Saw this gem of a gem on reddit earlier today and there were some trollish comments about no one using ruby anymore blah blah blah which quietly bummed me out. Surprised and Delighted to see it as #1 here on HN tonight!
There’s a lot of folks who get immense schadenfreude talking about things they know nothing about to strangers on the internet who also don’t know anything.
Ruby, specially with Rails, is particularly suited for AI coding, because of how mature it is and convention over configuration: Most of the important stuff is up to date in the model, and the entire thing comes with a fairy comprehensive set of ideas of how to to be used cohesively to built entire apps.
> It's worth remembering that the trolls that complain about Ruby do so because they care about it.
I don't think so. I mean there are complains about stuff you care about like people complaining about Healthcare. (edit: there are other forms of caring, see my grandchild comment)
Dissing on Ruby is definitely not this, they are not Ruby users wanting Ruby to be better. They don't even know Ruby apart from dissing on it is socially accepted, and makes them feel good.
Usually people get huffed up about stuff they care about. Caring doesn’t mean wanting it to be better, it could also mean get worked up about.
Surely a one-off comment about nobody using Ruby doesn’t mean you “care”, but if it is true that it is the same people who keep commenting, they obviously care.
Is it because they are jealous of the beauty of Ruby/Rails, as a Rubyist I’d think so, but who is to say really. Maybe they worked at a company where they replaced whatever their favourite stack is with Rails and they have hated Ruby ever since. It could be anything.
You wouldn’t keep responding to stuff you don’t care about at some level.
Equating caring and wanting it to be better was a mistake on my part. It made my comment not true, and it made you worked-up. Sorry for that.
All in all, I don't think that other forms of caring apply either. I think that parroting "Ruby is dead" doesn't mean that they care about Ruby, it's just a thing people like to parrot, without the meaning realizing in their heads. A form of bonding, a form of distraction, a form of opening to a social interaction, a form of self-reassurance etc. It is lot of things, and caring about Ruby at all is usually not among those (IMO).
I agree. Parroting some meme isn’t caring per se. But I was working under the assumption that the statement that it was the same names who keep doing it. If you say “Ruby is dead” 5 times a year it isn’t necessarily “caring” if it becomes 100 times a year there is something else at play.
I'm not sure what your point is. I care about Ruby and want it to die because I have worked on the Gitlab codebase, which is written in Ruby. It's a bad language and it stopped me being able to understand behaviours and fix bugs.
In contrast I have also worked on VSCode which is similarly huge but written in Typescript. Faaaar easier to work with, enough that I've been able to contribute a couple of medium sized features and several bug fixes.
So when people say "yeay Ruby" I try to discourage them because I don't want more Ruby code in the world that I might have the misfortune of having to interact with in future.
I think you are confusing the beauty and elegance of the language with the crap thatpeople write.
My experience is that the sort of folks who misuse Ruby's powerful features are the sort of idiotes who dont realise that because a thing can be done, doesn't mean that it should be done. These are the sort of people who are capable of misusing most languages.
Was it really idiomatic ruby that "stopped you from being unable to understand behaviors"? Or was it unorganized monkey patching?
I'm having a hard time thinking that ruby is difficult to understand, particularly compared to its opposites lisp, erlang, Haskell, e.g. languages that are extremely simple to the point where the burden of complexity is shoved into code space.
IIRC Github was originally written in Ruby as well.
Now that they use something "far easier to work with", the UX gets to suffer accordingly.
I've never been in a situation where making the customer happy was synonymous with applying best practices to the tech stack or otherwise making it so everyone and their dog can contribute.
It ranks right after Shell (#8) and C (#9). Ruby is still a mainstream language, and it's fairly easy to find a Ruby job. Compare that to Clojure or Haskell.
It's dropped in relative popularity, but the demand feels like it's still increasing to me (been doing Ruby professionally since 2006), just not as fast as some of the other languages.
Keep in mind the number of developers overall is rising rapidly still.
Compare that to Rust. For all the hype it has, very few companies are shipping products with it. There are a few, but nowhere near as many as are using Ruby.
I get your point but it's a case of right tool for the job. Every copy of Ruby now includes YJIT written in Rust because Rust is the right tool for that task.
It's easy to forget though that number of lines of code required to do something is also a valid metric and Ruby beats Rust on that.
So if you're shipping CRUD web apps that might be a more important metric than say memory usage or CPU time.
Different job, different tool. More people want to ship web apps than write their own JITs.
That's probably true, but also a poor measure of success. I bet there are more companies using Ruby than there are companies using C++, too. They fill different niches, and different types of companies deliver very different products using those languages.
The ratio of people who can code in Python or Ruby to people who can code in Rust or C++ is very high.
I don’t know why “number of companies using language X” is a metric that is used here. Wordpress is serving 43% of websites on the internet as of 2025, so we should all be learning PHP!
That's very nice, but not in itself a good argument for language use. If you count using a system written in a language, then almost every programmer uses Ruby daily as both Github and Gitlab are written in Ruby. Similarly you probably interact quite frequently with (banking) systems written in COBOL, but nobody would call COBOL a popular language.
Ruby will always have a special place in my heart. I cut my teeth as a young programmer on that language, and I learnt its value (as well as the value of using something else) along the way.
Ruby code can be downright poetic, for better or worse. There's a certain kind of magic to the kind of code it enables. That's not always good, but it _is_ beautiful.
I encourage everybody to read the venerable "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" [1] to see what I'm talking about.
I wish Ruby was cross-platform. It still only works on Windows using the MSYS2 emulation layer, and the only reason as far as I can tell is that it committed hard and early to `fork()` as the main way to use multiple cores.
Over the last 10 years the number of programmers has grown enormously. So ruby dropping in position does not necessarily imply the absolute number of ruby programmers went down.
It doesn't take too many for new stuff. HN has voting ring protection, so I think if enough unrelated people vote on new stuff, it can make the front page. I've made it on the front page with 6 points before. But if it can't get more points at an acceptable rate while on the front page, it drops pretty quickly.
Sometimes, interested things are boosted by dang. This doesn't seem interesting enough, so I doubt it was.
This is a guess based on personal experience and old HN comments, but I think HN boosts potentially promising links based on how quickly they're getting upvoted (i.e., momentum). If the link doesn't keep gaining momentum after the boost, it'll quickly fall off the front page.
If we only consider what you get today, nobody is beating Bambu yet. At least not if you want a printer that doesn't focus on customization and just does the right thing out of the box.
Prusa's Core One could be a better option for print farms because Prusa is great at building printers for that kind of constant abuse. But for everyone else it's just a worse version of the Bambu X1C.
However Bambu has gotten a lot of flak for their recent software changes. They have promised not to do anything evil with the currently released printers and to give customers escape hatches. But they are certainly at a moment where consumer trust is justifiably low, and it will take some time to grow that trust back
Pretty much just go buy a Bambu X1C and be done with it. I've been through a bunch of 3d printers, all of which required constant tinkering and babysitting. The Bambu just works, you click print and it prints, and fast.
There's some drama now around them closing up the ecosystem and locking out third party firmware, etc. but I honestly could care less so long as it stays good at being a printer.
What, precisely, does a voron 2.4 offer over a Bambu X1C (or, more fairly, a P1P) that is worth the additional price (double a P1P) and the fact you have to assemble it yourself (which takes days)?
I’m all for building something that offers an advantage, but it seems neither cheaper nor offering any better quality (and, if you build it poorly or use a poor quality kit, it’ll have substantially worse quality).
I don't get this take. Criticizing Bambu for being very proprietary is fair. But how are they a Prusa rip-off? Prusa has been selling various evolutions of their Mk3 bedslinger for years, while Bambu entered the market with CoreXY printers. And not only is their design different, the entire philosophy is different: Prusa is selling to enthusiasts who want to tinker with their printer, Bambu is selling an out-of-the-box experience that "just works". Basically the Apple among the printers, if Apple was cheaper than the competition and sold replacement parts.
Bambu has a very detailed wiki, and replacement parts are readily available and cheap. I've replaced numerous parts across my small batch of Bambu printers.
> Bambu if you want to pay less for a proprietary rip-off of Prusa and totally trust them to always repair it for you, and with access to your network.
Uhm, how could it be a ripoff if X1 cameout a year earlier than Prusa XL, the only CoreXY printer Prusa had until recently. Entirely different approach to multi-material printer (to both XL and MMU). Core One btw still has no mount solution for MMU3 that doesn't require you removing top lid.
If one want to fund an actual open innovation then it should be something Voron related. You know...fully open-source printer.
Right now Prusa is playing catch up: Mk4 was shipped with incomplete firmware.
You get youself a Prusa if you're running a busy print farm or if you want to see what it was like to 3d printer 5 years ago and how user interfaces looked 15 years ago.
BambuLab has fair share of controversies, but none of them were about printer perfomance.
7. The previous version of Daino Notes, called Notes is FOSS (free and open-source software) available at https://www.notes-foss.com/ and the source code is available at https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes. I decided to make Daino Notes closed source due to difficulties in monetizing FOSS. In order to comply with Notes' MPL license, all common files between Notes and Daino Notes are published in https://github.com/nuttyartist/daino-notes-public
As the former proprietor of LanParty.com (which I mistakenly included in a sale to IGN) I must salute you. The absolute genius of the provided lan equipment and particularly the management thereof is an inspiration.
I think the lack of any standing offerings of variations of Quake is a glaring mistake but easily rectified. :)
It's really heartening to see lan gaming continued and offered in such a way that the amount of hassle and setup is minimized and the gaming is maximized. We spent far too much time in the 90's and 2000's dealing with driver issues, etc etc. Bravo.
I remember our biggest issue being IP addresses. We had no router, or expertise, so we were at the whims of automatic addresses (254.x... as far as I recall?). Good times.
Oof. Back in the day friends and I would get together to LAN and the first few hours would just be fiddling with network cards, cables, terminators and software.
There was always someone who would just be totally unable to connect with someone else.
I've definitely been to a LAN party where IP addresses were written on clothes pegs by the entrance. You take a peg on your way in, clip it to your ethernet cable, configure that IP statically!
The idea was specified in 2005, and there's a related question about Windows using these addresses in 2011 [1]. I haven't tried to find older evidence.
I remember the parts of the 90s where the most reliable LAN party connections for the games we were playing were IPX/SPX or worse, as I recall, and they didn't really have automatic addresses at all, so trial and error configuration tweaking in DOS config files, DOS Game UIs, the Windows 3.11 UIs, and then Windows 95 UIs was way too much of the process.
It is amazing to think how much IPv4 and IPv6 "just work" in comparison.
Oddly enough, my memory of IPX/SPX was that it "just worked" by default whereas when we switched to IP we started having to manually configure IP addresses and make sure no one chose the same address.
That said my first LAN party was 1996 and we were running Windows 95 by that point, which probably helped.
I remember the first time, we bought some 10BASE2 ethernet cards and BNC connector cables, and spend hours to figure out why it does not work, only then to learn the next day that we also need cable end terminators (if I remember that correctly). But then it worked and we had lots of fun.
The terminator creates a ring I think, so it should be possible to just connect end to end. But then you need to have more cables running around the place.
New ways to exploit the physics to do things your opponents don't expect and can't easily reproduce. As the skill level of regular players increases, I always look for new ways to approach the maps.
I read his books every day when really young. He created such a great world to imagine. The note about him moving to Switzerland makes sense - his world did feel really European now that I think about it.
My kids, now grown, did not get to experience his books - are his books sold widely anymore?
His books are still kicking around, although not as big as they used to be. My toddler has a few.
They're still lovely books, but I think they're less popular mostly because they're a bit dated now; lots of obsolete jobs and few female animals doing any of the cool jobs.
I have a 5yo daughter, and I appreciate that *What Do People Do All Day?* have female characters in homemaker roles, which is still common in most of the world. Many of her other books have female protagonists doing everything else.
Part of an education should be learning how other people live, whether it's in the past or in another part of the world. And of course, there's nothing wrong with being a homemaker today.
> I have a 5yo daughter, and I appreciate that What Do People Do All Day? have female characters in homemaker roles, which is still common in most of the world. Many of her other books have female protagonists doing everything else.
Is that a new copy or an old one?
The newer editions of Best Word Book Ever were updated to be less stereotypical (I think there's a gallery somewhere that shows the changes). Unfortunately the updated art is noticeably inferior (even to my untrained eye), and in some places kinda dumb (on one page I think they decided they needed more girls, so they phoned it in and slapped a big "LISA" on the shirt of some androgynous animal). Also they dropped A LOT of content, so the newer editions are something like half as long.
The abridged and edited versions were somewhat disappointing to me. I remember looking through these books as a kid and how there was so much in them.
While they are dated, there are insights in some of them. If they had a bakery, they also had a mill where the flour was ground, and that required wheat which was gathered.
The houses had cross-sections showing the pipes and where water came into the house and distributed to the faucets/showers. It connected to the fireplugs outside.
There was an inter-connectedness to this world that is still simplified, of course, but so much deeper than anything else I can think of in that format. The only thing vaguely comparable would be the DK books which are packed with info. Most kids books are ultra-simplified and not meant for exploration, they are just a linear "show this".
Richard Scarry's books are problematic because of the reasons you stated, and I think there were issues with ethnic and gender stereotypes as well (similar to issues with Dr. Seuss). He updated some of them in the 90s to reflect changing mores, but I don't know if those efforts reached all of them.
Yes, you can buy them. When I was a child, my friend owned the "Cars and Trucks and Things That Go" book and I spent hours browsing the book by myself when visiting him. When I had children, it was one of the first books that I bought, and they loved it, too, although not quite as much as me. It is a great present for young children if you don't want to bring a Nintendo gift card.
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