eric970

I love how at the end, they're all like "hey, our competitors do it too!"

You don't need data to back up bold claims when your ego is the size of a watermelon.

[rant] If you're going to claim that your strong opinions are facts, please treat them as such and give citations or back them up yourself. [/rant]

Ruby is not my favorite language anymore, but I still use it and see evidence that there is a huge place it fills in the dev community and ecosystem. I have never used a more expressive language. I'm stating this as a fact from what I have experienced, and I'm giving points that back it up. There are dozens of actively maintained Ruby projects, some of which are the most popular repos on GitHub. I don't see any evidence that the Ruby ecosystem is on a downward trend of activity and is "dying", so I have no reason to think otherwise.

This kind of stuff reminds me why I take breaks from HackerNews every once in a while -_- Yuck.

Storing IDs in session cookies is not something the Rails framework introduced. Smh. It's easier to blame someone else's code though.

So the provided solution is, essentially, to store a list of active user sessions in the database and use that as a reference during authentication?

I love this game. It starts out simple, but as your country's relations with other countries change, the rules for letting people in and the amount of security in place changes.

"Diet" and "weight loss" are often used interchangeably, sure, but can you think of any instances in which diet Pepsi or diet Coke has been advertised as actually causing weight loss (ie; the product itself is a weight loss supplement)?

I think the name "diet soda" needs to go, as it really is misleading, but (and I could be wrong about this) I don't think these companies have ever claimed their products make you shed pounds by simply drinking them.

I agree that calories can have different impacts on people. We all require a certain intake of calories to achieve a certain weight or build. There are a lot of different variables that make this happen, such as exercise, lifestyle, genetics, and so on.

But where is the evidence that a calorie-free beverage can have an impact on your metabolism? You're eliminating the idea of calories entirely with diet soda, so I don't see how your argument stands any ground.

Er, this whole topic can be a little misleading. I haven't found a single reputable study that claims diet soda itself causes weight gain. Rather, just as the reasoning in this article suggests, the only scientific fact they present is that the consumption of diet soda itself does not encourage weight loss.

Side note: Do any brands really advertise drinking their diet soda as a method of (actual) weight loss? I can't think of any that actually present it this way.

It goes on to say that substituting sugary soda for diet soda isn't enough for most people to stop gaining weight. This is probably because you're likely to substitue the calories and sugars for something else, since your body notices its getting less of something and will crave it.

Yet you have things like this:

"One large study found that people who drank artificially sweetened soda were more likely to experience weight gain than those who drank non-diet soda"

This again is a correlation with the typical behavior of a diet soda drinker. They're not drinking diet soda because they want to lose weight. Rather, they're drinking it because they don't want to gain weight. They could have a terrible diet overall and this alone does nothing but move the problem over into, say, consuming two scoops of ice scream after dinner everyday. All because the soda they had during lunch didn't satisfy their bodily craving of refined sugars.

So this is a case of correlation not being causation. These types of articles do nothing but encourage this error to propagate. Perhaps the term "diet soda" is misleading in itself, but perhaps telling people that drinking a calorie-free drink will make them gain weight is just as silly as telling people it will make them lose weight.