Hacker News Reader

pagson Do Not Learn Frameworks – Learn the Architecture

The difference is that the framework is built to be an open source framework - it has general abstractions.

Your own patterns and practices are developed to apply directly to what you're building.

pagson Riot – A React-like, 2.5K user interface library

Maybe I just don't get it, but I can't even get anything from the landing page. What concerns does this library address? What are the general abstractions like?

Why would I even consider digging deeper without knowing the answers to those two questions?

pagson Decentralize All the Things

I predict that "decentralized" will be the next big buzzword. That is all.

pagson Dirty Assembly Tricks in NES Assembly (2013)

Awesome.

pagson Ask HN: Does Node dominate at new startups?

It should be noted that none of these comparisons - Ruby\Node.js, nor Rails\Node.js, are really apples to apples.

pagson Ask HN: Does Node dominate at new startups?

Web - but when the time comes to focus on mobile, Node should still serve us well.

pagson Ask HN: Does Node dominate at new startups?

I've heard the opposite declared many times (Node falling, Ruby rising)...there's never a lack of people who are quick to declare the death of any specific technology.

That being said, I work for a new, funded startup in SF, and our web stack is based on Node.

pagson The chaos and tangled energy of living cities

It's an entirely pleasant vision.

pagson Linus Torvalds Receives 2014 IEEE Computer Pioneer Award

I can't help but think that he was conveniently leaving out details that give the entire story - clearly he thinks the audience are unintelligent sheep, so surely they'll take him at his word, right?

pagson Linus Torvalds Receives 2014 IEEE Computer Pioneer Award

Isn't he blurring the line between "commit" meaning creating a state you can roll back to (in all version control systems), and "commit" meaning pushing to the "official" code base in a non-distributed system? In other words, some issues with non-distributed systems that he highlights (having to keep an elite group deemed smart enough to integrate changes, for example) still exist when pushing to a consensus "official" instance of a distributed repo.

pagson The JavaScript Problem

This is well put, but I can't offer the same concession about "this" ... what exactly is the problem? It provides access to the state of the object on which you are working, if utilizing OO paradigms within JavaScript. Sure "this" values when executing pure functions in some runtimes make little sense but if you understand what "this" means with respect to OO, you wouldn't be trying to access it in that situation in the first place.

pagson “Don't fuck up the culture” – A letter to the Airbnb team

"fuck" is an edgy word.

pagson Low-level is easy

This seems pretty spot on to me. More moving parts = more failure points...as a web engineer, I find myself bitten more by the trappings of abstract code structure than by things like faulty algorithms. This ties pretty heavily into why I feel the standard technical interview for web engineering talent is severely broken, but I digress.

pagson Hiring Software Developers

Or that not having a GitHub account with a billion stars makes you a bad programmer.

Or (gasp) not having a GitHub account at all.

Chances are, if you're a full-time software engineer, you're already spending a significant chunk of your waking life thinking about\working on code, just by showing up to work for >= 40 hours per week. Whatever happened to well-rounded employees?

pagson Dojo for jQuery Developers: A comprehensive tutorial

I get the sense from reading some of these comments that most people who try Dojo don't really have a clear understanding of what it is, or how to separate and leverage the individual tools that it provides. Too bad, since it's a really powerful toolkit. I'd suggest anyone looking for MVC structure to not neglect looking at Dijit templated widgets.

pagson JS Adolescence: Change of opinion regarding certain JavaScript practices

Why post this stuff? He offers opinion without explanation, this is the same type of JavaScript "wisdom" that probably had him following the conventions he is now nixing in the first place. I'm not sure if his "dogma" disclaimer at the end is ironic or a cop-out.

pagson Show HN: a small jQuery Form Validation library

https://github.com/pags/fields.js

Give it a look. As you described, it simply parses standard input tag params, including HTML 5 types. It's my first attempt at anything like this, so be gentle.