Metro: don't be afraid to dream a little bigger - <AUTHOR> http://aaronisthinking.com/my-dream-for-metro-apps <comment><USER2> What is neat about metro (ooops windows 8 style) apps is that you get the whole canvas by design to play with. The pattern that controls are out of sight when you don't need them is really neat.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone remember the first iPhone apps? They all looked exactly the same. I think that as time goes on, designers and developers will do some really cool stuff with Metro, just like they did with iOS.

</comment><comment><USER4> _But Metro is not to blame... When most people think of Metro, they think of rectangular boxes, Segoe fonts, and not much else._

Whatever people think of Metro as being _is_ Metro's fault. Metro is the "design concept" or "design language" and so whatever is communicated as "being Metro" is exactly Metro's fault.

<comment><USER5> The point the article was going for (and that I think it made successfully) is that the concept/language has more possibilities than have been explored in the two years its been publicly available. So far most third-party apps have done little more with the ideas than copy how Microsoft has used them so far, that doesn't mean there's no possibilities to do more.

It reminds me a bit of my first Powerbook running OS X and the slew of poorly- Aquified 3rd party apps that didn't take real advantages of the differences in the OS X interface, but just slapped on the pinstripes and gumdrops.

<comment><USER6> We are a Microsoft ISV and have actually taken some of those concepts and morphed them to introduce something Metro-esque in a new product release that is about to RTM.

Got rave reviews @ Microsoft Tech Ed -- would love to show the people on HN about different UI/UX concepts in biz apps.

<comment><USER7> Please do that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can we dream for sideloading unsigned apps for all user that desire it?

</comment><comment><USER9> Metro (yeah I'm not going to stop calling it that, it's annoying), I think is a mostly a flash in the pan. It will probably be gone in the next consumer OS. It wouldn't be the first time Microsoft offered some UI "game changer" and then backed off. In fact ...

It's just so generic boring and not particularly useful. I haven't paid close attention, but if you look at demos of what Microsoft called Surface back in 2007 for tabletops vs this Metro stuff now, which one is more visually compelling? Kind of a strange place they went, in my view.</comment>


Ask HN: Should startups do PR? - <AUTHOR>

I'm conducting a survey for my startup, Press42.com to see how startups interact with the press/bloggers. I would love to get the input from the HN community: http://press42.com/survey <comment><USER2> See these useful posts by Daniel Tenner:

<http://swombat.com/2011/1/24/how-to-PR-firms-startups>

<http://swombat.com/2011/2/4/attention-seeking-for-startups>

</comment><comment><USER3> A technique that I think works very well for startups is to find an api in the area of your startup and slice and dice the data into some nice infographpic. Serve it up to smaller blogs that love the free information. You're just giving them what they want and building an initial relationship, if they don't actually post your data it's fine, but they'll always be happy you sent it to them.

Then just do it again, slicing from a different angle and present it to the blogs again. Once you have data posted somewhere, it's time to move on to guest posts. Use the data that was posted to ask a different blog if for your next data slice you can exclusively present the data as a guest post. They'll love this, though you'll need to write the article first before they actually agree.

Rinse and repeat the system farther up the blog, local news, online news entity, radio, TV totem pole.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true! A lot of bloggers tell me it's a matter of telling a story, let it be about data or something else :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> See. This Q&A is useful to you. [http://www.quora.com/Is-the-press-release- really-dead?q=pres...](http://www.quora.com/Is-the-press-release-really- dead?q=press+release+dead)

</comment><comment><USER2> @VSerge, I think question #3 is meant to be interpreted as "Are you doing either of the following?".

</comment><comment><USER5> check your Q 3, seems like the answer shouldn't be a yes/no

<comment><AUTHOR> You're definitely right, I just updated it.</comment></comment>


Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room - <AUTHOR> http://www.akitaonrails.com/2016/05/23/rails-has-won-the-elephant-in-the-room <comment><USER3> This article is a superb example of bad writing, of bad thinking. I have no skin in the Ruby/Rails game. I'm not a web developer. But I'm interested in the fates of languages and the merits of major approaches that define many jobs and decide the employability of millions, so I read it. The problem is: what in the world is he saying? What is his thesis, and what reason does he give us for believing his thesis? His opening section summarizes as: "I started to read a rant. It made me mad so I wrote a rant. Then I read the whole thing and felt better, so I wrote this." Okay, now try to summarize the second section. Something about Rails and Basecamp. Wordpress. Apple crushed Adobe. Finally: "Then there is the issue that Ruby's future is now tightly coupled with Rails." What issue? What is the point of all this? Sorry, OP, this is bad writing. It's bad thinking. It's saying "stuff" without knowing why.

My advice: if you have skin in this game and need to make real decisions about what platform/language you use, find an article that reasons soundly about what the questions are and convinces you of its answers. Don't listen to this one. And if this quality of thinking is diagnostic of how Ruby/Rails developers think generally... well I'm glad that's a game my skin is safe from.

<comment><USER4> I found it pretty coherent, actually. The author is trying to reset our focus from the technical details of how Rails works to the bigger picture of how the market for web technology has evolved over time. All the more important for those of us with "skin in the game," which I'm guessing means coders, because we tend to be myopic about our little world of symbols and tools, and often get caught clueless when the rug gets pulled out from under us by market forces that are indifferent to which design patterns are objectively better than others.

<comment><USER5> I concur. Coming from São Paulo, Brazil, I thought Akita's post was well written and derived out of positive, lightly spoken, opinion. Breath of fresh air against the backdrop of hostile tech machoism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been using Rails for a decade now, across many jobs, and one thing I've experienced fairly consistently is the worst Ruby web apps I have ever dealt with are the ones that _weren 't_ written in Rails.

I've both seen and spent a lot of time rewriting overgrown Sinatra monstrosities with assorted non-AR ORMs. These apps were generally riddled with XSS since they didn't handle escaping correctly, often had unmaintainable code that sometimes was thousands of lines long crammed into a single file, and lacking any sort of basic structuring principles mixed parameter handling with business logic all over the place.

I've seen several attempts to "build a better Rails" that's "more OO", but even frameworks that solve the problems I've just described in the previous paragraph have one huge drawback: Rails is a lingua franca for web development in Ruby, and whatever incremental gains you get from having a better framework are heavily outweighed by the costs of making people learn a new framework- per-project, the lack of features and documentation, and the lack of the library ecosystem that surrounds Rails.

At points I've tried to keep three ORMs/DB libraries in my head at a time: AR, DataMapper, and Sequel, which just left me wishing I was dealing with AR (the devil you know...)

ORMs need massive feature sets to jam the proverbial square peg of relational databases through the round hole of objects, and AR is the only one I've used that's both expressive enough to cover all the cases I'm interested in and mature enough to even have a story around database concurrency, even if most Rails developers are getting database concurrency wrong with AR (e.g. [http://www.bailis.org/papers/feral- sigmod2015.pdf](http://www.bailis.org/papers/feral-sigmod2015.pdf) ) At least AR has _any_ story around things like optimistic and pessimistic locking and lets you build apps where you can read an object and persist your changes without silently clobbering another requests's database writes with your locally cached copy of stale data.

tl;dr: if you want to do web development but dislike Rails, your best bet is probably to switch to a different programming language than Ruby.

<comment><USER7> I used Sequel once on a major project and as nice as it was, there was major pain. Pain I wouldn't have had with ActiveRecord.

I seriously would have gotten the job done in half the time, with less problems had I just used Rails...and I've written my own ORMs before - I have somewhat of a clue.

<comment><USER8> I'm having the opposite experience, but I think that's because I'm working on a legacy database that really doesn't follow conventions. Even when overriding defaults in AR, I still found myself trying to hammer what I was doing into a AR-shaped block, whereas Sequel feels like it lets me craft a resultset as I desire regardless of what I'm starting with. But like I said, it's a legacy database and it was originally driving an app where writing raw SQL was the SOP, some of which really leans of higher-level SQL engine features for function and performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recall a lot of articles like this about J2EE. And then a lot like this about MSFT technologies.

There was an essay pg wrote where he said that Microsoft was Dead ([http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html)). He didn't mean dead as in "Dead," he meant dead as in "Nobody is afraid of them any more," and the generalization of that is that it was no longer relevant.

I think Rails is there. I think Rails is dead. Obviously, not dead as in dead, but dead as in, it is no longer revolutionizing anything. It is no longer making new things possible. People no longer adopt it and discover a productivity dividend they didn't expect. It no longer swings business decisions ("How can we get this done in three months? What about using Rails? Let's try it.")

I think that's fine. I can quote "A new perspective is worth 80 points of IQ." I don't think that's true of Rails today, but then again, I don't think that's what people want from Rails. If people want 80 points of IQ, they're off looking at Elixir and Phoenix.

Likewise, I can say that "A language that doesn't change the way you think about programming isn't worth learning," but who is learning Ruby and Rails in order to change the way they think about programming? They're trying to bang out CRUD apps, and they don't want to think about programming, that's why they value a stable community with widely adopted "best practices."

When you have a stable, mature language and framework, you spend more time thinking about your business and less time thinking about programming.

And thus, Rails (and sorry, but Ruby too) is not for people who want 80 points of IQ or to change the way they think about programming. And thus, in the sense of being influential, in the sense of disrupting anything or changing anything Rails is dead.

It has matured. It is mainstream. It is plumbing, it is concrete, it is rebar, it is infrastructure. Necessary and useful. But not something you want to spend a lot of time thinking about, just something you use if it suits your purposes.

<comment><USER10> _"A new perspective is worth 80 points of IQ."_

That's not how IQ works. It's not additive.

<comment><USER9> The quote is from Dr. Alan Kay. I think he knew that when he said, it, and personally I think IQ is a racist, bullshit metric. But the general idea of the quote is still meaningful, and the thing I am saying when quoting it is that having gone mainstream, adopting Rails is no longer about adopting a new perspective.

It's tautological: You don't get a new perspective, or an advantage, by adopting the mainstream thing and using it the mainstream way with the mainstream best practices, carefully writing your code to be familiar to the mainstream programmers.

That's not a bad thing, but it is a different thing from when Rails was first popping up in Reddit's old days and HN's early days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ruby was the number 1 reason why about 6 years ago, fresh out of uni with a Java/C background, I chose to learn Python and Django.

Ruby seemed rather useless outside of Rails and I really, __really __liked what I saw in the Zen of Python.

Ie. less magic, explicit > implicit. Etc.

<comment><USER12> I have to agree here. Its a good thing that Django doesn't have the kind of overwhelming power that Rails has in the community, which is pretty awesome! There's a lot of diversity, like flask, pyramid and others; although Django does have a large part of the pie.

<comment><USER13> I think he was saying thay Django has a relatively small part in the overall Python pie.

<comment><USER14> As in web development plays a small part in everything Python. Python's scientific use comes to mind as a strong alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Rails isn't the fastest or the smartest framework. It has weird choices, confusing aspects and some downright terrible defaults, but for me at least, it is the _best_ framework and it has been for years for one simple reason: DOCUMENTATION!

Every few years or so, a bunch of these articles come out shouting from the roof tops, "Rails is dead!" and "Long live Rails!" They often like to praise some new framework, like Hanami, as the answer to all our woes, but they never seem to address documentation.

In my opinion, documentation is where Rails blows every other framework away. I have never been forced to read Rails' source code to understand how something works (I have read some of the source, but for fun, not out of need), and I can't say that about any of the other framework I've worked with. There's always some obscure method or class somewhere in them that does something unintuitive that I always have to look up. In Rails, finding the documentation on that method is as simple as a Google search, but in django, expressjs, or any of the others I've encountered, that documentation usually doesn't even exist at all.

Efficiency, scalability and reliability are all great, but when I'm starting a web app from scratch, they're really not that important. I can worry about those things once I have funding. In the meantime, I only need them to be good enough, and Rails defaults are usually good enough.

What I really need when I'm starting a new project and I'm working on a shoestring budget, is speed. I need to build something fast so I can get funded. Once I'm funded, then I can think about implementing JRuby or splitting code out into microservices or rewriting with another framework, but by then, I'll have the money to take my time. Until then, Rails is the perfect framework for me and I'll keep using it until it's not.

<comment><USER16> Elixir and Phoenix is what you're looking for. Most of the goodness of Rails for productivity, without the long term bad decisions that come with it to force eventual rewrites when the funding comes. There's a reason Rails core guys have put so much time into it.

It gets every...single...dang...decision...right. I may never use another language unless forced because it's what I've spent years trying to find.

<comment><USER17> Why does someone come to promote Elixir and Phoenix in every Ruby/Rails article? The first times was nice to see someone showing an alternative, now is almost like SPAM.

<comment><USER18> Because the Elixir/Phoenix community is largely spawned from the Ruby/Rails community. They are more likely to be continuing to follow what is going on with Rails, even living in both worlds. There are many shared values and experience. That historical affinity is probably why it shows up so much in the same context. The Elixir/Phoenix community is more likely to respect and understand what Rails is and isn't as opposed to the vast majority of pretenders who say they are creating a framework inspired by, or to rival Rails, but really have no clue and proceed to put up something nowhere near the breadth or depth of Rails. Nobody who knows anything is going to come and put up an advocacy post for a PHP framework as an alternative to Rails. They know the Rails community has no interest in going that way. Elixir/Phoenix on the other hand can say with a straight face: we understand Rails and why it is successful and put forward Elixir/Phoenix as a legitimate way forward for those who want to move to a more functional paradigm and the inherent scalability advantages of a Erlang/OTA based foundation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Periodically raise up such articles à la "Rails is dead, long live the Rails". Rails has won in the past because it was so more pragmatic than its alternatives, and in the end better designed, and still wins now because it is more mature than its recent better designed competitors (Phoenix, Hanami, ..), and its community is so a big speed up now.

> People think that because something is "technically superior" everybody else > should blindly adopt. But this is not how the market works.

This is really the citation describing the web development of the last 10-15 years. No surprise it comes from DHH.

</comment><comment><USER20> "But I would never, ever, begin a new business that depends solely on Angular to survive. Why? Because Google doesn't need it. It didn't blink to give up GWT, it didn't have to think twice to decide to rewrite Angular 2 in an incompatible way to Angular 1, and so on."

This is just wrong - almost 3/4 of Google's web apps depend on Angular from what I have heard from multiple Googlers. If a rare instance where an Angular release failure occurs, it shuts down Google's development process dramatically & costs millions in productivity.

That rewrite is aimed at making Angular vastly improved - that doesn't equate to giving up on Angular, that is a poor analogy. In fact, Google decided to start investing vastly more resources into the Angular team, rapidly hiring and growing the team into a proper one, as opposed to it being a pet project of the Adwords team. In the next year or two, that ambition will bear much more fruit as mindshare grows with the realization of the technical problems solved & improved upon by ng2 - if React doesn't gear up to evolve, we'll probably see either a lot of defection to Angular, or a competitor that disagrees with the complexity that Angular introduces appearing to swallow React, just as React has done the same to grab disenchanted Backbone/Angular/etc. users.

Otherwise, the article does a good job explaining a lot of things, but it is very defeatist, as if it is futile to try to improve upon things. I can't say I agree with that sentiment, it goes against the heart of research/trailblazing/experimentation/etc.

It also makes some weak assertions, such as "One rarely benefits from big bang rewrites from scratch.", which is a generality being applied to every single situation, a fallacy. Confusing commonly accepted wisdom in development with an overextension of their meaning can lead to bad conclusions, as well as bad decision making.

<comment><USER21> > This is just wrong - almost 3/4 of Google's web apps depend on Angular from > what I have heard from multiple Googlers. If a rare instance where an > Angular release failure occurs, it shuts down Google's development process > dramatically & costs millions in productivity.

So you were quick to call somebody wrong based on complete heresay? Do you have any conclusive proof that they use it? Gmail? Analytics?

<comment><USER22> Literally 5 seconds of Googling [1]. Turns out the app that allows Google's Ad customers (i.e. their main source of revenue) to use the Google platform is written in angular. It's also one of the oldest and largest Angular apps in existence.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62RvRQuMVyg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62RvRQuMVyg)

<comment><USER21> I also found [https://www.madewithangular.com/#/categories/google](https://www.madewithangular.com/#/categories/google). It's a far far far cry from OPs original assertion that 3/4 apps in Google are made of angular.

<comment><USER20> The Angular team has said over 70% of web apps at Google use Angular, but I can't recall what talks they have said that at off the top of my head. Various members of the Angular team have told me this directy as well, and are pretty open about that fact in general.

One told me about the broken release at one point last year bringing Google to a halt until that got fixed, since Google runs off of the master branch of Angular. Google has a lot of apps, most of them internal (I have seen some external ones too, such as a Nexus site in the past, and Google Domains. Google App Engine and Adwords also use it, as given in talks in the past - <USER2> Angular team is grouped under the Ads group within Google). Your original question for proof was completely misguided when accounting for that - examples of external facing apps does not confirm or deny percentage, it was a poorly conceived attack.

Certain apps like Gmail/Inbox go through very long development cycles and have specialized requirements. An Angular team member has explained to me that sometimes some teams think they can do better with vanilla JS - none of the popular web frameworks really met Google's perf/business requirements for those behemoth apps, although with the way Angular 2 is shaping, it likely will hit the bar (the Angular team has managed to get a hello world app smaller than a react-based one, and this is before they extract out the template compiler to allow tree shaking of that for builds - very impressive perf numbers were also thrown at Google I/O last week). Google has a lot of resources they can throw at big consumer facing apps, so they can build homespun frameworks if they need to (for big sites like YouTube, Inbox, Calendar, etc.).

I should also detail that I'm not someone unknowledgable about Angular and how it is used - I am one of the biggest Angular experts outside of Google, a core maintainer of one of the three most largest third party Angular libraries & involved in another top three most used third party library (UI Bootstrap and UI Router, respectively) and a contributor to many projects across the ecosystem. I am very aware of all of the things that are Angular's strengths, and its shortcomings (especially 1, and 2 to a lesser degree...but nobody is really an expert at 2 yet, excepting maybe Tobias Bosch on the Angular 2 team with his crazy work on it).

<comment><USER21> @Bahamut, thanks for your perspective! fwiw, we are big angular users as well. I was only questioning it's usage in Google. I think I now know that it's used a lot more than I thought inside google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but the ASP.NET MVC/IDE is a better ecosystem than Rails now. No more missing bundle x, install devkit x,....just install visual studio 15 and get to work.

<comment><USER24> As long as you agree with the choices Microsoft makes. If you have a different opinion? Too bad.

<comment><USER25> Same with RoR, no?

<comment><USER26> Relevant username.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I suppose this is how you gain fame these days, writing sensational counter- arguments instead of coding? Oh right, the author is a 'Ruby Activist', he couldn't help it. PHP has won, Node has won and now yet another language up to debate? Having something with its own niche and cult doesn't mean anything if it's not suitable for work. It does help populate shortcut-seeking approaches such as Heroku and more CRUD apps than ever before so Rails has its places.

Here's a piece to deflate any ego issues [http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html).

<comment><USER28> The article you linked is pure gold ;thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER27> Yeah, such a poignant read that cuts to the heart of the problem - our needs to associate and express.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Experienced people often forget the learning curve when they were themselves > beginners, and at that time Rails was so attractive, so sexy. Remember that > feeling? Of accomplishment in the face of the knowledge that some nice witch > left super useful black magic behind?

As one of those beginner programmers who had graduated from a development bootcamp, I fell in love with Sinatra much more than I did with Rails. Part of that love may be due to our curriculum...we have to master Sinatra first before you can start learning Rails. But I also liked the finer control that Sinatra provided to me. I suppose you can translate this to the current buzzword jargon of "hating Rails' magic", but writing out simple authentication using Bcrypt is just as much an accomplishment as using the Devise library.

But your bigger point still remains intact. Passion should take a backseat towards choosing the right tool for the job. If you need Wordpress, use Wordpress. If you need Rails, use Rails. And so on and so forth. I may not like a certain tool...in fact, I may hate it, but I should still go ahead and use it anyway. You're here to complete a job. And you should make sure you do it well.

<comment><USER30> I too like Sinatra but in my time writing Rails for both my day job(s) as well as various consulting gigs, I inevitably see Sinatra apps that start out with the best of intentions but always end up being just a shitty, hand-rolled version of Rails.

<comment><USER31> The amount of time I hear - Rails, you ain't gonna need it, followed 6 months later by some version of "can we use this library to add a feature which OOTB Rails would have given us if we used it".

What is bloat, and what is a useful feature you haven't quite grown into yet, is all a matter of perspective.

I haven't yet found a project where you know 100% of what you're going to need upfront, so having a bit of depth in the toolbox is serving me well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Rails was most influential in Rails v1 and v2, and after that it pretty much stagnated. In spite of that, millions of dollars have been spent upgrading Rails apps through subsequent versions, millions spent on developer training, etc.

Sinatra picked up the REST torch from Rails (and from Camping) and sparked a significant change in how web apps are built and a cultural shift from monolithic frameworks to micro-frameworks.

Node and Flask picked up from there, and gathered steam because both the Python and Node dependency management systems are less broken than Rubygems, allowing more practical use of smaller, orthogonal modules.

Now Elm and React are focused on improving the reliability and reducing the incidental complexity of web applications.

Aside from the occasional PR stunt rant from 37 Signals, Rails does not really have a thought leadership role in the development community anymore, aside from a loyal following of career rails programmers, who likely adopted Rails after v3 and would have been just as happy with nearly any monolithic framework and authoritative pundit.

None of this is good or bad. Who knows what the future has in store. Rails pre v3 inspired a lot of the thinking that came after, but has not really embraced any of the ideas that emerged subsequently.

I think the best analogy is Windows. It's a cash cow, it's not going to change quickly, and many people consider it the only sensible tool for the job.

</comment><comment><USER33> Nice read. I understand the sentiment but I find the "win declaration" a bit too weird.

How can one say "Rails won"? It's not like people will stop making web frameworks. Like any other software it will eventually be made obsolete by something newer and better.

Maybe I am just nitpicking.

<comment><USER34> Yeah, I found that weird. However, if I think deeply about it, given the move to micro-services and soa type architectures I can see elixir winning longer term which is really railsy. regardless, rails has a ton of influence and some great usecases, but I would say nodejs is about as vogue as rails was and will dominate for another several years.

as a nodejs dev, it is super annoying managing the asynchornicity of node and the horrifying dependencies. I suppose rails had stability issues as well. If you read rails is a ghetto by zed shaw, it is interesting (albeit super biased) look at how and why rails developed.

edit: As noted, elixir isn't comparable to rails the framework in that arena is phoenix which is similar (at least in function). Thanks!.

<comment><USER35> Elixir isn't comparable to rails, it's comparable to ruby. Phoenix is the thing comparable to rails

Edit: I don't mean comparable as similar per se, but that one set are languages and the other are web frameworks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These days, I'm finding a lot of joy in taking parts of a Rails app that feel clunky (meaning they usually aren't Basecamp-like, and I find myself using a lot of magic and config to make it fit a Rails-shaped hole), extracting it out as a stand-alone Sinatra app that uses Sequel instead of ActiveRecord, gemifying it, and then pulling it back into the parent monolith as an engine.

<comment><USER36> Wow! I didn't know Rails engines can be written in Sinatra/Sequel. Wondering how that works exactly.

<comment><USER8> Wrap your app in a class (extending Sinatra::Application or Sinatra::Base), require (I gemified it for componentization) then mount in routes:

        mount MySinatraApp => '/some_path'

(you can also mount it as rack app in config.ru, but not sure if you'd get access to things like authenticated session, etc)

<comment><USER36> Cool. A quick search landed me on [https://robots.thoughtbot.com/how-to-share- a-session-between...](https://robots.thoughtbot.com/how-to-share-a-session- between-sinatra-and-rails) it discusses sharing session using config.ru.

Even after using rails for so many years, learning something new every day!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The most important change of all: 2010 saw the advent of the Walled Garden > App Store, commercially available native applications for smartphone and > tablets. Forget web development: mobile was getting it all.

This is the real elephant in the room. Everyone is looking for the "next Rails." There will be no "next Rails" because the web is not what it was when Rails came out. It's not "dead" or "dying," but it is just not the same.

> Experienced people often forget the learning curve when they were themselves > beginners, and at that time Rails was so attractive, so sexy.

I always like to say Rails is for those kids who used to read the players' guides and instruction manuals for video games first, so they know all the secret moves and bonus areas before they even start playing.

Some people prefer the challenge and power of discovering and designing things on their own, and they are never going to enjoy Rails because they'll be too caught up negotiating with themselves about how they would have done it.

</comment><comment><USER37> If we are talking about frameworks, I believe Padrino is a much better designed framework than Rails. It doesn't have any magic of Rails and architected in a very elegant way. I just can't tolerate ActiveRecord, so Padrino having Sequel support out of the box was definitely an important step in going away from Rails. Also being built on top of Sinatra, it is also much lighter and faster than Rails, another huge reason to switch.

Yes Rails wins the popularity contest, but it doesn't mean it's the best thing for Ruby.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'd agree that the initial approach of Rails is becoming dated but Rails is quickly moving away from this. Consider Rails 5. Native web sockets and an API mode make Rails an excellent backend for JS apps. You fail to recognize the evolution of the framework and where it continues to fit in today. If you're done with Rails it's probably because you failed to evolve with the framework.

</comment><comment><USER39> " _Basecamp-like apps are not too difficult to make, at least in terms of architecture. You don 't need fancy super performant languages with super duper highly concurrent and parallel primitives. Also a reality is that 80% of the web applications are Basecamp-like (disclosure: my feelings for years of experience in consulting)._"

Someone once wrote something like, "An engineer is a person who can do for $1.50 what any damn fool can do for $5.00."

I admit I don't actually have much experience with Rails itself; we had a couple of Rails apps that, after a couple of months of painful deployment and uptime teething, we moved to JRuby running on the same architecture as the rest of our apps. Then, after a couple of years of deferred maintenance and no updates (and a long list of security vulnerabilities) we rewrote them as plain, no framework, no ORM, Java and Javascript.

But this quote rubs me the wrong way. Building small to medium web apps is what we do. A lot. We ought to be able to build them cheaply and quickly. But we also ought to be able to build them to be efficient and to not waste resources unnecessarily.

In my experience, Rails succeeded because it's easy to go from nothing to a demoable proof of concept. And the Rails environment succeeded because it's possible to teach someone up from nothing to building a pretty application in six weeks.

So why are we still fascinated with a tool that makes something easy that wasn't hard to begin with? That makes the first 10% trivial while leaving the other 90% alone, if not making it harder? That is optimized for the wrong thing?

 _And_ it soaks up resources like crazy?

</comment><comment><USER40> Watching the Google IO keynote, I couldn't help noticing that their new instant apps could be accomplished in open webtools if they would have focused on browser integrations rather than native apps. I hope this doesn't mean native apps are shutting the door on the original idea of pure webapps ( remember that iPhone 1 keynote? ). I think it would take a major new platform doing exclusive html5/css3/js first and only to shift the paradigm. Then, follow that up with mobile browser improvements to make payments, contacts, hardware integrations better and we'd be on our way. Anyone know of a good app that is web only? Unfortunately, I think as native apps continue to dominate, there will be less incentive to build out mobile browser integration with open web platforms.

</comment><comment><USER41> As a rails / startup guy, I can run circles around developers who are using Node/Angular/React/etc. The huge open source community with the infinite number of gems and massive volume of documentation accumulated over years is unparalleled. Sure, Rails may eventually be eclipsed but I see no reason to switch now when my immediate goal is to ship fast with intense speed and fast iteration while focusing on the much more pressing business validation and business objectives of my company. Just my two cents on the topic.

</comment><comment><USER42> Where there is a need for dynamic languages, Ruby can be a good fit. For example, Ruby is used in devops world where there is a bit of a split between Ruby and Python. It's very short sighted to think that Ruby has no future.

</comment><comment><USER34> I haven't used rails in about 3 years (when I first started programming) and I only built 1 application which was a super shitty weekend instagram clone that didn't really work well. I didn't want to use rails anymore because it didn't feel like programming and nodeJS was getting hot.

The thing is, I knew fuck all about programming then and now, I have the luxury of knowing _very slightly_ less than fuck all. Which gives me the perspective that this article has, rails is pretty fucking awesome for building a crud application that uses a relational datastore. The author indicated ~80%.

Wordpress is also something I swore off when I was learning because it straight up wasn't programming. I installed wordpress on a server for the first time last week to setup a blog. I browsed a few thousand themes, it took me a while to find a theme for _a blog_. The _just a blogging platform_ is actually more ironic now, than it ever was.

So, I agree with the author the design patterns shape the community and then the community shapes the design patterns. You can pretty much build any type of app with any language if you are motivated and talented, however, from my observation, the following languages seem to give you the highest leverage in the domains the community has evolved them for:

PHP/Wordpress: Blogging sites & CMS building.

Node/JS: Applications and APIs typically with a noSQL database.

Ruby/Rails: Building CRUD apps with relational datastores.

Python: Data intensive applications & programming.

erlang/elixir: Never used this, but seems ideal for highly scalable concurrent architecture and highly scalable process choreography.

So in essence, I agree with the author. I would love to switch from node to Rails as I like the framework aspect where you can just get productive super quick. I also see rails as going away, so I wouldn't make the time investment. I think learning node was the right thing to do ~3 years ago, but I wish I spent another 6 months using rails and got really comfortable with it first.

> This is not serious programming/you aren't a serious programmer

fairplay. I am a jr. web developer, explaining my conception of some frameworks/communities/languages, so I agree with you that I am not a particularly talented programmer (it isn't my core skillset) and I am not solving hard problems in this arena(as I don't conetend that I am). I disagree that I claimed any of the above was my definition of serious programming. Of the hard problems I will work on/what I think needs to be solved, I have spoken of at length elsewhere.

<comment><USER43> It sounds like you are just trying to justify your decision for Node. I use Node and Rails in production for different products/services. They both serve different purposes well.

"Going away" was said about .NET and PHP and they don't seem to be going anywhere, albeit they are less popular than they use to be.

Too many discussions on HN have this paranoia lurking around of whether or not "I chose the right path". I find it unhealthy, and find that the longer life of a product exposes the weaknesses of any language/framework.

<comment><USER34> Again, I am not trying to justify my decision, I think if you asked most developers to give advice to a kid learning programming 3 years ago how to get started(with the benefit of 3 years glance into the future) they would probably lean towards node if it was between nodejs v ruby.

However, I totally agree _that the longer life of a product exposes the weaknesses of any language /framework._ and there are multiple paths. Just that, if you want to get good at writing software you probably need to pick a starter language with a versatile community. People still write cobol, and wherever there is code in production, there will be demand for a language, but .NET and PHP are probably not growing in demand. I actually don't know about .NET tbh.

However, there is such thing as choosing a path as, without extensive time investment, skill and knowledgebase, it would be difficult to be a truly capable python, .NET, javascript and rails dev.

It would be wise to be capable in those languages, but to be a master or attempt mastery of the one most likely to embody your interests/career would likely be a better move than being able to be less than mediocre in numerous languages. I think we are largely in agreement, and I hope I didn;t mischarachterize you.

I think rails is cool, and I now regret not learning it as I do like the scaffolding nature and I am sure I could pick it back up quickly, I just do not have a need to right now. Elixir looks super cool though and if I do learn a new language that is markedly different it is a toss up between Go and Elixir. I am messing around with python right now, but javascript and ruby are pretty similar, and pyton seems _fairly_ similar. A functional language or a compiled language will be a radical departure from what I am used to.

<comment><USER44> .NET is alive and well.

Enterprise only cares about Java and .NET as standard backend stacks, regardless of the technology of the day HN posts how everyone is doing Go and node.js.

<comment><USER34> i actually have been interested in Java because apache has open sourced what seems to be the best collection of resources on the internet and they are almost entirely written in java for the java ecosystem. I also think I would learn a massive amount. I also am strongly considering Java and less strongly C. What are your thoughts on Java in terms of:

* How much it would teach me about programming/software design, e.g. just as a general learning excercise?

* What does Java lend itself best to/is a typical set of programs a beginner could build after say 1 month?

* Is google planning on phasing Java out and using Go?

<comment><USER45> 1\. Java has had huge amounts of open source code for years. (Case in point: course provider sales representative telling my colleague somewhat annoyed that Java people are the worst because "they are used to get everything for free.)

2\. Im going to read that as "... 1 month after finishing studies".

I will recommend starting somewhere where you get good colleagues. When I finished school I was sure I could never work with Java: it was hard and unforgiving compared to VB and PHP that I had picked up on my own.

After getting introduced to ides and working build systems however I was starting to get work done within a week and within a year I was confident enough to make a real difference.

Also I picked up a feel for just how annoying it is to be left with maintaining code based on abandoned commercial tools (old Delphi code).

3\. No idea, but IMO no way banks are leaving it anytime soon so plenty of jobs and momentum for the next few years:-)

<comment><USER34> I mean, could I teach myself Java and build something interesting in a month. Sounds like a no?

<comment><USER45> Depends on you as well as your definition of interesting.

I'd say you should start in a good team anyway because real life experience IMO is crucial and getting on a good team is a way of getting it fast and as painless as possible (I.E. without breaking _your_ bank.)

If you just want to make "something" go with whatever is less friction for you (for me it was php), just be prepared that there will be friction in any language as soon as you step outside of the tutorials.

Also keep in mind that if you get a good job you can do quite a lot on your spare time. I used to code a utility program in php while commuting. It never became a commercial success but a rewritten version became a major hit with the church I belong to, was maintained and in use for years and gave me both experience in sw architecture as well as bragging rights in job interviews for several years. (Oh and it totally helped in getting my head ready for my paid work in the morning as well as unwinding after work.)

But I also think Java has come a far way towards beginner-friendly. If you do just accept that in Java land IDEs are a must. Getting used to IDEs was were Java "clicked" for me. Use either Netbeans (all features free, my preferred choice), IntelliJ (lots of features free) or Eclipse (all features you'll ever want is free but takes some getting used to, I would never picked it as my first IDE if it wasn't the preferred choice on my first team and they where happy to help me up to speed.) And dismiss everyone who tells you that one of them is crap or way better: it is just a matter of preference in most cases. (Notable exception: android development where IntelliJ is the officially supported alternative.)

Also learn to use Maven or gradle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> > Rails can now be considered a "problem" for the very same reasons that made > it popular in the first place. And this is bound to happen to any > technology.

so, we won't be jobless anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER47> Why can't ruby? [http://poignant.guide/book/chapter-7.html](http://poignant.guide/book/chapter-7.html)

</comment><comment><USER48> There's a lot of personification and anthropomorphism of technology in this piece that distracts. Use the best tool for the job.

<comment><USER49> Agreed, but I'll just point out that works both ways. Devs "identify" with their default tool of choice, and too many coulda-been-GREAT tools try to be the Swiss Army Nuclear Ginsu Chainsaw of Code rather than the sweet hammer they started out as. Sometimes this happens to dominant tools in a category (such as Rails within Ruby); other times, it's happened to entire languages (PHP, VB, and many others; I once had to maintain a terminal emulator written in _COBOL_.)

As Larry Wall and countless others have noted, great programmers are creatively lazy. Mediocre-to-average devs are lazy in less creative ways, like sticking to one language/toolchain for years and not diversifying. Anything that lives, including your career, either grows or it dies. Anything that grows within an impenetrable walled garden will eventually crush itself to death within those walls. It's sad when I see people do that to their careers, and over nearly 40 years in this craft, I've had ringside seats to multiple such bouts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I'm sure I'm going to get piled on here, but whatever. I don't understand why those who spend most of their time writing web apps / CRUD apps focus so much on the tools they use to do it. "This framework's the best!" "No, this one is obviously better!" "My design pattern is better than your design pattern!"

I don't know, maybe I'm a 32 year old curmudgeon, but I just don't see this in my area. I work at a lower level; robotics, image processing/analysis, and general systems level stuff. We worry about what technologies we use for a given task as far as it impacts our design goals, i.e., "which technology is best suited for the job" (and there are more options nowadays than there used to be). Our customers couldn't care less about how we got there as long as the final product kicks ass.

Once we arrive at a conclusion we move on and spend the remaining 99% of development solving actual problems. Hard problems. Often times unsolved problems. Our number one priority is reliability and accuracy (ok, that's two priorities). Whether or not we used e.g. C++ or Python to do it is irrelevant. What matters is that _we built a system which works as it is supposed to and was engineered correctly._

I don't understand this 'programming for programming's sake' mentality. At the end of the day these are just tools, not an end goal. Help me to understand.

<comment><USER51> FTFY: "I don't understand why those who spend most of their time __using tools__ focus so much on the tools they use to do it."

It should be more self-evident now.

When there are many tools which meet the minimum requirements for doing a job, then the focus becomes not on which tool can do the job, but which tool you feel does the job the best (or you enjoy using). Carpenters argue about the best saws/drills, artists argue about the best brushes/paints, musicians argue about the best instrument maker.

You're right, customers don't care about what tool was used to build something, but they care that you can do your job well and good tools help you do that.

<comment><USER52> "Carpenters argue about the best saws/drills, artists argue about the best brushes/paints, musicians argue about the best instrument maker."

Is that actually true? I can't think of a single example of such an argument. I have heard recommendations, and heard various trendy tools being promoted (at least for music), but never an argument.

I think it has to do with transferability of skill. In music, carpentry, and painting, skill readily transfers to different tools even if it causes annoyance or a stylistic change in the result.

The stakes are much higher for web development; at least that's the perception. Skills probably transfer better than people think, but it's scary to have 10 years of experience and a high billing rate and then go back to "hello world".

It's much more comfortable to try to promote what you already know so that you don't have to do that. And it also avoids wasting time on a new framework that seems promising but never gets critical mass.

<comment><USER53> I've never had a problem moving to another language, I'll never understand why people pigeonhole themselves into categories like "rails dev" or "java dev".

The fundamentals are transferable, I don't even mention specific technologies or stacks these days if I don't have to.

<comment><USER54> Well, two things. Lots of people are good on the mechanics of a particular stack and weak on the fundamentals, making the description accurate.

And lots of people hire based on the assumption that expertise in a particular stack is the most important thing (perhaps in part as a result of the preceding point).

<comment><USER53> Definitely, which is how you end up with half of NPM's package repository.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


WE WILL SHOUT Your NAME IN PUBLIC - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/liamsapsford/we-will-shout-out-your-name-in-public

<comment><USER2> Amazing concept! But I have to ask, how come you chose Copenhagen, Denmark? Are you residing here? (Copenhagen citizen speaking)</comment>


Simple blood tests may soon be able to deliver news about your cognitive health - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/17/opinion/sunday/What-if-You-Knew-Alzheimers-Was-Coming-for-You.html <comment><USER2> Does 'simple' mean 'you can buy it in Amazon and perform it in the privacy of your own home'? Because needing to book an office visit with someone who has had about a decade of medical training just to get the test done is not exactly 'simple' in my book. And sharing those results with the increasingly invasive systems of insurance and government and otherwise doesn't fill me with anticipation.

Overall I definitely do want to know, though. If I know that I am highly likely to contract dementia I can start doing things to attempt to combat it, or at least plan 5 or so years before that point to begin using hard drugs. You don't get any money back if you leave your body in good shape. I'd prefer to slide it smoking and smouldering across the finish line, missing both bumpers and with only one headlight hanging out. Then explode.

<comment><USER3> Nicely put. However, it does take some excellent judgement to avoid an extended crawl across the last few meters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are three realities:

1\. The actions you should take if you knew that a serious disorder was coming for you will probably be beneficial one way or another.

2\. There is nothing you can do about Alzheimers.

3\. The only reason you wouldn't live the best, healthiest life you could now is because of an incorrect notion that you'll probably be fine until some set time (e.g. retirement)

Knowing these things, and the fact that stress has a negative effect on your health should compel anyone who reads the article to just live a sustainable life.

Since everyone dies and everyone knows it, the priority should be on living a nice life, free from the illusion that you'll live any given duration. Ideally, being diagnosed with something like Alzheimers would result in a shrug, just like how you would shrug if someone told you you're gonna die one day.

<comment><USER5> _Alzheimers would result in a shrug, just like how you would shrug if someone told you you 're gonna die one day._

Alzheimer's isn't like being dead though. It's an incredibly painful reminder to everyone you've every loved that you are no longer "you", but they have to take care of you every day anyways. Painfully re-opening wounds every time you don't remember who they are, or hurt yourself from confusion. It's a continuous living purgatory for your loved ones, with you gone but not gone.

I'd rather live the best, unhealthiest life, and hope I'm dead dead from other causes before I can cause so much pain to the ones I love.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. Personally I am confused by those wishing to die in their sleep. I'd prefer to be totally awake, cognitively aware that I'm dying. People think I'm joking when I say I'd like a violent death, if the alternative is Alzheimer's.

The trouble is a) knowing that I have it and b) having the drive to annihilate myself before I no longer can do it myself. Fortunately I live in a state where suicide is legal and available by pill, and that's a great option if I can't build up the drive to rig my death some other way.

<comment><USER7> > Fortunately I live in a state where suicide is legal and available by pill

for Alzheimer's?

[http://assisted-dying.org/blog/2011/01/10/can-an- alzheimers-...](http://assisted-dying.org/blog/2011/01/10/can-an-alzheimers- victim-end-their-own-life/)

'There is nowhere in the U.S. someone with Alzheimer's disease can legally commit suicide with the help of a physician or friend. (Suicide itself is not a crime.) People with Alzheimer's are not considered competent, and the disease is generally not considered terminal because a person often does not die within six months of a diagnosis.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have this variant. AMA

(It hasn't been traumatic knowledge for me -- anyone with severe dementia in their biological family knows that there is some heredity there, whether or not they know they have this particular gene variant)

<comment><USER9> I also learned I have one variant (not two) and was already fairly aware as well due to my family history. I already live as healthy a life as I can and focus on enjoying it. Can't really do much of anything else.

To me the greatest benefit of this knowledge is being able to prepare loved ones and family for the inevitable - beyond that, there's not really much to be done and the knowledge hasn't really impacted me much.

<comment><USER10> Their are some financial implications as to how much and what long term care insurance to have.

<comment><USER11> Regarding long term care, I have a relative who ended up on disability in their 40s and I pushed them hard to get an appropriate supplemental plan with Medicare to be sure they'd have coverage - eligibility to purchase that coverage is only for 6 months when you first get on disability, then wait until 65.

It basically came down to "with your issues, what are the odds you'll need to spend a few weeks in rehab after a bad fall within the next 20-25 years?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Get my affairs in order, then arrange for a quick death. I have no desire to become a burden on my children or anyone else.

<comment><USER13> _Due to a bug in our system we inadvertently provided some of our users with results from other patients._

Point being, watch the weather and plan, fine, but don't become certain until you see rain falling from the sky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pardon the editorial (I realize it's not very HN) but this type of fear mongering fluff does the public more harm than good.

The point being epigenetic is real. It does the general public more harm than good to perpetuate the myth that they (via lifestyle, diet, etc.) have no say in their genetic destiny.

No doubt sometimes some of these genes really matter. But often they are dormant notes of what might be if you don't take care of yourself.

p.s. I just finished reading "Grain Brain." Regardless of what you think about gluten, he makes very strong case for: where you take your body, your brain is going to follow. He mentions Alzheimer's often.

<comment><USER15> >p.s. I just finished reading "Grain Brain." Regardless of what you think about gluten,

It's not just gluten. Look into enrichment. [https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*pBs90R1LfdGOfpTS....](https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*pBs90R1LfdGOfpTS.png)

Most people are actually sensitive to the additives added to fortified wheat sold in the States, especially Vitamin B[0] and Iron[1].

[0]: [https://freetheanimal.com/2016/05/enrichment-promotes- everyt...](https://freetheanimal.com/2016/05/enrichment-promotes- everything.html)

[1]: [https://freetheanimal.com/2015/06/enrichment-theory- everythi...](https://freetheanimal.com/2015/06/enrichment-theory- everything.html)

<comment><USER14> Yup. Agreed. It's just some people are fond of latching on to anything "...gluten..." and then using that to push back againt. I didn't want to get into that politics, and wanted to recommend it as a brain hack type of manual. At least that's how I see it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I eat centrophenoxine and racetams and meditate ~daily. I quit drinking/using anything stronger than caffeine. Try to be good to myself.

<comment><USER17> Wow, just read this on Wikipedia:

> Meclofenoxate (centrophenoxine), as well as DMAE, have been found to > increase the lifespans of mice by 30–50%, and thus may be anti-aging > drugs/supplements.

Are you taking it for a specific reason? Or do you consider this a generally good supplement?

<comment><USER18> > Wow, just read this on Wikipedia: > > Meclofenoxate (centrophenoxine), as > well as DMAE, have been found to increase the lifespans of mice by 30–50%, > and thus may be anti-aging drugs/supplements.

Have you also checked the source? It's not a scientific publication, it's a claim from a book by a quack.

<comment><USER19> > Have you also checked the source? It's not a scientific publication

That's probably something to do with Wikipedia's editing guidelines these days. They have a rule against using primary research citations. Only literature reviews, books, and other secondary sources are acceptable.

I found the original source for the claim, which may be no better for supporting the claim for a number of reasons (why has this not been replicated, or did replication fail?):

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/05315565739...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0531556573900247)

Effect of dimethylaminoethyl p-chlorophenoxyacetate on the lifespan of male Swiss Webster albino mice, J Exp Gerontol 8: 177, 1973

Author: R. Hochschild of "Microware Instruments Co" of California.

doi (for sci-hub): 10.1016/0531-5565(73)90024-7

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/05315565739...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0531556573900247)

Note: If anyone is actually interested in the field of biogerontology, I recommend following the [https://www.fightaging.org](https://www.fightaging.org) blog for editorialisation of news and research papers coming out of the field.

<comment><USER20> > That's probably something to do with Wikipedia's editing guidelines these > days. They have a rule against using primary research citations.

Jeez. I haven't paid much attention, but every time I hear something about Wikipedia's editing guidelines, they're getting it horribly wrong.

<comment><USER21> Sorry for off topic but it is a difficult topic and goes beyond Wikipedia. I read on hacker news the complaints that many (even peer reviewed) studies are never reproduced because there is no incentive to reproduce/verify someone else's work. Also, I've read that the "sugar lobby" may have been behind previous studies linking eating fatty food with obesity. Given these facts, how do we create guidelines that allow original research?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can Alzheimer's disease also be known as Type 3 diabetes?

"Brain insulin resistance (diabetes) is very much like regular diabetes," de la Monte said. "Since the underlying problems continue to be just about the same, we believe that the development of new therapies would be applicable for all types of diabetes, including Alzheimer's disease, which we refer to as Type III diabetes."

Suzanne M. de la Monte, Edward Re, Lisa Longato, Ming Tong. Dysfunctional Pro- Ceramide, ER Stress, and Insulin/IGF Signaling Networks with Progression of Alzheimer's Disease. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, June 22, 2012, supplement; DOI: 10.3233/JAD-2012-111728

Same author four years prior:

"brain insulin resistance is sufficient to cause AD and that additional significant abnormalities, such as ongoing DNA damage and mitochondrial dysfunction, are required."

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2769828/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2769828/)

<comment><USER23> Your last quote is the _opposite_ of what the paper says. The authors write that insulin resistance is _not sufficient_ to cause AD and that other things are required:

> Therefore, T2DM and obesity may contribute to, i.e., serve as cofactors of > AD but by themselves are probably not sufficient to cause AD. Moreover, the > findings in the T2DM/obesity model indicate the _unlikelihood_ [emphasis > here] that brain insulin resistance is sufficient to cause AD and that > additional significant abnormalities, such as ongoing DNA damage and > mitochondrial dysfunction, are required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I know genetically for some this may be unavoidable but perhaps by living a healthy life you could delay it to a point where you would pass away before it took over.

Obesity, Insulin Resistance, have been linked to this disease/condition. Maybe regular fasting, exercise, taking supplements (Lions Mane come to mind), CBD oil, coconut oil, medications like Metaformin, etc might help. It would be worth a shot since there are no real alternatives at the moment.

<comment><USER25> That might have the opposite effect, since Alzheimer's rates go up ~exponentially after age 65 or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If I knew Alzheimer's were coming for me, I'd start meditating now. I currently do mindful meditation everyday, and have been doing since 2008.

<comment><USER27> I've had the same thought. I don't know that the meditation would slow down dementia, but I could hopefully cultivate mindfulness and cheerfulness, lest I become more and more frustrated at the world as I begin to lose comprehension of it. Also, some good drugs would be nice too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am getting a bit irritated when I read the news about Alzheimers since for a couple of years there is a treatment which was developed by Dr Dale Bredesen. Dr Bredesen looked at all factors which were linked with Alzheimers and combined many together into a treatment strategy. He also defined 3 subtypes of Alzheimers. The result is that his treatment cures 9 out 10 patients with mild Alzheimers. The fact that Bill Gates invests in new drug treatments is insane.

</comment><comment><USER29> Does anyone know an ETA on when this may be usable?

</comment><comment><USER30> Why would you ever want to know this.

<comment> intro-b for me, using 23andme and other components of genetic testing related to health risk factors (all four of my grandparents passed away from or are currently battling cancer) helped me make some long-term decisions regarding my habits and lifestyle, and it did influence my decision to go into a healthcare-related field as a career. I like to think of it more as "I'd like to know what I'm up against," rather than "I have a morbid curiosity about what non-accident deaths will most likely happen to me"

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'd fly to Africa, walk out into a herd of Cape Buffalo, and slap one of those bastards right in the face as hard as I could. Why people want to live forever is beyond me.

<comment><USER32> > Why people want to live forever is beyond me.

I have the same reaction when someone says they only want to live ~80 years. What a terrible outcome when the universe is so massive. There's so much to see, do, try, experience and learn.

There are trillions of galaxies out there and every one of them is different. I could easily happily fill thousands of years just in our solar system.

I'd like to live long enough to explore other solar systems and galaxies and yet the earth by itself is far too large to ever meaningfully explore in a few lifetimes, much less one.

I simply want to see what all is out there. Now, granted, plenty of people consider that a very selfish desire (based on a scarce resources premise) and I'll openly admit to that. It's about as selfish a desire as there can be. I'm ok with that, it's also not a desire that can be actual (not in my lifetime anyway). As such it's equivalent to wanting to be able to fly around like Superman. My desire to learn and experience more will never halt, as such my desire to live an _extremely_ long time will never cease.

<comment><USER33> But don't forget, our brain is limited to some extent and _won't_ be able to hold that amount of information. You'll live to a thousand years, but you'll probably only vividly remember the last five decades, and some smatterings from the past. Is that really meaningful?

Actually I also desire for longevity for reasons like yours, but I've been thinking, perhaps it's more important to measure the quality of experiences rather than number of years. Wisdom, basically - and from history, we know that a deep level of that is attainable irrespective of background and age.

And then, there is also the eventual apathy towards life and wonder. I'm most afraid of that.

Edit: typo

<comment><USER34> _You'll live to a thousand years, but you'll probably only vividly remember the last five decades, and some smatterings from the past. Is that really meaningful?_

I just want to get really good on the mandolin, and that's probably going to take a few decades more than I actually have. And that's what I think about when I watch movies about immortals ( _Highlander_ and the like). While you're thinking "oh, the things he must have seen! The rise and fall of empires! The loves won and lost!", I'm thinking, "he must play a hell of a violin by now." So I might only remember the last fifty years, but I'll _always_ be better on the mandolin than I was last year. Who knows, maybe I'd have time to get good on the fiddle?

<comment><USER33> > I just want to get really good on the mandolin

There's something sweet about that :) But a few centuries later, you sure you'll still enjoy it?

Myself, I'm prone to getting frustrated that I can't learn faster, but we just have to make peace with that. Being in ignorance and pain can sometimes be what makes life so poignant. Who knows, there will _never_ be enough years that we can be satisfied with.

I better take off my musing hat now..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Soon™</comment>


Announcing Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2014/09/30/announcing-windows-10/ <comment><USER2> >Error establishing a database connection

This works...

[http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/news/press/2014/sep14/09-30fu...](http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/news/press/2014/sep14/09-30futureofwindowspr.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER3> Quote: "Windows 10 represents the first step of a whole new generation of Windows."

You know, this is almost exactly how every version of Windows has been described, from the beginning to the present. I would have much preferred to hear something original: "The new windows is so much better _in fact_ that there's no longer any reason to buy anti-virus and anti-malware software to deal with its defects."

<comment><USER4> "The new windows is so much better in fact that there's no longer any reason to buy anti-virus and anti-malware software to deal with its defects."

That's Windows 8.

<comment><USER3> I hope you mean this ironically or sarcastically. Windows 8 is just as vulnerable as any other Windows version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://web.archive.org/web/20140930180146/http://blogs.wind...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140930180146/http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2014/09/30/announcing- windows-10/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Why can't they just release a patch for Windows 8? Does a new start menu really warrant all this?

</comment><comment><USER7> as now I am getting:

>The service is unavailable.

or

>Error establishing a database connection

I hope Microsoft servers run not on Windows 10 :-X

</comment><comment><USER8> Looking at the features, all I can think was, "Don't I already have all of this in KDE?"

<comment><USER9> If that's actually the case, then use KDE.

What does your comment contribute? It's about as useful as the apple/Samsung "my wiener was longer first!" Argument.

Who cares.

<comment><USER8> To be fair, I said the same thing about windows 7. You should try KDE sometime. You'll get to experience all the features windows will be offering in 2017.</comment></comment></comment>


AdRoll Raises $70M - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/21/adroll-raises-70m-led-by-foundation-as-ad-tech-and-retargeting-hit-the-big-time/?ncid=rss

<comment><USER2> Another thriving Erlang shop.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great news. I use AdRoll all the time for our clients, and I've been super happy with their service so far.

<comment><USER4> Just curious, havn't used AdRoll before, but now Google and Facebook also support easy remarketing integration, what exactly the advantage in using AdRoll?

<comment><USER5> I work at Perfect Audience. We're in the same space as Adroll.

People sign up for these services because they want a single place where they can manage all their audience data, a single place where they can create and optimize all their campaigns, a single conversion tracking system for all their retargeting, and a greater focus on support.

<comment><USER3> That would be exactly it. We're a pretty small shop so I run both accounts and help out with media planning. Having one dashboard for everything helps me out a ton. I would actually be open to trying perfect audience actually. Shoot me an email how you compare to AdRoll?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> erlang and AWS FTW!

</comment><comment><USER7> Title is confusing at first sight, company name should be AdRoll, not Adroll.

<comment><USER8> I read it as Adderall on first glance.

<comment><USER9> My roommate does sales for AdRoll, and it always sounds like he's saying "I'm trying to get [client] on Adderall"</comment></comment></comment>


Lights Out San Francisco Oct 20th - <AUTHOR> http://www.lightsoutsf.org/

<comment><USER2> Let's make this worldwide!</comment>


Extreme JavaScript Performance - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2008/10/07/extreme-javascript-performance <comment><USER2> _The majority of most processing time in the most common of web pages is consumed by issues unrelated (but not disconnected) to JavaScript performance._

This is my bête noire. The app I work on, though very js-intensive, is nevertheless performance-bound by these other constraints and has actually gotten _slower_ under some recent browser releases (Firefox 3). Not just a little slower, either: slower enough to become borderline-unusable. That's ironic when everybody is slapping each other on the back about their enormous performance advancements. "Of course it's faster. Look at these benchmarks!" It reminds me of my old professor's anecdote. She was visiting her sister and said "Oh, I'm cold." The sister went to look at the thermostat and said, "No you're not, it's 20˚ in here!" (70˚F)

That being said, WebKit kicks Gecko's ass right now (at least for this particular app). It renders and scrolls many times faster and in fact is just shockingly good in Safari 3 (not quite as great in Chrome).

Edit: This comment sounds a bit grumpier than I intended. The main thing is that browser innovation is back with a vengeance. Competition should sort all this out in the long run.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, DOM performance is often the real bottleneck.

In Cappuccino we go to great lengths to avoid touching the DOM wherever possible. Views (which wrap DOM elements) keep track of their position and size, so we never have to ask the DOM. We defer DOM manipulations to the end of each "run loop" where we coalesce them, removing redundant operations.

The overhead of this bookkeeping (which is reduced by increase JS engine performance) is less than the overhead of extra DOM operations, so it's worth it.

We're already seeing other frameworks adopt some of these practices.

<comment><USER2> _We defer DOM manipulations to the end of each "run loop" where we coalesce them, removing redundant operations_

That's very interesting. Can you give examples of redundant operations that you coalesce?

I'm wondering if this approach might help in my case. I'm frequently repositioning/resizing thousands of little divs. Any suggestions?

<comment><USER3> I'm not the expert on this among us, but from what I understand there are situations where changing one thing causes something else to change and so forth. The specific operations we coalesce are appending nodes, removing nodes, setting the position and setting the size.

Are you changing the position of the divs multiple times per "event" (i.e. mouse/keyboard event, etc) or just very frequently on separate events?

No idea how well this would work, but maybe you could have a timeout fire N times per second (5, 10, 15, 30?) and update the DOM positions then? Though with thousands of divs I don't know if that will help.

What are all these divs? Are they simple enough they could be drawn with Canvas?

<comment><USER2> _Are you changing the position of the divs multiple times per "event" (i.e. mouse/keyboard event, etc) or just very frequently on separate events?_

Very frequently on separate events.

 _What are all these divs?_

The cells of a spreadsheet. (The pos/size resets happen as the user scrolls or does something resizey. Oh, and the content of the divs changes under these conditions too.)

 _Are they simple enough they could be drawn with Canvas?_

They're about as simple as you could get (at least before you add in formatting and all that). I never considered Canvas as an option - do you recommend trying it?

We might not need to do anything, since the deterioration in FF3 is already getting better with the next release of FF (Shiretoko), though not as good as FF2. On the other hand, performance of this particular UI is critical to its user-acceptance, and if there's something we can do to get significant improvement I'd probably go for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone know what the respective graphs look like for IE7 and the IE8 betas?

The sad thing is that no matter how fast Gecko, Webkit and Chrome's JS engines are, you're probably going to have to design applications to cater for the lowest common denominator, which will probably be IE (atleast from the IE7 benchmarks I can see).

<comment><USER2> In the short term, sure. But if there are web apps people really like, and they discover how much faster they run in a different browser, things will change.

<comment><USER5> I'd also contend that, with the same frequency that it's good to create something really good for a niche instead of ok for the majority, it's good to create a fantastically capable ajax app that's only usable with tracemonkey, v8, or squirrelfish. The other great part is that the niche you're writing for is expanding geometrically.</comment></comment></comment>


Anonymous sends a press release, but the author doesn't clear his metadata... - <AUTHOR> http://paulrankin.tumblr.com/post/2166282743/anonymous-has-supposedly-released-a-press-release <comment><USER2> This should be retitled as "Anon successfully trolls Paul Rankin." Alex Tapanaris assuredly is not the one who wrote that document. <http://pastebin.com/5dBdu3qk>

If that link no longer works by the time you see this, it's one of hundreds of links where people posting as him describe in detail the degrading sexual acts they would like done to him.

The metadata has almost certainly been Admiral Ackbarred.

<comment><USER3> I don't believe you're right about that. What you're seeing is Anonymous punishing someone for making a stupid mistake, i.e. "being a newfag". The same kind of schadenfreude that lead Paul to post this to Tumblr tends to inspire a markedly more severe reaction out of Anonymous itself.

<comment><USER4> You seem to be right; all of the pastebins in the link below are from within the day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What a bunch of leet haxorz.

They can track people down from a still on a youtube video.

They can validate boobs as fake or real based on meta data in jpegs.

They are legion, they do not forgive and they do not forget and they will order pizza to your home until you stop hurting cats.

But they can't clear metadata in a word editor ...

<comment><USER6> Of course the counter is that the meta data is faked.

Although I think it's not faked and a silly oversight.

<comment><USER7> If it is then props to him but I think the chances of that are slight to non- existent.

One of the very good reasons why you should think twice before 'anonymously' harassing people online is that you are almost never as anonymous as you think you are.

We had a guy harassing a woman on ww.com for months on end, all it took was the one time he forgot to check the headers of the proxy that he used to do it again. Being anonymous is hard work, the more you do it the bigger the chances of slipping up.

Slipping up once is enough, assuming the other side is awake and watching.

<comment><USER8> Non-existent, indeed, unless he also changed all the advanced metadata inside the pdf, and give them the same fake name: [http://img.skitch.com/20101211-rwkgk3i7e5jq477ayyxudff883.jp...](http://img.skitch.com/20101211-rwkgk3i7e5jq477ayyxudff883.jpg)

<comment><USER6> If you fake it in OpenOffice then the meta data is carried through to th PDF. As far as I know, the default meta data in OO is what your operating system username is but is changeable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Possibly as a result of consuming too much conspiracy/crime fiction where both the bad guys and good guys love to put little word puzzles into their work, my first thought as to determining if this is a fake name or not is to run "Alex Tapanaris" through an anagram finder.

Which I _ahem_ leave as an exercise to the reader.

<comment><USER10> If you found something to do with the letters "Pa Rat I" that fits then I know what the rest of them were for...

<comment><USER9> I see where you're running with that, and with a slight adjustment we get 'Anal Rape Taxis'.

OMG, someone call Jack Bauer, _this goes all the way to the top_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Since Anonymous is both "everyone" and no-one in particular, couldn't _anyone_ issue releases or do things in their name and it'd be as "official" as anything else? This strikes me as a problem and leaves them open to a miscommunication campaign. Even Wikileaks, which used to be quite shadowy, ended up with Assange as an identifiable and consistent spokesman.

</comment><comment><USER12> A group famous for an ongoing DDOS attack and previous hacking incidents sends me a pdf document.

I:

a) Open it

-or-

b) wtf are you crazy?

I'm not saying there was anything in it, but I sure hope people don't open things like that up with reader.

<comment><USER13> I use xpdf for all PDF's, anyway. I only ever pull out reader for documents which clearly actually use its javascript features.

<comment><USER14> Be careful, xpdf has a few known problems: [http://freshmeat.net/articles/debian-new-xpdf-packages- fix-s...](http://freshmeat.net/articles/debian-new-xpdf-packages-fix-several- vulnerabilities)

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the pointer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This "press release" is also quite confused; "Amazon, which was until recently WikiLeaks' DNS provider"

</comment><comment><USER16> Strip any PDF of it's meta (and digital signature)

<http://www.becyhome.de/becypdfmetaedit/description_eng.htm>

</comment><comment><USER17> Not sure if this is the same guy but here's a website by that name <http://www.alextapanaris.com/> and there are few pastebin entries by someone with this name <http://pastebin.com/re2DZb6m>.

<comment><USER18> Well, looks like this guy took his contact info down:

<http://www.alextapanaris.com/cms/about>

versus

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PPhOZgL...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PPhOZgLXlo4J:www.alextapanaris.com/cms/about+http://www.alextapanaris.com/cms/about&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER19> Screenshot of contact info: <http://i.imgur.com/khfIH.png>

Alex Tapanaris

Tel.: +30 69 72 46 49 07

E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com

MSN: firstname.lastname@example.com

Graduated from Teesside University with a degree in Computer Games Art.

Proficient in:

* Autodesk 3D Studio Max

* Autodesk Maya

* Adobe Photoshop

* Pixologic ZBrush

* Adobe Premiere

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great choice of format too for a press release.

Guess that's what you get when you want to add fancy graphics, instead of just the text.

I hope Paul Rankin is on a flat-rate plan, the last time someone posted a phone number of an anonymous member (even with the last digit removed) that website was down for days.

</comment><comment><USER20> I can't quite tell, but it looks like anonymous might be working hard to do some coverup.

Witness timestamps: <http://pastebin.com/re2DZb6m>

[http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2010/12/anonymous- rele...](http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2010/12/anonymous-releases- very-unanonymous-press-release/)

[http://paulrankin.tumblr.com/post/2166282743/anonymous- has-s...](http://paulrankin.tumblr.com/post/2166282743/anonymous-has- supposedly-released-a-press-release)

Clearly two out of three links are trolling, but I'm not quite sure which ones (or all of them.)

</comment><comment><USER21> The press release claimed that Anonymous didn't try to DDoS Amazon because it would be "in bad taste." That doesn't sound like the Anonymous that I know.

<comment><USER22> Anonymous did try to DDoS amazon, it had no effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> He is a hell of a 3d artist though.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkB-kQ9ovVU>

</comment><comment><USER24> um. why would you even post this to your website?

<comment><USER25> I don't understand the question. Why not post it?

<comment><USER26> presumably he meant in fear of retaliation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> !Anon != Anon.

</comment><comment><USER28> Anonymous can have non-anonymous members as well. Just a suggestion.

<comment><USER29>
      In Project Mayhem, we have no names.

      Now, you listen to me.

      This is a man and he has a name,
      and it's Robert Paulsen, OK?

      - Robert Paulsen.
      - He's a man

      and he's dead now because of us.
      Do you understand that?

      I understand.

      In death, a member of Project Mayhem
      has a name.

      [all chanting] His name is Robert Paulsen.

      -- Fight Club

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's probably someone the author doesn't like

And remember the internet it's not your personal army

</comment><comment><USER31> what is this press release is all about?</comment>


A California lawmaker wants to punish registered voters who don't cast a ballot - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/11/us/california-vote-register-punish-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> America! Where you don't have rights just obligations to the government and the corporations it serves.</comment>


A delicious-like javascript tagging input component - <AUTHOR> http://roberto.open-lab.com/2010/02/10/a-delicious-javascript-tagging-input-field/

<comment><USER2> Why not put a short summary of the new plugin + a big "Live Demo" button at the top then explain the story?

<comment><USER3> done, thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Aslo check out [http://devthought.com/wp- content/projects/mootools/textboxli...](http://devthought.com/wp- content/projects/mootools/textboxlist/Demo/) [http://devthought.com/wp- content/projects/jquery/textboxlist...](http://devthought.com/wp- content/projects/jquery/textboxlist/Demo/)

<comment><USER3> added thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a good summary of existing plugins, but... Like dmix said, it's hard to find the demo: [http://bugsvoice.com/applications/bugsVoice/site/test/tagBox...](http://bugsvoice.com/applications/bugsVoice/site/test/tagBoxDemo.jsp) , and once I tried it, the list of suggested tags didn't match the tags it was actually auto completing, which lead me to believe it was broken. IE: it says "suggested tags: jquery tagging tag component delicious javascript", but "tag" doesn't complete.

<comment><USER3> demo button on top. Suggested tags, in delicious, are tag from community, in the drop-down hare your tags; it may not intersect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very nice article! Some comments on the component... I'd like to be able to esc out of the dropdown, I start typing backspace out and it remains. T shows tools but neither tag nor tagging which are in the suggested list.

<comment><USER3> yes true, I miss the esc key. Next release coming soon. Like delicious your tag and suggested ones are not related (neither suggested)

<comment><USER6> ah I see I thought that was suggestions to test it out</comment></comment></comment>


Apple reportedly buys AI startup with privacy-conscious approach - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/21/18106192/apple-privacy-ai-silk-labs-acquisition <comment><USER2> Privacy is a double edged sword and apple has taken the other side of it compared to most other companies. Doing good ai while being privacy conscious is not easy, huge props to them and hope they succeed.

<comment><USER3> > Doing good ai while being privacy conscious is not easy

Is this fact or do we just think this because the only companies who have put resources into AI are companies that doesn't give a shit about your privacy (because they use it for their other products)?

<comment><USER4> This seems fairly obvious - good ai can do things like predict what you want, understand your speech, understand your intent, etc. All this requires tons of personal data. And any amount of personal data can be difficult to keep secure/used ethically/etc.

<comment><USER3> Keep secure sure (although the same is true of all personal data not just that related to AI) but ethical use is _not_ a computer science problem.

<comment><USER5> Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but anonymization while still having the data be useful for deep learning seems computer science-related.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think Edge AI where nothing is passed to the cloud is going to be a big area.

Currently Apple is the only one of the fangm whose business model allows this. Probably the only huge growth area for apple-style margins (ie, $17/month for a local ai to train with you as its learning set with complete, auditable privacy).

<comment><USER7> Arguably, Microsoft could do this as well without cannibalizing too much business. It's truly a shame they aren't doing it.

<comment><USER8> I wish they'd stop trying to use Microsoft Windows as an ad platform for all their other products and focus instead on making their existing OS better. If you want to advertise all your Microsoft products, here's a crazy and wild idea, do it on the App store for Windows. Stop making duplicated services too, we got Microsoft Teams which I don't mind, it seems really good, but what about Skype and MSN?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It will be interesting to see how their technology is used.

Here are some examples [https://www.silklabs.com/](https://www.silklabs.com/)

Instantly search cameras at a shopping mall to find your missing child

Recognize who's coming home without training on specific faces

Know where people are spending their time in a retail store

Save power and storage by only recording when a person is seen

Count the vehicles that have entered a parking lot

Know when people are yelling to be alerted of commotion

</comment><comment><USER10> This seems pretty cool, I do like that on the surface at least, Apple seems to care a little about privacy.

<comment><USER11> Out of FANG, it seems like Apple is only one that really cares! See [https://www.fastcompany.com/90236195/forget-the-new- iphones-...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90236195/forget-the-new-iphones- apples-best-product-is-now-privacy)

<comment><USER12> Not that I'm convinced they fit in FAANG, but do Netflix have a particularly bad privacy record? I know they do lots of tracking and magic to make recommendations but I'm not sure they even have any concerning data to play fast and loose with privacy wise?

<comment><USER13> Its getting slowly more popular to personality profile people based on their behaviour. It might be tempting for Netflix to sell their viewing data for such a purpose one day if somebody decides they want to buy it for that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Please critique my launch page for Flourcast - <AUTHOR> http://fananta.github.io/flourcast

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll set up domain forwarding correctly soon so ignore the oddity.</comment>


Read-Me-The-News App Umano Launches On Android - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/21/umano-android-launch/

<comment><USER2> Congrats to the team!</comment>