I've heard the "hype" about vim for years, sometimes from people who clearly (in retrospect) didn't understand what made vim so good. It was not a selling point for me!
I switched to vim about a month ago and am more productive now than I ever was before. I'd fight to keep vim in my toolkit. Modal editing, jump commands, chained actions, macros, tiling, windowing and configurability are just a few of the features I would miss if I had to switch back.
Non-vimmers: Don't get blinded by the hype, vim rocks for practical reasons.
Yes. Tarential is me, and I am Tarential. I've used it for virtually every site/forum/game/system I've ever created an account on. I registered the domain for my personal site.
I completely understand and respect the need for anonymity in some people and some circumstances. For my own part, though, I think having everything publicly associated with me helps temper my somewhat extreme personality.
I experienced this phenomenon. I've been working hard to get in shape, and I told all my friends. The net result? They all think I'm trying to lose weight!
The ridiculous part is I've never had weight to lose. I started at 140 lbs! After considerable effort I'm up to 165 lbs now. An hour on the weights every second day and I eat ~4,000 calories / day. My goal is to reach 180.
I met my co-founder at the very first Ruby on Rails user group meeting I attended. His previous partner had left him high and dry with a customer and no product, so he was at the meeting looking for a technical co-founder. I didn't know RoR then, but I figured it would be a perfect chance to learn.
We were both wary enough not to agree to anything long term up front. It started with a simple quid pro quo 2 week contract after which we decided to test the waters further by continuing to work together unofficially. After about a month we negotiated a reverse vested stock agreement with a short cliff (already passed) that satisfied us both.
Version one of our product (voltagecrm.com) is nearing the end of the beta cycle and will soon be available for purchase. In the meantime we've been bootstrapping the product using a custom theme on top of an open source CRM to start building a customer base and stay profitable.
I think the partner I found by complete luck was better than I would have found if I'd gone searching. His skills complement mine in every way. He is a salesman, a people-person, who is willing to talk to clients, lawyers, mentors, etc. He has the proper "better to spend $10 than waste 3 hours of your time" attitude that I can't seem to manage. He goes out to ask current and potential customers what features they need and what problems they have with our current system. In short, he makes sure that all I have to do is write software.
Perhaps most importantly of all, I actually like my partner. We can sit and have lunch and talk about things besides the company without feeling uncomfortable.
From reading about the experiences of others, I'd say I got very lucky indeed.
I had to log in just to reply to this because it very well could be me writing this post. I taught myself PHP in grade 7 (around fifteen years ago, it must have been near the v3 release) and sold websites in high school. I hand built everything on web servers I compiled from source.
Then I made the terrible mistake of taking a long break from professional programming through university (I worked as a tech writer instead, the money was good). When I came back two years ago I found that I had to learn a whole new set of tools. Javascript was now the norm instead of a disabled annoyance. Browsers supported incredible display features using stylesheets which made my table-and-images based designs obsolete. All the sites were built using some sort of CMS.
I spent a year learning front end design, WordPress, Magento, Joomla, and Drupal theme design. Then I went back to my old do-it-yourself ways and wrote my own CMS [0]. Suffice to say that it wasn't necessary. I learned a lot about back end programming and MVC related design patterns while creating it, but the most valuable piece of knowledge I gained was "Don't reinvent and try to sell the wheel when other people are offering it for free." It should have been obvious, but it seems I'm much smarter in hindsight than I was in planning.
I'm still learning today. Now it's the Ruby on Rails world and a whole plethora of new technologies come into play. I'm using Haml, SCSS and CoffeeScript on top of the RoR / PostgreSQL back end. My first web app will be ready for release soon. After that it's on to learning Haskell and RethinkDB.
The irony of all this is back when I stopped programming I thought I had a pretty good grasp on everything I needed to know. I figured I'd step right back into web development and continue on the way it had been when I left it. I wouldn't have let my skills atrophy if I had known how important it was to stay up to date. I think after two years I'm finally catching up, and I don't intend to let them get rusty again.
TL;DR:
Don't get cozy because you think you know everything now. Even if you do, the state of the art changes quickly.
I have to weigh in here. It does not stop the abuse. Separating opiates from acetaminophen is extremely simple (look up cold water extraction). All it does is kill people who aren't aware of the danger or the alternatives.
There are many good reasons not to abuse oxycodone. The government doesn't need to add to the damage of people who are only hurting themselves.
Actually I think that poster was being slightly facetious and meant that it does stop that abuse for those 500 people a year because a dead person can't abuse drugs.
FWIW I have terrible handwriting and have only used it when forced to in high school. For everything else, I type. That was certainly not true of most others in my age group (I'm 27 now), but I think you're correct. It will be soon.
I had the opportunity a few years back to work with Jeremy McGrath (many time motocross/supercross world champion) on a commercial shoot he did at our local motocross track. He was modest and pleasant to talk to. He treated me as just another rider, despite the obvious difference in our skill levels.
I also later had a chance to meet Jean Sebastien Roy, a slightly less famous but still top level rider, when he came to do a promotion for KTM. You'd never know from either of them how good they were until you actually saw them ride.
This contrasts heavily with some of the "experts" I ride with every weekend during the summer. I once had a competitor refuse to shake my hand and scoff at my attempts to introduce myself. It is a huge difference in attitude.
By the way, hello HN crowd. I've been a daily reader for several months but never found a topic where I felt I had something useful to post. I hope this has been relevant and useful.
P.S. I ended up beating the guy who wouldn't shake my hand, which gave me a petty feeling of satisfaction. Childish, perhaps, but I'm not perfect.
I switched to vim about a month ago and am more productive now than I ever was before. I'd fight to keep vim in my toolkit. Modal editing, jump commands, chained actions, macros, tiling, windowing and configurability are just a few of the features I would miss if I had to switch back.
Non-vimmers: Don't get blinded by the hype, vim rocks for practical reasons.