Hacker News: egao1980

New comment by egao1980 in "Show HN: GrobPaint: Somewhere Between MS Paint and Paint.net"

egao1980 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 08:39:58 +0000

Grob is either Slavic cognate for "coffin" or German for "rough" :)

New comment by egao1980 in "Being poor vs. being broke"

egao1980 — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 20:53:20 +0000

Well written. Straight to the point. When poor is a rat race and no room for risk. Any mistake and you're done. Even if you see opportunity you can't afford to try. And hopelessness.

New comment by egao1980 in "Russians Seem Interested in My Book About How Dictatorships End"

egao1980 — Sun, 07 May 2023 23:47:37 +0000

Latvia and Estonia are allowed to have Nazi parades and repress Russian speaking population i.e. non-citizens, language police and criminal sentences for pro-Russian activists. EU looks some other way all the time. See for example https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/outrage-as-s... or https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/2019-03-16/ty-arti...

This is not how human rights and democracy should look like.

New comment by egao1980 in "UK Government scans all web servers hosted in the UK for vulnerabilities"

egao1980 — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 09:07:59 +0000

So now when the government hacks your website it's called - "scanning for vulnerabilities".

New comment by egao1980 in "Ask HN: Do people not have hobbies anymore?"

egao1980 — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 15:33:46 +0000

Big city life is too busy, too hard, and too volatile to have a space and time for a decent hobby. But people still manage to have it occasionally.

New comment by egao1980 in "Barcelona-style “superblocks” could make cities greener and less car-centric"

egao1980 — Sat, 22 Oct 2022 16:04:00 +0000

Barcelona's blocks are nice but won't work as a mostly pedestrian self contained urban unit. People have to work and get social services outside those blocks.

If you scale them up a bit, add infrastructure, add workplaces and make it 10-15 walking distance and add public transit links to other such places that will do it.

New comment by egao1980 in "Barcelona-style “superblocks” could make cities greener and less car-centric"

egao1980 — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 20:40:27 +0000

USSR had implemented this idea and it worked fine while factories / companies were providing accommodation in the walking distance along with all the necessary services - schools, hospitals, kindergartens and shops.

I doubt that it would work in a modern Capitalist society unless we all work from home.

New comment by egao1980 in "France ends gas heaters subsidies"

egao1980 — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 09:11:28 +0000

Unfortunately lower indoor temperature leads to excess mortality as stated in UK report - https://www.ons.gov.uk/releases/excesswintermortalityinengla...

New comment by egao1980 in "Russians are trying to flee – data from Google Trends"

egao1980 — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 17:17:51 +0000

There are some people who would see this as an opportunity to abuse EU migration laws. Some people fear to lose their outsourcing jobs. But the numbers are low.

Also West is definitely attacking Russians and not Russian government now. How on Earth cancelling Dostoevski, Chekvhov and Tchaikovski is going to stop the war and change Russian government policies? It resembles more to me some early XX century antisemitism that was rampant in Europe.

New comment by egao1980 in "Last Day of IKEA in Moscow"

egao1980 — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 10:32:29 +0000

It's actually not the last day but a temporary suspension. Russian market is quite large and attractive to likes of IKEA and they will try to return when the hype is over. But some would be displaced by that time by the other companies. We've seen this in 2014-2015.

New comment by egao1980 in "Last Day of IKEA in Moscow"

egao1980 — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 10:30:03 +0000

Only false information will get you a fine or a criminal conviction. If you report facts backed by hard evidence you'd be safe. To get 15 years you'd need to create some fakes on purpose that led to for example mass casualties at the war zone.

New comment by egao1980 in "Tell HN: If You Are in Russia"

egao1980 — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 08:40:35 +0000

1) It's not forbidden to control foreign company - you have to report it in 3 months time. And potentially pay taxes if there's no double taxation agreement. 2) That 80% is for corporations bringing funds into Russia as foreign currency. For an individual you'd need ruble to buy things in Russia anyway so it is not a thing to care about.

New comment by egao1980 in "Full consensus for disconnecting Russia from SWIFT achieved, process has begun"

egao1980 — Sat, 26 Feb 2022 23:24:31 +0000

Not really. SWIFT is just helps to make transaction fast. There are alternatives that include Russian and Chinese systems. And you can always use phone, fax, etc.

Disconnecting Russia from SWIFT will a) create short term hiccup in transaction clearing, b) reduce SWIFT revenues c) force Russia to switch oil/gas contracts to rouble or yuan. This in the long run is not good for euro as a reserve currency and will hurt petrodollar.

New comment by egao1980 in "Turns Out Schrödinger, the Father of Quantum Physics, Was a Pedophile"

egao1980 — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 14:36:25 +0000

SARCASM: ON It's time to cancel Quantum physics and wave equation in particular. Almost nobody understand it anyway. Along with macBooks and iPhones. SARCASM: OFF

New comment by egao1980 in "Russia restricts opposition election voting app"

egao1980 — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 15:52:56 +0000

The Navalny's team promised to remove personal data tracking only on 8th of September 2021 (i.e. https://www.dw.com/ru/umnoe-golosovanie-otkazhetsja-ot-sbora...). And the case against the app was opened way before that.

New comment by egao1980 in "Russia restricts opposition election voting app"

egao1980 — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 11:29:36 +0000

For curious - LinkedIn is banned in Russia for exactly the same reason.

New comment by egao1980 in "Russia restricts opposition election voting app"

egao1980 — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 11:28:07 +0000

As far as I understand those apps were illegally gathering and storing personal data - real names and addresses - storing them abroad - which is no-no not only in Russia but in EU (GDPR).

In terms of voting - people can still lookup candidates proposed by Navalny's team online without breaking the law.

Surprisingly most of them are from Communist party of Russia.

New comment by egao1980 in "Scale of Russian mercenary mission in Libya exposed"

egao1980 — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 12:15:41 +0000

Seeing increasing number of non-tech related political posts here. Is it HN or ZH?

New comment by egao1980 in "Siberia’s wildfires are bigger than all the world’s other blazes combined"

egao1980 — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 07:43:03 +0000

Though bears are not koalas I wonder why there's no compassion campaign in the worldwide media? Nobody gathering financial aid and doing any other such things.

New comment by egao1980 in "Overwork contributes to 745k premature deaths per year"

egao1980 — Fri, 28 May 2021 21:40:29 +0000

So basically Capitalism silently kills 745k in a year. If this figure raises up to 1910s levels we'll see Socialist revolutionary wave once more.