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shebson

67 karma · joined August 16, 2011

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shebson··on Choose Boring Technology
I generally agree with your post, but I think there is a critical difference between your argument and that of the blog post. Of course teams are more productive with technologies they know, but that isn't necessarily an arbitrarily-defined "boring" technology.

To pick on one specific example in the post: Node.js is popular enough that there are lots of teams and engineers that are most comfortable and productive working with it. For these teams, choosing Node certainly wouldn't cost an innovation token, while deciding to build some service in Python, Ruby or PHP (if we take at face value that this is more "boring") may end up being more costly.

shebson··on “Go’s design is a disservice to intelligent programmers”
A more appropriate example might be Python. It didn't ship with Pip by default until Python 3.4 (released in 2014).
shebson··on Why I am called "the Father of Visual Basic" (1996)
I just want to say thank you. VB was my first introduction to programming. I was in fourth grade and I asked my parents for VB6, and they thoughtfully also bought me "Visual Basic for Dummies." I was quickly hooked - I especially remember writing side scroller games with it and making the image sprites with Photoshop in my school's computer lab. I don't think I've written a line of VB since middle school, but I will always have fond memories of it.
shebson··on Ask HN: What are the projects/apps I can build to learn Go Language?
A friend and I built http://usefixie.com/ with it to learn Go. Like artursapek's project, Fixie was a good fit because it involved concurrency and networking, and latency was critical. It was also nice that we could leverage a well-developed open source project (GoProxy).
shebson··on Ross Ulbricht Convicted of Running Silk Road as Dread Pirate Roberts
Yes, several of those convictions carry the potential for a life sentence. Additionally, the New York Times reports that the two most serious convictions carry minimum sentences of 20 years and 10 years (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/05/nyregion/man-behind-silk-r...).
shebson··on Fixed Raises $650K More and Heads to Oakland
I tend to agree, but there is still a place for this app. SF's parking enforcement and the appeals process is thoroughly broken. I know several people who have lost appeals when they parked at a broken meter despite having taken photos or videos showing that meter wasn't working (and in SF, signs on parking meters indicate that parking at broken meters is legal as long as you stay within posted time limits).
shebson··on Ask HN: My 56-year-old father is a developer having a tough time finding a job
Berlin may be worth considering as well. Opportunities for developers in Berlin are comparatively plentiful, and while it would be nice to know German if you live there, many tech companies in Berlin use English as the official language because employees come from so many places around the EU and the world.
shebson··on NY Times releases military surplus gear data on GitHub
I'd assume it's an XLSX simply because that's the format they received it in from the Defense Department.
shebson··on Show HN: I'm renting a truck to make buying and selling furniture easier
Love this idea! I signed up and am looking forward to seeing what kind of items are available in the coming weeks.

One little thing confused me about the dashboard: I can see that I have "free item alerts" on, but I can't find a way to see if I have alerts on for normal auction items.

In any case, great idea and I'm excited to use it.

shebson··on Ask HN: What are good blogging platforms for programmers?
Jekyll with GitHub Pages is a great solution, but it's worth mentioning that other static site generators serve the same purpose and may be a better fit for you, depending on your preferences. Hyde is a very flexible static site generator based on Django, and Metalsmith is a very promising static site generator built on Node. Whatever static site generator you use, hosting on S3 is easy and cheap, and it's easy to automate deployments via Grunt or Gulp.
shebson··on Polyglot is a distributed web framework for multiple programming languages
This is cool, but the naming is unfortunate as Polyglot is already a somewhat popular library for doing internationalization in Javascript: https://github.com/airbnb/polyglot.js
shebson··on Heroku dyno scaling down
As a result, app deploys are also down.
shebson··on Ask HN: Creating a query builder for end users
You shouldn't trust it just because of your UI. With developer tools, regardless of your UI, it would be trivially easy for a malicious user to send any arbitrary SQL query. This would allow them to retrieve sensitive data or modify/delete records from your production database. You really should only build this query server-side, and, as the OP is using PHP, I should also add the caveat that they should use PDO.
shebson··on Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014
I would be so happy if Heroku passed along these price cuts to their customers, but based on past AWS price cuts, I'm not holding my breath.
shebson··on You might not need jQuery
I love the idea of removing Backbone's jQuery dependency. If I could use Backbone without jQuery, I would gladly leave jQuery behind.

For my use case, Backbone would also have to lose it's jQuery dependency for RESTful model persistence, but maybe that means I should get to work on it and submit a PR :-)

shebson··on Gmail was down
I'm not sure it's a really a small subset of users. My personal gmail is down as are all accounts in two different Google Apps organizations I belong to.
shebson··on React: Finally, a great server/client web stack
Exactly this. Serving fully formed html and picking it up by a client-side framework is great for crawlers and also great for performance. In addition to React, you should check out Rendr (https://github.com/airbnb/rendr) - it's a really cool library for doing this via server-side rendering of Backbone views.
shebson··on Django 1.7 alpha 1 released
It's great to see schema migrations move into Django core. South is great, but Django will be much better with schema migrations baked in, especially for newcomers.

For anyone coming to Django from Rails, South seems anomalous. Outside of database migrations, Django is a very battery-included framework, so it's weird that until 1.7 data migrations were handled by third party tools (mostly South) and not mentioned at all in the Django documentation.

This is a big step for Django. I'm excited for the (not too distant) future when 1.7 is the official release.

shebson··on Response to "Math is Not Necessary for Software Development"
It's certainly possible to do a kind of software development without much math, but having a strong basis in math definitely gives you tools to solve hard problems better. Even fairly trivial apps often need to solve problems (like recommending content, auto-generating playlists, etc.) that are much easier if you're familiar with fairly advanced math topics (like k-means clustering and Markov chains in those examples).
shebson··on SSL Labs: Stricter security requirements for 2014
An interesting effect of this is that everyone using ssl provided by CloudFlare's Pro tier now gets dropped to an A- because they use RC4 with TLS 1.1.
shebson··on Show HN: Probabilistically Generating HN Post Titles
My favorites:

"Google is about to learn stats"

"Progressive JPEGs: a new alternative to Node.js"

"Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Problem"

"Your Username Will Now Have Amazon Ads Pre-Installed"

shebson··on JavaScript particle simulator
I'm getting 38 FPS on a 2012 Macbook Air with Chrome. Didn't expect the HD4000/HD3000 difference to be so big.
shebson··on YouTube is down
Both their site and their data API are down.
shebson··on "X for Y" Startups
One of the examples given of a startup that created a new category is Angellist. I generally agree, but it's worth noting that Angellist has embraced being described as "Facebook for startups" and "Facebook for companies": http://betabeat.com/2011/09/angellist-gains-prestige-as-it-b...
shebson··on GoDaddy's DNS Service is Down
They now have the DNS working for their own site, which means you can now log in and change your nameservers to another service like Route53.
shebson··on GoDaddy's DNS Service is Down
These are instructions on how to move your domain, not migrate to different DNS servers. Moving away from GoDaddy in general might be a good idea, but if you're just looking to migrate to another DNS service like Route53, this isn't what your looking for.
shebson··on OSX apps that keep you hooked to your Mac?
Of course! I probably should have clarified and said something like "being able to run a real terminal alongside programs like Photoshop without having to us a VM has me hooked." I love linux, but there's a lot of software I use every day that only exists for mac/windows.
shebson··on OSX apps that keep you hooked to your Mac?
It's only loosely an app, but having a real unix terminal (without having to run a VM) is the biggest reason I'm hooked.
shebson··on PHP-CGI Vulnerability Exploited in the Wild
My thought exactly. Anyone who keeps their stack up to date is using the Apache2 Handler or FastCGI. Even if they're still on Apache1, mod_php isn't vulnerable.
shebson··on Attackers target unpatched PHP bug allowing malicious code execution
Because this only affects PHP running in CGI mode, it should really only affect out-of-date systems. By default with Apache 2, PHP is run by the Apache 2 Handler (which isn't vulnerable). Even before that, mod_php has been standard for quite a while.
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