swombat

> like there's some kind of existential crisis occurring over there

If you're running a Saas, especially a SaaS whose market is developers, and you're NOT having an existential crisis in 2026, the only possible explanation is you're asleep or possibly already dead.

Bitcoin's success is extremely easy to understand.

Socially:

Some people don't trust governments to handle one of the most powerful collaboration technologies ever invented (money). All financial systems before Bitcoin were government controlled. Some have behaved in a trustworthy way, many have not. And over the longer term they all tend to mess it up eventually.

So these people set out to build an alternative that they believed governments couldn't control.

Technically:

The interesting key advance that made Bitcoin interesting and successful was coming up with an algorithm that solved the problem of getting parties that don't trust each other at all, to collaborate on maintaining a global ledger to everyone's benefits, without them having to even know about each other.

This is already a feature of money (I don't need to know about you to have indirect financial ties to you) but was not true of the financial system itself until Bitcoin.

Feels like a misleading headline. The author created another templating language alternative to ERB, found that it was slower than ERB, then optimise it until it was roundabout as fast as ERB given a relatively simple template.

The author then appears to draw the wrong conclusion:

> What I find most interesting about the changes I’ve made to code generation in P2, is that the currently compiled code is more than twice as fast as it was when P2 first came out, which just goes to show than in fact Ruby is not slow, it is actually quite fast, you just need to know how to write fast code! (And I guess this is true for any programming language.)

I love Ruby, but it is still a slow language on most benchmarks. That's ok. For most webapps, the bottleneck is not execution-time performance, it's the speed and joy of writing the code. Functionality that never got built because it was too annoying to build is infinitely slow. But there's no point in pretending Ruby, compared to, say, Rust, isn't a slow-as-molasses execution environment. It is. It's ok. It's optimised for developer happiness, not speed.

And yes, even so, you can write slow Ruby code and fast Ruby code. Again, which one makes sense is contextual. But it doesn't make the point that "Ruby isn't slow."

Seconding Omarchy.

Not only I'm progressively migrating from my Mac onto an Omarchy linux setup... but I've even gone and beaten my Mac into behaving more like Omarchy (with Aerospace as the tiling wm) in the meantime...

Not even that long, but I agree on the "underwhelming"...

"Oh I found some niche issue that bothered me and wrote some code to fix it."

-> HN Front Page

Granted, he did. At the same time, Asimov was well known to be a groper, and even wrote a satire book called "The sensuous dirty old man" which would probably have landed better as satire had he not been fairly well known in scifi circles to be in fact a dirty old man.

There were some decent scifi authors at the time - not least, Ursula K LeGuin.

No, only if you have some kind of terrestrial TV set up or if you watch Live TV online via BBC's iPlayer or one of the major channels' live TV players.

I look forward to the updated book too (bought the Kamal 1 version!) :-) Thanks for writing it.

I've been working with RoR since back in 2008 (Rails 2.1 yay!).

I'm still working with RoR.

It's still an incredibly quick, powerful, flexible, versatile framework. I'm able to build pretty large and complex apps all by myself, quite quickly, without fuss.

I'm looking forward to the deployment improvements since that was one of the shortcomings that was still around. Kamal v1 didn't really do it for me (currently using Dokku instead). Maybe Kamal 2 is it.

With love, please consider - the "shame" you're describing is really something else in a mask.

Perhaps... a longing? Maybe this stranger has helped you find the place where you do truly long for life.

Let the feeling be. Don't label it shame. Don't label it longing. Just let it be. Give it space. Cry if you feel like it. Laugh if you feel like it. Just feel it.

And when you're ready to speak about this with others, there will be many, many willing to be there for you. You are loved.

Identification & Authorisation are a better pairing here than Authentication and Authorisation.

This way, if someone says "Oh yeah we have an auth module on this site" you don't need to immediately disambiguate the statement.

But then "auth" itself is ambiguous. So it might make sense to get rid of the lot. "Identification" is a good word for the first. Perhaps "Permissions" for the second?

Similarly, AlphaGo and Stockfish are only able to simulate reasoning their way through a game of Go or a game of Chess.

That simulated reasoning is enough to annihilate any human player they're faced with.

As Dijkstra famously said, "whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim".

Submarines don't swim, cars don't walk or gallop, cameras don't paint or draw... So what?

Once AI can simulate reasoning better than we can do the genuine thing, the question really becomes utterly irrelevant to the likely outcome.

The story gets way more deep and interesting as you progress. If you feel like giving it another shot, the remaster also makes it look super-pretty and improved the gameplay somewhat.

The Last Of Us has been mentioned, and I'd also add a recent entry, Baldur's Gate 3.

Go look up "fair use" under copyright laws.