In Japan, there's an industry devoted to cleaning up after people who died alone - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/world/wp/2018/01/24/feature/so-many-japanese-people-die-alone-theres-a-whole-industry-devoted-to-cleaning-up-after-them/?utm_term=.6e543bc7e6d4 <comment><USER2> Recommend also reading this beautiful and very sad NYT article from a couple of months ago.

"A Generation in Japan Faces a Lonely Death"

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/asia/japan- lonely-d...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/asia/japan-lonely- deaths-the-end.html)

Discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822064)

<comment><USER3> Glad you posted this. I found the article from November to be quite moving. As someone who knows precious little about Japanese culture, it surprises me that someone would die alone - and then sit alone for a long time before discovery. I had always heard Japan was a very collectivist society. Does that play into this?

<comment><USER4> My opinion as a Westerner who has spent a lot of time in Japan: as in any crowded place, a key coping skill is the ability to ignore people who are in close proximity to you. When you're riding on a train with people crammed up against every square inch of your body, you kind of zone out, avoid eye contact, and definitely don't strike up a conversation. I get the strong sense that people who are alone can go though life with very few meaningful interactions, even with neighbors who live only a few centimeters away (note that the apartment in the story is 200 square feet, I'd bet that a lot of American homes have bathrooms bigger than that).

Being collectivist means not taking up unnecessary psychic space in the lives of others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of this documentary about Sweden. 50% of Swedes live alone, and 25% die alone. Often it takes a long time for someone to notice, as pensions come in to the account automatically, and the rent is also paid automatically.

[https://www.svtplay.se/video/10458343/the-swedish-theory- of-...](https://www.svtplay.se/video/10458343/the-swedish-theory-of-love/dox- the-swedish-theory-of-love-avsnitt-1)

<comment><USER6> This is why my mother sends me an email every morning. Sometimes she just says _hey_ , but most other times she includes other info about her life or asks me questions. Her reasoning was that because she had a cat (at the time), she didn't want to become cat food should she died suddenly.

<comment><USER7> Off Topic:

 _This is why my mother sends me an email every morning._

Should be the other way around. Parents watched us every hour when growing up, as adults we should be the ones checking on them constantly.

In the West I rarely hear people who talk about their parents with great love and care. Instead I see parents praising their children all day long. These kids grow up feeling like a prize and they do not develop enough appreciation for the hard work it took their parents.

Growing up in Africa it felt like, as a child, you owed everything to your parents and they did you a favor taking care of you. While extreme, in the long run people take care of their parents and you will not hear of older people being alone let alone die alone.

<comment><USER8> It doesn't really matter if mom initiates the email exchange or child does. The important detail is daily communication from the elderly parent confirming they are alive and functional. If child sends email, the elderly parent still needs to reply or you have no mechanism to check if they are okay.

<comment><USER9> The point was not about the mechanism, but caring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hope anyone reading this realizes that there will be a time in life when you should call your mother and / or call your father, once a week at least.

<comment><USER11> And not only parents either. I call my grandparents once a week, mainly because their weeks are filled with trips to the store or doctors appointments. But I've grown a lot closer to them and have learned a lot from their experiences and stories.

My grandfather loves talking about cars and he enjoys his weekly phone call. He can't wait to tell me all about new technologies he reads about. He tells me how his car is doing and asks how my car handles. He has 5 grandchildren and I believe that I am the only one who calls every week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Was that the entirety of the apartment in photos, minus the bathroom? Even by New York standards, that's pretty tiny.

<comment><USER13> Have you been in a Japanese hotel room? It's a bed, plus about a few square feet of access pathway into the bed.

<comment><USER14> Have _you_?

I've stayed in both 'international' hotels that cater to foreigners and in business hotels which explicitly discourage foreigners by having literally everything in Japanese and they've all had fairly standard sized rooms for a hotel.

<comment><USER9> To the parent's point, the one's in your description seem to all to fall on the expensive side, either for rich-ish foreigners or rich-ish Japanese.

<comment><USER14> They weren't and I can't possibly fathom how you got that from the description.

<comment><USER9> From the part that mentions that they are "international hotels that cater to foreigners" \-- so not some local cockroach hotel for junkies and poor people (not to mention the fact that they need to have enough money to travel to an expensive country like Japan in the first place -- 2/3rds of the world couldn't even afford the tickets with a year's salary).

And from the other part that mentions "business hotels" and especially ones that "explicitly discourage foreigners". Except if those are the rare kind of business hotels for poor destitute businessmen.

<comment><USER14> I think maybe we have a mismatch of cultural expectations. When I traveled in America I saw a lot of those junkie hotels - they're simply not really even thought of as viable hotels in my country. When you drive America you see America is _poor_.

An actual example from two of the categories I've actually stayed in.

ANA Crowne Plaza Okayama - $116AU a night. Not shockingly cheap, but cheap nonetheless.

PRINCE something something, in Osaka. 6000JPY a night on a public holiday.

No matter your definition of cheap, they're not 'expensive' hotels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is more about hospitals and less about solitary apartments, but there's a program in the US called No One Dies Alone: [http://www.how-we- die.org/howwedie/story?sid=8](http://www.how-we-die.org/howwedie/story?sid=8). I'm really glad there are people like that.

</comment><comment><USER16> """Fujita and his team had carted away all his belongings, ripped off the wallpaper, checked under flooring, and scrubbed and disinfected the apartment from top to bottom. They left a deodorizing machine to run inside the apartment for a few days."""

Anybody have any idea what sort of device this `deodorizing machine` would be? I'm very curious what sort of technology could pull off such a feat.

<comment><USER17> Probably either an ozone generator or something that sucks air through a carbon filter.

<comment><USER16> Aha, that must be what's on the box in that last image [https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp- apps/imrs.php?src=http://w...](https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp- apps/imrs.php?src=http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/world/wp- content/uploads/sites/7/2018/01/01092018_LonelyDeath_045.jpg&w=1484)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is a decent solution to encourage pet ownership (dog or cat) among the single elderly? Not only can they help alleviate feelings of loneliness while you're alive but they could theoretically be trained to get help if you fall or if you eventually pass away.

<comment><USER19> Considering the few other comments about pets eating their dead owners, this plan about getting help if you die needs a bit of thought. Would you train your pet to use the phone? Could it leave your house whenever it wanted? How will you train it to get help? By playing dead a lot?

I'm in favor of pets as companionship, but an emergency button around your neck seems like a better way to get help with the exception of dieing in your sleep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't there one in America also ? Is the market significantly smaller in America ?

<comment><USER21> in American it's target is people who will die alone and the objective is cleaning up financially.

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/how-the- elderl...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/how-the-elderly-lose- their-rights)

<comment><USER22> That's one of the most disturbing stories I've read in a while. It's unbelievable, felt like I was reading science fiction. I wonder if there are ways to protect oneself in old age from being a victim of that...

<comment><USER23> Don't live in one of the states with those type of guardianship laws. Probably need to elect a President that will choose a responsible steward for the HHS so that we can actually collect data on what is happening now and act upon it to reform this situation. [https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-17-33](https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-17-33)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > It was almost as if Hiroaki had never existed.

Bullshit. When I die, if all that is remembered of me are the things in my apartment, then it doesn't really matter if I was alone at the time or who cleans it up.

I'm willing to bet he made a lasting impression on _somebody_. Friends, coworkers, etc. If not, then having kids or someone living with him wouldn't have mattered.

I definitely get the feeling the message of this article is "make sure you have kids so you don't die alone and forgotten", which is stupid for several reasons.

<comment><USER12> > _I 'm willing to bet he made a lasting impression on somebody. Friends, > coworkers, etc._

Apparently not enough of an impression to carry on the friendship, though, right?

I think the point of the article is that Japanese society has traditionally been very dependent on family and work for all of your social bonding, with much less emphasis on maintaining relationships outside of those two spheres.

If he _did_ have kids, they would likely check up on him more than once a month. It's not guaranteed, of course, but Japanese culture does seem to put more of a weight on that than American culture.

The point of this article isn't "this is how it _should_ be or suffer the consequences", it's "this is how it _is_ , and this is one of the consequences".

<comment><USER16> I was struck by this part "They retire from lifetime jobs and lose the only communities they've ever really had." I've long recognized that deep friendships are those that transcend the circumstances which brought two individuals into proximity to take a liking to each other in the first place. A friendship that is limited to the circumstances that unite people I call "circumstantial friendships".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sign me up!</comment>


Created my own RSS Reader Nuesbyte - <AUTHOR> http://nuesbyte.com I would love some feedback! <comment><USER3> To have this said first: I really like your reader, it looks beautiful and so far it's the one that I'd most like to use.

In the wake of the Announcement of Google Reader shutting down, a lot of people are gonna be wary of jumping into another service that could go down any time.

What are your mid-/long-term plans for keeping this online? Will there be monetization through ads? Through a subscription? Or are you planning to open source it for self-hosting?

A last important question, can I export my data?

cheers hellerbarde

edit: updated question

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great comment. It really chews into some of the things I have been thinking about for the future. Right now I have decided to keep it a free services with no ads. Though as most sites, of course I would like to make money from it, which goes hand in hand with improving it continually. I have never thought of the idea of exporting data, however with the OO way I have created the database, I can definitely add this in. GReader imports are something I have to work on next. My focus for this start has been to keep it clean, simple and fast. Because of that I worked on the optimising code for weeks. (the server is based in Australia, thus, better hosting online will definitely speed it up).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I would love to hear what people think of it. I plan on doing a few updates, including adding a mobile version and adding Google Reader import ability.

<comment><USER4> What is your crawler backend? Superfeedr? Home made?

<comment><AUTHOR> Home made

<comment><USER5> Do you need any help with this project, specifically with the backend and scaling? My email is in my profile if so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, I'm really enjoying using this, slick looking too. I really like all the little touches you've added, the UX is great. I think you've come the closest yet to the simplicity that google reader offered. I would try as hard as possible to maintain the feeling of simplicity in your design even when adding more features.

A few feature requests, feed importing, profile editing and a larger feed view (maybe collapse the sidebars?) also folders to be able to sort feeds you've added and the respective views.

edit: updated some things

<comment><USER7> > the UX is great.

The UX is indeed very nice. Just a small issue: FF19 on OSX 10.8.3 displays a horizontal scrollbar. Looks like a margin or padding problem with the central feed element.

<comment><USER8> Same problem on Windows 7

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks really promising, actually signed up which is saying something because I've always leaned towards just using actual websites despite having built a few mobile RSS readers myself.

I am a bit confused with some UI elements though (perhaps because I wasn't a heavy Google Reader user):

1) Subscriptions are for grouping feeds ya? I see how I can create a new subscription and name it, but I'm totally failing on how to add a feed to it. If you go to the RSS page I see things I want to add, but no plus button or other interaction seems to do what I expect. Am I just confused?

2) Not sure if this is a setting somewhere, but having full articles open in a new tab would be nice.

3) Is there a way to set all the items in a single subscription as read?

4) What is the column on the right? Popular items? Some label there might be good.

Overall super cool, I like it! Keep it up man. If you continue developing it, consider a Bitcoin tip jar, I'd throw some your way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah. You createa group and click on it (its highlighted) and then you move to the right side, and click on the feeds you want, you can use the input to search for feeds, or, put the feed directly into the input box.

The column on the right its popular views in your feed selection. The 'views' should hopefully outline this fact. I agree I have to setup a better method (or instructions) on how to add feeds to a group

<comment><USER9> Ah, ok.. Ya I think I was clicking on the link title before perhaps? I see it works if I click on the box instead. Just having a + button there would do worlds to explain that process I think.

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The design is great but it's really slow. Which I'll forgive because it's new, and this post is probably giving you new traffic, but to be a replacement for GReader, I want it to be as close to instantaneous as possible.

This is also why I don't use Feedly. It's slow!

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely due to too much traffic, its just a cheap shared hosting site in Australia. I will definitely have to bump it up.

<comment><USER11> I'm getting:

      Resource Limit Is Reached
      The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded
      resource limit. Please try again later

From click to click.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ') AND date > NOW() - INTERVAL 1 WEEK ORDER BY views DESC LIMIT 0 , 10' at line 1

<comment><AUTHOR> Ill have to check the manual!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like it so far. I would encourage you to keep improving it, because as things stand now you're at the top of my list of GReader replacements. I like that Nuesbyte is in the browser and doesn't require a client. Importing my feeds from GReader will be great. Also on my wishlist: vi-style movement keys (j,k,l) &c. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER14> Its funny that deleting all the RSS feeds - will result in the MYSQL Error... Look into it developer...

You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ') AND date > NOW() - INTERVAL 1 WEEK ORDER BY views DESC LIMIT 0 , 10' at line 1

<comment><USER15> Sounds to me like insufficiently intelligent IN clause generation - a mistake I've made at least once and seen many more times.

I'm guessing english isn't your first language from the way you misconjugated the "will result" part but "look into it developer" comes across as "you suck and I am laughing at you" whereas for an early stage service I think "here's a bug report" is rather more appropriate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks promising, but I clicked on a story and got a mysql error. Do you have pubsubhubbub support? That's the first thing[0] I look for in a feed reader.

[0]<http://lee-phillips.org/newsblurred/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't heard of it, I will look into adding it.

In terms of mysql error, the site is getting way more traffic than my simple hosting provider can provide. I will need to bumb it up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nuesbyte is definitely one of the better Google reader alternatives out there. Love the layout and simplicity. Added to my list - <http://ginicharts.com/google-reader-alternatives>

</comment><comment><USER18> Awesome, Would you ever go into detail why you did it ? I wrote a personal app over year ago called DashBored (I suspected this was gonna happen when the big CO's were all about API restrictions).

Thanks,

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. I have been musing over building a website for a long time. I knew that to build something new was difficult. So I wanted to build something cleaner, faster and simpler than other people. News is the number one thing that people often seek on the internet, and thus, that is the path I went down. Originally, it was just a site that I created as a hobby for myself to view, but as i progressed, quite a few people liked it, and then Google Reader died, and I thought, this would be a good opportunity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks promising, but I only get to use it for a minute, then I started getting 508 errors. If it gets more stable and faster, I may consider switching to this from the Old Reader.

</comment><comment><USER20> I saw this before (you posted it on some blog or something), and I really liked the design. I really hope you are able to scale it up for public use!

</comment><comment><USER21> You need to add top:0; left:0 on your fixed topbar for android browser - <USER2> job btw

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ill add that in!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> super slick. Are there any keyboard shortcuts though? I need my 'n' key

<comment><AUTHOR> yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> very slick, any framework used for developing the application ?

</comment><comment><USER24> j/k navigation?

</comment><comment><USER25> no https?

<comment><AUTHOR> Is it something people want?

<comment><USER25> Definitely because you can sign up and login. For anonymous reading less so.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Oneliner.me – Get a one-liner about you - <AUTHOR> https://oneliner.me/ <comment><USER2> I often wish that "Show HN" posts followed the same format as "Launch HN". I think it would be more beneficial for both the community seeing the product as well as the showcasing party.

Posts where there is detailed information about the project, who is behind it, how it started, etc., and maybe some contact info. Even the tiniest percentage of this information would be more helpful.

This is the second time in as many days I clicked a Show HN link and had no idea what I was looking at. The first was the nearest volcano site from yesterday; the page did nothing without location access.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an unassuming request for valuable user data. Any informed user would refuse to give out their account information to a service like this. This encourages unsafe behavior with regards to personal privacy.

<comment><USER4> I totally agree. It's like theses quiz used by Cambridge Analytica to know who celebrity are you.

Why not use a more privacy friendy system? Like just use your email or generate a uniq link to share with your friends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some examples would be neat. Though, even if I was interested I'm not using Google or Facebook, so I guess I can't partake.

Congrats regardless :)

<comment><USER6> Same, no way I am letting a random app go through all my stuff for some novelty purpose.

Maybe it doesn't go through things? Maybe it isn't novelty? Who knows, the website isn't indicative of anything at all.

<comment><USER7> For what it's worth, the login pop-up served by Google or Facebook describes what kind of data will be shared with the app, so you can make a conscious decision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's completely broken for me.

Privacy page: 503 Server Unavailable — [https://i.imgur.com/cOihKSE.png](https://i.imgur.com/cOihKSE.png)

Terms page: 504 Gateway Timeout — [https://i.imgur.com/ZR8QOsy.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZR8QOsy.png)

Facebook account: 200 OK but the OAuth flow is broken, here's an example [1].

[1] [https://tellingr-a5c30.firebaseapp.com/__/auth/handler?code=...](https://tellingr-a5c30.firebaseapp.com/__/auth/handler?code=vHvpevPrlfHWeANw-e8zPA31IHtKprTMkK4-ro82pXEetfnghaXHZqfh7uWi2wCy7EnsNXavGFSHW_9akYCvvEOu4skbQbhed- Sxq_ZYMd3XyZVBq8JueOWSbQjBJfKBi0g6Hwz9Qibf6ii1c8XSZZXwD5M2yleZsXuh85BgMYIrDzy0q3w4cdF0I5_TDgiWeiwijODmTUGpa60iezrsjaMi6b0saAoQh2sDQ3K-yteAi9g4CFSweeyx- RFo62dyoICfXJZv2I0vcbc3WWgs-J9ngS3EV2zwC_k8lEAf0LWFhUiMqMl4Ef4h7hrzvIn3ISprX54HnHv3RnfnEGNPV_Al-4mdX5sHxrUmDlbFdOBwjF73WWDAN1al1OUNj86aS1B&granted_scopes=public_profile,email&state=AMbdmDlwQqYKHSbBAteM2WXxn6w29sBC4-aB5T1Am0zRA6US83FOl51nnpr_7vdR8tsztAVqz_cGz0ZNBKMMqEMUfoFASqYAhCQpLmQ8huUNFs1_BIJ7oGFhRdbLK7yqt9aF3fXObT5vCRfdEZUXBjNo7UaIDMlH5E5MU5Q9GziJcr_zzTv4eRypzuA8Z8b1AXCWeCjy52HPqnecR7-whui8G1UbihgNsTcgtR4D06jw5E-5Ogc74ZS3C9UJT6nQV26gIw9Vfglc3XR9z8pJoTdkS- XO69fyXH8-oaXQ9-Rl1yvY_KZc4D0vbjSc_cMQhkSgqBXRNsU1QeSnWFf3qKQ#_=_)

<comment><USER9> The privacy and terms page are viewable now~~

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You have to grant permissions on Google to read the Terms of Use or Privacy Policy.

Hard no.

<comment><USER11> The TOS and Privacy Policy are in the home page. At least on mobile.

Still, not signing up to them because I don't have a Google or Facebook account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Kudos on launching but HN may not be the right platform to showcase a tool that offers a cryptic explanation of what it does and then requires the keys to the kingdom to try it out.

I think a video showing the tool in action, or even a few screenshots and couple blurbs, would go a long way to convincing a person to use it (if they're interested).

</comment><comment><USER13> Continue with Google

Continue with Facebook

.. I'll continue elsewhere

</comment><comment><USER14> Just curious if this note[0] was already there before or your just added it after receiving criticism...

[0] "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. "

<comment><AUTHOR> Lol it was already there. I do love critical feedback.:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > The social login only access your name, profile image, and email address.

The oneline is based on only that? Sounds like being very random

</comment><comment><USER16> how to trust this?

<comment><AUTHOR> What makes you hesitant?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku? - <AUTHOR> Are there other viable/hands-off/scalable rails app hosting solutions you'd recommend?
What I love about heroku : super easy to deploy and maintain.
What I don't love about heroku : poor support, uptime and performance <comment><USER2> In my experience Dotcloud has the advantage of giving you more control over your instances and the ability to SSH into them. But I had issues with the reliability of deployment there. I used to love the sandbox, but I dropped Dotcloud as a provider after that was removed without a drop-in replacement. However, I still use them to serve Redis, and so far, it's way cheaper than using a dedicated Redis service.

I looked into AppFog, but it was not nearly customizable for my fairly intense Django app. I found too much of the configuration to be baked in.

On Heroku, I really like the ease of connecting third party services, and the fact that many of those services have free tiers. I love their New Relic pricing as well. I like that Foreman/Honcho make for a pretty awesome staging environment. What I don't like is the inability to directly connect to dynos.

So far, of the products I've tried, Heroku seems the closest to being fully baked, but it's still a ways away from hitting it out of the park. I'm really glad this question was brought up, even if it's quite frequently asked. There are so many players and the scene is so rapidly changing that information is constantly going out of date. It seems to me that what's really needed is some sort of ongoing comparison tool/site to track the whole PaaS scene.

<comment><USER3> > giving you more control over your instances and the ability to SSH into > them.

FWIW you can do:

        heroku run bash

Which let's you mess around on a new dyno (not an existing one).

<comment><USER4> Didn't know about this. What's the difference between a new dyno and an existing one? Why would they act differently?

<comment><USER5> They don't act differently, its just a dyno separate from the web and other processes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The one hosting I'd recommend is of course Shelly Cloud: <https://shellycloud.com/> I'm a co-founder and I can tell you we have everything you asked for:

\- Super easy deployment. Just as in Heroku you just do a git push and we take care of the rest. We also offer integrated setup for databases and file storage, so deployment of Ruby applications is even more streamlined than on Heroku.

\- Super easy maintenance. We take care of monitoring, and broken processes and machines are replaced automatically. You also get logs and backups for free.

\- Great support. We're Ruby programmers ourselves and we're easily approachable. Even if you're not our client feel free to visit our Campfire room at <http://support.shellycloud.com/> . We help with deployment to our platform and day to day usage problems for free.

\- Highly reliable architecture. We offer components (like mongo replica sets) that allow you to create applications with very high uptime.

\- Great performance. In our model you get something comparable to an EC2 instance, so even our "small" server gets you much more power (and RAM space) than a Heroku dyno.

I hope that this at least piqued your interest. Feel free to ask questions, I'd be glad to answer them.

<comment><USER7> +1 for that, I've been using Shellycloud for almost a year now and the support has been great

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> We are using AWS Elastic Beanstalk for Java and quite satisfied for the ease of use, and they also support Ruby now: <http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/>

The best thing about AWS Elastic Beanstalk is you can still login into the machine in case you need to troubleshoot for some low level stuffs.

<comment><USER9> I evaluated Elastic Beanstalk for PHP about a year ago. I was impressed with the features I had at my finger tips. But, I couldn't get my custom PHP AMI to work the way I wanted (likely due to my own errors). So, I opted for another solution.

I'd like to think that Elastic Beanstalk is Amazon's answer to Heroku

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You might try <https://www.engineyard.com/> instead. You might also want to look at Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk.

Your "not loves" don't ring true for me though- perhaps you'd like to elaborate there?

I've been running production apps on Heroku for more than 2 years now, and there has only been one occasion where their uptime impacted the apps' availability. Even during Hurricane Sandy, my apps were up 24/7, so it's hard to understand your comment.

Yes, they do have non-critical issues at times (their API goes through brief, but not infrequent periods of instability)... but this only impacts your ability to deploy/manage an app, not the app's actual uptime.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess my experience has been different. I can probably count a dozen serious incidents since I've been using them (1.5 years). Database corruption, unexplained network issues, long period of unavailable API (does impact uptime or performance if you need to push an urgent bug fix or timely data update). But what convinced to switch or at least to invest time to see if there's something better out there is the poor customer support. At the beginning I was a big fan of their support team, super responsive and knowledgeable but in the last 9 months or so it's been increasingly frustrating interacting with them. No more support during the week-end, wait 2-3 days between each email and getting more and more canned responses that don't really address my problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> OpenShift from Red Hat is often cited as a competitive offering in Heroku vs X reviews. When I first checked it out they hadn't yet come out of beta.

Uses git just like Heroku. Has a similar "dyno" concept but calls them gears. Has a free developer version.

Don't know about support today, but the people I talked to from the team were incredibly helpful.

<comment><USER12> I haven't deployed anything 'real' on OpenShift, but having played and experimented with it, I'm rather impressed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd definitely recommend <http://clever-cloud.com/>

It scales automaticaly, analyzing the resource you need on your server, and you only pay what you use, like electricity.

It supports actually PHP, Scala, Ruby, Java, Node JS, and it's still upgrading. Also they have deployed PostgreSQL, MySQL, CouchBase and they are working on MongoDB integration, and ElasticSearch as well.

This company is pretty young, so they have a good support, as they care for their customer. I don't hesitate to send them an email and then give a call, or to tweet their account. Usually I get an answer under 2 hours.

Short story: I used to work with Play 2.0 and MongoDB, and had several issues on Heroku because of a problem on their side with the MongoDB driver. They didn't help in 3 days. With Clever-Cloud, everything worked perfectly, and they even helped me to deploy my app the first time. I immediately migrated my apps from Heroku, no regrets since.

<comment><USER14> I have never heard of this service, but looking at their pricing page, they seem to have made it as obscure as possible.

<comment><USER13> > I have never heard of this service

Maybe because it's French eheh. We don't have the same politics to go global!

For their pricing page, you buy Drops, which is like fuel for your car. They offer a better documentation here: <http://doc.clever-cloud.com/pricing/> It will go from $600 (classical apps) to $2400 (huge apps) a year.

They designed their offer to be cheaper than AWS with same or better performances.

<comment><USER15> I'm running an ecommerce website on clever-cloud (sales revenue: €1.5M/y). It works perfectly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've had a good time working with Blue Box Group (<https://bluebox.net/>). I've been using them as a backup for an uptime-critical festival application that runs on Heroku.

They helped me by setting up a Capistrano script for me that I run alongside my Heroku pushes. They set up the entire stack according to a specification I talked them through. And they helped me write a script to keep my backup DB in line with my production DB (Heroku Postgres). It's not nearly as quick as provisioning a Heroku app yourself, but if you can spare the week it took to get all that put together with just a little hands-on work, it's not bad.

Overall good experience, good support, if a little slow to respond, but I think mainly because they had one engineer working my case for the entire process, who I'm sure was also working with other customers. But having that 1:1 relationship is good, too. Tradeoffs.

<comment><USER17> I second the vote for Blue Box. We moved from Heroku 8 months ago and have been extremely happy.

I agree with grrrando, there were a few instances of slow responses during setup, but I also agree thats because you're talking to an individual in that case, rather than a support team.

Two of my favorite things about Blue Box: 1) On the first sales call they had a knowledgeable engineer that discussed the specifics of our app. 2) With their online chat I get answers from an engineer within minutes, even on nights or weekends (they have phone support too, I prefer chat)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't use services like Heroku (expect for my hubot instance) but I have researched a couple and I have found dotcloud to be very good. They support a large amount of different services, and they have open sourced a lot of their stack

</comment><comment><USER19> At Pogoapp we're basically building a Heroku-compatible platform (buildpacks + S3/API-compatible) on our own hardware, with support for storing data on the local filesystem (to run your own databases, etc).

We're also really happy about Dotcloud open-sourcing hipache and docker, and it seems like at least some sort of quasi-standardized PaaS-stack is in the near future, in the same way that you can shop around for LAMP hosts.

<http://www.pogoapp.com/>

</comment><comment><USER20> I am having a similar problem with heroku at this current point in time as I have been made aware that they do not provide access to web sockets which is definitely the direction I am wanting to go with my startup. Do any of these solutions cater for web sockets?

</comment><comment><USER21> I've really enjoyed building on Google App Engine. (Disclaimer; I work for Google, but not in engineering)

You can use the Datastore for NoSQL data, or connect with CloudSQL if you want to use a traditional MySQL database. It's quite forgiving when it comes to mistakes; and GAE will automatically spin up new instances as traffic warrants. (No need to manually add/remove dynos).

I know people have had problems with support, but at the same point I understand that if you pay the ($500/year?) for Premium support that the team is really responsive.

For me, as a very novice developer, I had enough on my plate building my app. It was nice to leave ALL of the sysadmin work to App Engine...

</comment><comment><USER22> You should check out OpDemand's EC2-based Ruby on Rails stack. Workflow is also very similar to Heroku (one click deploys, or `opdemand deploy`) but you run it off your own AWS account:

[http://www.opdemand.com/docs/ruby-on-rails-quick-start- guide...](http://www.opdemand.com/docs/ruby-on-rails-quick-start-guide/)

The stack automatically provisions, monitors and maintains an ELB, EC2 Instance(s), RDS and all the networking and key pair infrastructure you need. Most Heroku apps don't even need to be modified due to OpDemand's use Procfiles and standard dependency management. Deployment automation is all open-source Puppet hosted on GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER23> Engine Yard: Slightly more low level than Heroku, good support, uptime, and performance.

</comment><comment><USER24> Setup a centOS server with rackspace and use badger-rails to deploy with same workflow at Heroku. badger-rails takes a fresh centOS server and installed all dependencies for ruby and rails. Low-stress. <https://github.com/curiousminds/badger-rails>

<comment><USER25> BYOB - Best of all worlds

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Haven't seen AWS OpsWorks mentioned yet. Its lower level but it's been pretty great so far. (And it's way cheaper)

</comment><comment><USER27> As far as Node.js is concerned, Stackful.io [<http://stackful.io> ] provides an easy (and low-cost) way to deploy and scale your app on Digital Ocean SSD servers.

Meteor support is coming next week, and Rails will follow shortly.

(Disclaimer: I do work at Stackful.io)

<comment><USER28> Your 8$/month plan brings a tear to my eye. My ONLY gripe against Heroku is the lack of a hard drive to save things in, for example user uploads, etc.

Does Stackful offer the hard drive to use as we please? If so, you just got yourself a customer. (As soon as you support Rails)

<comment><USER27> Yep. You have your app running on a Digital Ocean virtual instance and all resources there are yours.

The $8 plan, for example, offers 20 GB SSD storage, and this includes files and database.

You can sign up, so we can notify you when Rails support is ready.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Red Hat Openshift has been pretty solid for us for over a year and is incredible easy to use.

</comment><comment><USER30> If you want a very simple solution, check out AWS Elastic Beanstalk. It's really easy to setup and you just need 1 simple command to deploy (git aws.push). Not sure how big your app is but they give you 1 year free of a micro instance too.

</comment><comment><USER31> Not really hands-off, but for an open-source alternative, rubber is interesting. If nothing else, but for the ideas on how to automate a scalable rails app on ec2.

<https://github.com/rubber/rubber>

</comment><comment><USER32> Well, you can try <https://www.cloudcontrol.com>

They also support Heroku's buildpack API and compared to Heroku, they have a lot of support options.

</comment><comment><USER33> While on the topic, does anybody know any Heroku alternative that offers postgis, preferably at a more reasonable price than the 200$/month Heroku charge.

<comment><USER34> PostGIS is now available in public beta on all production tier databases (including the Crane/Kappa plans at $50/$100 a month) - [https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2013/4/30/building_loc...](https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2013/4/30/building_location_based_apps_with_postgis/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Does anybody have experience deploying Django to Elastic Beanstalk? I'd love to hear a comparison between them and Heroku.

<comment><USER35> When I finally got it to work it worked great, but took me a good few hours to figure out some stuff that should of been documented at the time, but couldn't find it. That's just apart of trying something new though. I tried it when it was first announced so should of improved documentation since then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> EngineYard, DotCloud, AppFog. But I'd be surprised if you find better support and uptime. Hard to say about performance.

</comment><comment><USER37> If on Node Nodejitsu is highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER38> I like CloudBees (Java only). It's powerful, has high reliability and auto- scaling baked in.

<comment><USER2> If I recall correctly, it's not Java-only anymore. I started setting up a Jenkins server for CI for my Django app. I never finished getting the configuration right, and I'm not 100% positive you can serve Django from it (I don't see why you wouldn't be able to though), so I can't give an endorsement backed by experience, but it's something to look into.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> try cloud66.com with digitalocean

<comment><USER40> I have heard good things about this combination. You buy your on VPS setups to get redundancy or regional dispersion and cloud66 manages the deploy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Not for rails, but Google App Engine has been a pleasure for Python and Java web apps.

</comment><comment><USER42> I lovvvvvvvvvve Appfog.</comment>


Quora Banned Me for Saying the Earth Isn't Flat - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@brothke/quora-banned-me-for-saying-the-earth-isnt-flat-9bd98010c09d <comment><USER2> > Quora Banned Me For Saying The Earth Isn't Flat

1 + 1 = 2

> From a scientific perspective, no flat earther has ever given me a rational > response to why it is incorrect. So rather than answer the field of science, > they reported my answers as spam.

Flat-earthers are free to think this nonsense, despite being proven wrong over and over again. But of course. If they can't attack the authors argument. They attack the person by getting them banned.

As soon as Quora was breached, the bots came. I stopped looking at Quora a long time ago.

<comment><USER3> > As soon as Quora was breached, the bots came.

I'm curious why the flat earthers and the anti-vaxxers seem to have such good bot power but their adversaries don't.

<comment><USER4> I suppose those who are spreading bad ideas are more committed than those refuting those ideas. It takes a fair bit of commitment to even adapt flat earth or ant vax ideas in the first place.

Tge internet is good at filtering commitment and not very good at filtering truth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think we all agree Quora has pivoted to spam.

But I think we need to start acknowledging anti-flat Earthers and anti-anti- vaccers are part of Cancel Culture and are an unhealthy part of society.

They are about bullying not moving society forward in a positive way.

<comment><USER6> I believe the pro-polio advocates are an unhealthy part of society.

<comment><USER5> I believe quips that anti-vaxers are pro-polio are no longer insightfull or funny.

I think they are about cruelty.

Humans like to be cruel, and the current game is finding who we are allowed to be cruel to next.</comment></comment></comment>


Anandtech: AMD Radeon HD 7970 Review (28nm, new architecture) - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/print/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review

<comment><USER2> I wish someone would make an explanation of the current NVIDIA and AMD architectures with the terms used translated to their CPU equivalents, instead of the current half-marketing-speak which uses similar terms for different things between the two vendors.

I'm finding it exceedingly hard to make any guess whether certain algorithms are worth trying to port over or not, because the explanations are almost incomprehensible.

To give an example, the VLIW->SIMD unit transition in this architecture compared to NVIDIA's scalar units.

As far as I understand the VLIW vs SIMD difference, a VLIW instruction is more powerful compared to SIMD because one "long instruction" can contain different operations on different data. Whereas SIMD is the same operation on multiple data.

Traditionally, VLIW was entirely statically scheduled, which put all the burden on the compiler. Because graphics cards recompile all shaders anyway, it's not a bad fit.

So, now AMD changed their units from 16x4 VLIW to groups of 16xSIMD engines. The advantage here is that you no longer have to have groups of 64 similar ALU operations, but can do with groups of 16 similar ALU operations. Conversely, there should be more of such groups, i.e. more control logic compared to the old design. To top that off, there's improvements that allow one to schedule multiple threads over the GPU at once.

Am I on the right track here?

If I am, whats the minimum amount of identical operations that you must do to achieve reasonable throughput? 16 identical operations for 100% efficiency? Put differently, if I have code that requires different operations (due to branches, i.e. effectively conditional operations) on each computation stream that I'm pulling through, what factors are going to limit the effective speed I get out of this?

<comment><USER3> VLIW merely means instructions are setup in blocks with clearly defined starts and ends (AMD calls these blocks 'clauses'). This technique is also called MIMD (multiple instruction multiple data, as opposed to SIMD, single instruction multiple data).

VLIW exists to exploit very wide instruction parallelism while clearly delineating what instructions have dependencies on other instructions, and (at least on the Radeon) usually end on a memory write or a complex branch.

Radeon clauses are up to 128 instructions long, and manage 5 ALUs (on 4xxx, 5xxx, and 68xx, 4 of them identical, 1 of them being able to do double precision math and transcendentals), or 4 ALUs (on 69xx, all 4 identical and does not require a specialized ALU for DP and T).

The compiler optimizes dependency flow and ALU usage, instead of requiring dedicated hardware common in CPU design. This means far less silicon is dedicated to the task, and instruction scheduling is far more predictable and optimized.

Your suggestion that AMD used 16 ALUs per pipe under VLIW is wrong, The change is 4/5 VLIW ALUs to 16 ALUs that now can execute SIMD instructions. The compute units (the head end that synchronizes multiple pipes to perform one task in parallel) still use VLIW-like clauses to synchronize pipe usage.

Your suggestion that this new arch allows you to schedule multiple threads on the GPU at once is nonsensical: the correct term for pipe is "hardware thread", on a GPU like 5870 you have 320 hardware threads (1600 ALUs), you already schedule all of them at the same time for massively parallel execution.

What has changed is the CUs now support running clauses from different shaders at the same time by using some CU on one task, and some on another, and I believe it may also be able to have clauses from different shaders loaded at the same time and switch without overhead; on VLIW Radeons, shader change out has a high context switch penalty.

The only thing the new GCN arch really does is allow the ALUs to operate on SIMD instructions which allows higher instruction packing. This does not mean they do not use VLIW-like clauses, and it doesn't mean it is like Nvidia's design (which the media keeps repeating).

Nvidia's ALUs are free form stream processors, and do not have a clear beginning or end to each clause (as the hardware does not exploit hardware thread synchronization), they frequently suffer from cache misses and pipeline stalls, and they cannot easily exploit instruction level parallelism.

In addition, Nvidia does not exploit deep pipelining. On VLIW Radeons, the instruction pipeline is multistaged and 4 instructions deep, so by the time you are submitting the 5th instruction you are getting the results from the first and instructions 2, 3, and 4 are still being processed. This allows much easier synchronization between ALUs since they all read/write to the same set of registers.

The addition of SIMD instructions to this design allows much higher data throughput and much higher instruction packing; instead of executing, say, two Bitcoin hashes per VLIW4/5 group, each instruction winding around the group for maximum ALU efficiency, you can run 4 (or however many GCN uses for SIMD, most likely 4 or 8) hashes at the same time as a SIMD operation and not require complex compiler maneuvering to do a clearly instruction parallel operation (thus 16x4 hashes per group).

Now, ultimately, nothing of what I've written actually matters. OpenCL is a black box on purpose, it doesn't matter how the implementation executes it as long as it does so correctly and efficiently. AMD is betting that GCN is more efficient for the given silicon real estate.

<comment> Tuna-Fish > Your suggestion that AMD used 16 ALUs per pipe under VLIW is wrong, The > change is 4/5 VLIW ALUs to 16 ALUs that now can execute SIMD instructions.

Actually, the previous architecture was a setup of 16x simd, where each of the simd operations was a 5/4 wide vliw. So calling that 320 hardware threads is wrong -- in Cypress there really was only 20 front-ends which drove these bundles of 80 alus in groups of 5x16. Also, it was a 4-long barrel processor, so you had to schedule a SIMD "wavefront" of 64 "threads" for each unit.

In the new version each CU still has 4x16 ALUS like it had in Cayman, but now each of the 4 simd units of 16 elements can be scheduled independently by a different hardware thread.

<comment><USER3> There are 20 CUs, but it controls multiple sets of VLIW5/4 in parallel. AMD claims 1600 ALUs on the 5870, so 1600/5 = 320. I'm not sure how they are are factoring in the 4 deep pipeline for the barrel, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean there is only 80 actual ALUs.

The R700 Programming Manual seems to indicate my interpretation is correct, although if you can provide evidence that I'm misinterpreting it, I'm all ears.

<comment> Tuna-Fish There are 1600 Alus, but they are grouped in vliws of 5 elements, which are grouped in simd groups of 16 vliws. So there are 20 front ends, and reading a single bundle in one of them will instantly make 80 alus execute an instruction.

The barrel is essentially used to extend the vector registers from 16-elem to 64-elem, and a 64 "thread" wavefront, consisting of 5 VLIW'd instructions is essentially the smallest amount of work that R700 can do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When describing the (quite interesting, and well-described) "partially resident textures" technology, which is in turn inspired by John Carmack's MegaTexture technology, the review states:

 _For AMD's technology each tile will be 64KB, which for an uncompressed 32bit texture would be enough room for a 4K x 4K chunk._

Isn't this off by a factor of 1,000? 4K x 4K is 16M texels, which at 32 bits per texel would require 64 MB. A chunk of 64 KB cannot hold that. They repeat the "64KB" value for the chunk size many times, not sure in what direction they're wrong, really. I guess if I kept up more with graphics tech, the answer would be obvious. :)

<comment><USER5> 4kx4k pixels is a higher resolution than all but the most extreme gaming system can display (ignoring the fact textures are wrapped around 3d objects). So, I think the idea is 64KB chunks out of an arbitrary image that could in theory be 64 MB. AKA, you get to have 1,000 of those chunks for your 4kx4k image some of which are loaded into memory.

<comment><USER6> 4kx4k textures can easily be displayed even on my Macbook Pro's 9400M card. It does cost a high amount of memory; depending on if and how it's compressed, if it has mipmaps, if it contains an alpha channel etc. it can be anywhere between ~16 and ~64 MBs, but is very doable.

<comment><USER7> Yea, but how many of those 16million pixels can be map'd to the display.

A: Not all that many which is why breaking that up into smaller chunks an enabling a virtual 4k texture without compression is a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> With all those benchmarks out there already, I wonder if they'll ever start using BitCoin mining as one?

<comment><USER9> That would be hard to do and pretty pointless.

Do not forget that mining bitcoins becomes progressively harder with time.

Thus to get any sort of meaningful reviews, they would have to review whole field of graphic cards each time a new one comes out.

Not feasible.

Edit: Ok, so I don't know anything about Bitcoin mining, thanks for clarifications.

<comment><USER10> No, there is a very simple, well-defined and difficulty-independent metric of Bitcoin mining performance: hashes per second.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm curious about the larger memory bus width. GPUs are still considered sub- par for real-time audio applications because of the memory bottleneck, despite their numerical computing power.

<comment><USER12> I expect that's down to latency rather than throughput. Back in the day, I recall some people working with audio preferring ISA sound cards to PCI sound cards, because the latency was worse with PCI; but PCI has orders of magnitude more bandwidth.

<comment><USER13> It would be unsurprising if latency were the issue. Think about it- a GPU with a turnaround time of 1/60th of a second is plenty fast for any standard monitor.

<comment><USER14> Only if you're uploading data to it just once per frame. And you're not doing stereo.

<comment><USER13> Sure, 1/60th of a second may not be the exact right number, but the point is, I would think that traditionally a GPU designer wouldn't exactly have a tight latency budget.

Even if you're in stereo (1/120) and you write a new image to the buffer 100 times per frame (1/12000) that still gives you 40,000 cycles on a 500MHz clock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am surprised 6990 outperforms this card in so many tests!

<comment><USER16> It shouldn't really be surprising. A 6990 is essentially two 6970s on the same board. We'll probably have to wait for a 7990 to have a fair comparison.

<comment><USER3> It is two underclocked 6970s, Two 6970s in Crossfire are approximately 6% faster than a 6990, or 20% faster than than two 6950s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nowadays the graphics cards are so fast that neither games nor APIs can keep up.

No really, when we will get something as simple as OpenMP to do our data mining on GPUs? There is more data to be processed than there are games to play.

<comment><USER18> What do you mean APIs cannot keep up? It is perfectly possible to write a GPGPU app that utilizes practically all the resources, eg. Bitcoin miners, which use the OpenCL API, have a typical ALU utilization ratio of ~95%+.

<comment><USER3> Closer to 98%+ on DiabloMiner or newest phatk2 (now that phateus finally decided to catch up).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In before Bitcoin mining comment</comment>


Magic Leap – Separating Magic and Reality - <AUTHOR> http://www.kguttag.com/2016/11/20/magic-leap-separating-magic-and-reality/ <comment><USER2> Keep in mind he openly disclosed in his first post that he bought EMagin and is hoping to pump up their stock price by saying Magic Leap may be using microdisplays or other tech instead of scanning fiber projectors.

That isn't illegal if he isn't lying or anything, but whether he is right or not, he isn't an unbiased source.

He was also eviscerated here and never replied, though he replies to almost every other reddit comment:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/magicleap/comments/5c337v/magic_lea...](https://www.reddit.com/r/magicleap/comments/5c337v/magic_leaps_videos_appear_to_be_using_oled/d9uokuq/)

(disclaimer: I own a small amount of EMagin from before his post)

<comment><USER3> Hi,

I'm not sure what you think eviscerated me. My information is factual.

I try to answer all responses but I am getting a LOT responses and I may have missed some at reddit. It is best to go to the comment section on my site.

It turns out that Magic Leap does use Mico-OLED in one of its prototype, but they are also using DLPs and LCOS. My subsequent posts point this out. I warned people that it was just a hunch. I kept my stake in eMagin at least for the time being, but as I said it was a small stake for me.

BTW, my website is down right now. I found out that there was a lot of traffic from Hacker News while trying to see what was going on which is what brought me here. I'm on hold with tech support right now.

<comment><USER2> >I'm not sure what you think eviscerated me.

After he showed you the caption on the images all you came back with was a statement (via an edit to your post) that the first image was still an "artists concept" (it isn't, highlighting the projector's field of view and pointing out that it was done in the caption isn't anything like an "artist's concept").

And then for the second image you said it "might be real."

That means you are essentially accusing the researchers and saying they "might" be faking the second image and committing research fraud. Their caption says, "the bottom photo is unaltered."

(shameless edit: I have VR and mixed-reality experience including relighting the real-world with game-engine lighting. If any Magic Leap guys are browsing the thread and looking for third party content devs or recruiting, send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com!)

<comment><USER3> You are shameless alright.

OK, I was answering a lot of questions that day and I went to the direct links the person gave to the jpeg images and not the paper. The first one was obviously altered but the picture I saw did not have the caption. Same for the second, I never saw the caption or that paper before I went back to check tonight.

As for speckle, it would not have shown up in the low resolution pictures. It might also not be there due to the vibrating fiber (some types of vibration will essentially eliminate speckle but usually it has to be the screen that is vibrate).

BTW, my website may be down for a while.

<comment><USER4> > _You are shameless alright_

You're of course welcome to comment here, but HN commenters are required to remain civil and substantive, and especially to refrain from personal attacks.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

<comment><USER3> The person implied I was a shameless, a liar, and that I was eviscerated. I was just using his words back.

<comment><USER5> No, they stated you may be biased and were eviscerated (which I interpreted to mean your views were throughly disproven). They laid out evidence that they believe points to you being wrong. Their postscript regarding being shameless is a self depreciation that applies to their self promotion, not you.

It's a fairly factual and benign set of comments to my eyes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you want to get some insight of ML tech, simply ask Thomas Furness ([http://www.hitl.washington.edu/people/person.php?name=tfurne...](http://www.hitl.washington.edu/people/person.php?name=tfurness)). He was the Prof. of the ML guys and developed many of the patents with them. He is a pretty cool guy (I'm not just saying that because he was also my Prof.) and easily approachable.

</comment><comment><USER3> FYI, My blog that went down last night is back up, at least for now, but it may be slow. At least recently it is running better. I'm starting to wonder if there was a problem with the hosting service.

</comment><comment><USER7> Mirror?

<comment><USER8> No, magic.

<comment><USER9> Where there's smoke, there's magic.

<comment><USER10> Or at least, there _was_ magic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The link is broken for me.

<comment><USER3> The site when down about a hour ago. I'm on the line with tech support of my hosting service to try and get it resolved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The site is 500ing, does anyone have a mirror?

<comment><USER13> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:S5Jsin1...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:S5Jsin1-kFcJ:www.kguttag.com/2016/11/20/magic- leap-separating-magic-and-reality/+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Magic Leaps website downloads 1GB (edit) of high def video every 10 minutes to my mobile phone. I have some serious doubts about their understanding of how technology works or even if they give a crap.

<comment><USER2> You phone has a 13.33gbps connection?

<comment><USER14> I meant gigabyte. I'm trying to find the screen grab I made using Charles Web Debugging Proxy which was over wifi. Regardless, the videos on their front page just keep loading and don't stop on mobile devices.

<comment><USER15> The marketing team at a company and the technology team at a company are comprised of completely different people. Your comments are ad hominem based and biased. Without being present in the company yourself, you have no idea what they are capable of building based off observations from their website's efficiencies.

That said, I have serious doubts about their ability to secure the hardware and software from intruders who believe it is just another objective reality in which they may speak and act for others.

<comment><USER14> If they are going to acquire that much venture capital, the same as Theranos did, over other, perhaps, more deserving startups who don't actively bullshit investors I have no problem holding their feet to the fire. When their only example so far of what they are capable of with technology is their website which is a hack I feel it is a valid criticism and should cast doubt about what they are capable of. Yes they have a small group of talented researchers in Washington but the rest of the company is smoke and mirrors. It is also rude to do that to mobile users.

<comment><USER16> After having learned that it would take us just 300 million to test the latest version of fusion power... Investing that much into Magic Leap Style Hedonistic Ventures feels off.

<comment><USER9> I'm not saying I'm 100% sure they don't have something worth investing $300 million in, but this sure blew the fuse on my bullshit detector.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY)

<comment><USER17> Anything presented through TedX blows a fuse on my bullshit detector. They have lost all credibility as far as I'm concerned as the TedX brand is mostly associated with nonsense.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rands in Repose: How nerds and geeks parse the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2010/10/21/an_unexpected_connection.html

<comment><USER4> > This is why, when you've piqued my interest, I keep asking questions, > incessantly, while staring you in the face… never blinking.

Personally, I'm interested in what makes a person push themselves. Normally, in conversations with strangers or even friends about eating at X restaurant - I'm bored. But every once in a while we'll have a fascinating discussion about something important to me. It's a lot easier to do this one on one - <USER2> because it's easier to process one data stream. When I go to parties that evolve into people telling stories, I usually sit back and soak it all in. I usually get asked by someone if I am having a good time - and I truly am - <USER3> the person thinks because I am not actively participating that I am wishing to be somewhere else. Sure, I've had my share of aborted conversations that are uncomfortable. But this article makes me think that true people persons are truly interested in finding out who someone is - what they feel about things, what their life is like. By limiting my relevancy filter to stuff that is important to me - I am potentially funneling out a significant amount of people that I meet. Interesting article - it makes me wonder if there is a hack for consistently being able to engage people in real conversation.

<comment><USER5> _Interesting article - it makes me wonder if there is a hack for consistently being able to engage people in real conversation._

There probably is. But I would suggest this falls under the heading of "be careful what you wish for". I seem to have this knack (or something akin to it) and sometimes wish I could gnaw my left arm off and escape this trap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Blue whales never interested me as a child.

Relevance is subjective, what seems important to me might seem unimportant to someone else, and vice versa.

Not all nerds behave the same way, we have different personalities.

I for one didn't relate to most of what that article claimed. Actually I find it rather offensive that someone makes assumptions about me based on his observation about himself.

I find the MBTI to be a better tool to understand behavior than a general stereotype like "nerd". Not all nerds share the same type.

Though I do think that most entrepreneurial types of people tend to be xNxP. But nerds and entrepreneurs are not necessarily the same thing at all.

</comment><comment><USER7> I really don't understand what the distinction he's making here between "nerds" and "smart people who aren't nerds" is.

All smart people, nerdy or not-nerdy, have a vast collection of random trivia stored away in their brains somewhere (dumb people have something similar but smaller), and everybody enjoys saying funny things. What's the real distinction here?

<comment><USER8> I'm not even sure what _your_ distinction between nerds and smart non-nerds, to be honest. I've always found them essentially equivalent (modulo the topics they find interesting).

<comment><USER7> Well, I don't want to get into an argument about poorly-defined words, but I see "nerds" as embodying a certain set of negative behavioural stereotypes.

You can define it so broadly as to include all smart people if you wish, but then what label do you have for the fat smelly bearded 35-year-old virgin on the bus writing Firefly/Dollhouse crossover fanfiction?

<comment><USER9> That's a pretty negative image. I'm sure most people would just call that person a loser.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps, but this particular form of loserdom seems to be a common enough trap for smart people, so it's an interesting one to analyze.

<comment><USER10> Ah, but now we have to discuss the definition of smart: I think there's a distinct type of intelligence involved in _not_ being a weird, smelly loser. In fact, the vast majority of people are at least moderately smart in this regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good post. I find there is a lot of potential economic value in connections of information. Essentially this is innovation.

Find just a few useful concepts/tools/techniques not previously connected together. Figure out if there are any new useful emergent features that result. See if you can build a business model around the features. Implement. Market. Prosper.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice post, but the phenomenon of being witty that he describes is not solely the domain of being a nerd.

There exists a class of people, collectively known as "smartasses," who exhibit these same tendencies. Being an engineer is not a prerequisite. I personally know many smartasses, most of them are not engineers.

</comment><comment><USER13> > _blue whales_

> _Quaking Aspen grove in Utah_

> _Giant Sequoia named General Sherman._

He's too good, I've read the wikipedia article for each of those within the past couple years :/

</comment><comment><USER14> At least now it's been diagnosed. As I was reading this article, I couldn't resist the urge to wikipedia Quaking Aspen, General Sherman, and (from the comments) the antimalarial effects of quinine.

<comment><USER7> I have a different reaction. I figure that if other people already know about quaking aspen, then that no longer interests me. I'd rather press the "Random Article" button and find out about... Mount Grace Priory.

Did you know it was the last monastery established in Yorkshire? And the monks were Carthusians, who basically live as a community of hermits, keeping to their own rooms and only coming together on rare occasions?</comment></comment>


Hypothesis: Bipolar disorder is an Epstein–Barr virus‐driven disease - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7133420/ <comment><USER2> This study is from April, I wonder if there's been any substantial progress on whether this hypothesis is true?

<comment><USER3> Maybe someone in the field can pitch in, but I also saw this sentence in the article: "I have previously hypothesised that all human chronic autoimmune diseases are caused by Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) infection of autoreactive B cells,"

So it seems he's been hovering around the EBV hypothesis for longer than that so I am also curious if there was any real progress and whether this is something the medical research community is treating seriously.

<comment><USER4> "I have previously hypothesised that all human chronic autoimmune diseases are caused by Epstein–Barr virus (EBV)"

Obvious red flag is obvious, because once you start looking for something in particular you do start finding it everywhere you look.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias)

This is why we developed the scientific method, to act as a filter for such human follies. That the author is _still_ hypothesizing instead of rolling up his sleeves and doing the actual work to DISprove his own ideas speaks volumes.

Or, to put it another way: it is not sufficient merely to gird oneself in the mantle of Marshall and Warren; one must also swallow the H Pylori and serve their hard time on the shitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Epstein-Barr virus, or EBV, is one of the most common human viruses in the world. It spreads primarily through saliva. EBV can cause infectious mononucleosis, also called mono, and other illnesses. Most people will get infected with EBV in their lifetime and will not have any symptoms. Mono caused by EBV is most common among teens and adults."

[https://www.cdc.gov/epstein-barr/index.html](https://www.cdc.gov/epstein- barr/index.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> While true, what this misses that is discussed in the paper is that some people's immune systems aren't able to fight EBV effectively.

Their bodies show high levels of antibodies, indicating an active fight, whereas most people will only have antibodies showing a previous fight.

In bipolar and schizophrenia, the blood seems to indicate an active fight, and a higher antibody count, versus in a neurotypical person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Diets optimized for managing autoimmune disorders -- e.g. Wahl's -- are effective with BD, too.

<comment><USER7> Is this through first-hand experience? I am tempted to give this a go.

<comment><USER6> Yes.

Ketogenic diets are often used for autoimmune disorders and are known effective for BD, too.

<comment><USER8> Can you cite a source on the latter claim?

<comment><USER6> [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30075165/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30075165/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This implies that the genetic link is somewhat of a coincidence, the family members just happen to have all caught the same virus? Is that the right interpretation? Because BD does seem to come in waves in families.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not just that they caught the virus, but that their immune systems are unable to defeat the virus. So, the battle remains active for life, and becomes a chronic infection.

Presumably, this would suggest that the genetic component is the susceptibility to the virus, and inability to defeat it.

<comment><USER9> Seems unlikely that virus is so prevalent to infect multiple family members that do not cohabitate but nonetheless show genetic link for BD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, if this is true, could provide amazing new insights on many brain related ailments.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can someone give a layman's explanation?

<comment><USER12> I'm a layman but I read the paper. The paper's main points are that people with bipolar show a specific lack of some chemicals that Epstein-Barr Virus infections can cause, it argues that this theory would explain lithium being paradoxically good at treating BD (for some technical reasons it gets into), and further there's ample evidence that mood disorders and autoimmune disorders have a high comorbdity, with the author suggesting that the two are more deeply related.

<comment><USER13> Woah. So i should treat autoimmune to improve my mood? Like specific diet?

<comment><USER14> Extremely unspecific advice:

If you use too much toilet paper all the time then something is wrong with your diet and you should try figuring out what the cause is. Once your diet has improved you won't need more than one wipe.

I doubt this will help with bipolar disorder specifically though. This is mostly helpful for people who don't get enough fiber.

<comment><USER15> ... but I love Taco Bell so much it hurts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Woah

<comment><USER17> Epstein didn't kill himself.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Bashblog-Ng - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dvwallin/bashblog-ng <comment><AUTHOR> Bashblog is a great tool but there we stuff missing in my opinion. So made a small fork (drop-in-replacement), with a few more features like menu, html5-compat, github-banner, etc. nothing fancy and based on my wants and needs alone.</comment>


Why We Chose Rails to Build Gitlab - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2018/10/29/why-we-use-rails-to-build-gitlab/ <comment><USER2> What I really liked about Ruby on Rails when I took an online course on it were the schema.rb files and `rake db:migrate` command. I don't know if there's an analog in Python, but honestly I think clean, highly structured, maintainable data is way more important than the backend you use. Having the ability to quickly iterate your SQL schemas and roll them back as necessary is essential to shipping high quality features with fast changing requirements.

<comment><USER3> Just wait til you actually work on some production code... For the most part you don't actually want to roll back schemas as you would lose data. And iterating on SQL schemas in a live app involves all kinds of tricky edge cases and backfills, knowing when to make your changes in multiple steps, being careful not to take down the whole thing because you didn't realize a certain change required a full table lock or a certain index would take so long to create, etc.

As is so often the case in Rails, it's set up to be nice and simple for a hello world example but little more. It doesn't actually make things as simple as they seem at first, and you're on your own to figure out which of its niceties are actually helpful and which are dangerous to use that you need to build your own workarounds for.

<comment><USER4> Or you inherit a DB that's a complete disaster scheme wise and all the nice assumptions go out the window.

I've mostly found that migrations work best as a structure way to just run normal SQL and know a) what ran b) when.

For that they are handy.

I've even considered how to structure a stand alone migration running tool with a nice API since the good ones for each language tend to be fairly different.

It annoys me that the tooling around RDBMS in 2019 is still so shit.

Prime example, try to find a halfway reasonable way to debug a badly written MySQL sproc you inherited.

<comment><USER5> I've used Flywheel ([https://flywaydb.org/](https://flywaydb.org/)) for this exact problem on personal projects before and been fairly happy with it. It's intended for use in JVM-based projects, but ships with a CLI that gets you a long way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Ruby was optimized for the developer, not for running it in production," says Sid. "For the things that get hit a lot and have to be very performant or that, for example, have to wait very long on a system IO, we rewrite those in Go … We are still trying to make GitLab use less memory"

Honestly, I think that Go is beginning to be where Rails was few years ago, and lots of developer friends want to hop on the Go train because everybody is doing the same.

In the same time, I'm thinking about switching to Gitea or Gogs + Drone.io, because Gitlab takes just too.damn.much.memory ! Seriously, 8GB RAM to even just begin with ? (Because yes, 4GB RAM + 4GB Swap is not viable). Even my biggest website is not consuming as much.

So if I could suggest something, it would be a global rewrite in Go or something like that, to lower the requirements, not just one or two parts (excuse me, microservices ;)).

Just my 2 cents

<comment><USER7> Or Elixir, or Rust, or Node. Having spent time with all of these options, Rails is still really really good for a lot of use cases. Go comes nowhere near Ruby's readability for me (but I like the lack of surprise).

Personally I'd love something typed, performant, and as readable as Ruby with a convention focused platform like Rails. Elixir + Phoenix is probably the closest I can find, but not a perfect fit. Maybe close enough though.

<comment><USER8> > Go comes nowhere near Ruby's readability for me

I am not fluent in either, and I'm not looking to change that, but I have read code in both. I feel the exact opposite way, and I'm not trying to start a war or anything, but I was wondering if you'd be open to talking about what things in Go you find hard to read (and what things in Ruby you find very easy to read). Or is this about libraries (are Go libraries providing lower-level APIs than Ruby ones?)? Or have you read/written a lot more code in Ruby than Go?

<comment><USER9> I agree - Go has issues, but they're not related to readability. Perhaps if you include "familiarity with the standard interfaces" (like using io.Reader) which is different to other languages, and took a while for me to get used to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to be RoR developer a while ago. Working with gitlab is a breeze because I can apply all the knowledge I have - by the virtue of being a RoR app i know how can i apply migrations, how to call interactive console, how to monitor and clear work queues, how to add middleware. Gitlab using RoR is a great win for /me/

</comment><comment><USER11> No offense, but this is just a really weak PR fluff piece. The with only interesting thing is that they use Go for the hit access part.

Oh, and Ruby and multithreading don't mix, who knew?

I like that if you preface your offending remarks with "no offense" you're excused.

<comment><USER11> As an aside, when companies are doing these interview-style pieces are they actually interviewing the CEO? I always just assume they pull the quotes out of their ass.

<comment><USER12> I don't know about other companies, but given that gitlab's CEO is the type to be regularly active on HN (and will probably be reading this) it seems safe to assume that he would actively cooperate with such an article

<comment><USER13> Correct, this was an interview with me. We keep a list of topics that might be a CEO interview [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/issues?scope=al...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&label_name\[\]=CEO%20interview)

If I recall correctly [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/issues/2887](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/2887) was part of a 1 hour interview that generated 4 articles [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/issues?scope=al...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=closed&label_name\[\]=CEO%20interview) Great work by our content team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Why GitLab are stuck with Ruby on Rails"

<comment><USER13> As listed in the article under 'Overcoming challenges' we do replace code in Go and Vue where needed. I do believe Rails is still the most productive framework out there.

See [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/architecture.html#com...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/architecture.html#components) for more information on what parts are Go.

<comment><USER15> Serious question. Why do so many companies choose to rewrite in Go? I tried to like it, but it just felt so painful to use.

<comment><USER16> It seems that every few years a new backend language comes to the forefront and becomes a popular for greenfield projects or rewrites. First people moved from PHP to Ruby, then Node, and now Go.

Of course, Go's popularity is helped a great deal by Google using it, as well as the huge amount of devops software written in Go (docker, terraform, kubernetes). But at some point the hype for those will settle and they'll just become more tools. At the same time there'll be more and more legacy Go projects at various companies that won't be very exciting. Around about this time we'll probably see the next language start rising in popularity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My biggest issue with GitLab is support.

After using it for our test pipelines for a year we've switched to GitLab CI completely with our deployments and right after we've started running into issues on our selfhosted instance where for about three weeks now we're fighting with stuck pipelines where runners won't pick up jobs until you manually restart them. We've been paying customers for GitLab Enterprise (now Starter) for years and the recurring theme is that our tickets go unanswered for basically ever.

We're having performance issues on AWS, trying to run on ECS with an EFS Filesystem underneath, have basically done everything to rule out the EFS as the issue and now because our tickets go unanswered migrating to a dedicated EC2 Instance to see if this makes things run faster...

From a product perspective we're starting to love GitLab, but from a technical & business pov it's getting increasingly painful to work with if you rely on it for too much.

I wonder if Ruby is the reason it's hard for them to run reliably as a self- hostable solution, but as I have 0 Ruby experience I wouldn't know.

<comment><USER18> Hi @Roritharr - Support Manager at GitLab here.

I'd like to follow up on this to see where we dropped the ball and how (or if) we can make things right. Feel free to email me at lyle[at]gitlab.com and I'll look into your ticket history and move things along.

For others, performance issues with EFS and GitLab have been frequent enough that we specifically call EFS out in our documentation: [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/high_availability/...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/high_availability/nfs.html#avoid- using-awss-elastic-file-system-efs)

This isn't to say that EFS doesn't have its place, it's just that git operations quickly exhaust burst credits and many of our users on EFS end up with difficult to diagnose performance problems.

This may or may not have anything to do with @Roritharr's problems, but it's worth noting!

<comment><USER17> Hi, mail is out, if for some reason this doesn't reach you:

Our Ticketnumber is 111794 for the pipeline issue and the other one is 104887 for the Performance Issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> vaer-k > Ruby was optimized for the developer, not for running it in production," > says Sid. "For the things that get hit a lot and have to be very performant > or that, for example, have to wait very long on a system IO, we rewrite > those in Go

Since they prefer the language patterns of Ruby but want better performance for concurrent processes, it seems like this would be a perfect use case for Elixir with Phoenix. I wonder if they considered it.

<comment><USER19> > Since they prefer the language patterns of Ruby but want better performance > for concurrent processes, it seems like this would be a perfect use case for > Elixir with Phoenix. I wonder if they considered it.

The difference being that the Rails ecosystem is infinitely more mature than the Phoenix ecosystem (and community). Ecto is still going through some massive changes (ActiveRecord is comparatively stable). Personally I think that Elixr is an interesting language but it's not one I'd want to mess with in a production environment.

The big win for Go is that it compiles down to a single binary. Ruby you get a single point of entry (script with a shebang). But Elixr/Phoenix? You get a handful of bash (not even POSIX sh!) scripts and binaries and a whole VM to deploy. As a BSD user, I gave up on Elixr/Phoenix after trying to debug the nightmarish deployments that had been broken for months. I couldn't tell if it was an issue in the rat's nest of bash scripts or a VM bug. Sure, ruby-bcrypt is broken on FreeBSD too with a similar head-in-sand mentality from the bcrypt gem maintainer (which could make Rails deployments a non-starter) but that's easy to fix and has been fixed out-of-band. Elixr? Well there's one maintainer for the deployment tool and he's stopped responding to bug reports of any sort.

That said, I like Rails. A lot. But ruby is painfully slow and I've learned to push as much logic into the database as possible. So there's a compelling case to be made for an alternative. Unfortunately I've never had any other language give me that much trouble as Elixr has. Personally, I detest Go dependency and build management (and the Google involvement), but the simplicity of concurrency and deployment combined with the breadth of the standard library make a very compelling case for Go IMO. Hell, I would reach for Clojure before Elixr because at least then you're dealing with the comparatively mature Java VM.

Personally I've gone down the Rust road, but even then I'm not sure I'd want to deploy a Rust web app in production just yet (although I really do like Rocket).

<comment><USER20> > _The difference being that the Rails ecosystem is infinitely more mature > than the Phoenix ecosystem (and community)_

What are you viewing as mature? It's a loaded word and many people use it with a different meaning in mind.

> _Ecto is still going through some massive changes (ActiveRecord is > comparatively stable)_

As of the latest release of Ecto -- 3.0 -- the maintainers said they consider it mostly complete and said they will not do breaking API changes [0]; this part in particular:

 _" With the release of Ecto 3.0, I would like to announce that I finally consider Ecto to provide a stable API. This means no more new features, although we will continue providing bug fixes and updates. For everyone running Ecto in production, rest assured that Ecto will continue to be a well maintained project with the same production quality and polish that it has today."_

So the first part of your statement is factually false.

For ActiveRecord being stable... subjective, I'll give you this much. Try and migrate a Rails 4.0 app to 5.x and come cry with me over a dozen beers. ;)

> _Personally I think that Elixr is an interesting language but it 's not one > I'd want to mess with in a production environment._

Many people and organizations are "messing" with Elixir in production with great -- and increasing -- success.

Phoenix at the moment is one of the very few frameworks that delay your scalability problems much farther into the future than most me and many others have worked with. Phoenix can easily give you thousands of requests per second on a $5 DigitalOcean droplet. Rails and several C# and Java frameworks cannot.

I am not attacking you and I hope I don't sound that way -- but you seem to have a non-factually supported negative bias against Elixir. It gets more mature by the day and is quite capable of very serious work in pretty tough environments. Positive case studies spring into existence often.

[0] [https://elixirforum.com/t/ecto-3-0-is-out-and-stable- api/173...](https://elixirforum.com/t/ecto-3-0-is-out-and-stable-api/17306)

<comment><USER19> > but you seem to have a non-factually supported negative bias against Elixir.

If deployments are broken for months[1] with no fix in sight, what do you expect? I'm currently seeing zero requests per second with Elixr. If the sole maintainer of the sole deployment tool is too disengaged to reply to bug reports I don't care one way or another what sort of performance a product (or its fanbase) are claiming. If the product can't be deployed it's not going to scale. Period.

It's a bit silly to talk performance comparisons between Ruby and Elixr as the premise of this article was that Ruby is simply too slow. Are you going to have a harder time scaling Go or Rust than Elixr? I doubt it. I have no idea if you're going to have a harder time scaling Java than Erlang, but Java is popular enough in the enterprise space that finding people with that sort of experience isn't so difficult. The only time I've seen Erlang at scale was with Megacorp's Enterprise Chef deployment. There was easily tens of thousands of dollars in hardware there and the Chef server was still regularly brought to its knees with well less than a thousand total users (and well fewer than that at any given time).

1: [https://github.com/bitwalker/distillery/issues/561](https://github.com/bitwalker/distillery/issues/561)

<comment><USER20> Open source maintainers burn out. It's a fact of life that's hardly specific to Elixir though, wouldn't you agree?

As for deployments, I've setup several of them in the last 2 months -- from scratch, and successfully. There's an initial learning curve that might be way too annoying for many. The deployment story is one of the weaker parts of Elixir -- I am not running away from that.

As for scaling, you might be mistaken. Erlang/Elixir can be scaled with almost zero effort up to 50 or so machines before you need to introduce special libraries or any extra tooling at all.

Of course, you can do the same with many other languages if you put Kubernetes or HAProxy in the picture. Point is, with Erlang/Elixir, it is 99% effortless up to a certain scale which most projects won't ever hit.

If you were talking about raw speed however, I can't argue that Erlang/Elixir are just a little faster than a very optimized JS (and still plenty faster than Python, Ruby or PHP). But nobody advocates Elixir for raw number crunching.

<comment><USER19> > Open source maintainers burn out. It's a fact of life that's hardly specific > to Elixir though, wouldn't you agree?

Of course. How many languages have a single deployment story maintained by a single person though? That level of fragility is something I wouldn't put in production. Period. Not even on Linux.

And, yes, you could just compile the app in production (and watch the security team lose their shit). Or you can blow everything away for each deployment. Or you could use a tool that's simply less tedious to deploy (e.g. Rust, Go, Java, Clojure, ClojureScript, Javascript).

To put it another way, if deploying is a pain, scaling is a pain.

<comment><USER20> > _To put it another way, if deploying is a pain, scaling is a pain._

I can't understand that argument. Would you please expand?

\---

I agree it doesn't look very trustworthy that the only viable deployment option in Elixir is kind of stalled lately. Of course. What I am saying is, what we have at the moment works plenty well -- if you can get over the fact that enabling deployment in an Elixir app is needlessly complex.

As is said many times here in HN, judging an open-source project by its frequency and recency of commits is quite a flawed strategy.

<comment><USER19> > I can't understand that argument. Would you please expand?

See the Github issue linked (and the related issues). Distillery is known broken. Who cares if Elixr or Erlang scales really well if you can't even get it deployed? That Distillery is, for all intents and purposes, abandoned is secondary. It wasn't left in a usable state.

<comment><USER20> I agree it doesn't look well but you simply can't claim that Distillery is broken. The last stable version works just fine.

Interesting to see an outside take on the situation though. Thank you.

 _(EDIT: Also, in the issue it 's pointed out that a newer Erlang OTP release fixes the problem.)_

<comment><USER19> Uh, there's also a suggestion that setting NODE_NAME will fix the solution. Unfortunately the issue remains open because Distillery has been abandoned in a non-working (which, by definition, is broken) state.

I would compare Elixr to Go, Java (OpenJDK), Javascript (node) and Rust here. All have passive support for the BSDs, and yet all three have actively maintained native packages (rustup and/or ports tree). That neither the Distllery author nor the BSD users have managed to come up with a solution is quite telling — deployments on Elixir are nightmarishly complex. I'm most familiar with Rust, so in contrast if you look at the the BSD specific issues you'll find a very engaged userbase.

Deploying unmaintained software in production is sometimes a necessity with legacy stuff but is almost always a bad idea for new deployments. Elixir has plenty of passionate advocates but no good deployment or support stories. That's just a long-winded way of saying Elixir/Phoenix, unfortunately, aren't things I would be comfortable deploying in production (Linux or not) no matter how many compelling ideas they dangle in front of you. And, as has been pointed out, Elixr doesn't offer significant (if any performance benefits) over modern Ruby (and by extension Java, Go, or Rust).

vOv

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I find the whole library/framework existing functionality thing to be vastly overrated. There's a certain minimum you need, but once you hit it, OK.

For me, what I liked about Ruby when I played with it years ago was how expressive and concise the language was. There is joy in NOT having to read through a mountain of drivel when you go to dive in and maintain a feature.

I realize I am in a minority, though. Most of the industry seems to insist that we are doomed, DOOOOMED (!!!), without static types, no matter what the cost to have them. For me, mutable data seems like a much bigger evil and impediment to comprehension than dynamic types. Of course, to have something that had types and type inference, but also allowed dynamic types with minimum ceremony would be nice. Maybe someday (but until Typescript groks partial function application, and maybe type inference of object literals, that's not yet the answer)

Anyway, back to work on a big fugly mountain o Java code...

<comment><USER22> [https://kotlinlang.org/](https://kotlinlang.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Because GitHub did.

Which was because two of the co-founders met at a Ruby meetup.

<comment><USER13> I can't find the quoted part in the article. Anyway, we met online a year after GitLab started, so by the time we met it was already decided to many it in Ruby.

<comment><USER23> Sorry, I paraphrased as part of forming a TLDR - the actual article is much more loquacious

> Dmitriy Zaporozhets decided to build GitLab, he chose to do it with Ruby on > Rails, despite working primarily in PHP at the time. GitHub, a source of > inspiration for GitLab, was also based on Rails, making it a logical pick > considering his interest in the framework.

By co-founders, I meant why GitHub chose RoR, not GitLab.

<comment><USER13> Ah, thanks for explaining.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone ever have to justify using Java for their backend?

<comment><USER25> Yes. I work for a company that used to build almost everything in Java and people are constantly asking why the hell we used Java for it and we're constantly apologizing and saying how quickly we're moving to a more modern solution.

Before this, I worked for a company that build almost everything in Java and we had to constantly explain why things were in Java and what we were doing to move things to a more modern solution.

But you don't read blog posts about those companies because they choose not to write them. The blog posts you see about the backend technologies are from companies who are proud to use those technologies and want to promote their use of that technology. The companies who use Java (mostly) are companies who aren't going to write blog posts about their backend technology choices.

<comment><USER26> I used to hate Java, but years of experience later, I would gladly inherit a well maintained/architected and modern Java codebase over anything written in Python or Ruby (even a well maintained one)

<comment><USER27> So the only thing you would trade ruby or python for is something that doesn't exist.

<comment><USER26> Oh but it does. And even when it's not great, it's usually a less horrendous task to refactor into something better.

<comment><USER28> That, actually, is one of the the largest selling points of Java as a platform: when it's bad, it's not that bad, and even when it is, the tools to clean it up are better than anyone else's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Haters gonna hate. Shopify, Stripe, Github, Gitlab, AirBNB, Fiverr, Bloomberg, Hulu, Kickstarter, Deliveroo, Zendesk, New Relic, etc etc etc.

How many more companies does it take to prove the point that Ruby/Rails is a viable option to base a company on?

<comment><USER29> Same with PHP and its frameworks (lots of haters comes from RoR side, isn't it?) So let's leave this aside :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, PHP is more than viable to build companies, and has proved it again and again. As did Ruby :) The fact that PHP isn't my favorite language is really besides the point. Those vocal Ruby/Elixir/Go/Node enthusaists who crap all over other battle tested stacks are very immature individuals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I really enjoy Gitlab's UI/UX, but I wish it were easy to manage a self-hosted Gitlab presence. The architecture diagrams[1] frankly read as supporting justification to go with the hosted solution.

[1] [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/architecture.html#com...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/architecture.html#components)

<comment><USER31> It's fairly easy to host in my opinion.

Either you use the omnibus installer for a single server, or the helm chart for a distributed kubernetes install.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Because Rails was all the hype in 2011?

</comment><comment><USER33> i just assumed it was becasue "we didnt know better"

</comment><comment><USER34> because it was the "the thing" at that time, just admit it.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's amusing, that you can substitute every reference from Ruby to Python and Rails to Django and article would still make sense.

Except for the part about running in production. Seems like Python is a bit ahead there.

</comment><comment><USER36> This really strangely sounds like an advertisement for Ruby on Rails. It doesn't even give any specific advantages of RoR.

> _If you look at GitLab, it has an enormous amount of functionality. Software > development is very complex and to help with that, we need a lot of > functionality and Ruby on Rails is a way to do it._

You could say this about almost any framework.</comment>