jarrett

Do you recommend any particular alternative to New Relic? In particular, I'd be interested in something that helps answer the questions "How much memory am I using, and what's using it?" New Relic helps a lot with the latter question, as it can aggregate request time by Rails action. E.g. it can say "30% of your Apache workers' time is spent in this one Rails action." Which helps you understand what's driving the need for more Apache workers, and thus the need for more memory.

I think most people would be OK with an additional flat fee so long as the notice is clear and conspicuous. For example, if I were renting a space daily and had to tack on a flat cleaning fee, I might write something like this:

$99 per day, plus $20 flat fee

In other words, you can develop whatever fee structure you want. You just have to adequately explain it to customers so they can make an informed decision.

Hypothetically, what if you actually believed it in every instance? That is, what if you genuinely felt (as I do) that nearly all jobs are hard. Granted, some may be harder than others, but I've never met anyone who worked a job I would describe as "not hard."

> common tooling like benchmarking and profiling tools

And might I add: A debugger! For both shaders and the entire GL state. Yes, 3rd party tools exist. But more often than not, I find they won't even compile or execute on a given platform.

> I really liked the modified Platinum UI from MacOS X DR2 code named Rhapsody, though it could have used some polish

Interesting. I feel like the current OS X UI is just that: Rhapsody with a lot of polish. The core concept seems to be the same.

Which one is your favorite? Googling turned up several.

> but they don't age well...In general, a flat icon tends to age better and reduce "eye exhaustion"

Two thoughts on that:

1) Is that just an opinion? (If so, there's obviously nothing wrong with that.) Or is there some objective evidence?

2) How well do icons need to age? Realistically, how many icons in the wild will go 5+ years without a design refresh?

It's not a Rails vs Django feature comparison that gives Rails the edge. Convergent evolution means they're pretty much on par with each other all the time.

The difference is in the size of the ecosystem as a whole. The Ruby web dev world appears to have more (or more visible) participants. Which affects things like Stack Overflow, web-specific packages on Github, blog posts, etc.

It's not an order-of-magnitude difference, as far as I can tell. But still significant.

I think we have almost the same opinion, actually. I said Ruby's "web dev ecosystem...feels much larger to me." I agree that Ruby's strongest niche is web dev. And I think it has an edge of Python there. Outside web dev, I don't see Ruby dominating any particular niche.

> Silencing the ongoing debate, even if one side or the other is obviously delusional, is completely contrary to the spirit of science.

A news outfit does not have the power to silence scientific debate. Real, productive scientific debate does not occur in 5-minute talk show segments. That's just entertainment. Scientific debate occurs in less glamorous venues, such as conferences, journals, and labs. And it involves a great deal more time and technical detail than what you get on a news show. News organizations don't control those venues.

Now, one can of course raise valid concerns about process in the scientific community. Much has been written along those lines as of late. But that's entirely separate from the BBC's policy, and out of the scope of this discussion.

Other than the scientific method, how would you propose humankind gather the information needed to make important decisions?

> Climate change scepticism is not a fringe view, but moderately widely held

Amongst 1) the general public, 2) scientists in general, or 3) climate scientists specifically?

My take on Ruby vs Python is this:

While Python has a healthy web dev ecosystem, Ruby's feels much larger to me. That's almost certainly because Rails is so wildly popular. And Rails is an excellent, mature framework. So for web dev, I would consider Ruby the winner.

Python is the clear winner for scientific computing. That's not really due to anything inherent in the language. It's an ecosystem thing. If you were using Fortran before, you might be working in a problem domain where Python dominates.

Both are excellent for miscellaneous scripting work. E.g. reading in a CSV file and doing something with each row; batch-processing a bunch of images; renaming 1000 files according to some ruleset; gathering some system data and sending nightly status emails.

In terms of syntax and features, they're very very similar. Python has meaningful whitespace, which you may like or dislike. (I think it's good for enforcing proper formatting, but you're free to disagree.) Ruby has multiple ways of expressing the mathematical concept of a function (methods, blocks, and procs), which has its pros and cons. Both have metaprogramming facilities, though I find Ruby's more pleasant. If I remember correctly, it was in large part the metaprogramming that made DHH pick Ruby for Rails.