Ask HN: How can I ensure my Ruby on Rails App will be scalable? - <AUTHOR>

What steps can I take while I write my web app from scratch right now, to ensure that it scales beautifully when it is launched? <comment><USER2> > What steps can I take while I write my web app from scratch right now, to > ensure that it scales beautifully when it is launched?

That question is far to generic to have a useful answer. If you want to know how to design for scalability, you need to be more specific about what needs to scale and how than just "a Ruby on Rails web app".

There are a number of different things that can scale in an application, and what you need to make one of them scale well may be counterproductive to scaling another one.

OTOH, you are probably worrying about scalability at exactly the wrong time. You either should have a clear problem to address (which you haven't yet reached), or if you know what your scalability concern is before you've started writing your app (much less encountered an actual pragmatic problem), you should be asking that question before you choose the implementation language and framework (since particular choices there may be part of the solution.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I see this come up every so often. [http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r5](http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r5)

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=web+framework+...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=web+framework+benchmarks)

Performance really is relative. As they say: "If you always optimize for the future, you will never get there"

Many high end sites are run on rails. Load balancing/clustering will handle most traffic problems you might run in to.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you are worried about performance because it nags at you and not because you have a specific known performance pain, I would suggest selecting a higher-performance platform and framework so that you can defer scale concerns until much later. With a high-performance framework, you can build your application with the peace-of-mind that performance won't be a problem _unless_ your product has decent market traction.

A common problem I've observed several times with low-performance frameworks is that you can run into performance pain before you've adequately vetted your project's ability to convert customers. By comparison, a high-performance framework allows you to be experimental and relatively reckless with your application logic. Your application code can be closer to brute-force with a high-performance platform, meaning you can optimize the application code later when the time comes, rather than bringing out the big guns of scalability.

<comment><USER5> Which platforms / frameworks would you recommend over Rails ?...

<comment><USER6> I'd argue in favor of javascript based platforms/frameworks. Angular.js is a very powerful MVC (front-end) framework that's rapidly gaining popularity. If you combine that with a Node.js server written with something like express, you'll be cooking with gas in no time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The main thing you need to do in order to prevent scaling issues are making sure you aren't making an absurd amount of queries per page request. I once worked on a project that was taking close to 10 seconds at scale. Turns out it was making close to 1000 DB queries per request because they were doing iterative logic and making 3-4 db calls per iteration (which was also being done in the view...) I moved it all into the controller and it was sub 1 second, and had about 80 queries left over. This is actually very common to see in Rails apps, even with some of the more prestigious consultancies out there.

If you avoid doing things that absolutely won't scale you will be fine. Rails has no issues scaling, for 99.9% of the use cases. Regardless of the framework you use you will still have plenty of scaling issues if you have Twitter/Facebook level of success. But again that is a great problem to have.

</comment><comment><USER8> There are a few rules I follow at the beginning of building an app.

\- avoid n + 1 queries \- shorten response time as much as possible without caching (focus on good code, avoid logic etc..., least db queries as possible)

\- anything that takes longer than 100ms to process I use async processing to handle it.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is the wrong thing to worry about. Scaling problems are EXCELLENT problems.

<comment><USER10> Probably because my 1st language is Spanish, but what do you mean by EXCELLENT?

(in Spanish, "excelente" means "admirable")

<comment><USER11> It's an execlente problem.

If you're bringing in enough customers to cause you scaling problems, then that's a good position to be in.</comment></comment></comment>


Hands on with the JooJoo/Crunchpad - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/hands-on-joojoo-crunchpad/

<comment><USER2> _Designed and developed by a Singapore-based company, Fusion Garage_

I'm guessing they were paid for the review?!</comment>


The first website went online 25 years ago today - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2015/12/20/first-website-is-25-years-old/ <comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't view it for another four years until the University of Illinois introduced the Mosaic browser and Peter Tattam coded Trumpet Winsock. Mosaic was coded by a team led by a young student from Wisconsin by the name of Mark Andreessen.

But web time moves fast and another thirteen years later Mark Zuckerberg would ask him, I know you're famous for something but I don't know what. Bet you Henry Ford never suffered that same indignity.</comment>


One-year GitHub streak - <AUTHOR> http://bamos.github.io/2014/12/15/one-year-github-streak/

<comment><USER2> Does a very long streak is really good thing? I don't think I would like to collaborate with somebody who never spend all-day/weekend with family, partner, travelling or something else that don't require using computer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, though isn't it extreme to say you wouldn't want to work with somebody based on this information?

This has been brought up in a lot of the other GitHub streak threads such as [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7309310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7309310) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6701384](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6701384). See more links from my original post.

I included the following paragraph to try to address this question. I don't have much to add to it. The few minutes away from sometimes week-long vacations is negligible and worth the motivation to me.

> I favor counting small commits as part of streak to better support external > workloads and my personal life. I have traveled to over 10 cities over the > past year with friends and family and am always able to find small commits > to improve my projects in less than 5 minutes.

<comment><USER2> Don't take it personal, sorry if that sound rude - I didn't meant with that sentiment, maybe I could say differently.

One of my top priorities is health balance between work and personal life and one year streak doesn't indicate that. If you're able to manage both so well, I'm impressed, but it's still hard for me to imagine a year without any day dedicated only to my parents or girlfriend.</comment></comment></comment>


Review of "Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey" (1993) - <AUTHOR> http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/lighthill/lighthill.html <comment><USER2> Here's the paper that this is a review of:

[http://www.chilton- computing.org.uk/inf/literature/reports/l...](http://www.chilton- computing.org.uk/inf/literature/reports/lighthill_report/p001.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow:

> 1\. Much work in AI has the ``look ma, no hands'' disease. Someone programs > a computer to do something no computer has done before and writes a paper > pointing out that the computer did it. The paper is not directed to the > identification and study of intellectual mechanisms and often contains no > coherent account of how the program works at all.

(It seems this was written in about 1973, published online in 1993. I infer this because the article being reviewed appeared in 1973, and this one speaks of 1978 as being in the future).

<comment><USER4> Also:

> _It would be a great relief to the rest of the workers in AI if the > inventors of new general formalisms would express their hopes in a more > guarded form than has sometimes been the case._

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a review of the Lighthill report 1973, commissioned by the UK govt. to evaluate investment into AI research.

It split AI research into the categories of; "Advanced Automation", (category A), for any work whose goal was to produce useful behaviour which would be considered intelligent if seen performed by a human; "Computer-based [Central Nervous System] research", (category C), for any work that wanted to further the understanding of the natural central nervous system through study upon models of artificial neurons. A third category, "Building Robots",(category B) was placed theoretically between the other two categories. Category B contained all work which aimed to make progress towards the goal of the creation of an artefact that exhibited behaviour from category A through methods developed by work in category C, it was therefore also referred to as the "Bridge category".

The tone of the Lighthill report was more cautious than much related literature, often referring directly to admissions of naivety and subsequent disappointment from distinguished researchers. Categories A and C were therefore hailed as promising endeavours within the contexts that individual projects in category A remained within a tightly defined context, and work in category C remained tightly aligned to merely computationally supporting work that would have otherwise been performed in psychology and neurobiology. The tone was largely critical, though not unfair, of category B which was unable to unite categories A and C into a single research field by citing successful projects that drew heavily on both categories.

The central critique of category B was that no projects existed that were both, (i) sufficiently related to the other two categories and, (ii) successful. This critique can be interpreted as an example of the "No True Scotsman" informal fallacy in that any successful project suggested as a counterexample could be immediately claimed as being not sufficiently in either category A or C, and any project that drew significantly from both categories A and C when suggested as a counterexample could be claimed to be insufficiently successful.

This can be seen in the report as any projects that are inarguably successful, are inevitably described as using "general computational theory" which, given that the roots of computational theory lay in Turing's work in decidability and intelligence is not obviously distinct from category A research. Similarly, Winograd's SHRDLU project which is admitted to draw deeply on work from both other categories was claimed to be essentially not successful enough as "suggestions for possible developments in other areas that can properly be inferred from the studies are rather discouraging". Lighthill also noted that "one swallow does not make a summer", though this was a "banal" observation by his own admission.

The Lighthill report had a significantly negative effect on AI research funding, though it was not entirely unfair. It was broadly compatible with the view of Dreyfus and potentially saved the reputation of AI from a more disastrous period which may have occurred in the future had overconfidence and overpromising been allowed to continue unchecked.

<comment><USER5> Anyone interested in the History of AI can also watch the report being presented by Lighthill, and subsequently debated by John McCarthy, Donald Michie, and Richard Gregory.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03p2CADwGF8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03p2CADwGF8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Totally not germane to the content, but it's amusing how i can _know_ that this was originally written in LaTeX by the quotation marks alone.

Inspecting page source confirms it.

<comment><USER2> The page source confirms that it was converted from LaTeX, but TeX itself was only released in 1978 and a sibling comment to yours points out that this article refers to 1978 as the future:

> Well, if programs can't do better than that by 1978, I shall lose a L250 bet > [...]

(presumably £250)

This makes the original format of the document more of a mystery.

<comment><USER7> There's a chance it has been written in the "Stanford Artificial Intelligence text editor E (written by Dan Swinehart)", and later converted to TeX: [http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/oldnotes.html](http://www- formal.stanford.edu/jmc/oldnotes.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(text_editor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_\(text_editor\))</comment></comment></comment>


Malaria caught on video breaking and entering into red blood cell - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/01/malaria-caught-breaking-and-entering-red-blood-cell.html

<comment><USER2> The implications of this video are stunning. This is the closest we have ever been to understanding the invasion process of the parasite at a molecular level. Perhaps this will finally lead to a viable and effective vaccine for Malaria. This disease is a major killer in tropical and sub-tropical regions and any real vaccine can save literally millions of lives.

The abstract is at [http://www.cell.com/cell-host- microbe/abstract/S1931-3128(10...](http://www.cell.com/cell-host- microbe/abstract/S1931-3128\(10\)00413-0) The actual PDF is at [http://download.cell.com/cell-host- microbe/pdf/PIIS193131281...](http://download.cell.com/cell-host- microbe/pdf/PIIS1931312810004130.pdf?intermediate=true)

EDITed for PDF link

<comment><USER3> You're being a bit hyperbolic[1]. The video included in the article, at least, is low resolution, jittery, and grainy. It says absolutely nothing about the methods used by Malaria to enter the blood cells, much less "at a molecular level." It's cool, of course, just not quite as cool as you're suggesting. Admittedly, the fact that the second parasite completely ignored the infected cell is really interesting - if how it knew to ignore the infected cell was known, that would be a huge advance.

[1] And I'm being a bit cynical. Hopefully we'll balance out.

<comment><USER2> Possibly. I should have been more clear though; I really meant 'study' instead of 'video'. I'm ecstatic because of this: 'The ability to dissect in detail the spatial and temporal localization of key molecular and cellular events during P. falciparum merozoite invasion provides a powerful platform to explore strategies to block the process.'

That's from the discussion section in the paper.

Your cynicism is highly warranted though. Its taken awfully long for us to understand this common and curable disease; there's no reason to expect that a usable vaccine will be available soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had always just assumed that deformation of blood cells as portrayed by computer graphics in shows like CSI or House were arbitrary and 'artistic representations'. But the last 15 seconds of this video are outstanding.

<comment><USER5> That's the coolest part of the video imo. Super creepy.

<comment><USER6> Even creepier when you realize that there's actually a bunch of fresh parasites inside waiting to do the same to your other cells.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Aside from the implications of this for medical research (congrats to the team), I don't believe I've ever been so horrified by a video in my life. If I were to catch malaria, knowing what is going on internally..

<comment><USER8> No kidding. I lived in Zaire back when it was still called Zaire, and woke up one morning to a cacophony of wailing...it was the funeral procession of a girl down the street who had died of cerebral malaria the night before. I was only 5 years old, but I believe that put a stop to my complaining about the bitter pills we had to take.

It's easy to forget that scenes like this are still played out a million times per year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The video is fascinating, but I feel like asking Arthur Dent-like questions: How does the parasite know the red cell is around and how does it go toward the cell. Or do they get attached randomly, the movement in the video seemed pretty random, perhaps due to Brownian motion?

<comment><USER10> While the macro movement will be dominated random brownian style motion I wouldn't rule out that at a fine level it can seek out the red blood cells - plasmodium cells certainly have motor functions and can move themselves around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fun stuff! And just as I'm starting my hematology course!

SO, just to be a smart-aleck...

Jun8: Most cells have a variety of distinctive proteins embedded in their membranes peculiar to cells of that type. Other cells and other elements (think antibodies) may detect and respond to some of these proteins. I wouldn't be surprised to find that plasmodium has some such mechanism.

As for moving towards the cell, it probably doesn't take much in the bloodstream. Almost half of your blood's volume (45%) is cells, and about ninety-nine out of a hundred are red blood cells. With a cell for every cell- sized volume of fluid, that doesn't leave a lot of space between cells, so they're bumping up against each other all the time! It would probably be harder for a plasmodium to _avoid_ hitting RBCs than to find one!

Very interesting bit at the end, too. It almost looks like the cell's becoming crenellated as water is forced or drawn out. That would usually happen in a hypertonic solution, where the concentration of solutes is higher outside the cell than inside, but I'm sure that's not changing, here. I wonder if the solutes _inside_ the cell are being taken up by the plasmodium's offspring as they develop? I could see that "purifying" the water inside, thus driving it out, maybe?

Osmosis is a weird and wonderful thing...

</comment><comment><USER12> Could someone elaborate on what's happening towards the end of that video, when the cell seems to crumple?

<comment><USER13> Its being digested from the inside by the parasite and a bunch of new parasites are about to burst out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's amazing. Is this real-time? Or fast-forwarded motion?

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone know how to actually download this video?

I've tried quite a few basic tricks and website usuals, including file2hd, keepvid, firefox extension, etc. Nothing quite as simple as "page info" and sifting through to the .swf file.

Best I can tell is there is some sort of embedded custom java player by brightcove.com

Any thoughts or pointers greatly appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER16> A friend of mine died of malaria last year - this was difficult to watch. But for sure an amazing achievement for science.

</comment><comment><USER17> The video could be made more visually pleasing and the shapes easier to identify with a little filtering. Perhaps a Gaussian blur followed by edge detection and contrast enhancement, maybe with some false color added for fun.

</comment><comment><USER18> So cool.</comment>


CoffeeScripters, Have You Tried ES6 Yet? - <AUTHOR> http://chris-schmitz.com/coffeescripters-have-you-tried-es6-yet/

<comment><AUTHOR> CoffeeScript still provides a lot of value, especially for people who can't stand the syntax and quirks of JavaScript, but new features in ES6 eliminate the value proposition for some of CoffeeScript's main features.</comment>


Google has seven messaging apps – Here's all of them and what they do - <AUTHOR> https://www.androidauthority.com/google-messaging-apps-867843/ <comment><USER2> I understand it must be hard for a small company like Google to release and push to all users an iMessage/Telegram competitor with great group chat and video capabilities. [https://gcemetery.co](https://gcemetery.co)</comment>


The open-source "svblte like" blogging platform - <AUTHOR> http://simvla.net Simvla is an open source Publishing Platform and Blogging Network. <comment><USER2> Svbtle was apparently "released" as a technical solution, but it quickly became clear to me that Dustin was more interested in the prestige of the invite-only "network" than the platform itself.

I haven't dug into Simvla enough to see if it has some of the interesting backend features—I hope so because otherwise this seems to be an academic exercise (pointing out on simvla.com that "there're many publishing platforms out there; hosted or non-hosted solutions are popping out like snails after a storm").

<comment><AUTHOR> why do not give it a try? there're many nice features in the backend. btw this what the editor looks like: <http://faaa.at/ObJ7>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey simvla - looks good, but to actually be open source you need a license. Right now the source doesn't have a license, so it defaults to "All Rights Reserved". If you intended this to be open source as the title claims, can you add a license please? Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> We've added it.

<comment><USER3> Kick-ass; thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can somebody tell me what is technically interesting about Svbtle? How is it different from, say, Tumblr? It seems to be just a normal CMS with a minimalistic look. It does attract a lot of prominent bloggers in tech, which, to me, has more to do with Curtis's personal connections than any technical merits.

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure you answered your own question there. I don't know for sure but I tend to agree with your assessment. I wondered the same thing for a long time and I finally realized that this is one of those questions where the answer is so simple that you refuse to consider it because of how damn simple it really is.

<comment><USER6> Spot on.

Such assessment doesn't answer my personal question about why so many people are fixated with emulating, comparing and flat out copying Svbtle.

Dustin outlined some very cool design decisions when he first introduced Svbtle, but the presentation of final content wasn't incredibly unique which further confuses me. He shared some interesting workflow ideas which people are free to share, so why insist on publicly using Svbtle as some arbitrary benchmark?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the svblte look, but I'm stuck with WordPress. So, I use the Open Source wp-svbtle[0] theme on my blog[1].

Gives me the looks and feel of svbtle for reading and posting without needing to abandon WordPress.

[0] <https://github.com/gravityonmars/wp-svbtle> [1] <http://shkspr.mobi/blog/>

<comment><USER8> I feel somewhat similar.

I like how easy it is so get started with wordpress (PHP environment + famous simple "installer") and I find it's popularity staggering (very high proportion of ALL new websites)

However, after making custom themes and modules, and trying to hack others, and doing a fairly lengthy performance review I must say I intensely dislike it from a development perspective, particularly the architecture (or comparatively lack of).

I have a vision of a clean, well written and architected MVC blogging platform that is a joy to use for both users and developers.

It would have to be PHP/MySQL (simvla is Rails and unfortunately this just cuts off most of the market), I would use an established framework (CakePHP would be my preference).

I have been debating for about 12 months just writing it (possibly forking wordpress to help the core developers follow my decisions) but I know adoption would be governed by users, and do they want to change? No!

I've almost resigned myself to the fact that no matter how good my intentions, it would just end up another "snail after a storm"

<comment><USER9> I feel it would be easier to write from scratch than to fork Wordpress.

I share your dislikes of Wordpress though, and decided that writing a blogging platform myself was simpler than trying to hack Wordpress into doing what I wanted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious, how does this offering compare to <https://github.com/natew/obtvse> (which I assume you encountered in your research)? Or is this not a valid comparison?

</comment><comment><USER11> Svbtle is a very controversial Blogging platform in my opinion. It says it strives for quality unlike the rest, yet it is sometimes full of rants[1] by random people. Heck, it even has MG Seigler (MG is known for shitty quality, heavily biased content in the tech journalism world) in it. With that being said, blog networks like these should have a superior, fool-proof rating system (like Quora), so that people can filter out shitty content written for pageviews and to gain more subscribers, and focus only on quality-oriented articles.

As someone over here said, it is best to ignore such 'elitist' blog networks, because when you tear them apart into pieces, they're _also_ mostly shit, like any other network and are no different.

Stay away, next time when someone tells you their platform is for 'elitists' and invite only. The best things in life are the ones that give everyone an equal opportunity to speak out their mind.

[1]<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4500136>

<comment><USER12> Dustin Curtis' idea of "quality" is not the same as yours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does the 'vla' part have anything to do with the wonderful Dutch dessert?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vla>

<comment><AUTHOR> haha! that's funny, but the name has something to do with this <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simula>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's great that they think everyone should be heard equally and all but a closed network isn't such a bad thing just because it's closed. Svbtle maintains quality _because_ it's closed. Open it up and it becomes the next Wordpress where everyone and their mom is publishing their half baked malformed ideas.

Still, I like this and if I weren't already happy with Octopress I'd pick it up in a heartbeat. I just didn't like their answer to the "Isn't this like Svbtle?" questions. You know, if you're gonna be a Svbtle copy then own it! There's absolutely no shame in that at all.

<comment><USER14> I think it's funny that Svbtle is both closed AND accepts 'kudos' points.

If the goal is to promote good quality posts, then it could be open, and only promote the top voted posts.

Or if this list of bloggers are so great at blog posts, why do they need these achievements adorning their posts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The code for this is pretty messy/gross.

Look at the Gemfile, which was committed as a conflicted file.

[https://raw.github.com/iamues/Simvla- Network/c316e42ad85dcb1...](https://raw.github.com/iamues/Simvla- Network/c316e42ad85dcb1b65419660c21b021b45deef11/Gemfile)

If you're going to duplicate Svbtle, part of that is understanding the Dustin Curtis™ way of thinking. Simple, uncluttered, straightforward. This is just an absolute hackjob with a layer of paint to give the illusion of Svbtle. The essence is not there.

<comment><USER16> The simple, uncluttered thing (which, let's face it, Curtis is hardly the first to think of...) is the design. Who knows what the code for Svbtle is like?

<comment><USER17> It's not like Dustin claimed to be the first to think of an uncluttered design. He did put a lot of effort into making it work, and look really good though. (You probably know what I mean if you've tried to visually simplify something while enhancing its functionality!)

<comment><USER16> I wasn't saying that he claimed to be- it was the OP's statement that it is the "Dustin Curtis™ way of thinking" that led me to say it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would suggest an increase to the left padding on the text. Currently there is a thin colored bar that is between the content and the bio, and the content runs into it. Adding some space between them would make posts easier to read.

</comment><comment><USER19> Anyone else notice the subtle typo in the title of this post? (At the time I am writing this, the title is: The open-source "svblte like" blogging platform).

<comment><USER20> I don't see a typo. He's referring to <https://svbtle.com/>.

<comment><USER19> The title says Svblte instead of Svbtle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can you use a custom domain with the hosted version?

<comment><AUTHOR> sure.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> signup to our hosted solution if you like <https://simvla.com/join/index>

<comment><USER22> Looks like an interesting product. I noticed a typo on this sentence "someone else are hidden under the hood." I think you mean "some others are hidden..."

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah! thank you very much, thanks for letting me know!

<comment><USER23> Also, the input box inside the Drafts div, where you are supposed to enter the Post title (which is not very clear/intuitive) - the input box continues expanding overflowing the bounds of the containing div and all that. Need a max-length, word-wrapping solution there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Your SSL certificate on simvia.com is not valid.

edit: Sorry that is simvla.com, but my point still stands.

<comment><AUTHOR> simvia.com isn't our domain.

<comment><USER24> Then why do you link to it on your website? Look at "Signup to our Hosted Solution" a little closer. :(

edit: Sorry, I missed the typo there, but it's still invalid for SIMVLA.com as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So, I like the idea of a Svbtle-like blogging platform (and recently launched a closed beta of something vaguely like this, but not really very like this at all), but I think that there are a few cases where this misses the point.

I think the signup page asks for far too much. First name, last name, email are fine, but then it asks for profession, icon, bio and a network color. I don't even know what a network color is, and I don't see that anywhere that it is explained.

The admin panel has a few inconsistent UI choices and I think falls victim to the notion that a simple color palette = minimalism. The writing panel is cluttered in my opinion, and doesn't seem to have had much thought put into it aside from copying what Svbtle has publicized. That isn't necessarily horrible as an MVP of course, but this doesn't show any improvement or uniqueness. That also isn't a crime, but I think that the changes made for the sake of being different were just that, and weren't evaluated for placement or use case studies.

This may seem overly critical, but it isn't intended to be so, but I think this shows telltale signs of being a copycat without having given much thought to the reasons WHY Svbtle is so appealing.

To paraphrase somebody (perhaps Kevin Smith) -- the reasons that most (movie) sequels fail are because they're copying the wrong thing. Most people look at Jaws and see a shark and a boat, but in reality, there's a love story there, there are ties of camaraderie, a tale of obsession, yadda yadda. Remakes capture the bit about the shark, and not much else, and I feel that's where this is falling down.

That isn't to say that it can't be turned around, but I recommend to the author to watch how people use it and try to make some decisions that aren't based on the Svbtle screenshots.

It's a good-looking project that shipped, and I feel like a lot of the criticism here isn't terribly constructive, and I hope that this is (but maybe it isn't). Grats to the author and good luck, but I think that the path to success is maybe a little more involved.

</comment><comment><USER26> Because of the whole elitest nature of svblte, I actively go out of my way to ignore it. When the 'cool kid' in school doesn't want you to be in his group, you don't mimic him and try to be like him. You say fuck 'em, I'm going to do my own thing.

<comment><USER27> While I understand the sentiment; I do. Svbtle is nothing more than a network of blogs by various authors that one man (dcurtis) thinks have good substance. Your argument is roughly equivalent to me saying I'm starting my own newspaper because the Chicago Tribune won't print my article and wasting my time being all angry about it. Not worth it.

<comment><USER28> Given the quality of some of the svbtle output, I think that the Chicago Tribune comparison is overly generous.</comment></comment></comment>


Building an iPad interface for Overtone in ClojureScript - <AUTHOR> http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/02/20/overtone-and-clojurescript/ <comment><USER2> The font colors on that page, especially in the code snippets are so low contrast that I can hardly read it. It's a topic I'm interested in but the styling is keeping me from reading it.

I know that there are bookmarklets, etc, which will make it readable, but the author should take note.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a brand new design, and I haven't seen it on all screens yet. What OS/type of monitor?

<comment><AUTHOR> Eitherway, I just increased the contrast on all content areas :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for this Chris. I've been learning Clojure in my free time, and you've combined several of the things that most interest me in one post (noir, overtone, and clojurescript).

</comment><comment><USER4> Side note: I like it when authors include a link the the HN discussions(when they are apart of the community) in their article so I don't bookmark both. So thanks :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I find that the discussions on HN are always better than having comments on the blog itself... Also it means I don't have to curate comments on the blog.

Basically it just feeds into my being lazy ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool.

I think the approach is clean, nicely composable, and directly usable. Well done Chris.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would like to see more people recording themselves coding, then going back over top of it and commentating explaining what their were doing, perhaps with a "co-caster"/reviewer.</comment>


The Making of Nefertiti 1kb (2018) - <AUTHOR> http://romancortes.com/v2/nefertiti-1kb.html <comment><USER2> > Find 2 or more evaluation functions that share a global minimum for your > problem. Choose one of those functions randomly at each step of the hill > climbing.

This reminds me of the Pandora strategy where you don't every upvote anything, you only tell it no, to encourage it wandering the search space instead of orbiting tightly around a handful of songs.

Never tell people your favorite, or that is all you will get.

<comment><USER3> This explains a lot about why youtube recommendations are so bad.

<comment><USER4> YT is much worse, it keeps recommending "popular" clips it deemed worth of pushing. Conspiracy theories (still!), top 10 you wont believe number 9 garbage, politics, etc.

Just now out of 20 related/recommended slots: one 9/11 conspiracy, one Nuremberg trials? something about Nazi experiments, 6 watched videos I already gave a like few weeks/months/years ago! top 10 some gimmick artillery guns list, Belarus drunken driving compilation, 3 totally random videos in my native language despite YT UI being set to English, 4 videos actually related to the clip on the page, finally 2 videos somewhat related to my subscriptions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I worked with Javier (hi! ) at Montage Studio where we built a web app framework and an IDE inspired by the Apple development stack. Javier is an amazing mind and a wizard at CSS. Fun fact: he used to sketch out code in good 'ol Notepad! Here are a few more js1k entries by him:

[http://www.romancortes.com/blog/furbee-my- js1k-spring-13-ent...](http://www.romancortes.com/blog/furbee-my- js1k-spring-13-entry/)

[https://js1k.com/2012-love/demo/1100](https://js1k.com/2012-love/demo/1100)

[https://js1k.com/2010-xmas/demo/856](https://js1k.com/2010-xmas/demo/856)

</comment><comment><USER6> _And I came up with a block compressor based in sinusoidal circular waves._

That's actually not too far off what the DCT used in JPEG does, in that you're similarly trying to represent sampled data using a series of sinusoidal functions.

I wonder how well wavelet-based compression (like JPEG2000) would be for this data, since it's been used before in a demo too:

[http://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/wavelet/wavelet.htm](http://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/wavelet/wavelet.htm)

<comment><USER7> Is [https://github.com/victorvde/jpeg2png](https://github.com/victorvde/jpeg2png) analogous to a deblocking filter for jpeg?

>JPEG encoding loses information. But it is JPEG decoding that introduces artifacts by filling the missing information with noise.

>jpeg2png is smarter and fills the missing information to create the smoothest possible picture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The underlying model only exists because a couple of artists snuck into the German museum where Nefertiti is displayed, and clandestinely made a 3d scan. Nice to see it getting used for this.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20160220090011/https://hyperalle...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160220090011/https://hyperallergic.com/274635/artists- covertly-scan-bust-of-nefertiti-and-release-the-data-for-free-online/)

<comment><USER9> That story is probably not true: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11238921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11238921)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pure genius. Even with his explanation of the problem domain, I have no idea about how he arrived at the 'magical idea' of random double losses

<comment><USER11> I don't understand this. Could someone give a quick explanation? Specifically, why changing the cost function helps?

Is the point that the cost functions have incompatible gradients around local minima/different local minima?

<comment><USER12> I gather that's the idea, but mean squared error and mean absolute error are fairly correlated, so I'm not sure if that would be an advantage or disadvantage.

I'm running a MSE hill climbing thing at the moment, I might give it a go and see if it helps.

<comment><USER13> My guess is the random that helps. Noisey hill climbing is a technique (simulated annealing) to address local optima.

<comment><USER10> Ah, now that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anybody remember Second Life?

They used a similar technique of creating an object out of an image.

The maps where called sculpts and consisted of an 64 by 64 image. Each pixels rgb value was mapped as xyz coodinate onto a grid. The grid base mesh was either a sphere or flat which allowed for a "closed" or "open" object surface so one could simulate holes (it also influenced the physics).

The users figured out a lot of funky tricks.

Like having multiple connected objects described by only one such map by having the connection be an ultra thin line which got not rendered. This lowered the "costs" Second Life calculated since it consisted of only one primitive.

Or using a bug to create giant ones of these things to create houses and other big objects.

On top having an automatic LOD was quite easy just half the number of grid vertices and there is your lower poly object.

</comment><comment><USER15> > The other option available in browsers is H.264. I thought in using a single > frame video stored in H.264 but I was unable to generate a video file little > enough to fit in 1kb. It might be possible, but my knowledge about video > compression is limited.

Even though support isn't universal yet, I wonder how HEIC would fare here.

<comment><USER6> Fabrice Bellard submitted a 2018 IOCCC entry that uses H.264-like techniques to compress a 128x128 Lena (RGB) into 1220 bytes, but the decoder is >2KB of obfuscated C:

[https://www.ioccc.org/2018/bellard/hint.html](https://www.ioccc.org/2018/bellard/hint.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> 1kb != 1kB.</comment>


Ask HN: How does Instagram or Twitter feed work engineering architecture wise? - <AUTHOR> Was just curious. I remember reading a nice post on Instagram feed queues and sharding architecture, and the S3 issues they faced. But can't find it anywhere on Google now. Would be great if anyone could point to engineering architecture explanations of these at that scale. <comment><USER2> [http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/4/20/how-twitter- handle...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/4/20/how-twitter- handles-3000-images-per-second.html)

[http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/4/9/the-instagram- archi...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/4/9/the-instagram-architecture- facebook-bought-for-a-cool-billio.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Kitchen sponges are festering germ dens–and sanitizing them doesn't help - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/kitchen-sponges-are-festering-germ-dens-and-sanitizing-them-doesnt-help/ <comment><USER2> > "Presumably, resistant bacteria survive the sanitation process and rapidly > re–colonize the released niches until reaching a similar abundance as before > the treatment," the authors concluded.

So we could sterilise sponges then deliberately re-colonise with 'good' bacteria to fill the niches. Maybe rinse with a bit of live culture yoghurt perhaps? Any bacteriologists on HN that could weigh in?

</comment><comment><USER3> >The researchers noted that a few of the sponge owners had said that they cleaned them regularly, either by microwaving or using hot-soapy washes. Those sponges didn't have fewer microbes than the others, but they did tend to have more bacteria related to those that are linked to disease.

Microwaving or "hot soapy washes" sound ineffective to me. I boil my sponges, which seems to work; it certainly kills the smell.</comment>


TPP Is Still Very Much Alive - <AUTHOR> https://ourfuture.org/20160804/dont-be-fooled-tpp-is-still-very-much-alive-you-help-kill-it-for-good <comment><USER2> There's a lot of abstract "this deal is bad!" stuff, but what, specific, are the issues with TPP? What reason does the president have for wanting to pass it? I generally find him to be a reasonable person, so I don't think he's just being "evil" or whatever.

<comment><USER3> There's a lot of controversy regarding the specific contents of the TPP, but for me personally, I am against the cloud of secrecy that it (along with most trade agreements) was developed under. It took WikiLeaks to even let the public know of its existence. And after that they refused to let members of congress (our elected officials) from even reviewing the document except for selected sections, under the watchful eyes of a USTR official. No matter what the pros and cons of the TPP, the people had no say in it, nor did our elected officials; and when we tried to get a say, they refused. That's inherently anti-democratic.

<comment><USER2> I just don't buy this argument, that a trade deal can't be negotiated in secret. The public's control over its government in the US is _exclusively_ through its election system, and the idea that the public "has a right to debate the deal" is, to me, utter nonsense.

You elect officials who you trust to appoint other officials who will negotiate with the US's best interest in mind. If the deal goes through, you elect different people who you trust will fix the laws you don't agree with.

"The people" _never_ have a say in _any_ legislation, not directly, and there are _countless_ meetings that take place on Capitol Hill which aren't open to the public.

We don't have a "democracy" as you describe it, and for _very_ good reason. Populism is reactionary and predatory. It would be very harmful to minorities if we did live in a system where the most popular decisions were the ones that got made. Remember prop 8 in California, or more recently brexit?

<comment><USER4> You just gave the cookie cutter answer without reading the comment you replied to. Some members of Congress were denied access to the agreement during the negotiations.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans- Pacific_Partnership#Secr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans- Pacific_Partnership#Secrecy_of_negotiations)

<comment><USER2> I still don't see a problem with barring members of congress from the TPP negotiations. It makes it harder for the Obama administration to convince them to pass TPP, but that's up to White House to decide if that's the most prudent way to negotiate, and apparently they thought so.

The "democratic" part of the TPP comes when the US elected the congress who will or won't pass the resolution, and when the US elected Obama into office to negotiate on our behalf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is the case for TPP,[https://piie.com/blogs/trade-investment-policy- watch/case-tp...](https://piie.com/blogs/trade-investment-policy-watch/case- tpp-rebutting-naysayers)

<comment><USER6> Interesting:

       Given this record, TPP critics are at a loss to cite an
       outrageous ISDS award against the United States—because
       there are none. In fact, the United States has prevailed
       in all 13 ISDS cases brought against it by foreign
       firms. Instead, critics speculate that future cases
       might seek compensation for foreign corporate losses
       arguably incurred on account of environmental, safety,
       or financial regulation. This speculation is flatly
       contradicted by explicit language in past US agreements
       that explicitly recognizes the proper role of fair
       regulation. Similar language is sure to appear in the
       TPP.

What does he mean, "sure to appear?" _Hasn 't he read the thing?_

If not, why is he advocating for it?</comment></comment>


Rural Ohio Internet Options? - <AUTHOR>

I'm planning to buy some farmland in Rural Ohio in a few years (not exactly sure where yet.)  Anyway, I'm wondering how good the various out-in-the-sticks internet options are now?  I'm thinking I will mainly have access to satellite, maybe 3G.  I mainly need to be able to do web, email, ssh, plus vpn/remote desktop to work.<p>Any ideas would be appreciated, thanks. <comment><USER2> Just how rural?

We've got a 100 acre farm in Scio, Ohio, which is pretty rural, but we were still able to get Verizon DSL. Admittedly, it's on the low end of the speed spectrum (600-800Kb down), but it does work. And we're at least 2 miles from any phone facility; I think there's a remote "head end" (wrong industry but you get the idea) out there somewhere supporting these remote houses.</comment>


VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure - <AUTHOR> http://chrisdodds.net/blog/vmwares-cloud-adventure <comment><USER2> Can a mod (or OP) change this submission's title? "VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure" is an editorializing of "VMware's Cloud Adventure", especially since the word bumbling never occurs in the post.

@OP HN guidelines say "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER3> I agree with your suggestion (despite the fact that the additional word might be very accurate in this particular case).

<comment><USER4> Also, the article's cloud illustration is not of a sunny day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Despite being critical this sounds like the author is still wearing quite VMware-colored glasses:

> Unfortunately, the world that they built is now eating them. Hypervisors > became commodity, where "good enough" is an acceptable target. Hyper-V, Xen, > KVM: they all became good enough for ecosystems to be built around them

In reality VMware (and VirtualBox) were leapfrogged by platform native hypervisors quality-wise, at least on Linux. Which is inevitable since there isn't really any way to ship robust proprietary binary-only kernel drivers of this complexity there.

(ESXi might be another story, but it's also not just a hypervisor, it's a whole stack of enterprisey proprietary infrastructure that you commit to instead of open systems, and hopping on that train is more a cultural/strategy/mindset choice than something based on technical hypervisor- vs-hypervisor benchmark)

<comment><USER6> > (ESXi might be another story, but it's also not just a hypervisor, it's a > whole stack of enterprisey proprietary infrastructure that you commit to > instead of open systems, and hopping on that train is more a > cultural/strategy/mindset choice than something based on technical > hypervisor-vs-hypervisor benchmark)

I may be wrong here, but I thought ESXi was the lightweight hypervisor-only product (which at the time was offered for free!), without all the enterprisey features or requirements.

Basically Microsoft Windows Hyper-V without the need to boot an OS of its own.

<comment><USER7> Well, yes. It's a hypervisor only product. It also requires you to use VMware's tools to manage, and that closed architect poses road blocks to integrating it into a larger hybrid cloud environment. To basically do anything resembling what a real business would want, youd need to throw big bags of money at VMware to get more features. You can build all that in the open with KVM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _They 've already started that with containers. Docker orchestration > platforms like Kubernetes and Mesos are still rough around the edges and > there is room in the space for VMware to get in and leverage the benefit of > their size and engineering bench._

VMWare started doing this circa 2010-11.

Eventually that project turned into the first version of Cloud Foundry.

Edit: forgot my usual disclaimer that I work for Pivotal etc etc

<comment><USER9> Let's be honest though, CloudFoundry isn't a cloud. It's deployed onto a cloud provider like AWS and runs your apps on virtual machines inside an EC2 instance. It's useful if you want to abstract away your cloud provider, but it's not a cloud provider in and of itself.

Disclaimer: Currently working with a customer deploying to Cloud Foundry.

<comment><USER8> It just depends on what you mean by "a cloud".

I usually refer to Cloud Foundry as a PaaS. It sits on top of an IaaS like AWS, OpenStack, Azure or vSphere, managed by BOSH.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The stumble was that CloudFoundry sucked until EMC bought Pivotal [Labs] and tasked them with cleaning up the mess. VMware isn't the cloud, Pivotal is.

<comment><USER9> To be clear, Cloud Foundry is not a cloud provider. It's an abstraction layer between your applications and an actual cloud provider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article here might be relevant to the discussion: "Technology Lab / Information Technology VMware Fusion, Workstation team culled in company restructure"

[http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/01/vmware...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/01/vmware-fusion-workstation-team-culled-in-company- restructure/)

So they've lost the cloud... They're firing the desktop guys. Where do they plan to go?

</comment><comment><USER11> I wasn't even aware that VMware had a cloud service, and I follow this stuff reasonably closely. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Rackspace, Linode, Joyent - these are all the companies that I think of when I think of "Cloud Services" \- I would have bet money that VMware wasn't providing this as a service.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been using VMWare Workstation for years and it is awesome product reasonably priced, but other VMWare products are too expensive. I think they have missed opportunity there big time. There is nothing in their offering for startups for example.

</comment><comment><USER13> VMware is 3Com of today.

</comment><comment><USER14> It wasn't myopia. VMWare suffered from the same thing that other companies have gone through. They tried/are trying not to cannibalize their main source of revenue, and the world has moved on without them. CloudFoundry was their way of attempting to control the conversation, but it failed.

They couldn't go from a lucrative private cloud revenue stream and then somehow convert it to a public cloud and expect to make the same amount of money. During that time that was mentioned, from 2006 until probably 2010/2011, AWS was great for small companies, but there were still issues with security, availability, reliability, etc, so VMware could get away with selling the private cloud.

I mentioned this is another post that got a lot of vehement comments, but virtualization itself is dying. Not dead, but dying. Many large companies with their own datacenters are running off of bare metal, and this will be the trend going forward. Yes, virtualization is still in many private datacenters, but bare metal is how newer companies are going, and in 10 years, I bet virtualization will be gone from all but the slowest of private datacenters. It's a level of overheard now that has been completely circumvented as unnecessary for the most part, and it will fall into disfavor as more and more people learn techniques on how to avoid it altogether.

This doesn't mean that VMware will be gone in 10 years. Even WinZip to this day has something like $50-75M/year in annual revenue. But it will be relegated as a legacy app.

<comment><USER15> I literally don't know of any large companies moving away from virtualization to bare metal. Where is that information coming from?

I know of some that are deploying some things back to "bare metal" if that's what you want to call containers, but even in those instances, it's a very, VERY small subset of the larger environment.

<comment><USER16> I do know a few companies are using tools like OpenStack Ironic to do "Metal as a Service" \- basically using a full machine like a VM.

That said it is usually deployed beside a cloud like thing, and only used for select workloads.</comment></comment></comment>


15 years ago we placed the largest server offer in our history - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+UrsH%C3%B6lzle/posts/VGwMnY3oUSY

<comment><USER2> "For reference, we have more than an order of magnitude more now :-) What's more amazing though is that a very small number of current servers (3-4, but that's just a guess) have as much compute and storage as these 21 racks, so we could serve 1999's traffic on just these 3-4 servers."

</comment><comment><USER3> While the hardware is cute, it's not the real story. It seems like most of the large computing companies essentially migrate to being vast operations-centric organizations once they find a hardware/software mix that earns money and scales. Now Amazon is selling access to part of that infrastructure, and we have mechanical turks as well. No individual actually _even knows_ what they do anymore, rather they just approximate some kind of notion and only ever check when measured state moves out of defined parameters of normalcy. Next step... [TRANSMISSION TERMINATED BY ORDER OF SKYNET]</comment>


Datoray 1.0 for cloud-based equipment manuals, videos, images, notes - <AUTHOR> https://datoray.com/ <comment><USER2> very useful app to keep track of things in our busy life. easy to use.</comment>


UI responsiveness: OSX vs. Windows, iOS vs. Android - <AUTHOR> http://kentnguyen.com/ios/ui-responsiveness-ios-osx-android-windows/

<comment><USER2> Speaking of anecdotes, I have always found Windows more responsive than OS X to the point where I have completely switched to Win 7 - mouse handling and screen drawing is definitely superior on Windows.

However it is easier on Windows to mess up the experience - install some crappy antivirus or other messy program and it is a piece of cake to make Windows feel laggy.

<comment><USER3> That and considering that shrink wrapped consumer anti-virus has become paid malware (reports your browsing history, slows down your machine, and renews on your credit card automatically), it is unsurprising that Microsoft provides no-cost anti-virus which is both fast and unobtrusive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't really have an opinion on Windows vs. OS X, but I have been extremely impressed with iOS's graphical performance.

It's not just that they have good framerate - even Android can get good average framerate. The amazing thing about iOS that it gets amazing maximum frame delay, i.e. the space between frames is almost never more than 33ms (~30fps). On Android you frequently run into tiny little hiccups in frame delay that might not impact its measured FPS, but are certainly noticeable to the human eye. The result is that it just doesn't feel as smooth.

I don't know how Apple achieved this. It's certainly not perfect - you can occasionally get an iDevice to freeze for a few hundred milliseconds, but those are very rare occurrences. It's _as if_ they have a real-time guarantee built into the system, but I don't think they actually have one. Which is a pretty amazing accomplishment.

<comment><USER5> This is why _good_ game hardware (CPU/GPU) benchmarks measure minimum framerate in addition to average. There was some site that measured 99th percentile framerates too, which seemed like a good idea.

edit: Example of better measurements: <http://techreport.com/articles.x/22151/6> Notice how Radeons have lower avg fps but the framerate seems more stable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love OSX, but objectively speaking, "The lag of a Mac OS X cursor is at least twice bigger than Windows' cursor and yes, a human eye can surely notice that." [http://d43.me/blog/1205/the-cause-for-all-your-mac-os-x- mous...](http://d43.me/blog/1205/the-cause-for-all-your-mac-os-x-mouse- annoyances/)

<comment><USER7> To add to this I remember when OS X came out there was a lot of groaning about how slow window resizing was. Years of improvement later it still lags a hair. Noticeably slower than windows.

<comment><USER8> I think one of the reasons is that OS X provides automatic double-buffering of window content at the OS level (it also has a somewhat different drawing model than Windows), which adds a bit of latency but reduces flicker. Another factor is that Mac apps typically adapt themselves to the size of a window, and resizing will trigger a redraw of _everything_. Apps like Mail have always been really slow at redrawing themselves, whereas Chrome is very fast.

OS X was written from the ground up to be graphics-intensive. From very early on, Quartz, OS X's compositing manager, has been using the GPU to render windows to OpenGL textures, essentially using the graphics card's very fast 3D support to render a 2D screen.

Windows's classic GDI (which has been replaced by Aero, afaik, but I guess most apps are still GDI) is considerably simpler, and leaves the drawing entirely to the application. This is the reason you see a lot more redraw flickering in Windows apps. Some apps are so slow at redrawing that when you resize the window to make it bigger, you can see the new unpainted areas filled with various garbage (or with some default background colour at best) before the actual content comes in. To create smooth, non-flickering widget drawing in Windows you have always been forced to do the double-buffering yourself.

Even in Windows 7 there is a lot of redraw flickering. I'm particularly annoyed about how the mouse cursor tend to flicker randomly -- eg. when Internet Explorer is loading a page -- which is such a small, trivial detail, but one that ends up making the entire OS _feel_ shoddily built.

<comment><USER8> Oh, and OS X actually resizes windows at a fixed frame rate. You can change the rate with:

       defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.001

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's many reasons to prefer OSX over Windows (and vice-versa)

But OSX UI certainly never has been reacting faster than Windows UI. Things like opening dirs, menu navigation, window resizing, etc is much faster in Window and its been that way since OSX started (OS9 and prior had a fast UI).

</comment><comment><USER10> Unless people can back this up with hard facts they simply shouldn't post these kinds of stuff.

</comment><comment><USER11> This submission needed some actual data ...

<comment><USER12> My thoughts exactly. I was exited to read it, as this is the kind of thing that sometimes feels like I'm the only one who cares, but was disappointed. No mesurament, nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I agree with needing more data but I will give my testimonial. I switched from Windows 7 to Mac Lion several months go and have not looked back. Simple things like responsiveness of the touch pad, gestures, and a better terminal are definitely what got me. Overall I would say the UX is just simply better.

<comment><USER14> OSX has definite advantages here.

1\. The trackpad hardware is great. It's so good that when we were making the Bamboo Touch at Wacom, the Macbook Pro trackpad was the standard we measured ourselves against.

2\. True pixel-level scrolling from HID devices. Windows has the concept of "wheel scrolling", but it's only vertical, and lots of apps won't scroll in less than a wheel increment (which is oddly 120 units), so you're stuck with jerky 3-lines-at-a-time scrolling. Oh, and it's vertical-only; there's no system standard for horizontal scrolling.

3\. It's never had a software-based rendering and compositing engine for the windowing system. The Windows team is fully committed to backward- compatibility, which means allowing all sorts of wonky GDI-based pixel pushers to work they same way they did in Win95. OSX has been OpenGL-based from the start.

<comment><USER15> regarding #2..

I used Mac for a week and went back to Windows. The jerky scrolling in Windows was driving me crazy. The fact was that before Mac I never realized that (maybe I'm numb to perfection) but it was only using Mac that it occurred how much crap scrolling is in Windows.

<comment><USER16> I currently have a vm of windows 7 open on my mac with the host file open in notepad. Two lines are selected (as I needed to copy them from time to time). If that window loses focus, the selection stays, but if I click the titlebar to that window, giving it focus again, those two lines are unselected.

There are many many quirks like this in Windows that you only notice once you use a different window manager.

<comment><USER17> Sigh... this is an issue with your VM and not Windows.

<comment><USER16> You're right. The deselection doesnt happen if I click the titlebar, but it does if I click the content area (that doesnt happen in OS X, I havent checked any Linux window managers).

<comment><USER17> Of course it does, when you click the content area you reposition the cursor and thus deselects the text. The alternative would be to not be able to reposition the cursor when you bring focus to the window which presents other "quirks" if you look at it from other angles (and it of course needs to be consistent, if you can't reposition the cursor why would you be able to press a button if the window isn't active? etc.).

OS X is quite unique in this and probably stems from the use of common menus for different windows, which also makes it uniquely inadequate for handling multiple monitors. I just can't take a WM that doesn't handle multiple monitors well seriously.

<comment><USER16> I, and a host of others, work fine with multiple monitors..

I'm sure if people were presented with both options; regain focus and lose selection vs keepi g selection, they'd choose the keep selection. It's as if someone used the computer and said "you know what would be useful?..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well there's no denying iOS is the king of responsiveness in the mobile sector, but to be honest, I can't really say the same thing on OS X vs Windows 7. I use both on a daily basis and Win7 is definitely the most rock solid OS Microsoft ever put out. For example, when an application crashes Windows just kills it and everything is fine. On OS X when something crashes, you can usually Force Close, but sometimes the process just can't be killed. Also it feels OS X memory management almost requires an SSD nowadays.

There are other things, which makes me like OS X more, but being faster or more stable is not one of them.

<comment><USER19> I can't agree with this enough. I use both daily and my feelings match yours 100%.

I find crashes far more disruptive on OS X - argh...the dreaded spinning beach ball. Windows app crashes (when they happen) rarely cause me any harm beyond restarting that single app and telling Windows I don't want to send a bug report to MS.

I'm always blown away when picking up the iPad just how seamlessly I can fly between different apps, tabs, airplay, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have experienced the exact opposite of what this person experienced.

I use both Windows and OS X all through the day and while the response on both is adequate, the Core 2 Quad Windows 7 box is much more responsive than my MBP with the high end 15" i7. They both have 8GB RAM -- but then again, my Core 2 Duo Thinkpad X200 feels more responsive, and requires fewer resources.

I've never experienced or heard of the "infamous" cloned dialogs bug on Windows 7, but oddly, I have experienced it on OS X. Conversely, I've never experienced the reported cursor lag on OS X.

Like I said, I find both OSes perfectly good, but the post just seems suspect to me.

Now, if only Microsoft would integrate a _well-supported_ , _well-integrated_ , native bash/zsh. I can't bring myself to like Powershell.

</comment><comment><USER21> I never thought I would say this: but I miss the OS X spinning-wheel-o-death … on my non-current generation iOS device. Sometimes the software just does nothing for a noticeable amount of time and you don't know if it didn't got the input or just hangs.

<comment><USER22> I find myself holding my phone against my ear occasionally to see if I can hear the drive spinning. I feel like a fool every time when I remember there are no moving parts, but if my Zune would hang, or my iPod before that, I could tell if it was hung or if it was just crunching away.

That's one thing I really miss since I went to using an Ubuntu HP Touchpad instead of a laptop, there's no flashing hard drive indicator to let me know if it's still working or if it's just hung.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I completely agree with the iOS vs. Android responsiveness difference, but completely disagree that Windows 7 on a fast PC with an SSD is unresponsive. I've literally never had any of those problems on my Windows 7 gaming machine.

</comment><comment><USER24> Another thing which OSX has done for a long time that I really liked is that everything syncs to vertical refresh. It doesn't actually speed anything up, but it gives the perception that things are smoother and more responsive. You don't see the 'tearing' effect that you often see on other systems when you drag windows around the screen.

</comment><comment><USER25> I use both platforms with a MacBook Pro/Lion being my main machine. I have always felt that my Windows 7 machine is snappier in starting apps and generally moving around the desktop. In fact, if Windows 7 were *nix based I would probably switch to it as my primary. The command processor situation feels pretty hopeless to me in Windows.

</comment><comment><USER26> Is this a troll thread? if so 10/10

</comment><comment><USER27> My favorite explanation of this phenomenon, beyond the visual demonstration, is that lag time reminds the human mind that it is interfacing with a machine.

Because that feels unnatural, it creates fatigue and builds separation between the user and his work.

UI guru Jakob Nielsen has an excellent description of this here:

<http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html></comment>


Amazon launches Spark, a shoppable feed of stories and photos - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/18/amazon-launches-spark-a-shoppable-feed-of-stories-and-photos-aimed-at-prime-members/?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_feed%3BRIqf2Fx7TjK%2FMOtz0%2FG3rg%3D%3D <comment><USER2> Yes, a new way to help people shop! It's just what we needed ;)</comment>


Push It – Promo Codes - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys, wanted to share a few Push It App promo codes with you.
iOS 8 Required.
4NHYJPYRKTNK W6M4FEPKEAH7 7JAN6YFWAFLP LAJ3ME49HEWP A9KP7RM9Y374 NKLAX6WNM639 MLTWHYEYLW99 YAP7RXPT99JF WT7RLWNRP347 L9FHM3YA9Y76 <comment><USER2> Why the promo codes? Its listed as a free app.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just a heads up, I redeemed WT7RLWNRP347.

</comment><comment><USER4> Redeemed 7JAN6YFWAFLP</comment>


A short list of notable sessions of Microsoft Build 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/syncedreview/buildup-to-microsoft-build-2019-cb0c1f75aa76 <comment><USER2> Lots of emphasis on AI and computer vision... we're a long way from the days of Microsoft __only __caring about selling Windows and Office.</comment>


Ask HN: Has Apple Messages stopped working for you in the past week? - <AUTHOR> In the past week, Messages on my iPhone has completely stopped working and a couple friends of mine have told me they've recently had the same issue. I'm curious to know how widespread this issue is or if it's just us. <comment><USER2> No issues for me whatsoever.</comment>


iPads < teachers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/bright/ipads-teachers-e51896af3930 <comment><USER2> In my experience, the quality variance with teachers is much higher than with iPads. iPads have never had the attitude problems that some teachers have had (except some Siri edge cases perhaps).

</comment><comment><USER3> The headline is a troll; the technology revolution in education is not iPads, it's reinventing the purpose of teachers in a classroom. The flipped classroom[0][1] might be the single greatest advance in education in a hundred years, made possible largely by our ability to rapidly distribute compelling instruction.

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

[1] [http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_rein...](http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education)

</comment><comment><USER4> From outside, US education seems astonishingly bad, especially for a 1st world country. In US, 14 years old kids just start to learn how to solve for X, while in Russia it's time to finish trigonometry and move to calculus.

<comment><USER5> Wow, that indeed doesn't look good. In France I learnt trigonometry at 13 (I gonna turn 34 this year so maybe it has changed by now).

<comment><USER6> The problem is less about when someone learns math (an easy subject once one cares), but rather the attitude about math. In the US, people walk away from math education hating and fearing math. "Math is important, but I can't do math" is the attitude many have. What is the attitude of general people in France? Do they take math ignorance as a point of pride as they do in the US or they take math knowledge and use as a point of pride?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" Great teachers aren't likely to buy into the vision of any single ed tech company. They want to integrate ideas — likely from several sources, designers, and companies — into their own creative processes."_

I'd suggest that anyone here thinking of producing _content_ for those iPads (or any platform) think in terms of _maximum granularity_ and adding tools for a teacher to select items for use.

Disclaimer: I've been teaching maths for 28 years now and so may be either part of the problem, or a 'great teacher'. I tend to let the students make up their own mind about that one.

</comment><comment><USER8> What I learned from teachers, mostly, was to distrust authority figures. Maybe iPads can't provide this lesson.

The article says: "Finding and growing great teachers is devilishly hard. Retaining them is very expensive." How do we even know who is a great teacher?

One of my best teachers told me, after years of me skipping his classes to play around with computer stuff, that he loved my style of learning. My style was to mostly ignore school, stay out of trouble, and read and tinker on my own.

I might be biased and wrong, but from my perspective, it seems like there's way too much talk about teaching, and way too little about learning.

The kids in that nightmarish Indianapolis "learning center" are being oppressed. If there's anything they're interested in on their own, they're probably too burned out when they come home from the "learning center" to pursue it.

And they learn that learning is something you do with someone else's permission, guidance, and monitoring. I learned that learning happens when I'm free to play around, follow my curiosity, and work hard with the natural zeal of a restless child.

Alan Kay had the idea of building an educational tablet computer in 1972, and was quite realistic about it. [1] Since he has a humanistic and child-centric view of learning, he envisioned the tablet as a tool for children to learn on their own. When interviewed in 2013 about whether new computing devices are helping in the classroom, he said:

"The perspective on this is first to ask whether the current educational practices are even using books in a powerful and educative way. Or even to ask whether the classroom process without any special media at all is educative.

"I would say, to a distressing extent, the answer is 'no.'"

[1]: [http://techland.time.com/2013/04/02/an-interview-with- comput...](http://techland.time.com/2013/04/02/an-interview-with-computing- pioneer-alan-kay/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I believe there is a smarter way to reform education with technology. The iPads are not supposed to replace the teacher, but to maximize goals given the real economic reality - information delivery is the commodity while personal attention is scarce.

This is my humble proposal: [http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158](http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158)

I intend to realize it in practice and will be happy to work with people who feel the same. If you feel there's truth in what I wrote, contact me by going to [http://qbix.com/about](http://qbix.com/about) \- I am Greg there.

<comment><USER5> I would agree in general with your proposal, but I'd suggest replacing the iPad by a cheap laptop, like a chromebook: it's cheaper, gives the kids more freedom, and for the ones who will be interested, it can be a first step to programming.

<comment><USER9> I agree. It can be a cheap one. One of my friends actually has a company where they produced a cheat ($50) educatioal tablet and have many schools in Brazil using it. They are looking for apps. So I can get it to market.

<comment><USER5> I am making an app for education. For now it's a website but I will port it to Android soon. Wanna talk?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> read in conjunction with this ~ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9402292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9402292)

</comment><comment><USER10> Relevant link:

Veritasium, "This will revolutionize education".

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEmuEWjHr5c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEmuEWjHr5c)</comment>