do less stuff" path.

sdizdaron Flash + 307 redirect = Game Over

I have a stupid question: Does this vulnerability exist if rails runs https?

sdizdaron Find the "bug" - Two equals Four - a mathematical "paradox"

In layman terms, infinity can't be a number, and neither can something times infinity. The problem is that infinity isn't really a number at all.

sdizdaron Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back

Here is what I don't understand. They have multiple redundant copies in case of unlikely scenario of disaster, but they have no copies or protection in case of quite likely scenario of operator error. This seems backward to me.

EDIT: I don't believe that Yahoo! Flickr does not have a way to recover these things. Or I'm completely wrong.

sdizdaron Ask HN: YC new move will change SV dynamics. Are you sure for the better?

It looks like a bubble, and in the human history every bubble has crushed; soon or later.

My understanding is that each bubbles require leverage (credit, margins, etc.) with imperfectly informed lenders. You might call this as a bad investment (which I don't think - internet and mobile is finaly maturing), but it lacks definition of bubble.

sdizdaron Qwiki Epitomizes the Current Startup Bubble

I think Qwiki raised $8 million becasue they have excellent team (Louis Monier, Christian Le Cocq, etc.). However, I'm bothered with the fact that such a excellent team is working on something which is not really groundbreaking nor disruptive. Not something it will change the world (as search engine changed it).

However, it could be also that they have vision of the world which is hard for me to comprehend or imagine. The question is: what is their vision?

sdizdaron Does Google do "research"?

The danger with integrating research as part of day-to-day development is that you might not end up with groundbreaking or disruptive innovation. The problem is that forces which are controlling day-to-day work are essentially controlled by value network of the company (social and technical resources within and between businesses) and constrained by resources, values, and processes of the company. So, there is a danger of missing inventions which will replace the current (profitable) way do doing things (i.e., start Groupon kind of business model, or Twitter, or Facebook).

However, I also 100% agree that having pure "research labs" is not effective: in many cases some great idea from research arm are just forgotten.

Clayton Christensen wrote a few books on this topic (and I am a very big fan of Clayton Christensen's work).

I would like to also mention that Google is not the only company which has this approach: it seems to me that majority of companies in Silicon Valley operate like this (I don't think Facebook has "research labs", but they do invent things).