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Is asking the subject of an article for comment before ripping them to shreds just a lost art at this point?

Seriously? It's an adverb.

_piuson Parse Launches Web Apps with the Express Web Framework

Do you really think that Parse is doing all of the security updates that come through Ubuntu or CentOS?

Yes. Yes I do.

This whole line of argument is one I typically hear from folks who've never had to deal with a Sev 1 incident in the middle of the night. If your argument holds, sysadmins and DevOps teams are essentially pointless.

Moreover, even a developer confident handling both maintenance and incident response should value his or her time more than zero. Given that, presumably there is a price point at which it makes sense to simply pay a platform provider or hire dedicated DevOps. There may be varying opinions as to what that price point is, but it does exist if the developer has the cash.

_piuson Ask HN: I'm 26 and would like to make 100k/yearly before I'm 30. How do I do it?

I'd look at AngelList jobs, set the slider to $100k minimum, and see what comes out.

https://angel.co/jobs

_piuson Marco Arment's 2006 Resume [pdf]

This is interesting background, but you should reconsider revealing this kind of information about him publicly unless you've got his permission. It's really none of our business what his GPA was or whether he did well at his first job.

_piuson Ask HN: Is 30 too old to start in software engineering or CS?

I'll echo the sentiment that you wouldn't be too old, but question your approach. Why get the degree at this point? Why not continue to learn through self-study and demonstrate your ability through open source?

Unless you want to be a bonafide computer scientist (i.e. working towards a career in academia or otherwise pushing the boundaries of current knowledge of the field), it seems like pursuing a second degree may do little else but exacerbate the age concerns you're already having.

In my opinion you'd be better off starting somewhere as a junior programmer now and honing your craft on the job (as you'd have to do after finishing your degree anyway).

_piuson SQL injection search

https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/

_piuson I Sold The Magazine, Too

It might also be useful context that TPM — to which I subscribe — took a round of funding lead by Marc Andreessen a few years ago.

_piuson Is Silicon Valley only interested in the problems of twentysomethings?

Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies.

_piuson Soylent Campaign

My main gripe with Soylent (ever since I first saw it here on HN a month ago) is that they are making cooking seem like a horrible chore that nobody wants to do.

To me, the more worrisome thing is that they are making eating seem like a horrible chore that nobody wants to do.

_piuson Sublime Text 3

Any ST3 users want to share how it compares to ST2?

_piuson Box Acquires Crocodoc (YC W10)

Congrats on the exit Ryan!

_piuson Airport Exposes Class Divisions in Silicon Valley

what would you call a fifth generation Baronet who was educated at Eton and Oxford, served as an officer in a prestigious Army regiment, listens to Radio 4, reads the Telegraph, never watches TV and likes to walk in the country ...?

British. Very, very British.

_piuson Is this what it’s supposed to feel like?

... is not a business many high level hackers would be interested in at all.

If you don't see that that's fine ....

You sound very defensive about this, which leads to the flip side of your argument: any prospect who can't take the lightest of jabs at their pet platform is not a person many "high level" startups would be interested in at all.

_piuson Is this what it’s supposed to feel like?

That will simply turn off some people and there is no reason for a self-interested business to do that.

Actually, judging by your comment and the ensuing replies, it looks like listing the benefit this way is doing a great job attracting the people they want and filtering out those who wouldn't fit in there.

_piuson Yahoo shuts down six products

Upcoming.org was a big deal once upon a time.

_piuson [dead]

It doesn't.

Sure it does, if enough people upvote it.

I flagged it.

Great. Flagging and ignoring is the right way to deal with a story you don't think belongs. Fueling a meta-debate about the so-called poisonous story probably isn't.

... threads like this one are poison for HN.

Care to elaborate? I think the meta-commentary about whether something belongs on the front page is far less germane. Just watch as this comment thread devolves into a pointless back-and-forth about the guidelines.

_piuson [dead]

Epic quote from Ron: "We will employ the most sophisticated social media campaign ever to remove them from office."

_piuson Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

I submitted this, but I'm not the author of the library.

I agree with many of the concerns and limitations brought up here, most notably the fluid, non-binary nature of gender. That said, thoughtful application of probabilistic guesses about gender can add value in certain situations. For instance: http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/learning/freeing-plu...

_piuson Github turns five

February 18th, 2008 (#365)

https://api.github.com/users/pius

Those were the good old days. Hanging out in #merb, just starting to get my feet wet with contributing to open source. Really great memories.

_piuson Practical Techniques to Achieve Quality in Large Software Projects

I have a friend who can derive no value from unit tests. He works on a thing that--by no fault of his own, but just by the very nature of physical reality--cannot be automatically tested.

What is he, a quantum cryptographer?

_piuson Setting up Sublime Text 2

I see your perspective, but I disagree that vi speed is mostly theoretical.

1. you have to check if you're in insert mode or not.

You should always be in normal mode unless you're actively inserting, so this shouldn't be something you really have to think about.

2. you have to know you want to go down 5 lines....

Since your example assumes that line numbers are visible, you could just type vnG, where n is the line number you're trying to put the cursor before. No subtraction needed. Depending of the shape of the text, there are probably other intuitive approaches as well.

Does the "tao" of vi take time to internalize? Sure. But once you've done that, you can be blazing fast.

_piuson Announcing Yeoman 1.0 beta 4

Congratulations on the new release. Ironically, I tried Yeoman in earnest for the first time yesterday.

I've got deep respect for the authors, but I've had a pretty miserable experience with Yeoman so far, even after giving it another try this morning. In particular:

* Using the web app generator seems to download an absurd number of dependencies every time. It takes minutes to download everything to start a simple app, about as long as it takes me to install Rails from scratch on the same system.

* After generating an app, I've yet to be able to actually run grunt on the result ... it always errors out with something. If it's not a jshint warning that causes it to abort, it's a Compass warning.

One of the great joys of writing HTML5 + Javascript apps is that the experience tends to feel clean and unencumbered. So far, Yeoman has done nothing but make my workflow much more complex and error-prone. Things just feel ... rickety. At the end of the day, I gave up and used Initializr [1] to start the app. Didn't even want to bother trying out Brunch [2], I was so frustrated.

I wanted to love it and I know there are folks out there who've had great luck with Yeoman; hopefully some of them can chime in to tell me what I'm missing.

[1] http://www.initializr.com/

[2] http://brunch.io

_piuson Surfacing Interesting Content

Great article. Unlike most blog posts on this topic, it offers practical approaches to computing the score in real time without resorting to cron jobs and the like.

_piuson How the Internet Archive is having a great time with Bitcoin

http://longbets.org/

_piuson Ask HN: Best environments to hack in SF

The POPOS.

http://www.spur.org/files/u7/POPOSGuide.pdf

_piuson Email First Startups

I had an idea for website called "Global Voices" (domain will be glblvcs.com) Users from all over the world will enter their email and subscribe to a micro-newsletter that comes out every Friday night. By entering their email they're also automatically entered into a "lottery".

There's already a popular project very similar to this called The Listserve.

http://thelistserve.com

_piuson Mailbox Is Joining Dropbox

If you look at their foray into photos and the way they talk about their service now, Dropbox is becoming a lifestyle brand focused on your personal data.

Meanwhile, the mobile e-mail client that the Mailbox team built is so cool that it convinced about a million people to let Mailbox store a full copy of their e-mail archive ... in 10 weeks.

That kind of strategic value means it's smart for them to swoop the product and team up RIGHT NOW, even if they had to pay a premium to do it.

_piuson Mailbox Is Joining Dropbox

This is a very clever move by Dropbox.

_piuson Build an AirBnB Clone in a Day

It could be like saying: "hey, I just built a clone of McDonalds; I made a burger with fries."

Why troll? This is obviously a developer tutorial meant to show off a platform. I just can't believe you actually think the author claimed to clone AirBnB's whole business in this article.