shebson's comments

shebson | 11 years ago | 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 | 11 years ago | 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 | 11 years ago | 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 | 11 years ago | 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 | 11 years ago | 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 | 11 years ago | 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 | 11 years ago | 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 | 11 years ago | 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 | 11 years ago | 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 | 11 years ago | 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 | 11 years ago | 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 | 11 years ago | on: Heroku dyno scaling down

As a result, app deploys are also down.

shebson | 12 years ago | 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 | 12 years ago | 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 | 12 years ago | 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 | 12 years ago | 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 | 12 years ago | 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 | 12 years ago | 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 | 12 years ago | 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 | 12 years ago | 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.