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techpeaceon Building Nuclide, a unified developer experience

Atom is a graphical editor, unlike either Vim or Emacs. It's much easier for web developers specifically to work on, since it's built with web technologies, rather than vimscript. If I want to change the background color of the file browser pane, I can pop open an inspector, identify the element, and change my custom editor CSS, all within about 2 minutes. Its plugin distribution system also integrates directly into the editor - meaning I can browse for and install plugins from within the Atom itself.

techpeaceon How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

Isn't reading books a good way to build fundamentals? I don't think reading a book necessarily precludes you from working on the exercises in that book, which would indeed be a great way to build your understanding of a language. This is the way I approach learning new languages - working through a tutorial, or, indeed, a book. Giving someone the advice, "Hey, just go write some JavaScript," probably isn't great if they don't know any JavaScript.

techpeaceon Bootcards

Could someone explain to me the difference between a "card" and any other rectangular grouping of content?

techpeaceon Get a Packt Pub book a day for free

Many of their books, as far as I can tell, are simply reprints of a framework's API documentation.

techpeaceon In Search of the Red Cross' $500M in Haiti Relief

If you find that distressing, consider donating to https://givedirectly.org/ instead. They keep their admin costs very low, they're remarkably transparent, and all they do is hand your money over to the extremely poor - a tactic with a growing amount of empirical evidence supporting its efficacy.

techpeaceon Deploying branches to GitHub.com

Thanks! This is exactly what I was looking for.

techpeaceon Deploying branches to GitHub.com

If one of your developer's Campfire (assuming y'all still use this) accounts gets popped, does the attacker now have the ability to deploy to production, or is there some other mitigating factor not mentioned here?

techpeaceon Google Design

As do I, but I don't appreciate that I can't select any of the text on that page.

techpeaceon About Coding House (2014)

http://codinghouse.co/#!partners

Don't list those companies as "partners" if they just allowed you to tour their offices one day, unless your intent is to receive a C&D from Google.

techpeaceon Wherein I ridicule Facebook some more, then collaborate with the Panopticon

There's also https://github.com/tfrce/social-buttons-server , from https://taskforce.is/

techpeaceon Existential crisis at Railsconf

http://www.cvedetails.com/product/18211/Djangoproject-Django...

techpeaceon Existential crisis at Railsconf

Not quite sure I'm understanding the point of your snark. The fact that vulnerabilities exist mean that it's not well tested? Take a look at the tests directory.

No matter how many tests you have, security vulnerabilities exist in your code, I assure you. Their frequency of discovery says more about the popularity of a codebase than it does about the thoroughness of testing.

techpeaceon The hidden FM radio in your pocket and why you can't use it

Citation needed.

techpeaceon Straightening our Backbone: A lesson in event-driven UI development

We've had great success with Marionette, specifically by leveraging concepts from the http://backbonerails.com architecture.

techpeaceon A Strong Welfare State Produces More Entrepreneurs

I'm a big fan of skepticism, but blindly questioning anything you see without supporting your claims is just another form of superstition.

techpeaceon A Strong Welfare State Produces More Entrepreneurs

The amount of blind conservatism on HN is pretty rattling. Here's the formula:

"Headline Claiming That Anything About Welfare is Positive, with Supporting Evidence"

Top comment: "Sorry, but the evidence doesn't support that." Evidence provided to substantiate claim: none.

techpeaceon A Strong Welfare State Produces More Entrepreneurs

Citation needed.

techpeaceon Slack Chats

I don't feel like even attempting to try to hack together what Flowdock gives me on top of IRC. That would involve far too much of my time, and I'd rather have a team of very smart engineers dedicated to keeping it secure, running, and feature-rich, rather than relying on my time to do any of those things. I use an IDE, rather than trying to cobble an IDE together in Vim, for the same reason.

> I can sort of understand Slack for a small company, but if you have your own server infrastructure, no, I can't.

This seems to be based on the assumption that IRC is anywhere near as feature-rich as a web-based chat client, but it isn't. If you could point me to an OS X IRC client that isn't absolutely terrible (and please do, I'd really love one), I'd be happy to give it a shot, but even with all of the above perceived advantages of IRC, Flowdock still wins for me. Every team I've worked on that's switched to it has had a marked uptick in productivity.

techpeaceon Primer – CSS toolkit and guidelines that power GitHub

Indeed. From the announcement blog post: "It will always be GitHub’s internal toolkit first, designed to help build GitHubby things. That said, we love to share." [1]

[1]: http://markdotto.com/2015/03/23/introducing-primer/

techpeaceon The Hacker Who Drank Ayahuasca

For anybody else interested in learning more about DMT, the active ingredient in Ayahuasca, I'd recommend the excellent documentary "The Spirit Molecule": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340425/

techpeaceon Fired

Exactly right! Every engineering job I've had has been considered "at will employment," [1] meaning that the company can terminate you, or you can walk, at any time, and for any (legal) reason.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

(edited to correct typo)

techpeaceon An important lesson about pitching your app at a high school assembly

tl;dr - the lesson here is "don't do that."

techpeaceon Mozilla not accepted for Google Summer of Code 2015

This comment confuses me. They're currently in the process of building a new systems programming language (http://www.rust-lang.org/) with which to build the next version of Firefox.

techpeaceon Mozilla not accepted for Google Summer of Code 2015

I don't think anyone is claiming that they benefit from sponsoring non-competitors, only that they would suffer a disadvantage from funding a competitor, and that this MAY have weighed into their decision-making.

techpeaceon Marijuana may be even safer than previously thought, researchers say

Thanks!

techpeaceon Marijuana may be even safer than previously thought, researchers say

I think labelling me as "very short-sighted" because we might one day, in the future, hypothetically reach THC intake levels that are considered lethal is a bit much. We aren't there yet, and even with the technologies you mentioned, we aren't even close. You would need to ingest a third your bodyweight (conservatively) all at once to kill yourself[1].

Physiologically, you would lose motor function long before you were able to kill yourself. So maybe in 2056 if somebody produces a machine that lets you take in 50kg of THC in a single hit, don't use it.

[1]: http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/mj_overdose.htm

techpeaceon Show HN: Add “Magic” to Your Business

You're being downvoted for comments like this: "I hope someone did the same when you guys launched and I hope it made you struggle."

The fact is that you're freaking out about something nobody else here really cares about. "Piggybacking" on the popularity of something else is a tried and true marketing technique. When McDonald's tweets something featuring a trending hashtag that's only tangentially related, they're "piggybacking" on its popularity. Magic itself is "piggybacking" on the popularity of the services it navigates for you.

More importantly, this isn't going to hurt Magic one bit. You could build a "clone" of magic yourself in less than a day: set up a stripe account, build a low-fi landing page, and own a phone. Boom. You're done. Hell, you could build a Sonar clone on Twilio without too much effort (nb: I've never used the service, but I'm referring to the basic feature set). The trick would be making the same kind of splash that Magic made, and therein lies the challenge.

In summary: calm down and you'll stop losing so many Internet points.

techpeaceon Marijuana may be even safer than previously thought, researchers say

A "lethal" dosage of THC would require a blood transfusion - literally replacing your blood with THC until you asphyxiated. I've heard the LD50 (the lethal dosage that would kill 50% of the population) of cannabis described as "50 pounds dropped on your head from 50 feet."

techpeaceon Marijuana may be even safer than previously thought, researchers say

Could you reference a study that makes that claim? I've never heard that before.

techpeaceon Marijuana may be even safer than previously thought, researchers say

The plural of anecdote isn't data.