Hacker News Reader

piuson Be a JavaScript Rockstar (jQuery site redesign)

Shockingly disgusting... I'm incredibly embarrassed, imagine trying to convince your boss that you should be using jQuery.

I'm scratching my head on what to say or how to vote your comment because, for the life of me, I just can't figure out if you're serious or not.

piuson Object#returning (Ruby's K Combinator)

It's (perhaps) worth noting that Object#returning is part of ActiveSupport, not the Ruby Standard Library.

piuson My Life With Tim

Beautiful essay.

piuson Anne Trubek on Why We Shouldn’t Still Be Learning Catcher in the Rye

Nice to see a writer who actually knows how to spell "cachet."

piuson Aaron Swartz: How To Launch Software

Geez, that's a lot of ad hominem. Did I accidentally murder your dog or something?

Nah, that's pretty much tptacek's commenting style, I wouldn't take it personally.

piuson Sarah Lacy's counter argument to PG's 6.4% point

I was pretty disappointed by this article; I'd expected to see something compelling here and there just wasn't anything there.

I try not to be swayed by proofreading issues and the like, but starting the article off implying that the Paul Graham "Equity" essay (which is clearly labeled to be from July 2007) was written a few days ago as a response to her colleague's Y Combinator critique set a really bad tone for the article.

piuson Explaining REST to Damien Katz

Perhaps I judge too soon?

Yes.

piuson Twitter stream of Chinese journalist nabbed by security

Scary stuff.

piuson Design-based Web Applications Development - The Essential New Paradigm

I think this is a really important idea, but I was dismayed to find this link to be nothing more than an ad for some conference.

piuson Secrets of the JavaScript Ninjas

A nice antidote to this completely nonsensical article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=263021

piuson Nine Deadly Startup Diseases—and How to Cure Them

This is just the sort of comment I really appreciate. I was on the fence as to whether or not to click through to the article and your comment helped me decide.

piuson How black drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories to confound the Feds.

The Wire meets Good Will Hunting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5JPliWh6G4

piuson We feel your pain, and we're sorry

People should go easy on them. I mean, hey, GMail's still in beta, right?

piuson What happened to Dropbox, and why some startups are in private beta forever?

right, but not a private beta

piuson The secret of the web (hint: it's a virtue)

I think the two views are compatible. The message I got from Seth here is to take the broad, macroscopic view; if your first startup fails, don't quit, try again. And again. And again, if need be. Be patient.

This essay was good, but I thought Ira Glass presented a related idea in a much more powerful way here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE. Depending on where you are in your career/startup/creative life, this 5 minute clip of Ira Glass could be the most important thing you watch all year.

piuson Ask HN: Ruby on Rails Hosting

Ah, cool. Hopefully they're adding support for all Rack-based apps and not just Sinatra. That'd be sweet.

piuson Ask HN: Ruby on Rails Hosting

Hmm, didn't realize they allowed you to use local development tools. Question for people who are using Heroku: Is it fair to call it a tool for beginning Rails developers or does it have benefits for "advanced" Rails devs? This blog post is definitely making me take a second look at the service.

piuson Ask HN: Ruby on Rails Hosting

If you're comfortable administering a Linux slice, consider Slicehost ($20/month). If you're just learning, Heroku might be a great option.

piuson The Tech (MIT student newspaper) publishes the banned DEFCON slides

http://web.mit.edu/zacka/www/warcart.html

I want one. :)

piuson The Tech (MIT student newspaper) publishes the banned DEFCON slides

That's not a bug, it's a feature. I think. :)

I tried the Scribd vacuum link right after posting and I got an error saying that the PDF was encrypted, so it wouldn't be able to show it. I think that result gets cached and Scribd just redirects to the PDF for subsequent requests.

piuson The Tech (MIT student newspaper) publishes the banned DEFCON slides

It all makes me think terrorists must be really incompetent if they can't pull off these same hacks.

What's to say they can't or haven't?

piuson Ticketstumbler (YC Summer 08) launches

Done and done. :)

piuson The Tech (MIT student newspaper) publishes the banned DEFCON slides

Smartcard security is notoriously bad in the vast majority of deployed systems.

The people designing these high human traffic systems are usually much more concerned about other factors (low latency at the turnstile, minimal number of network connections to wire, card reliability, etc.) than they are about security.

piuson The Tech (MIT student newspaper) publishes the banned DEFCON slides

From the Wired article:

"Among the documents the MTBA filed with its declaration to the court today is a vulnerability assessment report (http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/files/vulnerability_assessm...) that the three students gave the MTBA about the flaws in its system. The document is dated August 8, the day the MTBA filed its lawsuit against the students, and is essentially the information the students declined to give the MTBA before it filed its lawsuit."

I can't help but think Wired got this wrong. Knowing who the students' advisor is, I find it pretty hard to believe that the students refused to give the assessment to the MBTA before publishing this presentation.

piuson The Tech (MIT student newspaper) publishes the banned DEFCON slides

Context: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/injunction-requ.htm...

piuson Anyone going to SXSW?

I will be this year, for sure. (first time)

piuson MA seeks restraining order to silence Defcon presentation about subway pass exploit

They got the restraining order in time to stop the presentation, but not in time to stop the distribution of the slides and source code. The question now is when will the torrent of the Defcon CD get posted?

piuson Successfully poisoned the latest BIND with fully randomized ports

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=168525

piuson Ask HN: When to do an API for my web app?

I agree. Ideally, the API you end up exposing should be something that you're already using to build services on top of yours (plus or minus a few modifications).

Also, check out Joshua Bloch's excellent presentation on how to design a good API: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3733345136856180693. One interesting point he makes is that you should avoid exposing a public API until you've successfully built three clients for it.

piuson Ticketstumbler (YC Summer 08) launches

Private works too, as long as I get a key. :P