Are you in a startup career path or are you one and done? - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/are-you-in-a-startup-career-path-or-are-you-one-and-done.html <comment><USER2> Strongly recommend, if you're interested in startups as a career, that you add "taking a job at a startup and working your way up to a key role" to your to- do list. I know a couple people who have tried to make startups their career by serially founding go-nowhere companies; that's the wrong way to do it.

(My rule of thumb, which I've back-rationalized onto my career, is not to start back-to-back companies).

<comment><USER3> I totally agree. The reason this is so important is it makes it possible for you to see the ways companies fail without bearing the burden yourself. (Because, odds are, the startups you join will fail.)

It also shows you that there is more than one path to success. I've worked for several startups and each one taught me a different way of thinking about what are the important things to focus on, what kind of people to hire, and what problems are worth solving.

<comment><USER4> Agree with you and the GP. Both well said.

It wasn't until my fourth start-up job that I found one that I loved and stuck with for more than 1.5 years. Luckily, that one worked out and I was rewarded for it. Not as a founder, but as the GP recommended: work at it and find a key role. Work up from there and get your efforts recognized.

You won't make millions this way but you will learn a lot about business-- mainly, how to recognize the good and bad things in your environment, and how to navigate those issues. You also don't have to risk your savings or livelihood. Unless you have a clear or novel idea about what you want (which I didn't), it is a great learning environment.

One thing that I have always known is that I'm not a natural business-type person. After having the safety blanket of learning through 6 years of funded start-ups, rather than on my own dime (and thinking I could do it myself "because it's so easy"), it really helped my long-term prospects of running my own business. One day I will but not yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure how I feel about phrase "startup career path" as concept. Not that I disagree with what Gabriel is saying here, but be careful not to box yourself in conceptually.

I definitely consider myself an early-stage startup guy, and I am extremely hesitant to work for a large company, however I've actually only been in a true startup for 3 years out of a 12-year career. Before that I worked for a public University, a new media agency, and a bunch of small freelance gigs. In all of those circumstances I was able to do great work, meet great people, and learn a lot about business (yes even at the U).

Now it's true that nothing matches the ambition or intensity of a true startup, and it's definitely a place I like to be. Conventional wisdom in silicon valley evolves quickly, but it's very inbred, and it tends to create bubbles of competition around sexy concepts, where hundreds or thousands of the very smartest people in the world are working 18 hour days on some specific concept that doesn't even have a market yet (eg. Check-in-base mobile apps). Meanwhile, out in wider industries you find huge markets with huge inefficiencies due; billion dollar markets that are ripe for disruption, with reasonably small barriers to entry for someone with a little inside information.

If you bring your technical and execution skills to one of these markets you have a much greater chance of success, and with an established market you also can be sure there's something really there. Spending a couple years in an established company could be the seed to a brilliant startup. Likewise, working on yet another social widget just for the sake of being in a "startup" could land you with obsolete skills when app-fatigue turns to backlash, and silicon valley moves onto the next hot thing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Gabriel, I really like your article because all too often to we get short- sighted and get caught in the "get rich quick" mentality. I think it is critical to balance this long term approach with a firm belief that your current project will make it BIG.

Without this belief that what you are working on will be the next sliced bread, it can be easy to get discouraged or, as you mentioned, move on to the next project.

</comment><comment><USER7> One of the best startup posts I've read yet - big kudos to @yegg, he's the man.

Thinking that you're going to win by just playing one or two hands is dumb. I also don't like the view that entrepreneurs do it because their personality naturally gravitates towards risk, that's just not smart business.

Only way to win is to take advantage of high EV moments in life, but to also maintain a long-term view and mitigate risk along the way so you can keep playing the game for as long as possible - survival goes before anything else.

Max Levchin failed 4x before he hit it with PayPal. No one becomes a great entrepreneur overnight.

<comment><USER8> Using investment as an analogy, this is like a barbell strategy. Put most of your portfolio into bonds and put 10% into pure speculation like out-of-the money options.

<comment><USER7> No, it's not. It's more like the Kelly strategy: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion>

Be ready to seize opportune times, but never risk disaster. The world's greatest entrepreneurs and investors didn't get to where they are today with diversification strategies.

They did it by concentrating the bets they made in life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think there are lots of ways to go about startups and only some subset qualify as the yegg's "startup career path." Which is to say, there are a fair number of things that are startups and can be done with a couple coders and some ramen over a couple months -- often not evening needing a "marketing" guru -- while there are lots of other problems which require more specialized domain knowledge (either with respect to technology, market, or both).

In this case, what you need to succeed depends largely on having the right set of skills to succeed within your specific domain, assuming you have one. I'm generally of the opinion that there is much lower risk in these areas (assuming you know your market well) since presumably all you have to do is match an existing need with a product, the primary barrier being your competence.

How do you acquire the skills necessary? This too depends on which side of the ball you are on. Larger startups need people in different roles. Rather than getting in on a little startup and being part-time coder, part-time cleaner, part-time ramen cook, get out in the would and be the most excellent in whatever facet you excel in. Heck, you may decide that making the world a better place in whatever capacity you are best at (usually also what you enjoy) you is better than attempting getting superrich and retiring at 30.

In other words, my advice to all "startup" people out there is do what makes you tick, do it as best as you can, and let your startup, _if_ it arises meet a need that you know is real. This may be a problem that people don't realize is a problem (like limited and often unintuitive course management software) or it may be something bigger and better that only a few people will understand (e.g. a cure for Multiple Sclerosis).

Anyways, I've nothing against serial entrepreneurs if that's what makes you tick. More important though is do what you love.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wrote a blog post about this a few months ago, the cloud or the ladder:

[http://blog.opportunitycloud.com/2010/05/07/the-cloud-or- the...](http://blog.opportunitycloud.com/2010/05/07/the-cloud-or-the-ladder- choosing-a-career-strategy/)

"Cloud" in this context is an opportunity cloud, the sum total of all the positive things that can happen to you at one particular moment. It is what happens when you position yourself to be in a spot where good things happen, not knowing exactly what.

This is a different strategy than the "ladder" strategy which basically is about climbing a corporate career ladder.

When you're in "startup mode" you constantly try to expand your opportunity cloud but you don't always know the direction. It's a completely different way of thinking compared to the ladder.

</comment><comment><USER11> I joined my first startup 20+ years ago because I liked creating software, being at the researchy end of the product spectrum, the informality and speed of a small company, having a lot of responsibility, and of course, the prospect of a big payout was attractive.

I've been exceptionally lucky in all of these aspects, so I've been doing nothing but startups since then (except when I found myself at a big company post-acquisition).

If you're going into it _just_ to get rich quick, you are definitely doing it wrong. And your motivation is sufficiently off-course to pretty much guarantee that you won't get what you want.

</comment><comment><USER12> I respectfully disagree. A start-up is hard. If you're doing anything other than putting maximal effort into your current endeavor odds of success go down.

<comment><USER13> I think you can certainly be successful in that mode. I was--working in almost complete isolation, and afterwards I still wasn't really a part of the startup community (since I didn't really know many people in it).

What I missed though and what I've realized since is that if you actively engage in that community you end up meeting people that end up helping you that you would otherwise never meet because you can't justify meeting them with your head down all the time.

So it ends up being sort of non-intuitive, and hence the post. I think if you do relax that mode a bit your chances actually go up. Of course there needs to be a balance though.

<comment><USER5> I'm three years into an ambitious and promising startup now, and feel the same way. I gotta get out and get in touch more with the community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm doing my current job for now, but there's plenty of other stuff I could be doing afterwards. I imagine that I'll probably take a break, but sitting at home growing olives and playing tavla isn't something I could do forever.</comment>


The Food Lab: The Science of No-Knead Dough (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.seriouseats.com/2011/06/the-food-lab-the-science-of-no-knead-dough.html <comment><USER2> The thermodynamic argument is wrong. The radiant energy only depends on the temperature of the enclosure, not on its size. For example, if the diameter of the oven doubles, then each surface unit of the oven transfers energy to the dough at a rate 4 times slower, but there are 4 times as many surface units. The result is that the total energy flow dies not change.

<comment><USER3> I don't believe you're characterizing his thermodynamic explanation accurately - he's simply pointing out that the _distance_ from the source of thermal radiation matters. Since radiant energy follows the inverse square law, this makes perfect sense.

<comment><USER4> if there were exactly one point source of radiation it would matter, but there isn't. You have to integrate the cumulative radiation from all the points on the surface. The number of points in a subtended angle goes up as the square of the distance from the bread, and each points' contribution is the inverse square of that distance. This is true uniformly over any subtended arc, so the shape can't matter either. The result only depends on the emissivity of the material.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another pretty-easy variation to this are the "overnight" and "Saturday" recipes in Flour Water Salt Yeast.

Very slight kneading required, but not much. Easy cleanup, and better crumb than the no-knead recipes in my experience.

[http://www.karenskitchenstories.com/2013/09/overnight- white-...](http://www.karenskitchenstories.com/2013/09/overnight-white- bread.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Turns out that steam baking is making a huge difference in the quality and taste of bread. That's why a dutch oven is required when baking in a normal oven.

I recently got a steam capable combi oven from the Tovala Kickstarter project (a YC company), and it makes awesome bread, even from something as simple and cheap as Trader Joe's pizza dough.

This it what it looks like (not my tweet): [https://twitter.com/AvidanRoss/status/861346625859371008](https://twitter.com/AvidanRoss/status/861346625859371008)

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been making this overnight style bread for years and people love it. I've probably told guests to "Google country bread city bread" 30 times.

[http://chefmichaelsmith.com/recipe/country-bread-city- bread/](http://chefmichaelsmith.com/recipe/country-bread-city-bread/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Getting steam in with your dough is a big deal. Instead of using the dutch oven to bake my loaves, I have a baking steel for high heat transfer and bake under a stainless steel bowl. The bowl doesn't have the thermal mass that a dutch oven does, but it's a lot easier to put a loaf in the oven, since you're not manipulating a 450F cast iron pot, but instead just peeling the loaf onto the baking steel. The bowl keeps a lot of moisture trapped close to the loaf (sometimes, if I'm feeling frisky I'll spray some extra water in on as I put the whole thing together).

What I've found is that the retained moisture inside the bowl setup helps a lot, but it's also relatively easy to burn the bottom of the loaf, as the baking steel can hold a _lot_ of heat (I also have the problem of an older oven with a pretty wide swing in thermostat tolerances)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been baking a variant of this recipe for several years now. It's the best bread I've made at home hands down. If you have a dutch oven (even a large cookie tray and upside down stainless steel bowl will do the trick), do try it!

<comment><USER10> I've made this bread a few times with great success, too! I can advocate for the steel bowl method, as I've never owned a proper dutch oven.

<comment><USER11> I'll try it with a stainless steel stock pot with steel lid - would anyone suggest any form if 'seasoning' of the steel?

And has anyone tried a sourdough version of this recipe? I have a pretty cheerful sourdough going at present.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think rather than "radiant energy" the dutch oven (being pre-heated) acts like a "thermal capacitor" because of its mass. It discharges a large amount of heat into the dough very quickly once its dropped into the confined space. The lid trapping the humidity in that tiny space does the rest.

</comment><comment><USER13> The thing that makes kneading annoying is the flour on the counter and all the little pieces of dough left in the mixing bowl when taking the dough out on the table. So in a sense, this doesn't solve the problem of kneading for me.

Will I get a better bread if I knead this recipe?

<comment><USER14> You will get a different bread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is like a pre-ferment rather than an actual dough. It's overproofed -- you can see through the crumb, and it has a wet, gelatinous texture due to the starch all breaking down.

And as others have noted physics knowledge is lacking.

</comment><comment><USER16> Some folks local to Minneapolis have had a good run with their no-knead recipe

[https://artisanbreadinfive.com/](https://artisanbreadinfive.com/)

The basic sourdough recipe makes a loaf with a great crust and good crumb, although I find it a bit weepy, in that it doesn't hold its shape too well because the dough is so wet.

The kids love the olive oil dough for pizzas and breadsticks.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've been baking a lot of bread lately (pushing 80 lbs of flour this year), but I haven't tried these no-knead recipes yet. My kids don't like a really assertive crust, and peanut butter falls right through a wide-open crumb, so I'm going to stick to drier, denser loaves for the time being. Nonetheless, I'm interested! Maybe I'll try a one-off loaf just to see how it turns out.

<comment><USER18> Can you give me a good bread recipe with a soft crust? We've tried these no- knead recipes and the crust has always come out too hard -- that's turned us off from baking our own bread.

<comment><USER17> For my money, kneading is part of the fun. Within reason anyhow. Like the sibling comment says, add fat. I use butter or olive oil. It's hard to go wrong when supermarket bread is your baseline. Pretty much any loaf you bake is better (the occasional inedible experiment notwithstanding.) Here's my approach. Let's call it...

Four Kids Bread -- The Bread You Make When You Have Four Kids And Can't Be Bothered To Do Anything Fancy

Step 1: Mix some flour, maybe three cups, with an equal amount of water and maybe a teaspoonful of yeast and a little less than a teaspoonful of salt. This makes a very wet mix. Put it in a big bowl and cover with plastic wrap.

Step 2: Find a cool part of your living space and let it sit there. Possibly forget that you started bread.

Step 3: A day or three later, whenever you get the chance, remember that you started bread. Come back to it. It smells funky, but there's no fuzz on it so it's probably OK.

Step 4: Add some fat. Half a stick of melted butter, or a couple tablespoons of olive oil. Stir.

Step 5: Add a little flour and stir, continuing to add more until stirring becomes tiresome. Then put some flour on a flat surface and turn the dough out onto it. Sprinkle some more flour on top. Knead the dough until it stops being fun. Add more flour if it sticks to your hands or the surface.

Step 6: Shape it into a cylinder, more or less and put on an oiled baking sheet. Cover and let sit until it looks bigger. Or not. If you don't you'll have a denser loaf. Possibly very dense. But maybe you're in a hurry.

Step 7: Preheat an oven to whatever seems hot enough. 375? Ovens vary.

Step 8: Bake until it's done. I know they say to use a thermometer, but I don't have one so I thump the bread and if it sounds hollow, it's done. Hasn't failed me.

Looks like a lot of steps, but it's really minimal effort. Cheaper and way better than American supermarket bread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I make no-knead at least twice a week at home. it's all we eat in terms of bread. i don't bake anything else, just bread (and pizza using the same dough). it has not failed me in 5 years.</comment>


Assist HNer: Hashing SSNs and other limited-domain information - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3315172/hashing-ssns-and-other-limited-domain-information

<comment><USER2> How exactly do you plan on using these hashes to ensure uniqueness if you are going to hash them with a patient specific salt? If you want to know if you have a patient with SSN X you would have to go through every patient record computing however you plan on doing it with their salt plus the query SSN (you could make it not so horrible by ordering the checks by similar names/birthdays/whatever).

Since you are talking about generating an identifier from the SSN and using that instead there is no benefit to using the SSN in the first place. Generate a UUID and use that instead.</comment>


Why Elon Musk Wants To Bring People to Mars—and Go There Himself - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/03/15/elon_musk_wants_spacex_to_help_establish_a_colony_on_mars_.html

<comment><USER2> Mars is a very harsh environment - and it's very far from Earth (6 months best case with current propulsion technology). I'd suggest a permanent base on the Moon as a useful first step - it has some water, abundant energy, plenty of Aluminum, Magnesium, Titanium and a lack of atmosphere that makes metallurgy easy. Radiation is worse than Mars, but, in both cases, buried housing structures make sense and the Moon's low gravity would make construction easier and cheaper. With some infrastructure development, it would even be a nice launching point for Mars-bound spacecraft - think of a maglev train that reaches escape speed.

It's also close, so, even if someone screws up _very_ badly, a rescue mission would be less than a week away. If someone on Mars manages to, say, contaminate the colony's water supply, all we can do is record farewell messages for loved ones and deal with the bad publicity for decades. I wouldn't like that.

A second step could be an Aldrin cycler space station - this way you could ride a small spacecraft to the cycler, live there for a couple months and depart to Mars when it passes by. Plus, you'd get some prime moving real- estate - one that goes between Earth and Mars without spending fuel.

<comment><USER3> If you compare it with 19th century polar expeditions, a trip to Mars doesn't look _that_ bad. They sometimes took multiple years, with men trapped in iced up ships, usually with no chance of rescue or even communication - at least we know how to prevent scurvy now!

Have a read of the book "Barrow's Boys: A Stirring Story of Daring, Fortitude, and Outright Lunacy":

[http://www.amazon.com/Barrows-Boys-Stirring-Fortitude- Outrig...](http://www.amazon.com/Barrows-Boys-Stirring-Fortitude- Outright/dp/B006J45Q4G)

NB Having read too much Kim Stanley Robinson and Zubrin, I'd jump at the chance to go to Mars.

<comment><USER2> An expedition to Mars would cost a lot more, with a much smaller expected ROI. I too would love the idea of going to Mars, but, in order to build a sustainable colony, you'd need to put in place a whole lot of infrastructure to make interplanetary travel cheaper. And, right now, it's not even feasible.

<comment><USER4> Insurance for humanity against disaster is a small ROI? Not trying to offend, but how do you define ROI of a colony on Mars?

<comment><USER5> As far as I can see, there are very, very few disasters that would render Earth _less_ inhabitable than Mars but not also destroy Mars in the process. Even if Earth were reduced to a cold, lifeless rock with almost no atmosphere or water, high radiation levels and almost all sources of energy gone (including geothermal and wind energy and things as simple as burning wood), that would just put it in the same ballpark as Mars.

Basically, if you have the technology to support human life on Mars, you have the technology to disaster-proof Earth.

<comment><USER6> The scenario that comes to mind is a massive asteroid impact, but your final sentence sums up the objection nicely: identifying and redirecting a space rock seems at least an order of magnitude less difficult & technologically distant than building a self-sustaining colony on Mars.

<comment><USER7> Even the worst asteroid impact would not render the planet uninhabitable. It might kill lots of people, but it wouldn't kill all of them.

<comment><USER2> And yet, again, a Moon colony would be handy to counter an asteroid too. The far side could host very powerful telescopes that could map NEOs with unprecedented efficiency and clarity. On Earth, you have a couple hours of sensor exposure. On the Moon, you have two weeks to trace stuff. And most of the heavy parts could be manufactured in situ, be lighter and higher quality (made in a high grade vacuum).

And that's to say nothing about the ability to launch spacecraft from a lower gravity and/or using a magnetic rail. One could even turn the asteroid into dust (which is less dangerous than a ferrous mountain falling from the sky) with a kinetic impactor packing enough energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love the last line:

 _"I would definitely like to go to Mars. I think it would be cool to be born on Earth and die on Mars," he said as the night wrapped. "Hopefully, not at the point of impact."_

<comment><USER9> I will take his grandest adventure line coupled with the part about, there will always be problems on Earth and waiting for a time there isn't will never come.

Far too many people criticize lavish dreams such as what Musk has but that is what separates the watchers from the doers.

<comment><USER10> > _lavish dreams such as what Musk has but that is what separates the watchers > from the doers._

?? Not sure of your meaning: Dreams are usually the domain of the watchers, expertise and hard work are usually the domain of the doers. Musk has demonstrated expertise and hard work, but in a different area; here he is a dreamer. Is that what you meant?

<comment><USER11> Musk is demonstrating hard work in this area, too: they're building rockets and launching them. Far more affordably than their competitors, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am convinced that Mars colonization should be seriously considered as a part of space exploration policy:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_to_Stay>

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm with Carl Sagan.

 _Visit? Yes. Settle? Not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand._

Not that there's anything wrong with wanting to go to Mars as a hobby, as a tourist-- if that's how you want to spend your billions, fine. But I worry that too many impatient sci-fi lovers see space travel as some way to escape from the problems of Earth, which it will never be. If we can't figure out how to live sustainably on Earth, humanity will perish long before we have any realistic possibility of emigrating.

<comment><USER14> You say that with authority. Care to share your reasoning? Folks went as far (in terms of travel time) to desolate places to make a future before. You are likely descended from some of them.

<comment><USER13> No human being has ever settled in a place which was not previously the habitat of a billion years of successful organic life-- and we have failed to settle in a number of places which are.

To think of Mars as just the new New World is a romantic idea, but there is no basis for the comparison. Populating another world will be the most significant undertaking of humanity by orders of magnitude; to assume it can be done while it remains to be seen whether we can survive as a species on a planet with an atmosphere which is exactly what we breathe, which is made of as much water as we are, of the same phase ours is, where food grows in the ground all by itself and we are nearly completely protected from debris large and small, and with a legacy of billions of years to prove it can be done-- well, I'd ask to know _your_ reasoning.

<comment><USER14> We're smart. We live almost entirely in structures and cities that are very remote from the idyllic world you describe. When was the last time you saw your food grow?

There are technological hurdles to living on Mars, but not much we already don't know how to handle. Food, water, air - that's the minimum, and thats not all that hard given raw materials and energy, which is abundant on Mars.

<comment><USER13> ...really? How many cities run on recycled air produced from rocks? On recycled water from melted permafrost? With 100% solar power? Eating entirely food grown using the same? With the risk that if any ine of those things fails, everyone living there will certainly die?

To this you compare the fact that I eat cows fed grass from a hundred miles away, brought to me using energy we literally just _dug out of the ground_? That I drink water piped from a giant lake all of halfway across the county?

If anything, you support my point: what passes for "remote" and "inhospitable" on Earth is unbelievably luxurious by the standard of anywhere else. Even Death Valley gets rain. Even Antarctica has _oxygen_. Talk to me about your plans for a self-sustaining colony in one of those places, and then we can talk about how many times -- how many _orders of magnitude_ \-- harder and more expensive it will be to do the same thing on Mars.

<comment><USER14> I'll just answer with this: nobody who goes will be thinking like that. Sure there are problems, but really, all of them are solvable - we're not 16th- century folks grappling with science, we're 3rd-millenium folks with centuries of science behind us.

Graphene filters to purify sublimated water-ice. Solar cells manufactured from sand and plastic. Oxygen siezed from rocks, lots at first but then just recycled thru green growing things.

Plenty of folks starved in the New World when their support systems ran out, doesn't matter whether it was oxygen or food, dead just the same. The point is, they were willing to take the risk with a whole continent to win.

Now its a whole planet! With different challenges, different storms and temperatures. Without challenges like locusts, floods, communication issues, pesky natives to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A good leader sets a goal that is outside of our comfort zone and little by little works towards achieving those goals. Along the way, as steady progress is made, that once lofty goal starts to become more reasonable and others start to buy in. This seems to be the approach Elon has taken with Tesla and SpaceX. From personal experience I can tell you that simply making these lofty goals has attracted a lot of young, idealistic folk that are willing to put in a lot of sweat to show that this kind of stuff is within our reach.

</comment><comment><USER16> > In January, Newt Gingrich's space ambitions were mocked by many experts as > well as the public, particularly his vow that a moon colony would be > established by the conclusion of his "second term." Musk isn't committing to > a timeline nearly so ambitious; when pushed by Wright, he suggested that > this could be a reality within the next 30 years.

Gingrich's moon base by 2020 is probably _less_ ambitious than Musk's Martian colony by 2042. The moon is orders of magnitude closer, doesn't involve leaving Earth orbit, doesn't involve the radiation hazards, and we've actually been to the moon before. I don't want to get into a political argument, but going back to the moon and staying there is not an especially difficult or onerous goal for the next eight years.

<comment><USER17> You're forgetting the economy and number of technological achievements grows exponentially.

At 4% per annum growth the world economy will be triple the current size in 30 years. (assuming no technological singularity event).

An economy triple the current size doesn't seem like it can easily afford a colony on Mars either but I think Elon Musk thinks my assumption is wrong.

<comment><USER16> The economy is irrelevant. Technology just takes time to develop sometimes; nine women can't have a baby in one month.

<comment><USER17> It's not irrelevant. If our economy one thousandth the current size, even a trip to the moon would be difficult. It just wouldn't be producing enough fuel, metal, ceramics and quality human capital necessary for a trip to the moon. It is a lot easier to takes these things from a much larger economy than a small one.

Larger economy can speed up technological advancements too, but I guess that _is_ irrelevant here.

<comment><USER16> The economy already isn't the limiting factor on establishing a Mars colony; technology is. So it's irrelevant.

<comment><USER17> It'll be much more difficult to convince citizens to set up a Mars colony at a cost of $1,000,000 per citizen as opposed to only $1,000 per citizen. Therefore, I'd argue it is relevant. If you were talking about setting up a privately owned colony - a larger economy means there is more chance of a company large enough to take on this task. (In large economies capital is more concentrated, at least that's what I'm observing from history. It would be difficult to have a company the size of Apple in an impoverished country whose GDP per year is less than Apple's quarterly income, for example.)

<comment><USER16> So every citizen spends $1000 and suddenly you have a Mars colony? No, you have to develop the technology, and that takes time no matter how much money you throw at it. And when you look at the year 2042 and imagine having a Mars colony by then, having an order of magnitude more money rolling around by say 2022 or 2032 won't help if it takes longer than 10-20 years to develop the needed technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Mars, sounds great! I am still amazed that the Rovers are still operational.

<comment><USER10> > _I am still amazed that the Rovers are still operational._

A lot of people are. I had the pleasure of chatting with the NASA program manager in charge of one of the rovers. She was a bit hilarious: When it came time to set the height of one of the mission cameras, someone whipped out a ruler and measured the distance from the floor to her eyes -- and then wrote it in the spec.

Her comment on the first manned mission: Inevitably it leads to a discussion about one-way missions to mars. The next discussion is "who would volunteer", next followed by "who would you volunteer?"

[btw, she said NASA will not officially consider one-way missions as a matter of principle.]

<comment><USER18> Ha, now that's comical!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In the book "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert A. Heinlein, which is a fantastic science fiction book about colonizing Luna and the politics of an anarchistic government, he mentions the creation of a Rocket Sled (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_sled_launch>) which seems to never get mentioned when people talk about earth side technology for improving our ability to leave earth.

Does anyone know if there is some reason why this technology seems to get ignored? According to wikipedia it seems like a big win. Why aren't we doing this right now?

</comment><comment><USER20> What makes things go right? What makes wake up and work your best every day?

Well, such inspiring, exciting stuff, as colonizing other planets. Doing that also improves all other areas. Transportation of course. Electronics. Software. Radio. Medicine. You name it.

That is why such projects not a "childish idea" but actually a great plan.

There's only 2 reasons for humans to work hard, and work good:

\- fear of death (war)

\- f* exciting stuff (and no, software idea 923839 is not nearly exciting enough, and money isn't either)

</comment><comment><USER21> Why don't we focus on the shit here first?

I'm sorry, but I just get frustrate with all these wondrous predictions that always seem to be about 30-50 years in the future. Short enough away to be enticing, but long enough away where no one making these predictions will really he held accountable for their ridiculousness.

It just seems that every single generation a) has some "new threat" for "how the world will end" and b) has some technological vision that ends up being way overestimated.

<comment><USER22> We can do both. Hell, even Elon Musk can do both; he also runs Tesla Motors, which makes electric cars on Earth.

Also, I notice that people are _much_ more likely to condemn space development as frivolous than they are to criticize, say, football or whittling. Does that seem like a double standard to you, too?

<comment><USER16> Football and whittling are sustainably self-funding.

<comment><USER23> Football isn't a productive enterprise, regardless of how much money it can extract from the wider economy. Going to mars will most likely result in a large array of new tech which will find unrelated uses on Earth. Think of it like a way to buy a big burst of creativity.

<comment><USER16> OK, I'll bite. Define "productive enterprise".

<comment><USER23> You're not left with anything new at the end of a football game.

<comment><USER16> You have recordings and accounts of the game that can be published or resold, and potentially fond memories of an enjoyable experience. The same criticism could be made of live theatre or concerts. Is the presence of _physical artfacts_ after the fact your criteria for a "productive enterprise"? How do you reconcile this value judgment with the fact that experiences, rather than possessions, tend to be a bigger factor in human happiness?

It's very hard to justify that something is "frivolous" or "non-productive" when it contributes materially to the happiness of a lot of people. People can deeply enjoy football, it can strengthen family and community bonds or just make for a fun evening. We don't live in a bleak dystopian society where we do nothing all day but provide for each other's physical needs. Football is no more frivolous or non-productive than easily most of the economy.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, I get all that, and I'm a fan of movies, theatre, and even the occasional football game. But I think that entertainment in general is less worthy than anything that moves knowledge and understanding forward. To your original comment, it's a bad idea to try to derive something's true worth from its profitability, especially in the short term.

<comment><USER16> I wasn't trying to derive anything's "true worth"--I was just saying that football is self-sustaining.

And actually, movies and professional sports have advanced our understanding and technology a great deal, be it by advancing camera and computer imaging technologies or by advancing our medical knowledge by giving us more experience dealing with certain types of injuries. The competitive nature of professional sports also gives us insights into the most effective ways to train, condition, and give nutrition to the human body.

<comment><USER23> OK, you just seemed to be saying that those things were better because they could support themselves financially.

I don't think they're on the same order of magnitude in terms of knowledge gained - those are mature industries, space travel isn't anywhere near, so the gains should be much more dramatic and broadly applicable.

<comment><USER16> No, the main thing is that self-sustaining enterprises aren't up for public debate, so there's no reason anyone _would_ criticize them as frivolous. Whereas anything that needs public funding, like space travel historically has, is automatically subject to a debate about its worthiness.

<comment><USER23> Sure there is - I know people who would call those things frivolous. Football consumes a serious outlay of energy for comparatively little lasting benefit. It's not scrutinized as often as things that are funded with taxes, but that doesn't save it from frivolity. Anyway, we're probably arguing past each other. I see taxpayer funded science of all sorts as being more worthy than most things, because I view scientific discovery as the foundation of the country's economic competitiveness. Most things seem frivolous by comparison.

<comment><USER16> But doesn't most economic production and most scientific discovery ultimately serve frivolous ends anyway?

<comment><USER23> Maybe, but some of it helps ensure the continued survival of the species, which is about the least frivolous thing possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How is he going to get there and back without his bones disintegrating? I don't believe the science is there yet.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is remarkable, but is going to Mars really our most challenging goal, our raison d'etre as humanity? Given the choice between being either the First human on mars or the First machine-augmented-human what would you choose?

<comment><USER7> Is there some reason these are mutually exclusive?

<comment><USER25> I find it interesting that people find these equally challenging. For the record, we know way too much about Mars and too little about the machine that makes us want to go (and go) to mars, the brain. If we can master our intelligence we could do so much more than going to a desolate planet. TBH i believe the first mission to mars will leave us disappointed (we won't have learned anything - and we don't really need mars for our future).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The future of space travel is mining the asteroid belt and war preparation, anything else is just farting around, without the unobtanium or the fear of death to drive us, there is no reason to leave earth for more than a quick trip.

If Elon Musk wants a base on mars, have him start putting missile silos up there, there will be a McDonalds up there in 30 years instead of some decrepit shack with a few science projects going on.

<comment><USER27> Space is just a place. All that it takes is people who want to go there and the technology to do so being within their grasp. As technology advances and people grow wealthier colonization of space will become possible, and then it will happen. And once there are people living in space then the entire equation changes again, because once there is an economy in space there will be more reasons to go than just adventure.

Edit: In terms of technology/wealth, imagine a future in, say, 2100 when we have mastered things like automation, 3D printing, etc. When we can fill out a form on a web app, upload a few files and not just have, say, a fully reusable rocket ship pop out the end of a factory but actually a rocket ship producing _factory_ pop out. Such things are technologically possible, and within our grasp. What happens when we have such power? Do we sit at home?

<comment><USER28> 2100?? having those things in 2100 would mean we humans all are incredibly lazy. You already have 3D printers. Automation too. Why you need to wait 88 more years?

Given what happened in last 30 years, I would rather say in 2100 you will be able to scan yourself into a readable file and shoot it across the solar system all the way to the Mars, and print yourself out anew (printing algorithm would catch and get a rid of all cancers you caught and aging too).

<comment><USER27> Indeed, I was trying to be conservative with my assumptions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: New mirror for Arch Linux? - <AUTHOR>

Is anyone here who has some spare space/bandwidth on there company network that could create a better mirror(s) for Arch Linux community ?
The list of mirrors now; https://www.archlinux.org/mirrorlist/?country=all&protocol=http&ip_version=4&use_mirror_status=on
Official Mirrors Guide:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mirrors
Most of them are very slow. Thank you! <comment><USER2> I have to disagree. I use those from esslingen and usually max out my downlink. (Which is depending on time of day usually around 50MBps, also from where I connect due to lower grade routers)</comment>


What Major World Cities Look Like at Night, Minus the Light Pollution - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/artscience/2013/03/darkened-cities <comment><USER2> If you were in New York City during Hurricane Sandy, in the lower half, at least, you got a taste of this first hand.

I had to walk home into the unpowered section of Manhattan every night from work. I took some photos during that time. Unfortunately, as it was still overcast, we never did get a chance to see the stars from downtown Manhattan:

[http://tumblr.eyeheartnewyork.com/post/37636219209/i-finally...](http://tumblr.eyeheartnewyork.com/post/37636219209/i-finally- got-around-to-organizing-some-of-the)

<comment><USER3> An interesting difference between your photos and the renditions linked here is that the buildings in yours are black silhouettes, while the ones here are fairly well lit up. That's the first thing that stuck out at me: if there is no light pollution, what is lighting the foreground buildings? If you look at the Hong Kong photo, for example, it looks like there is a _ton_ of light pollution: all the buildings, plus the surface of the water in the harbor, are lit by a diffuse glow. The only exception is the sky, which is inexplicably not affected by the same glow, clearly giving away the Photoshopping.

Perhaps there's some combination of moon-lit conditions that would produce that effect, but it sure doesn't look right to me.

<comment><USER4> On a clear night without light pollution stars provide decent illumination. However, those photo's where clearly Photoshopped.

<comment><USER5> > However, those photo's where clearly Photoshopped.

That's pretty much what the entire article was about. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They would look nothing like those photos.

The city would look much, much darker. You can really tell that those are day shots of the cities with the brightness and saturation reduced.

The sky would look much, much less impressive. Photographers like to perpetuate a fantastic idea of the night sky by taking overexposed pictures, and this one is no exception. I have been in the middle of the savannah in Africa, with no light around for miles, and I don't remember the sky looking anything like that.

<comment><USER7> I've seen sky that looked pretty close to that--about like this video. (Probably a bit less bright, but still more impressive actually being there.)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=p...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pe4dpprVBGs#)!

I remember that it was different enough that I was blown away by the contrast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I doubt I'm the only one who read the article with the hope of finding some new technique to remove light pollution from images to show off the stars... and was mildly disappointed to find out the beautiful images were just cut-n- paste jobs (albeit outstanding ones).

I'm wondering what kinds of techniques exist for removing light pollution?

Spectrum sensitivity? Spectrum filtering on exposure? Post processing?

<comment><USER9> Tucson, Arizona uses sodium vapor lighting for all its street lighting specifically to allow the nearby observatories easily filter the light pollution.

<comment><USER10> I attended a conference in Tucson last fall and...being jetlagged, did a nice walk at 4AM in the desert behind our resort. It was really amazing, I hadn't seen shooting stars in decades.

<comment><USER11> It's only a couple hours from Tucson to the Kitt Peak Observatory, where they have astronomy programs for the public. I talked my wife into doing it when we were there visiting friends last year.

I highly recommend it. The astronomy is fairly basic, but the experience is incredible: You're up on a big mountain, surrounded by gigantic telescopes, in the middle of a vast desert wilderness. It's freezing cold outside after dark. When the program is over, you have to drive down the upper half of the mountain without headlights to protect the observations that are happening.

<comment><USER9> I went to scout camp in the Chiricahua mountains in SE Arizona and experienced the same thing. I'd sneak out if my tent at night to look at the night sky (until my scoutmaster chased a bear out of our camp...the guy was psycho!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> After living in Alaska for several years, I don't really think that is how cities would look at all. With just stars and even the aurora borealis, it is incredible how pure _darknesss_ looks. I really didn't know how much light pollution effected the sky until living there, but even in small towns and other less populated areas the light from various sources changes the skyline.

<comment><USER13> Whew. I was wondering if I was the only one who has been out in the mountains and other rural areas, but have never seen a night sky like these.

<comment><USER14> I grew up in rural New York and once, when camping, we stayed up very late with all the lights off. You would be amazed at how much your eyes eventually see after a couple hours in darkness. We could see Satellites, the Milky Way, and even the "Horse and Rider" (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_and_Rider>).

Nowadays, with phones and ipod, it's nearly impossible to let your eyes adjust that long without light. But it's worth it.

<comment><USER15> There's probably an app (that has probably been done) in there for making the screen show in hues of red. Or, if not an app then a screen protector that's a gel (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_gel>).

<comment><USER16> There's an app for that: <http://stereopsis.com/flux/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find it rather an epiphany to realise that our distant ancestors must have seen the sky like this _all the time_ , rather than the vague haze most of us experience. No wonder then that the movement of the stars and planets played such a cultural and religious impact on their lives.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the International Dark Sky association [1]:

      > Once a source of wonder--and one half of the entire
      > planet's natural  environment—the star-filled nights of
      > just a few years ago are vanishing in a yellow haze.
      > Human-produced light pollution not only mars our view of
      > the stars; poor lighting threatens astronomy, disrupts
      > ecosystems, affects human circadian rhythms, and wastes
      > energy to the tune of $2.2 billion per year
      > in the U.S. alone.

You may want to check out their Practical Guide [2] for homeowners who want to reduce their light pollution.

[1] <http://darksky.org/> [2] (PDF) [http://www.darksky.org/assets/documents/PG3-residential- ligh...](http://www.darksky.org/assets/documents/PG3-residential-lighting.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER19> "minus the atmosphere and with eyes that will absorb stars luminosity for 20s straight" let's not confuse it.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is somewhat of a repost: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5205058>

Kinda surprised nobody else said that yet...

</comment><comment><USER21> While the US is relatively good at keeping the air and water clean (relative to some places I've been), both light and noise pollution are a big problem - almost unregulated.

</comment><comment><USER22> I've seen the night sky (moonless) from out in the Arizona desert and watched the Aurora Borealis from a stone outcropping on Sarah Lake in Quetico National Park.

It is a wonder to behold. I wish it looked like these photos. It doesn't.

You can clearly see the band of the Milky Way in both places. At first you think it's cloudy. But as your eyes adjust it becomes apparent the sky is clear and that's when the wonder of it all occurs to you.

Cool photos tho'. I'd buy one for my workspace.

</comment><comment><USER23> " _"It is impossible not to read these pictures the way the artist wants them read: cold, cold cities below, cut off from the seemingly infinite energies above._ "

I see unity: humanity's improbable citadels cradled by the beckoning infinity of the universe. Not everything has to be framed in conflict.

<comment><USER24> I had a feeling of coziness and was reminded of human cohesion looking at what I presumed to be millions of people coming together to sleep at the same time preparing for the next day. It seemed so peaceful.

</comment></comment><comment> ryan-allen Is that what the sky literally looks like with no light pollution, or are they time lapsed at all?

<comment><USER25> Those must be long exposures with post processing. A clear sky without light pollution doesn't look anything like that, but it's beautiful. Go see one!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've always wondered what it would be like if there is a total black out in a big city. Now I can see it in these pictures. If the blackout isn't exactly simultaneous, would the stars slowly emerge one by one? How cool would that be!

<comment><USER27> Yes, they would. If you're in the middle of a remote desert during the day, you would be able to look up and see only blue sky. As the sun sets and the night becomes darker, you'll gradually see more and more stars until you see as many as you'll be able to when the sun is on the opposite side of the earth from you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What surprises me is the difference in nature between brazilian cities and the others. I would like to see one of those pictures of Porto Alegre, where there's almost one tree per person.

</comment><comment><USER29> Even though they look a bit fake, I like these photos. The atmosphere reminds me of Alan Weisman's book "the world without us". The cities appear as ghost cities, everything dark, allowing natural light to be visible again. It's like the early stages after humans deserted it, before the forces of nature (combined with lack of maintenance) break through and crumble the buildings.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is how it would look through a special lense on a camera. Anyone who has been in true wilderness knows it looks nothing like this.

</comment><comment><USER31> Reminds me of the dialogue in Kurosawa's Dreams movie in the part where there is a conversation with an old man in a treadmill village (I wouldn't like night so bright you could not see the stars) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1FIps--PGg>

</comment><comment><USER32> from the article: "It is impossible not to read these pictures the way the artist wants them read: cold, cold cities below, cut off from the seemingly infinite energies above. It's a powerful reversal, and one very much in tune with a wave of environmental thinking of the moment."

NOOOOO! What a load of bollocks. This is the _opposite_ of what I felt about these photos, until this bonehead art critic stepped in and told me what to feel. To hell with all commentators of art. Art does not tell you what to feel, and I resent anyone saying that any reaction is "impossible". Bah!!!

</comment><comment><USER33> These are beautiful. I would love to have one of these framed in my house.

<comment><USER27> If we didn't have light pollution, a window frame would be sufficient to have this kind of view on every clear night.

</comment></comment><comment> D-Train Wow, these are neat pictures. Interesting way of showing the night sky sans artificial light.</comment>


Proposed California bill allows hotels to be built in costal state parks - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-coastal-accommodations-20170201-story.html <comment><USER2> What happened to promoting Leave No Trace principles in our state and national parks?

Everyone can visit parks California's beaches now, just sign up on [http://www.reserveamerica.com](http://www.reserveamerica.com) and leave no trace. Hotels, motels, cabins and other permanent structures are a terrible idea.

[https://lnt.org](https://lnt.org)

</comment><comment><USER3> That is a wonderful news.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is just about the very last thing I can imagine passing in California.</comment>


Pixel Qi releases sunlight-readable netbook screen - Upgrade kit available - <AUTHOR> http://www.reghardware.com/2010/07/01/pixel_qi_diy_kits_released/

<comment><USER2> I've seen the screen on a netbook prototype and thought the color was pretty good. The truly great thing about the screen is how well it works in sunlight, though. I can't wait until I have a mobile screen I can use in the sun.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the technology I've been waiting for ever since I first saw a laptop. I don't care if it is monochrome, or washed out in color, this is huge news!</comment>


Facebook Gets a Little Less "Free" for Members - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/10/03/facebook-gets-a-little-less-free-for-members/

<comment><USER2> I am astonished. The idea that people would volunteer for, and ultimately pay for, the Facebook experience takes my breath way. It's not as though Facebook is the only online social experience, or that there are no alternatives.

Competition in a marketplace is generally accepted as a "good thing™". Why should the same reasoning not apply to online social experiences? Why should Facebook be the only player in this game, especially when, over time, their behavior toward subscribers becomes more contemptuous and predatory?

<comment><USER3> I've heard for years that the path to a better web would lie in for-pay services. Even here on HN, people often repeat "if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer". I don't see an issue with Facebook asking you to pay to give your status a priority over everything else. Advertisers already do just that.

Facebook needs to make money, and having users pay to have placement over ads is a way to do that. It's far from required, but if someone sees value in it, it's there.

<comment><USER2> > I don't see an issue with Facebook asking you to pay to give your status a > priority over everything else. Advertisers already do just that.

But Facebook already has advertising in a dozen ways, This is just another way to squeeze more money out of the system and its subscribers. And chances are it will work, because Facebook subscribers don't see that they have an alternative. That's why I posted -- it's wrong, they do. I think meaningful competition would shift power back to the subscribers where it belongs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And another urban myth takes a step towards becoming reality...

<http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/gold-membership-trolling></comment>


RubyMonk - ruby lessons right in your browser - <AUTHOR> http://rubymonk.com

<comment><USER3> You should add the link to the Next Lesson at the bottom of the page (or have use a fixed layout as you scroll down). I got to the end of Chapter 0 and was ready to move on, but I couldn't find the Go To Next Chapter button without looking around.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the heads-up, swanson. We'll add this shortly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love easy-to-engage sites like this. I have long-time java dev team members that I've been encouraging to learn ruby. This makes it easy to invite them in and give them a taste. Array manipulation alone should be enough to pique interest.

</comment><comment><USER6> It looks like codecademy.com really dropped the ball with their product. It's been a while since they released their MVP(emphasis on the 'M') and now they're being cloned left and right...while they still have yet to add a single lesson to their 30 minute introduction to javascript.

Congrats on rubymonk. I'll run through it in a bit.

<comment><USER7> hi inuhj, i'm one of the cofounders of codecademy. we haven't dropped the ball - expect an announcement soon!

<comment><USER8> What I like about rubymonk is it tells you what it expected when you give a wrong answer. Codeacademy on the other hand just informs you that you were wrong and gives an extra hint (can be annoying if you perhaps, didn't understand the question properly and hence leaves you stuck on that question).

<comment><USER7> thanks for the tip, wmboy. congrats as well to rubymonk - this is great!

<comment><USER4> zds, thank you! We're glad you like RubyMonk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I liked this, but found it hard to retain my interest after the first lessons until I found the 'problems' section. I tend to learn way better when actively working on a problem and having to go look things up and learn them to advance, so I look forward to seeing more problems here.

<comment><USER4> Noted, and thank you for the feedback. Please do let us know if there's any other feedback you have - you can email us at firstname.lastname@example.com.

We'll be working on smoothing out the cross references to exercises, so problems will tell you exactly what exercises you need to read up on so you can complete them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I took all lessons yesterday, and completed the problem. I found some UI glitches (% of classes completed), and I think that the UX can be improved by highlighting at any point which lessons/exercises are not done yet - <USER2> than simply highlighting how many are left.

The problems are valuable, and I enjoyed solving them. I think that you might want to show multiple alternatives for solving the same problem - that's one of the cool things about Ruby.

I would love to find something similar to HTML/CSS. I know that codeschool have an HTML5 one, but unfortunately, I need something more basic :)

<comment><USER11> What are your thoughts on Stanford's Open Classroom HTML courses?

They may not be HTML5, and I have not had a chance to browse codeschool's offerings, but I'd be curious to hear how it compares in complexity to Stanford's lectures.

[*] [http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/CoursePage.php?...](http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/CoursePage.php?course=WebApplications)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very happy to see the C42 guys crystallizing their vision of building their own products with revenues generated from their own services.

Many many congratulations, Sidu and Team :)

<comment><USER4> Thank you vaidy, we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the support of folks like yourself, and the awesome Ruby community in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem is that teaching yourself the basics of the language is trivial, whereas actually getting Ruby and gems working with textmate and then building real stuff on your own is quite difficult. I already know all the basics of Ruby, but I can't actually do anything with it, and so this doesn't really solve my problem.

<comment><USER14> What do you mean by "I can't actually do anything with it"?

If the problem is that you know what Ruby code looks like but don't feel comfortable enough to build stuff in it: go build stuff in it. Seriously. Just go write some code right now, Google around when you get stuck, and half an hour later you will already be a better programmer.

Do a few <http://projecteuler.net/> problems. Just, like, three or four. Bam: You've programmed.

Programming can seem like this big, scary thing; it's easy to feel like you're on the other side of this big huge wall and to say "I don't know how to program, so I can't program." The catch is, the only way to learn how to program is to program, and no in-browser language tutorial in the world can change that. Go for it, and ping me if you get stuck.

<comment><USER15> What I'd like to see from RubyMonk, CodeAcademy, and others, is a good list of resources for taking the next steps in programming their respective languages (i.e., here is the best list of instructions for setting up your development environment/installing Ruby on your machine, a good tutorial you know of about Rails/Sinatra, a suggestion to find a meetup group in your area, etc.). A curated list of resources for each of these languages would be extremely valuable for newcomers.

I've been learning Ruby myself lately, and I don't think it's quite as simple as "go build stuff in it." Much more helpful for seasoned people to say "take a class, join a meetup group, and get some help because it's normal to get stuck and need help." For someone who's never programmed before, just installing the right software and setting up an environment of any sort is intimidating and easy to get stuck on.

Sure, you need to start building stuff, but RubyMonk, CodeAcademy, and others like them are great ways to get people interested enough to take the next step. We just need some good resources to take those next steps, and Googling doesn't always lead you to a good, accessible resource (I hear <http://learnpythonthehardway> works for Python, but don't really know of similar resources for other languages).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Really nice. Can anyone comment on the architecture/stack used to create this, esp. with regard to the front end?

<comment><USER4> Sure - the front end is basically a Rails based custom CMS that allows us to write content in 'RubyMonk flavoured' HAML.

This is backed by servers that are running a bunch of eval loops using the Secure gem. See <https://github.com/c42/secure> if you're interested in the SandBoxing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like the peculiar starting level of instruction. Most tutorials like this start with the very basics of programming or skip to demos of hard stuff. This is like a level 2 tutorial for people who kind of know the very, very basics.

Looking forward to updates. I've completed everything thus far.

</comment><comment><USER18> Really well made. Loved the attention to detail: after switching from cmd + enter to clicking "run" a few times, I was given the hint to use cmd + enter instead. Ticker on the top really added to keeping focused and goal oriented. Going to get back to finishing this.

<comment><USER19> We have Badges and Achievements planned to keep it even more interesting. But had to cut down scope to release an MVP and see if the community likes it. Thanks for the response!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Did I do something wrong? After I finished the introduction to arrays it brought me to making a calculator class (don't quite see how that's relevant to arrays) and I had no idea how to write the code because I hadn't even learned the basic syntax yet.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is awesome. I really love this.

Really lowers the barrier to entry for Ruby developers.

</comment><comment><USER4> In the 90 minutes since we launched, 698 people have solved at least one exercise at <http://RubyMonk.com>, with a total of 8404 exercises being solved. Thank you for trying us out and giving us feedback!

</comment><comment><USER22> Very cool and great design, but I think I would recommend <http://rubykoans.com/> over it if you really want to jump into Ruby.

<comment><USER19> We love RubyKoans too! With RubyMonk we are trying to make things more interactive, and easier for new users to get into.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Loved it. I found most exercises and problems easy to do and most importantly it was fun. Looking forward to more lessons, exercise and problems.

</comment><comment><USER24> Very slick navigation and a lot of fun! Would really love to see the focus on the Problems sections to keep things interesting.

</comment><comment><USER25> The end of program problems don't allow you to view the solution even though there is a link on the page.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the feedback - I've opened a ticket and we should have this sorted shortly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Great tool! Great for daily practice while learning Rails on another tutorial.

</comment><comment><USER27> Outstanding UI design. This is enticing me to learn Ruby at last. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER28> I cannot seem to get further from the leasson 2 although my code passes

<comment><USER28> Now it seems to work

<comment><USER4> Sorry - I guess we were all asleep (passed out?) when this happened. I'm glad it's working, but I'll log a ticket anyway.

Also, thanks for the feedback. Let us know if there's anything else we should be fixing/changing - you can reach us at firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm really tired of seeing Ruby tutourials online. Teaching someone Ruby doesn't teach them the first thing about getting set up with a functioning website where they can put that code to practice.

<comment><USER30> >> Teaching someone Ruby doesn't teach them the first thing about getting set up with a functioning website where they can put that code to practice.

Well there are plenty of tutorials for that, too.</comment></comment>


Marijuana could be the biggest growth opportunity for struggling beverage-makers - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-are-ditching-beer-for-pot-so-expect-to-see-deals-2019-1 <comment><USER2> How about genetically modified yeast that makes psychoactive substances. Your bread could bake you!</comment>


Agile is not a Fucking Noun - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@magdoub/agile-is-not-a-fucking-noun-e2064b241311#.bkzysvs6q <comment><USER2> Noun or adjective - the term is overhyped to the point of being totally irrelevant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does your organization have a handbook? - <AUTHOR> GitLab has a handbook [1] which describes virtually all of their internal processes.
I wonder how many organizations use a similar approach.
I also wonder if anyone tried starting their handbook by just cloning parts of GitLab's handbook. Sharing processes between organizations would be interesting.
[1]: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ <comment><USER2> I collected a few links here (mostly German):

How institutions achieve independence from the individual [https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/55](https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/55)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes! [https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook- pdf/](https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook-pdf/) (free to download)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Recent discussion of GitLab's handbook: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22426616](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22426616)

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes: [https://about.sourcegraph.com/handbook](https://about.sourcegraph.com/handbook)

</comment><comment><USER5> I think a lot of companies use their intranet site as their handbook.

<comment><AUTHOR> My previous company had a wiki for that. But it was very high-level and hard to navigate: you couldn't drop into a project, read the docs and start contributing.

That company was not exactly representative, but I assume having comprehensive documentation that can be used for self-onboarding is rare.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, the intranet site is more like a company handbook for HR and general policies (not that they follow them).

The technical documents are a mess. Whe have 3 different systems that they might be in. I recently changed teams (and stacks) and there was no training, no real documentation, and just overall sucks.</comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin exchange Bitfinex loses 119,756 bitcoins in security breach - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4vupa6/p2shinfo_shows_movement_out_of_multisig_wallets/d61oe33 <comment><USER2> This HN thread should be merged with [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12214049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12214049)</comment>


My 9-year-old son helped me uncover a missing clue in allergy science - <AUTHOR> https://www.worth.com/what-causes-an-allergy-heres-where-i-think-we-should-look/ <comment><USER2> From the article: "'"Dad, maybe you just don't make enough epi?" asked my son, who was 9 years old at the time.'"

"epi" = "epinephrine". Indeed a possible explanation!

FWIW a cup of coffee is excellent emergency treatment for anaphylactic shock:

[https://www.faroutfirstaid.com/blog/anaphylaxis-coffee- time](https://www.faroutfirstaid.com/blog/anaphylaxis-coffee-time)

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/781053.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/781053.stm)

For those worried about "coffee allergy" I would note that there are less than a handful of recorded cases of anaphylactic shock due to caffeine - [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4313757/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4313757/)</comment>


Andy Rubin builds a smartphone: The "Essential Phone" is official - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/andy-rubins-modular-essential-phone-has-the-oddest-camera-placement-ever/ <comment><USER2> I'm heavily invested into the Android community. This misses the mark on many fronts.

1 - The front camera breaks into the screen. People hate that.

2 - No headphone jack? It's DOA. Some people use bluetooth and don't care, but nobody uses that stupid USBC to 3.5mm.

3 - The battery is tiny for its screen size.

I've read a lot over the last few years about what consumers want. First of all, it's completely different and random. Some want removable batteries, some want a 4.5 inch size, some want dual front facing speaker, etc.

The things in common everyone wants(or more precisely, EVERYONE is not against), are a headphone jack, and good battery life.

This phone could have been amazing, but is already creating its own demise.</comment>


Secure alternative to zoom? - <AUTHOR> Besides Jitsi, do folks have secure video conferencing favorites that can be used on a Mac? Jitsi is only iOS, not MacOS. <comment><USER2> > _Jitsi is only iOS, not MacOS._

Jitsi is primarily browser-based, which as far as I know works just fine on macOS?

</comment><comment><USER3> Jitsi has a MacOS client. Have you tried it?

[https://desktop.jitsi.org/Main/Download](https://desktop.jitsi.org/Main/Download)

Does Jitsi Meet (browser based) not work?

</comment><comment><USER4> Jitsi is great.</comment>


Pokemon or Big Data? - <AUTHOR> http://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/ <comment><USER2> Lots of fun, though don't miss the comments. Some are gold:

> Tokutek claim to improve MongoDB performance 20x. Unclear if this also mean > lose 20x as many documents.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey hey hey this thing has a few mistakes where it uses the Japanese Pokemon names instead of the English names.

Creebase(japanese) -> Avalug (English)

Mukubird (jpn) -> Staravia (English)

The rest of the Pokemon use the English names!

</comment><comment><USER4> Tim, I didn't know you build this :) really cool!

</comment><comment><USER5> I knew cuckly was big data...</comment>


720p Recording on Nexus One - <AUTHOR> http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=6744172

<comment><USER2> "I am not responsible for anything that happens to your phone"</comment>


Best WordPress sliders, that I've found on the web - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
This week, for my WordPress project I was looking for the best content slider plugin solution. There're a lot of lists on the web, but none of them is really useful.
So I thought that this mini-topic might be useful to someone, here is my independent list of (mostly) commercial WordPress sliders that I bought for testing:
1. Estro for WordPress - http://pixelentity.com/estro-jquery-ken-burns-slider-wordpress-plugin/

    + Has great Ken Burns effect

    + Fast on mobile, because of CSS3 transitions and canvas drawing, but works slow in old browsers

    + Thumbnails option

    - Can't display content from WordPress posts

    - Useful only when you need Ken Burns effect

 2. SlideDeck for WordPress - http://www.slidedeck.com/wordpress/

    + Can show content from WordPress post and RSS feeds

    + Can display slider inside slider

    + Has a free version

    + Thumbnails option

    + Great support, I had small issue and guys fixed my issue in a 3 hours.

    - Too overloaded with features, works sluggish on my phone
    - Works sluggish on mobile

 3. TouchCarousel for WordPress http://dimsemenov.com/plugins/touchcarousel-wp/

    + Very cool touch swiping navigation and fast CSS3
 transitions, works fast even on my old BlackBerry phone

    + Templating system to create custom layout in admin

    + Can display multiple images per view, which allows to create carousel and mail slider for site with same script

    + Slides any post type and taxonomies from it

    - Has no option to create slides with manually (only from WordPress posts)

    - Has no free version

 4. Smooth Slider for WordPress http://www.clickonf5.org/smooth-slider/

    + The only one free slider, that works relatively fine and can display posts.

    - Doesn't work on Android, works sluggish on iOS

 5. RoyalSlider for WordPress http://dimsemenov.com/plugins/royal-slider-wp/

    + Touch navigation, CSS3 transitions, responsive layout

    + Option to add animated captions with built-in wysiwig editor

    + Can be displayed as gallery with thumbnails, or as simple slider

    - As Estro, doesn't have an option to slide content from WordPress

    - Has no free version

    - Scales only images and slider wrapper, text content inside doesn't scale

 Please share your thoughts too. <comment><USER2> Thank you. Clickable:

1\. Estro for WordPress - [http://pixelentity.com/estro-jquery-ken-burns- slider-wordpre...](http://pixelentity.com/estro-jquery-ken-burns-slider- wordpress-plugin/)

2\. SlideDeck for WordPress - <http://www.slidedeck.com/wordpress/>

3\. TouchCarousel for WordPress <http://dimsemenov.com/plugins/touchcarousel- wp/>

4\. Smooth Slider for WordPress <http://www.clickonf5.org/smooth-slider/>

5\. RoyalSlider for WordPress <http://dimsemenov.com/plugins/royal-slider-wp/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing. Here's another one I've had success with: MenuCool Image Slider: <http://www.menucool.com/slider/image-slider>

\+ Only 10kb of pure JavaScript goodie \+ Thumbnails option \+ Fully customizable \+ Cross-browser compatible (even ie6..) \+ Really helpful customer support, helped me out through the entire process.

<comment><USER4> Looks old ;(, and this is WordPress sliders list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nivo Slider is one I've found to be very nice - surprised it wasn't on your list. It has versions for wordpress (paid) and jQuery (free):

<http://nivo.dev7studios.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing, please add links too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Done!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thank you. So what's your favourite?

<comment><USER6> It depends what you need to slide, but I like TouchCarousel for WordPress most of all.</comment></comment>


Google has 1,700 engineers working on Trump's Covid website (according to Trump) - <AUTHOR> https://www.protocol.com/trump-google-coronavirus-website-surprise <comment><USER2> From Wired: "There is no nationwide site like the one Trump described. And Google had no idea the president was going to mention one."

[https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-donald-trump- google-...](https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-donald-trump-google- website/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't valid news. Please check sources before posting speculative, unfounded claims.</comment>


The Best-Rated Cyber Security Bootcamps in the World - <AUTHOR> https://www.switchup.org/research/best-cyber-security-bootcamps <comment><AUTHOR> Demand for Cybersecurity professionals has taken off in recent years, with over 200,000 unfilled positions in the U.S.

SwitchUp, a site that tracks bootcamps, recently released their list of top- rated cybersecurity bootcamps worldwide.</comment>


A Prototype Is Not an MVP - <AUTHOR> http://svsg.co/prototype-is-not-mvp-know-what-youre-building/

<comment><USER2> A useful distinction to make, and one that I knew about, but definitely have trouble keeping my prototypes prototypes - always end up adding MVP features too evening and weekend projects!</comment>


Ask HN: What Caused Obama to Change His Stance on NSA? - <AUTHOR>

This [1] video highlights big differences between what Obama's view of the NSA was in 2007 and what it is now.
Honest question. What to you think the reason for this big change is?
This really goes for politicians in general too. How is it that in some cases there are such big shifts in their views once elected?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BmdovYztH8 <comment><USER2> First, you probably shouldn't put too much weight into what a politician says, since he's always (always) pandering to voters. They say what they must to the group of people they believe most likely to vote them in.

But in general, once someone gets power, they like it.

</comment><comment><USER3> The President of the United States is the spokesmodel for our owners. A presidential _candidate_ thinks he/she is going to be a leader.</comment>


Timeless Programming Tools - <AUTHOR> http://www.flyingmachinestudios.com/programming/timeless-tools/ <comment><USER2> Bonus points for emotion control as a programming tool. You can't code if your head's all over the place.

</comment><comment><USER3> Emacs. This comes first into my mind when I hear the word "programming tool".

Emacs' default configuration is horrible. It took me many months to get used to it and to realize a perfectly convenient configuration. But since I did that 25 years ago I have stuck with it to this day. Emacs' killer feature is its almost unlimited programmability. org-mode is just one awesome example. There are several other good editors (vim, sublime, atom etc.) but none of them comes close to the power of Emacs.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't hear about regular expressions without wanting to tell anybody that loves it so much to try Haskell. Really.

Monadic parsers are so much better, regular expressions become pointless. I've written an entire email server, with literally thousands of lines of parsers, and the only place I've used regular expressions is for accepting them from the user, in a configuration file.

<comment><USER5> Well... I've used regular expressions as arguments to grep _much_ more often than I've programmed them. But I used them in grep quite often as part of a programming task.

It's like an editor. I think the article is saying "you need a good editor, and to learn to use it well", and I think you're saying "Haskell makes it really handy to write an editor!" That could be true, but it's a bit tangential to the article's point (presuming that I understand both of you correctly).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm sad that the author seemed to know neither the original proper wording, source, nor context of the jwz quote about regular expressions. Maybe JWZ's quote has just spread too far or too wide. Either way, I think Jeff Atwood hit this nail on its head: [http://blog.codinghorror.com/regular-expressions-now- you-hav...](http://blog.codinghorror.com/regular-expressions-now-you-have-two- problems/) .

<comment><USER7> It's similar to the misunderstanding about Knuth's optimization quote.

Regex isn't bad, regex is bad when it's used thoughtlessly (like most tools, but worse than many because it's so information-dense that errors and misapplication may be non-obvious). Use regex to recognize strings. Don't use regex to recognize grammars. (A particularly common abuse of regex.) Break your regular expressions up either visually (if your language allows it) or into multiple expressions so that they're clearer and more easily understood and changed.</comment></comment>


Building and Test Driving a Clojure Webapp - <AUTHOR> http://www.jarrodctaylor.com/posts/Compojure-Address-Book-Part-1/

<comment><USER2> Sweet. This is way useful.</comment>


The Profound Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/07/the-profound-programmer/

<comment><USER2> Indents with tabs are bad? I always thought this was a good thing, allowing each user to set their tab spacing.

<comment><USER3> Languages where indents have semantic meaning tend to prefer spaces. Python style guide [1] explicitly specifies spaces and while Ruby community doesn't have official style guide all their popular unofficial style guides prefer spaces over tabs.

I think the problem is that it's so easy to accidentally mix spaces and tabs that it is more convenient to disable tabs and just use spaces.

[1] <http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/></comment></comment>


Why We're Ditching Ruby on Rails for JavaScript and Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/ditching-ruby-on-rails-for-javascript-and-nodejs/ <comment><USER2> Here's how I interpret the author's points:

1\. Rails isn't cool.

2\. If you spend enough time hunting around, you can find Node libraries that, collectively, do everything Rails does out of the box.

3\. Node is "cool."

4\. A third party product which has nothing to do with Rails for building native iOS apps in Ruby is no longer actively maintained.

5\. Write once run anywhere, but this time it'll really work!

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it felt like justifying wanting to play with newer, more exiciting tech. That's fine, I've rewritten Rails apps in Phoenix and had a blast, but be honest with yourself that that's why you're doing something. Both Rails and node will solve his problems.

<comment><USER4> Sort of. How do you justify the fact that the corporate world is not coping with the technology very well?

<comment><USER3> > Despite the great advantages of using Rails in a new project, there was an > area where Ruby was not able to penetrate, and not even Rails was a good > ambassador. I'm talking about the corporate world. There are of course some > exceptions, and one can always point some successful corporate use cases > where Ruby was adopted either for new projects or as a rewrite of existing > ones in. But we're still to see a mass adoption of the technology by well > established companies. There are several reasons for this, but this opinion > was developed based only on gut feeling and I have no clear data to validate > it. Thus, I'm not going to elaborate on the reasons why Ruby is not > massively used on the corporate market.

I found this paragraph really hard to grep given how vague it is, but I'm assuming that he's euphemistically saying that his team/company was either not interested or not able to learn the language/framework. That would have been a more interesting article to me if he'd expanded on that.

If the team isn't interested in using some tech, then that's a sufficient reason itself to not use it. If they don't want to learn _any_ language beyond what they're comfortable with, I'd be pretty concerned about that kind of culture, because it'll hurt them in the long-run.

If the issue is actually that they can't deliver rails projects to clients because corporate people can't write ruby, then that's more important than any other reason given in the article.

<comment><USER4> I've been using Rails since 2008, and participated in more than 100 projects in these last 10 years. Either by coding or managing them. Most of these were Rails projects. Moving to node is part of planning the tech that we're going to propose to our clients during the next 10 to 20 years.

I didn't conduct a thorough analysis on the reasons why I've seen big corps rejecting Rails, so what I'm about to say is based on the the experience of being through all these projects.

But most Rails projects are connected to the innovation departments and once they passed through the PoC stage, their IT departments asked for a re-write on a tech already in their ecosystem. Supporting additional techs raises complexity and forces them to support another stack.

We were indeed able to push some Rails apps to production on enterprises, but these were usually apps that performed a specific goal for one of the departments, and once we went for the big projects within their core, tech stack was always an issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Owner/CEO/Steward of RubyMotion here.

1\. Laurent did sell RubyMotion off (to basically retire). He sold it to me. The guy that built the mobile adaptation of A Dark Room with RubyMotion (which hit the number one spot on the AppStore _and_ the number two spot on Google Play).

2\. Since the acquisition, there have been monthly updates to the platform, and measures to slowly open source RM under a _sustainable_ open source model.

3\. I have since released 4 other apps using RubyMotion. Combined they have approximately 3.5 million downloads.

4\. RubyMotion is _actually_ native (unlike React Native).

5\. RubyMotion is definitely not cool anymore. It's battle-hardened, "just works", fast (faster than Swift in fact), and can leverage all the existing Android and iOS libraries out there (which React not-Native can't do out of the box).

6\. Email me and I'll hook you up with an Indie license <3.

<comment><USER4> Amir, thanks for following up. Like I said in the article, I've used RubyMotion in production in the past. We were one of the early adopters and launched at least half a dozens apps in it. We payed for all our licenses. I love the product and this was money very well spent. It allowed us to use the same language (Ruby) in a larger portion of the projects. This was particularly important when some of our clients were small startups with an existing Rails app, and it was important for them to keep the same language for the mobile app.

I just think the support for Android should have happened a lot sooner. But of course this is easier said than done.

Moving forward to React Native is part of the same approach. It's important for us to use a technology that delivers fast in multiple channels and has a great chance of still being relevant in the next 10 to 20 years. And for me, these are the strongest points on Javascript.

And you're correct, React Native is not truly native, but it does the job pretty well without major impacts on usability. RubyMotion is truly native and very well designed IMHO.

Best of luck for the future.

<comment><USER5> I totally understand the need for Android support back then (and to your point should have happened sooner).

With regards to relevancy, RubyMotion is built on top of LLVM. With regards to Ruby the language itself, it's been around for decades and won't be going anywhere (granted the same can be said for JavaScript).

I'm waiting to see how web assembly will shake things up.

Best of luck to you man (I genuinely mean that). And if you ever decide to come back to RM, I'll be here to help :-)

<comment><USER4> Thanks. Same here. I truly respect the work that has been done on RubyMotion. Like I said in my post, brilliant people there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's how I interpret the author's points:

1\. Rails was a breath of fresh air over the explicit-rather-than-implicit web frameworks of the time, but while making a splash in the startup world, it didn't seem to be embraced in legacy bigcorp settings.

2\. JS is an ecosystem that is mandatory on the frontend and has become viable (and actually novel) on the backend, and was eventually able to make inroads in bigcorp settings unlike Ruby. This ubiquity and agreeableness, combined with its rich array of libraries and active community, makes it compelling. As the Ruby community matured, the hype around it has died down, leading to less buzz but also less prominent innovation.

3\. React Native is the killer SDK for making one codebase work on every relevant (mobile) platform. (Presumably, if the author were concerned with lives-on-desktop applications too, Electron would be mentioned as well.)

4\. The core JS language is actually being worked on now and isn't nearly as quasi-abandonware or as horrendous as it once used to be. (Some credit paid to browser-makers is missing, as every browser-maker has done their part in both trying to move the ecosystem forward in divergent ways, and then much later coming together to harmonize their implementations and resolve to work in a more coordinated way. This 10-year evolution ultimately made duct tape shims like jQuery unnecessary, which paved the way for more holistic frameworks like Ember, Knockout, Angular, and React to set a different architectural model for JS code, landing the community where it is today.)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for summing it up.

I avoided desktop because the last time I don't develop for desktop since 2008.

But I take a look at some options for Ruby near that time, and I don't think the ecosystem is much different now. There were a couple of options but very incomplete.

Regarding the JavaScript ecosystem, yes. Electron is a perfect killer.

I see the JavaScript ecosystem at the same level that Java was in 2006. If you pick it, you can virtually deliver to any channel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had my doubts but read the post to see where I could be enlightened. Two points sums it up for me:

      1. Phoenix+Elixir [a modern Rails successor]
      2. [satisfy] both corporates and startups

I don't know who needs point 2. Perhaps consulting or a dev who only wants to learn a single stack? Not me.

I've used Rails at a scale where it hurts. Phoenix+Elixir is great if a little learning curve is okay. Spring+Java is bloated for many use cases so I have found and used microframeworks such as Javalin+Kotlin+JDBI which is far superior to Node on the back-end. For even smaller projects Go is a fine choice if you don't mind the simplicity which is simultaneously it's strong and weak point.

<comment><USER8> I completely agree. I'd stick with Rails or opt for Elixir, Clojure, or maybe Go instead. I'm balls-deep in the Node.js ecosystem and the only reason I would choose it over Rails or the others is because of React + TypeScript. React is by far my favorite 'templating language' and TypeScript makes JS pretty decent.

Basically, if I can get away with it I'd go for Phoenix+Elixir, followed by Clojure/ClojureScript. If I can't, I'd go for Rails. If for whatever reason that isn't an option, C# or Java. Node inhabits this weird in-between world that doesn't offer quite enough of anything, and has some serious drawbacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Corporate world is not coping with Ruby Rails very well.

Now I know DHH will mention Github and Shopify as examples. But I believe both tends towards "startup" and aren't very cooperate. So I will give two _Cooperate_ " examples,

Bloomberg News - I really wish they share more about the Rails Stack.

Apple Music - Not sure that is changed, but their first version of Apple Music I believe was on Ruby Rails.

The main reason, or the main point the author was _trying_ to get across,( some interrupted as not being _Cool_ ) I think are Ruby, and Rails, as one or as separate subject, lacks the direction, and more importantly the momentum. It is definitely not dead, far from it, but it is not growing either. And I guess the author simply bet on node.js is more like Javascript will continue to grow and survive for the next 10 years.

Python and Go had Google, PHP had Facebook, Java had Oracle, .Net had Microsoft, Ruby and Rails manage to come this far without any major backing, all just open source and works from communities. And the communities should be proud of this.

P.S - I still believe TruffleRuby will make Rails Great again.

</comment><comment><USER10> While I agree with the general sentiment only because I could never really get into Ruby beyond basic loops, and am beyond comfortable with JS, but it's hard to take this JS evangelism seriously when their site doesn't even scroll right on mobile. That pattern of behavior is often indicative that the engineers care more about their concerns than their users, and in that case, why should we care? If you're not using the tech to solve your users problems, but just using it to hammer your perceived nails, the choice of tech is unimportant, IMHO. I'm probably nitpicking things, but if you're going to proselytize one path, show the best usage of it, not show off the worst usages of it in the presentation of it's benefits.

</comment><comment><USER11> You can do it both in Node.is and Rails. But the cool-factor matters because cool means momentum.

And you have to make the choice of which platform you will be building your company's expertise on. If it is yesteryear's tech that's not good in the long run.

No need to migrate your existing systems but for new development the platform with momentum behind it (= cool-factor) is often better businesswise.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's somewhat similar to what happens in design. Trends come and go and anyone who is seeking a new design at any given time will want what's mainstream at that time. It's not exactly the same that's happening with Rails and JS, as here the difference also concerns the quality of the end product, but it follows the same logic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like the core of the argument is Javascript has wider adoption than Ruby, in enterprise and startups.

I was expecting a more technical comparisons to Rails and Node. The point made about Ruby not being adopted by well established companies seems half true considering adoption of Rails - AirBnB, Twitter, Coinbase, Github, etc

<comment><USER4> I avoided the tech part because, to be honest, I don't think it is relevant now. There is many information about that on the web. And from the technology standpoint both are fit for purpose if you're going to develop a web app.

The central point for me is exactly the adoption on the startup and enterprise world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good idea. This approach should definitely drive recurring consultancy revenue!

<comment><AUTHOR> The main point behind it is assuring that the best frameworks are being used. It's both relevant for both sides of any project.

<comment><USER13> I would like to read that article which talks about feature parity and support. This felt more like a hit piece. I didn't see a lot of evidence of 'best' other than broad generalizations. Would love to hear your followup in a year. I truly hope node.js can become as mature a choice as Rails, but even Ryan Dahl doesn't seem to be convinced that will happen.

<comment><USER4> We're on the verge of baselining a reference architecture in JavaScript for all our projects. We did the research with parity of features that already exist in Rails (Rails Admin, Devise, Sidekiq, etc).

You might not need a year to, at least, get my thoughts on that.

<comment><USER14> Do you mind sharing what back office solution you guys found?

Did somewhat the same kind of research for our projects, but unfortunately didn't find anything decent that could really compete with ActiveAdmin/Rails Admin/Trestle in terms of features and maintenance…

<comment><USER4> Here: [https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/node-js-admin-panels- str...](https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/node-js-admin-panels-strapi-and- express-admin-reviewed/)

<comment><USER14> Ah, didn't realise there is a blog article about it. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> the willingness to be uncool may become a powerful competitive advantage

<comment><USER16> We said that as Java developers back in 2004. I'd say we got mixed results on that.

<comment><USER4> And that as C++ developers before that.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who has the best elevator pitch? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for the best HN pitchman out there. Let's start with a challenge.
Challenge Rules:
1. Go to the Domain Name Maker on Bustaname http://www.bustaname.com/word_maker
2. Click on Make Random Domains
3. Pick out an available random domain from the generated list.
4. Pitch HN your genius/crazy/clever idea for the site.
5. Vote for your favorite.
Example: Ugandary.com seeks to be the premier destination site for foreigners deciding whether to relocate to Uganda--or not. <comment><USER2> Apologies in advance - I got a little carried away here:

Morrido.com - A dating site for fundamental Mormons, general polygamists, and the poly-curious.

Discussels.com - The _premier_ social community for people who love discussing mussels. Oyster lovers can fuck off.

Nihilised.com - Our website does nothing. Is nothing. Nothing to see here.

Spellante.com - A-N-T-E. Scaling content is our only issue.

Gourmes.com - Recipe sharing for the finest quality breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and suppers - but no teas.

Spillain.com - Home of the Tony Hayward Fan Club.

<comment><AUTHOR> Brilliant! +1 for Discussels.</comment></comment>