https://decasia.org/tech/2026/02/raise-not-a-reserved-word.h...

This being said, I don't think there is any requirement technically that every core method can also be re-implemented in Ruby... There are so many methods that are just thin interfaces to something written in C, whether because they are touching VM internals, or for perf reasons, or because they make system calls or call external libraries.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47631569

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I can remember the subsequent period in which Java desktop apps were relatively common. They had cross platform UI by default. But the problem was:

1) cross platform GUIs are ugly by default, compared to fully native desktop apps, because they don't entirely replicate the affordances or the style of the platform;

2) in the Java case, it seemed heavyweight to install and sluggish compared to native apps;

Point 2 would not have applied to stdwin, as it would have produced small compiled binaries I suppose, but Point 1 would have.

So in the end, obviously web apps (and partly, Flash) took over the niche that "cross platform desktop apps" had once tried to fill, and then it was something of a dead zone until Electron, as far as I remember.

I won't say I have conversations with strangers like that all the time, but it is 100% possible, and a lot of people really do appreciate it if you bother to talk to them. People often like being asked about themselves (I used to do cultural anthropology research so I have had quite a bit of practice too...).

There are of course reasons why it doesn't always work or becomes awkward. For example, gender is a factor - a significant part of the population is much more comfortable having same-sex conversations with strangers - not to mention other sociological factors around race, class, nationality, all the obvious things.

I realized early on in my enterprise software job that if I produce code faster than average for my team, it will just get stuck in the rest of our review and QA processes; it doesn’t get released any faster.

It feels like LLM code gen can exacerbate and generalize this effect (especially when people send mediocre LLM code gen for review which then makes the reviews become painful).

[1] https://www.macwhiz.com/blog/art-of-turboing/

My uncle was a pretty big pop star in the 1960s. His group at one point had a big fanzine, they were household names across the country, over time they had stalkers and weird fans and all that, made movies and albums, had big parties and knew other famous people, pretty much all those things that the OP writes about (circa 50 years later, some of it has changed but not that much).

He could be charismatic and surprisingly eloquent and I could picture him writing a piece like this, if the mood had struck.

He also lost pretty much all the money through mismanagement (several times over), eventually moved out of LA, had a tumultuous family life with numerous spouses and wasn’t around much for his kids, and after his 40s was trapped in a sad cycle of reunion tours because the band still needed the money. The tours still had some level of excitement and crowd enthusiasm, even pretty late in life and I guess he always loved the stage, the performing, all that. But in the end, I kinda felt it seemed like a lonely existence. Hard to form really deep connections when you’re always traveling and often away in your head.

https://libyear.com/

http://listen.hatnote.com/

If the request for additional access controls/access cleanup came from one of the Ruby Central funders, could we not know who that was and what exactly their ask consisted of? I am interested in knowing their side of the story, and what the motivation was. (But in general, cutting off long-time maintainers' access seems like a bad choice - as presumably they have long since proven their good will toward the ruby community as shepherds of these projects.)

It is implemented like this:

- The front end uses react to draw a UI.

- It fetches data from a JSON file stored on S3.

- When we get a write request, a lamdba function reads the JSON file, parses it, adds new data, and writes back to S3.

The main selling point for me is that almost all of it is static assets, which are cheap and simple to host, and the tiny bit of "back end" logic is just one nodejs function.

The previous implementation used SQLite and a golang back end, but I eventually got tired of having to maintain a virtual machine to host it.

Speaking as a former academic, I don’t really agree with this — I think academia can make you believe wrongly that it’s a kind of “unalienated labor,” but actually the alienation runs deep, all the deeper when it’s invisible at first glance.

Yes, you don’t have to make something that is sold to customers or that fits in a JIRA ticket. But when you stop and think about it, you’re going to be doing research based on topics and paradigms that other people have largely defined (advisors, peers); you have to publish in journals that are often for profit and pay you zero; when you teach you usually don’t get paid all the tuition that your students are paying per course (the institution takes a big cut); you end up doing a lot of silly things to have a solid institutional position… TLDR, it has great moments of course, but it isn’t unalienated.

The story is really about two things. Their poor information security is pathetic, but their actual surveillance tech is genuinely kind of politically concerning. Even if it is technically legal, it's unethical to record conversations without consent.

I for one really miss being able to go see the servers that my code runs on. I thought data centers were really interesting places. But I don't see a lot of effort to decide things based on pure dollar cost analysis at this point. There's a lot of other industry forces besides the microeconomics that predetermine people's hosting choices.

> I'll try to get a unicorn 7.x release soon but tests take forever to run on ancient HW and I need to ration releases to keep download counts low in order to stay under the MFA threshold on Rubygems.org

> I don't ever want users viewing me as trustworthy nor liable for anything I do, so no MFA nor sigs from me; just source + docs :>

If I understand correctly - the idea is that the unicorn maintainer does not want to be viewed as trustworthy and is avoiding MFA and signatures because they could build trust that isn't, in this case, wanted.

https://yhbt.net/unicorn-public/20231214230933.M299458@dcvr/

https://gekk.info/articles/traceroute.htm

(If it's outdated I'm curious if anyone knows relevant updates?)

Generally - we live in a world with lots of fantastic programming languages, so I would never choose PHP for a greenfield project if I had a choice, and I would not pursue professional opportunities with legacy PHP codebases except in very special circumstances.

Things like that make me feel apprehensive about trying to learn more bike maintenance stuff myself. It's almost inevitable to have to patch flat tires though so you're always going to be reinstalling the wheel yourself, but I don't touch the brakes even if it seems like an easy fix.