Hacker News Reader

(2009)

chankson Re-using Backbone.js Models on the server with Node.js and Socket.io

All the hubbub about the hashbang URL system got me thinking about sharing client/server javascript just this morning, and then lo and behold, a post about it pops up a few hours later.

Instead, though, I was thinking that perhaps controllers and views could be re-used across the server and client. When a request comes in to the server, it renders a page just like a typical MVC framework would, but also directs the client to download the view/controller javascript. Any links the user follows could then be rendered client-side. When the framework is running server-side, the model layer talks directly to the database - when it's running client-side, it talks to the server through JSON.

It could give you the best of both worlds - an initial request returns a quick, fully-formed HTML page, so it's speedy on the first load and crawlers will know what to do with it. Later requests use AJAX, so things are responsive and the server isn't weighed down with HTML rendering.

chankson Linux rules the Clouds

"Today, December 20th, Ubuntu is running 4,840 instances on EC2, followed by CentOS, with 1,250, Fedora with 313; Oracle with 80; and Red Hat with a mere 73 instances."

Only ~6500 instances up and running on EC2 today? That seems to me to be too low by at least a couple orders of magnitude.

Edit: Their cited source (http://thecloudmarket.com/stats) is a catalog of images, which makes a lot more sense.

chankson The Ruby Stdlib is a Ghetto

Copy:

Much of Ruby’s standard library (the set of classes shipped with the Ruby VM itself) is old and crufty. For laughs, go look at the code for some of the classes that you’ve never used. Chances are it’s from 2000-2003 and doesn’t even look like idiomatic Ruby. I’m wondering what classes should be removed from the standard library or deprecated so that higher quality replacements can take their place.

The canonical example is Ruby’s net/http library. Its performance and API are just terrible. (Side note: how do you know if an API is terrible? If you have to consult the docs even after having used the API for the past 5 years.) But because it’s in the standard library, most people use it as the base for higher-level API abstractions (e.g. httparty, rest-client).

So looking at Ruby’s core RDoc, my suggested list for removal (where removal means move to a rubygem):

Net::* DRb REXML RSS Rinda WEBrick XML

Any others I missed? Will Ruby 1.9.3 or 2.0 get a good spring cleaning or will we have to live with these classes forever?

chankson Tuesday's Heroku outage post-mortem

Heroku had 45 minutes of downtime in August, 28 in September, and 45 in October so far. (Source: http://groups.google.com/group/heroku/browse_thread/thread/f...)

That's 99.90%, 99.94%, and 99.88% (for the month so far), or simply 99.91% for the entire period.

So, what would you consider "rock-solid"? Personally, I'll echo what was said in the other thread - 99.91% is much better than what I could accomplish on my own, so I'll continue to trust my business to them.

chankson Nature thinks we could safely wipe mosquitoes off the face of the earth.

Unless the crops are crucial for something else, which is crucial for ten other things, which are each crucial for ten more things, and so on. That's the danger.

chankson Nature thinks we could safely wipe mosquitoes off the face of the earth.

Then what effect will the plants dying have?