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Answering myself:

According to Glassdoor:

Software Engineer: 20k USD/year

Senior Software Engineer: 24k USD/year

Principal Engineer: 29k USD/year

(https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/HTC-Taipei-Salaries-EI_IE41...)

I get that it's not exactly Silicon Valley, but, wow.

Hi Zack,

This headline made me think that Cloudflare had finally done what I first assumed Akamai did back in the noughties, before I learned they didn't really have magic tech. :/

Anyway: here's some indirect feedback. It doesn't really apply to your project (which I'm sure will be super useful to other people). I would expect Cloudflare to take the lead in... let's call it widely-distributed-computation. All I want is my code running on your nodes all around the world with an end-to-end ping that is less than 10 ms to the average client.

My guess: Star Citizen will eventually raise 500M USD. No full game resembling the original promises will ever be delivered.

The "investors" will keep saying that with just a little more time, things will be perfect

-1 Off-topic.

(I just explained why Lego is expensive. Nothing else.)

Ok, back to non-smiley world:

Yes. I hope so. Too.

I first realized Javascript/Frontend/client developers were a danger to society about 10 years ago.

We were trying to figure out why some particular, quite globally popular web site did not work when transcoded in our Opera Mini transcoder.

The page itself looked perfectly static, no fancy effects or anything. Turns out the site had decided to re-implement the "click a link" feature entirely in javascript, down to the "create a click listener for entire document, then create a click router based on X, Y, width, height coordinates" level. We patched it somehow, had a laugh about the stupidity, but the sour feeling of insanity got stuck with me. It did not provide any feature beyond what a simple 'a' tag would have done.

It was just so absurd. We spent some time to try to figure out if there was a legitimate reason for it but we couldn't find any.

I know you're probably just looking to replace DMOZ, and build something vast in scope/size. But please keep the idea I posted yesterday in mind:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13802555

Somewhat ironically/fitting one of the triggers for this idea was my dislike for the amount of corporate/institutional "spam" on dmoz.org. Browsing dmoz today it doesn't feel like browsing a treasure chest of information; it feels like browsing one of those vanity contact books that people are scammed into paying for placement in.

Just because 50 different museums from around the world are super reputable (to someone) that doesn't mean they should have a guaranteed place in the "art" category, for instance. They should need to have a kickass art collection online with great UX, super-highres images, easily downloadable if it's stuff that's out of copyright and so on. Just list the best ten (twenty? thirty? no idea what the right number is. it probably depends on the category) things, not every single art institution on earth that someone has bothered to submit.

I guess I would summarize this as opinionated, content quality-based selection.

I miss the 1996-1997 type web sites. Ads and money has changed the web so much.

I recently had the idea to start a like 1994-style Yahoo-style web site that only links to sites which fulfill these conditions:

a) they have a lot of quality content

b) they only have minimal or no ads (absolutely no signups, freemium sites, 14-day trials etc).

c) no obnoxious self-advertising of a company's own brand (e.g. "Will It Blend? | Presented by Blendtec").

d) (this one is hard to quantify, but it's a kind of "I know it when I see it" thing) they were made with love and a desire to spread thoughts and creations.. rather than a desire for making money.

Obviously this directory site would not be a vehicle for making money. I also don't want this to be a hipster coolness thing. It's not the retro-ugly layouts I'm after, it's the content.

Stupid? Does it already exist?

The site that I came across that triggered this thought was http://www.americanradiohistory.com/ .

I guess their bizarre thinking is something along the lines of: "unless we have proof that noone can access the service, we won't change the indicator from green to yellow.

Seriously: I don't understand why you guys stay with AWS.

It's also $18 and closed-source. You might have wanted to disclose that since I mentioned free/open. Just saying.

This seems like a good place to tell Uber users that the only way of removing your credit card details from your Uber account is to either:

a) plead with Uber's customer service to do so

or

b) add another payment method (like another credit card)

This, of course, is horribly bad practice. I can only imagine that they arrived at this very peculiar arrangement after extensive A/B testing - Uber has hired plenty of FB folks and those people tend to be really into that kind of thing. I haven't seen this kind of outright customer-hostility from a large Internet company.. well, ever, before.

So, no, I'm not surprised that this company is doing other unethical things - it sort of seems interwoven into their DNA.

There's so much selling in this post I get tired just by reading it.

They would operate a virtual machine-type layer on top of their actual linux machines. In the upper layer they could be doing whatever..

That doesn't say anything about the servers timezones. SMTP is a service on top of those.

Google App Engine + their other no-ops services. Google is way ahead in this area.

There is really not a shortage of open source high quality C64 emulators. Does this one bring anything unique to the table?

No. According to this document, there is always at least as much encryption with this proxy enabled as it is without.

They are pricing themselves out of the market for traffic-intensive small-fish operations that way though.

Tables? Frames? That stuff didn't exist in 1993.

(Tables first arrived in Mosaic 2.0 Alpha 8 in December 1994, according to http://www.barrypearson.co.uk/articles/layout_tables/history...)

Most use cases or apps don't deal well with read latencies in the thousands of seconds...

From quickly reading the source code; it doesn't do any particularly clever optimizations. I'd file this in the "IP over pigeons" category.

No offense (I have no idea who you are and how much you know), but...

Do you feel you are you competent enough (in e.g. SMTP and MIME) to distinguish between MIME-encoded base64 inline images (super rare) and references to images on external web sites (a lot more common)? Which in the case of old web sites are quite likely to stop working if you revisit old mails.

Did you make the effort to verify that it was the first type when you witnessed this?

And they even named their product in a way so that people could understand what it is about! That is so unlike them!

This can be generalised. It is also one of my favorite ways of doing developer interviews. Do they have a working/in-depth knowledge of what keeps the inter webs running? So many people have never ventured out of their main competence bubble, and that bubble can be quite small (but focused, I suppose).

For all I know, they believe everything is kept together with the help of magic. I guess I don't trust people who don't have a natural urge to understand at least the most basic things of our foundations.

It is possible to use something for a long time and still be aware of its shortcomings.

(I have been using emacs since 1996.)

Emacs is nice. But it's also a fractal of bad usability design. :/

You know, in case you are working on any competing BASIC for some hot new microcomputer coming into the market later this year.

iPhone models have a lifespan of 1 year. Game console models have a life span of 6-7 years.