HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

wayne

1,231 karma · joined April 3, 2007

https://www.waynekao.com
submissionscomments
wayne··on How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2
Somewhat surprising since unlike their customers, there's no license restriction to Apple running macOS on different hardware. Maybe they didn't want to maintain a separate fork only for internal use. And having their own OS makes it more challenging to port apps to AWS/Azure.
wayne··on Microsoft says it found malicious software in its systems
That might be true for a tech-competent company with a well-staffed security team, but for many companies and for individual data, I'd trust Amazon and Microsoft to secure my data more than I'd trust myself.
wayne··on Moving from Macbook to Linux
I setup a Thinkpad X-series with OpenBSD a few months ago and the hardware support was stellar. I researched ahead of time (lots of googling and reading HN and Reddit threads) and it seemed like the OpenBSD devs were using a handful of Thinkpad models so those worked perfectly. I've mostly used it to surf the web (Firefox) and code (Vim).

No one would say it's as seamless as using a Macbook, but being able to tinker with and customize everything has been half the fun.

wayne··on Show HN: Ugliest.app – Ugly but good app platform
Ditto on Chrome with an all-red screen and "Deceptive site ahead".
wayne··on Applebot
The main time I find myself using Apple Maps is when visiting China. Google Maps is blocked so the place data isn't as great, and the local apps are in Chinese, which I'm illiterate in.

I similarly find Apple Pay great for traveling, and easier to use than a credit card.

wayne··on MailTrackerBlocker – email tracker and spy pixel blocker plugin for Apple Mail
Wow! I've been trying to figure out for a year why my financial institution hasn't been able to deliver me electronic statements. Every month or so it's been auto-switching back to snail mail. I even switched email services and did extensive tweaks to my spam blockers to try to figure out what was happening. Them looking at the email image-loads never occurred to me... thanks for sharing that!
wayne··on Reverse Engineering Snapchat (Part II): Debofuscating the Undeobfuscatable
This level of API obfuscation reminds me of forever ago when MSN Messenger figured out AOL's AIM API, so MSN Messenger could send AIM messages, which annoyed AOL. AOL would make API changes to break MSN, but MSN would update the client and stay ahead. Eventually to make the API uncloneable, AOL changed their payload to exploit a buffer overrun in their own AIM clients that wouldn't be in the MSN clients.

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/

wayne··on Getting a 787 back in the air after a diversion
Ah, that was back when AA and Alaska were much closer partners, before the Virgin acquisition... I was surprised when reading the article that Alaska was so helpful.

https://thepointsguy.com/2017/12/last-call-alaska-american-a...

wayne··on Snap Inc. S-1
$1.3M for its COO (Sheryl Sandberg), not CFO.
wayne··on Toronto’s Chinese bottle ladies
A friend wrote an article about a NYC millennial who put herself through college collecting cans: http://bit.ly/2aj0IG7
wayne··on Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups
He probably meant the other cofounder Mike Krieger. http://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-cofounder-mike-krie...
wayne··on How long filenames were added in Windows 95 to be backward compatible
If you found that interesting, here's Raymond Chen's addendum to the above article: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/08/26/10200...

(I found the main link via Raymond's post and found it a lot more interesting, but Raymond's post is worth a read if you enjoyed the article.)

wayne··on Firefox 4, 5, 6 and 7 to be released before the end of 2011
They could also pull a Windows 7, which has the underlying version number 6.1, and decouple the real version number from the marketing version number: http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/200...
wayne··on Flickr Restores Mirco Wilhelm's 3,400 Lost Photos
Yeah, my guess is it was actually deleted but because of the PR hoopla they went to tape or did something equivalently time-consuming to recover the data. It's something that wouldn't scale to everyone, but worth a day of someone's time in this particular high profile case.
wayne··on The Great WebKit Comparison Table
What's the high-level reason for such a big discrepency between WebKit browsers? E.g. I'm confused why some would have :nth-child support and other wouldn't. Do all these companies have their own local forks? Are some using old versions of WebKit?
wayne··on Top kill fails to plug leak
According to 60 Minutes's interview with one of the engineers, the main failsafe equipment was damaged weeks before the explosion, and BP didn't bother repairing it and in fact increased drilling speed since they were slipping behind schedule.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6490509n

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/35642/

wayne··on Ex-Harvard senior charged with fabricating life history, stealing grant money
Similar past cases:

- Azia Kim from Stanford: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=5120

- Michael Godelia from Harvard: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/4/11/murky-past-trail...

wayne··on How to Kill a Great Idea
Java to PHP: http://ma.tt/2004/06/friendster-goes-php/
wayne··on Microsoft’s Creative Destruction
Why would you expect a research lab to ship a product? Seems like you were interviewing with the wrong group.
wayne··on Microsoft’s Creative Destruction
Entertainment and Devices made $375 million last quarter: http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/192686.asp
wayne··on Sergey Brin wanted to leave China; Eric Schmidt wanted to stay
Anyone else have a deja vu moment while reading this? The article repeats this snippet of text twice, the second time adding the word "very":

"suggest that Google, and the U.S. generally, has [very] little leverage to press China to back down on Internet censorship or other issues."

wayne··on "Jungle Dave", Founder of Jungle Disk, Leaves
I guess he had a one year retention contract.
wayne··on BackPress: Core PHP libraries for your web applications
Since it was an extraction from WordPress, which is GPL-licensed, maybe it was super hard to make this library LGPL since everyone who had contributed code had GPL-licensed it.
wayne··on Court: Microsoft violated patent; can't sell Word
Microsoft's plan is to remove the feature from Office: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/dec09/12-22sta...
wayne··on US Air Force says decision-making attack drones will be here by 2047
Your point is a good one but I think it's somewhat cheating to pick 1909-1947 as your arbitrary 38 year period since both world wars happened during that period. A world war has a way of spurring innovation in killing technologies more than anything else. I guess it's possible we have two more world wars between now and 2047, but that seems unlikely to me.
wayne··on The Story of Google's Closure: Advanced JavaScript Tools
Also, in terms of running speed, Closure is a better form of compression than gzip since the JS engine still has to parse all that ungzip'd JS.
wayne··on Report: Comcast Buying NBC for $35 Billion. Comcast: “Inaccurate”
The rumor was for NBC Universal, which includes more than just a network: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC_Universal
wayne··on The State of Java
> The only large – and lets say profitable and growing – startup that uses Java is LinkedIn.

Mint uses Java a ton too and they did ok: http://mint.jobscore.com/jobs/mint/javasoftwareengineerbacke...

wayne··on Google Maps – the $10k gotcha
If you want business-friendly maps, Microsoft's MapPoint terms were very startup-friendly last time I checked. You just pay as you go. The downside is you need to talk to a salesguy: http://www.microsoft.com/maps/
wayne··on How Zynga is doing 100 MM in revenue and how we can help you do it
They also make a bunch of popular Facebook apps like Mafia Wars and Vampires.
← PreviousPage 3 of 7Next →