Hacker News Reader

simplekoalaon I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

People like you make this world a better place Graycat! Respect!

simplekoalaon SalesForce.com acquires Clipboard, plans to shut it down.

Amen to that

simplekoalaon SalesForce.com acquires Clipboard, plans to shut it down.

Bro/Sis, your http://siculars.posterous.com link is out-of-date. What is your new home on web?

simplekoalaon SalesForce.com acquires Clipboard, plans to shut it down.

Going on one limb here - The vision of Clipboard per Gary William Flake (who is an awesome guy, btw) was laid out while he was working on similar ideas at Microsoft. There were already a few prototypes which I am sure, Microsoft (patent generating machine) would have patented. So, either Clipboard folks have filed a ton of patents as Gary continued to pursue relevant ideas at Clipboard, and are sitting on valuable IP, and SalesForce is buying IP + Gary + Team or just Gary + Team. Acquisition price would be higher in the former scenario (not sure by how much % though)

simplekoalaon SalesForce.com acquires Clipboard, plans to shut it down.

Evernote?

simplekoalaon SalesForce.com acquires Clipboard, plans to shut it down.

Any guesses on the acquisition price and/or windfall per employee?

simplekoalaon 125th Birthday of Ramanujan

He died at the young age of 32! What a tragedy! Simply amazing what he had accomplished by then. Always wondered the impact he would have had had he not died at such an young age.

simplekoalaon Color Labs And Bill Nguyen Sued By Ex-Employee Alleging Retaliation

There are also direct allegations on the Board ( except Doug Leone) that they were complacent, and did nothing in spite of being privy to all the alleged shenanigans of Bill Nguyen. This is serious stuff.

simplekoalaon Sol — a sunny little homemade virtual machine

I didn't realize the author is a designer till I went to his about me page. Pretty awesome that he can write some serious code. Respect.

simplekoalaon Google Keeps Paying Deceased Employees' Families for a Decade

I am amazed at how well Google always treated, and still treats its employees. I am even more amazed at companies like Zynga, Amazon and other popular valley companies (both big and small) dont take a leaf or two from Google's playbook, and start treating employees with more respect and give good perks, and spend resources to provide their employees an awesome working environment. The more a company gives, the more it gets from its employees. It is a simple rule. Marissa is prudent and wise enough to know this. Food is free for employees at Yahoo! now. Other execs can learn a thing or two from her.

simplekoalaon Get Exec to Volunteer for Charity on your Behalf

Brilliant idea!

simplekoalaon VMware Buys Nicira for $1.26B

Vinod Khosla talks about entrepreneurs having a deep understanding of an area instead of surface knowledge to make a difference. I guess, Nicira is one such example where deep technical know-how of founders helped them disrupt the networking industry with ground-breaking innovation.

Congrats on many levels! Nicara=1.3 times Instagram but several magnitudes greater than Instagram, when it came to solving hard-technical problems. I know, it is a dubious comparison but I am biased towards entrepenuers/founders who solve hard-technical problems. I am pretty sure, someone will argue that Instagram was pushing the boundaries of sharing, and in some fuzzy/meta way improving the human condition and experience in non-tangible ways, and in the process will end-up solving hard-technical problems (scale, data-science blah-blah). Let us just say, I disagree. Expecting to be voted down to oblivion.

simplekoalaon Advice for Marissa Mayer from an ex-Yahoo

Wow! Google counter offer numbers always fun to hear. Without the risk of divulging too much info, would you share, if he was a back-end, front-end or mobile app developer?

simplekoalaon Visas for entrepreneurs

The least US could do is to - Get rid of country based quotas for employment based GC immigration, Provide instant GCs for immigrations who get advanced degrees in STEM from top institutes in US

I know a ton of entrepreneurial Indian, Chinese immigrants with advanced degrees (MS/PhDs) from MIT, Stanford, UW etc who are sick and tired of waiting years for their GC (average of 5-7 years wait), so they are not tied to the fate of the employer for their stay in US. Imagine, freeing them for these visa shackles, so they are free to pursue their own ventures, without have to worry about getting kicked out of this country

simplekoalaon Yahoo announces 2,000 job cuts

5 way video chat == Google hangouts?

simplekoalaon Yahoo announces 2,000 job cuts

I am under the impression that laid off employees are going out with a good severance package. If it is true that there is no severance for laid off employees, then it is brutal

simplekoalaon I'm moving to Silicon Valley and living in my car

Reminds me of Bing Gordon's talk at CEO summit about how professional ball players go out to the field and deliver consistently in comparison to rookies. Consistency matters. This is the single most import thing which sets them apart. They bring in the goods every day. It is a marathon not a sprint. To do marathons, you need discipline, be balanced and be grounded. Experience teaches you a ton. You learn how to balance, keep your sanity while hitting the ball out of the park consistently. When I was young and felt invincible, I would code all night, had lots of unhealthy food, had irregular sleeping patterns, and looked down on old-experienced developers who balanced work/coding with everything else in their lives. As I got older, I realized how naive and stupid I was to have such a skewed perspective.

simplekoalaon Yahoo Appoints Scott Thompson CEO

For the sake of internet, valley and Yahoo! - I hope he succeeds big time. Yahoos deserve much better than a foul-mouthed, talentless and outdated CEO they ousted. I hope he lives up to the promise!

simplekoalaon Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired

Is Skype the first one?

simplekoalaon Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired

I would add, Bing Gordon from KPCB, to this list. Why would KPCB want to tarnish their image like this.

simplekoalaon Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired

I was told my many folks I respect that Zynga is a sweat shop, and discouraged me going there. Now, with the options scandal, Zynga shot themselves in their foot. What is surprising is, Bing Gordon is on KP's board and an honorable, great chap. Wonder why didn't he advise Pincus against this. Pincus openly admitted that Bing is a great friend and mentor. It is a poor reflection on KPCB, the venerable VC firm.

simplekoalaon Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

Thanks for the clarification. I was thinking may be they were mucking with shared libraries. I found this useful link on digging further. Doesn't seem like too much of black art. http://www.culater.net/wiki/moin.cgi/CocoaReverseEngineering

simplekoalaon Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

Thanks for the info. On further digging, I found this useful link - http://www.culater.net/wiki/moin.cgi/CocoaReverseEngineering

which provides some insights into accomplishing what Dropbox did.

simplekoalaon Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

They are injecting code into running Finder process? Hmmm, so they figured one of the jump instructions target address in Finder process ( for a function invocation, most likely the code to show the pop-up), and changed that location to jump to a different address where they injected their code? Don't you need root privileges to muck with Finder's process space? I see dropbox process running with non-privileged uid. Wonder, how they managed to change the VMM space of Finder process to inject code. Any thoughts? Please correct me, if I am totally off the mark here.

simplekoalaon Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

"Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple’s radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that."

Can anyone throw more context around this hack. Technical challenges to accomplish this will be bonus.

simplekoalaon Celebrities, CEOs & a former president attended Steve Jobs memorial

Wondering why Rahm Emmanuel, Chicago mayor was on invitees list. Any guesses?

simplekoalaon Steve's Google Platform rant

I was with Amazon in the past. I am no authority but I would come to a similar conclusion. Till end of 07, Amazon.com barely used AWS

simplekoalaon Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

Sums up my feelings too. dmr is a legendary computer scientist who in all fairness had more impact on the field of computer science, and programming than any one of us can even begin to fathom. True legend.

simplekoalaon Steve's Google Platform rant

LOL at bias of action :) Reminds me of ex-manager's parrotry of Amazon's values

simplekoalaon Steve's Google Platform rant

I have been a victim of this down-voting in the past :) Even till end of 2007, majority of Amazon.com was not powered by AWS. If I remember correctly, website team tested out serving traffic on EC2 machines during 06-07 timeframe, and categorically declared that Amazon can't run on cloud without crossing major technology hurdles.