a13xb

Joined 12 years ago

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Comment · 3 years ago

It feels weird reading that someone in America “reinvents” the Australian concept of “chucking a sickie”.

Comment · 9 years ago

HN is not a government or a political party, it's a privately run link aggregator.

Comment · 9 years ago

> Not trying to be negative, I'm a fan of how much power AWS gives you.

I am.

I find AWS API incredibly baroque and has a lot of historic baggage. I suspect a lot of this complexity is a result of an accumulation of features made by multiple people in multiple teams over the years and inertia of customers relying on it, so there is (understandably) no will to change it.

Comment · 9 years ago

I'll be a contrarian here and say that Objective-C is an ugly mess, and not even "because brackets". It's the language full of terrible hacks, historic baggage, and bolted-on features. Objective-C++ is basically the worst of both worlds. :)

Programming languages have advanced a fair bit since the 80s, it's time for Objective-C to die peacefully.

Comment · 9 years ago

Please note that I specifically singled out C++ here, not C. C is not C++ (not even technically a subset of C++). It is a very different and a much smaller language.

Comment · 9 years ago

I am a former C++ programmer who has moved on to the other languages/technologies and no longer suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many dark corners, historic baggage, and complex interplay of language features in C++. This complexity breeds bad codebases plagued by subtle bugs created by misunderstanding of finer points of the language.

If these things scare you, run away in the other direction as fast as possible.

Comment · 9 years ago

> This is a pretty bold claim - can you cite any examples of this?

I don't know if you have read the original thread, but there are a few examples of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14356409

Also this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38959321/firebase-databa...

Comment · 9 years ago

Ah, so the secret to launching without previous audience is to build up an audience prior to launch.

Comment · 9 years ago

They are not at all equivalent. Shares are a lot more volatile, and your guess needs to be accurate within a very short term or you lose 100% of your investment.

Comment · 9 years ago

Keep in mind that as an individual you cannot have a near-million dollar leverage at a relatively low rate to buy other investments.

Comment · 9 years ago

Negative gearing is only one piece of the puzzle. There is also a 50% CGT discount if you hold an investment for more than a year.

And yes, it applies to shares too, but it's not possible to get this amount of debt leverage for buying shares.

There is also 100% CGT exemption if the property is owner-occupied. The worst part is that it extends up to 6 years after you move out (e.g. to rent somewhere cheaper). So you can buy a property, live in it for a year (at which point it's deemed primary residence), then rent it out for up to 6 years, move back in for a year, rinse, repeat, and avoid paying any CGT when you sell. Obligatory: none of this is tax advice.

Comment · 9 years ago

People like to rag on Chinese investors, but I think the main reasons are insane tax breaks and limited supply.

Comment · 10 years ago

I think the original intent of obscuring input password is to counter shoulder surfing.

Comment · 10 years ago

I didn't know, that's great news.

Comment · 10 years ago

I think the biggest annoyance by far is iTunes Connect. It's an odd beast.

It's awkwardly separate from the rest of developer centre, and have this bizarre requirement that you use a separate Apple ID for each iTC organisation, so you end up with one primary Apple ID tied to all developer programs and separate Apple IDs for each iTC account.