Npmjs.org moderated one of my comments regarding their outage today

I know you don't know me, but if you ever meet anyone who does, you can ask them about my personal attitude towards censorship of any kind. The idea that I would stoop to censorship for something as petty as somebody voicing legitimate complaints about a technical screwup of mine is laughable.

(Update: I remembered I wrote http://seldo.com/weblog/2013/09/04/why_i_am_a_web_developer a while ago, which should give some indication about how I feel about censoring the web)

> Tough to give benefit of the doubt

Why?

I was under the impression that anyone could flag something on disqus and it would be censored automatically.

I'm not sure why you think version number is any indicator of quality. In any case, npm is 1.4.4 on my machine.

You're right, I was far too indignant. I can't say that I don't trust npm. I am a javascript developer, after all. For the most part, I have had a great experience working with Node.js and npm. Further, we were not affected by the bug at my company.

I hadn't seen the seldo's apology when I posted, but they do seem very honestly apologetic. Like I said, I have nothing against them messing something up time and again, especially something that shouldn't break responsible production environments. Everybody makes mistakes.

The big red flag to me was the deletion of Rob's criticism. I know they must have been very stressed out, but it wasn't a good move. The industry needs to question if we can rely on these people, and kneejerk reactions like that don't earn any trust.

Nobody can deny that trustworthiness is a touchy subject as npm transitions into a real company. Node developers rely on the reliability of thier development stack, and the reputation of node is largely in the hands of this organization. As npm changes and becomes more opaque, it will become harder for the open alternatives to keep up. If npm gets messed up, node does too. For developers working on production node projects, there is certianally something to loose. If the time comes that npm does need to be forked, the path forward will certianally be a bumpy one.

For the time being, I continue to trust npm for my js modules (and even with my "life", considering I have a few -g installed modules.) Like I said, developers working on node projects don't have much choice, but after reading their apologetic response I will continue to trust npm.

> better still JVM/.Net!

Sure do, enjoying them every day.

I think it's more that his home internet connection can do it.

I don't think it's even 135 concurrent connections, it's 135 users who have his page open. Probably far less were actually loading it simultaneously.

Yikes. He seems to be in a really bad place right now. I don't think tweeting and acting like that are going to help his prospects though. He seems like a passionate person but I'm not sure he is communicating that passion in the best of ways. Hopefully things get better for him.

> do not quit out of professional principle without a backup plan.

Quite!

It's an interesting thing to read through after reading the other HN article "We have luxurious jobs but we are not ware of it" [0].

> Thanks for reaffirming my commitment to not read up about an author/user/submitter other than in regards to the opinion/assertion made at hand...

Oh dear, down the rabbit hole I go...

As far as I can tell, it seems to be about IT not supporting MongoDB and him not wanting to use *SQL.

> I will key=value a BLOB in your row. Good luck reporting that. I am NOT dealing with tables. It's 20 the fuck 14.

Hmm.

[0] http://blog.gedrap.me/blog/2014/02/27/we-have-luxurious-jobs...

Hence the "Vitriol gets you nowhere. This is something I've learned the hard way.".

Wait, he didn't keep a 6-12 month cash emergency fund?

I wouldn't hire him. In fact, I think he goes on an explicit no-hire list. And I definitely would have deleted the comment and banned him from making further comments.

The mass of people coming to his defense is a great example of why I can't take the JavaScript community seriously. The very first line of the comment screams "arrogant jackass" who won't play well with others and prefers to make his points through mockery and derision.

Don't forget about the npm trademark thing.

http://blog.nodejitsu.com/an-open-letter-to-the-node-communi...

Passionate people create drama... which technology stack are you in that doesn't have drama? Because I can't think of a modern one that doesn't have some amount.

And the catch all is of course Steve Balmers sweaty speech...

Or AppEngine. Or GitHub Pages if the content's static. Both of which are effectively free.

Running a home server is fun, but not the best choice if you're publishing content to the outside world.

According to a document published by the government where Rob lives [1], electricity rates are around 0.08 USD/kWh. We can assume Rob uses a computer at home anyway, and would have his DSL modem on anyway, so the extra electricity should be computed based on a single desktop being on for the extra hours per day that it might otherwise be put to sleep. Typical power consumption for a desktop box is around 90W if it is somewhat active vs. sleeping. There are about 730 hours in a month, but his computer would be on say 30% of the time anyway, so that's 511 extra hours per month. That comes to 46 kWh per month of extra electricity, which in his area costs about 3.68 USD per month.

So the price is slightly less, but the value for money isn't good with the home solution. Then again, unemployed people are sometimes known to make suboptimal economic decisions in terms of expected value, because they're optimizing for other things (e.g. being able to switch off a cost mid-month).

[1] http://www.oca.state.pa.us/Industry/Electric/elecomp/Archive...

Because hosting it yourself is so much nicer and you learn so much more from it. It's not nicer in terms of connection speed (although unlimited bandwidth counters that a bit), but you just have everything under control. You can do and put anything on the server while being assured there is no BOFH nosing in your data, or someone social engineering the support team. I would not feel entirely safe storing private keys on a VPS.

I agree that from a business perspective, a VPS is the obvious winner. You don't get redundant hardware and fast internet at home for the same price as you can with a VPS. And if something goes down, you needn't be the one on call: your host fixes it all for you. But for personal hosting that doesn't need someone on call, I prefer hosting my own stuff.

And, especially on DSL internet, it's much nicer to have your data and backups in the LAN instead of having to up/download it all through that pipe. So if you have a server at home anyway, no need to get another VPS really.

Hosted my own blog on DSL for years, I know the issues. He just shouldn't try to serve up half a megabyte of javascript over that connection. The Javascript is required though, so I'm not sure you can't blame Pulsar.

It's somewhat amusing to see him brag about how he's a self-sufficient bad-ass that can keep his site running because he doesn't use any hosting services and he wrote his CMS himself, and then when the site doesn't actually stay up he starts backpedaling and saying it's because it's on his home network and he threw the whole thing together in two weeks only spending a few hours each week and making it better isn't really a priority.

"I'm awesome because I built this kick-ass system." "Yes, well, this system isn't working very well." "Well it's not like I tried very hard."

The comment thread on his post is a trainwreck. The guy needs to learn when to shut his mouth. He even comes across as a total hot-head in the description of his last job on his resume. I'd feel kind of bad for him if he wasn't being such an asshole.

That's why I moderate comments directly myself on my own blog, without using Disqus or akismet. Those systems have false positives.

I eliminated almost all my comment spam by writing a custom version of the Growmap Anti-Spam plugin.