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JoelAnairon Ask HN: What habit have you dropped or picked up that improved your life?

Psychedelic drugs. They help keep priorities in order and aid creativity by forcing you to examine different points of view and approach problems from different angles.

JoelAnairon Dear Google, Thanks For Copying My Startup But You’re Doing It All Wrong

If it's a squeeze bunt and the batter is out at first base, presumably the runner scored. That is exactly the purpose of a suicide squeeze. Safety squeezes are extremely rare, and "a squeeze bunt" nearly always refers to a suicide squeeze.

JoelAnairon Ionicons – Free and beautiful icons, MIT licensed

Really nice icons. Thanks for sharing.

JoelAnairon Bring Back the Lash: Why flogging is more humane than prison.

Well said. The US prison complex is hopelessly broken and the absurdity of flogging criminals only underscores that.

JoelAnairon Show HN: Hiro – Fast and responsive notetaking meets semantic search

This is really cool. The app is beautiful to look at. I find the search useful, particularly being able to pin results to the document. Highlighting a word and getting a list of synonyms is great, too.

This fills a niche similar to Microsoft OneNote's, but with the complexity scaled down admirably. Great job.

JoelAnairon RulersGuides.js - Photoshop-like rulers and guides

neat.

JoelAnairon Ask HN: What are the best technologies you have worked with in 2013?

I like the IDE (a lot). I'm not reinventing anything, just doing web development. Visual Studio gives you every tool you need to get the job done in one package that's frequently updated and runs stably and consistently (on my machine). The individual tools may not be better than their OSS equivalents, but as an overall ecosystem they are fairly well-tested and work together extremely well in my experience. NuGet is very cool and easy to use.

The end result for me has been that I spend significantly less time wondering why things aren't working (almost none, really) and more time actually writing and improving my code.

If you are doing something groundbreaking or way-out-of-the-box, Visual Studio is probably not a great choice. But for workaday web developers like me it's reliable, easy, and has objectively made me more productive compared to Node/Express/Backbone.

JoelAnairon Ask HN: What are the best technologies you have worked with in 2013?

Yeah, MVC. WebForms look a little painful, but most of the pluses of Visual Studio still apply IMO.

JoelAnairon Ask HN: What are the best technologies you have worked with in 2013?

You're going to hate this answer, but after a couple of years of Node/Express development I'm really enjoying writing Asp.NET in C# using Visual Studio 2013.

JoelAnairon The iOS 7 review

Lol at "And I don't know anyone with a Windows Phone that doesn't have a Visual Studio license."

JoelAnairon A Social Network for Crohn’s Disease – Crohnology (YC S12)

Seems like a good place to shoot the shit.

JoelAnairon Forebruary, an endless wall calendar

My grandfather used to say "Thirty days has November, all the rest I can't remember."