sowhatquestion

As a Laravel dev who almost went down the Rails path, I’m curious: what advantages do you think Rails has over Laravel at this point?

This is the Soylent hypothesis. "Processed food" as such is not the problem—it's processed food used as a delivery vehicle for as many addictive sugars, fats, and simple carbs as possible. I would guess that the bad kind of processed food is much more common because it's both easier to make and more profitable (flour is cheap; oil is cheap; protein is expensive).

The same hypothesis (that we can reclaim the idea of processed food for nutritionally complete foods) is also on display in a product like Vite Ramen which explicitly patterns itself after a nutritionally dubious staple food (i.e., instant ramen). I would expect to see more startups in this space in the next few years.

I would recommend Kafka's short story "The Great Wall of China"

> It's so easy in the vacuum of a single developer with a single application to think everyone should keep up to date, but the reality is most of the PHP sites on the internet are owned by non-technical people

"Non-technical" people who don't plan for maintenance costs to their software (including maintenance to keep up with dependencies like PHP) don't get a ton of sympathy from me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I've heard this criticism of Laravel a couple times and never understood it. I've been using the framework for years and have never had an issue with upgrades. There is a clear and comprehensive upgrade guide with each release, as well as a third-party package called Laravel Shift that can inspect your code and perform automatic upgrades in many cases. I've found there are only one or two breaking changes per minor version release (which seems reasonable to me), and they are always well-documented.

Aside from that, I'm glad you've highlighted Laravel, which—despite being the most popular server-side Web framework on GitHub—gets virtually no attention from HN. It's typical to use Laravel in the old server-side rendered Rails paradigm (which is still probably best for some applications), but I've had success using it to develop APIs as well. Core features like the ORM, job queues, dependency injection, email templating, etc, are very solid, and the ecosystem of packages around it is phenomenal. I would recommend it to any Web developer.

> How do you compose two base classes into a subclass?

In most other OOP languages besides JS, the obvious answer would be to use traits.

Honest question: what's so bad about the reddit redesign?

PHP has had optionally typed function parameters and return values since the late 5.x releases I think (current release is 7.3). Types are checked at runtime and throw TypeErrors if the declared types are violated. They can also be checked ahead of time by IDEs with code inspection such as PhpStorm.

The 7.4 release is adding typed class properties as well[1].

I maintain a ~75k LOC PHP codebase (using the Laravel framework), and we have almost never encountered type issues. The new style of PHP (and Javascript is heading in a similar direction tbh) is to write it almost like it's Java, but with the option to fall back to dynamic "magic" as needed. If you utilize the dynamic elements sparingly, and following widely understood conventions, the productivity-vs.-reliability tradeoff is highly favorable for many applications compared to languages like Java and C#.

P.S. I like Python, but I would argue PHP actually has a better story to tell about types these days. "While Python 3.6 gives you this syntax for declaring types, there’s absolutely nothing in Python itself yet that does anything with these type declarations..." [2]. Declaring types in a dynamic language only to have them ignored at runtime does not inspire much confidence.

1. https://laravel-news.com/php7-typed-properties

2. https://medium.com/@ageitgey/learn-how-to-use-static-type-ch...

It would be far from the first HN article (or comment) that failed to make a distinction between "poorly designed object-oriented systems" and the very idea of OOP, design patterns, etc

I was glad to see this posted here. Reading it again, I thought, "I can't be the only one who works in ad tech yet broadly agrees with this proposal."

Very impressive. Does the federal government have anything comparable to this?

I'm a (primarily backend/API) web developer, with 5 years of experience at this point, and I've been planning to apply to Georgia Tech OMSCS in order to branch out into different specializations like ML and data science. A better foundation in algorithms etc. wouldn't hurt either--my bachelor's is not CS-related.

This article gave me pause, since I've never heard much skepticism expressed about a Comp Sci MS before. Is it really so overrated?

They've addressed this many times. There are different "grades" of maltodextrin with different glycemic indexes. Soylent uses a higher grade with a low glycemic index. Google "low DE maltodextrin." Soylent also uses other low-glycemic carbs such as isomaltulose.

> It always amazed me when someone looks at computer systems of the 70's through the lens of "today's" technology and then projects a failure of imagination on the part of those engineers back in the 70's

True enough, but as a younger programmer, I find it pretty reasonable to look back at computer systems of the 70s and wonder if we can do better today. I feel a little bit gross every time I have to write a bash shell script (or edit config files that aren't JSON/XML/YAML, for that matter), and I don't think that's a bad impulse. That something so inelegant and unsafe is still in widespread use in 2017 really ought to be a scandal. Even if the author didn't frame the issue in the most charitable way for the earlier trailblazing generations, he's calling attention to the right issues.

In other words, if you couldn't justify something being designed a certain way de novo, why be content with the existing design!?

I'm highly curious about Rust as a potential introduction to systems programming. One thing that bothers me is the lack of proper classes. This seems to have become a trend among newer languages, as though traditional OOP is an outdated paradigm.

I have yet to be convinced that this is a good move. The attempted justifications I've seen hand-wave about problems with OOP, "composition over inheritance," etc. Meanwhile, in the real world, 99% of production code is OO and the paradigm continues to do its basic job--helping programmers model domain objects. Older languages like JavaScript and PHP have made their OO constructs more robust over time, which suggests to me that in the end a critical mass of developers will always clamor for this easily understandable and productivity-enhancing paradigm over some theoretically pure alternative.

> Most professional developers I talked to are perfectly fine with the changes. They just weren't interested in taking part in the online drama.

You just described my reaction to every single MBP thread I've seen since the announcement. Not only did I not want to participate in the drama, I have a feeling that a fair number of people who did will turn around and buy an MBP anyway. People are risk-averse and howl indiscriminately when things change. Let's hear about some real experiences of developers having problems using it, then it may be legitimate to revisit the issue

This is false. Soylent is classified as a food, and has to follow the same FDA requirements as any other food.

"Soylent is not in violation of any product-safety standards or requirements, and is manufactured in FDA-approved facilities that follow federally regulated current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP)."

Source: https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/204197379-Californ...

>I think that Soylent will go down as a cautionary tale for anyone who looks at a field they know very little about and thinks "how hard could it be?". Along with Theranos.

Terrible analogy. Unlike Theranos, Soylent has been shipping their core product to many satisfied customers for over two years. The recent quality control issues are real, and they are troubling, but they don't invalidate Soylent's thesis that an engineered staple food could save people time and money. By contrast, the kind of small-sample blood analysis Theranos aimed to do may never have been possible in the first place, which is why informed investors never touched their product.

>We know that different people have different dietary needs.

Better pull Ensure from all the hospitals then, just to be safe.

DNS resolves for me now but the page doesn't load.

You're describing the reality that any observant Millenial lives in. Unfortunately, the spurious trend pieces will continue until Boomers finally grasp that the economy no longer offers the "average" person the same opportunities it did when they were growing up (and will likely never do so again).

Was anyone else disturbed by Strack and Martin's hand-waving away the null replication result? Based on my (admittedly elementary) knowledge of statistics, it seems like 17 replication attempts (samples) whose means are distributed around zero constitute some pretty airtight empirical evidence that there's no inner emotional effect from smiling. How else to read Strack and Martin's complaints but as a kind of special pleading that there was something ineffable about the experiment that the replications missed? Some of their comments gesture in the direction of claiming that replication may be literally impossible.

I walked away from this article more convinced than ever that there are big problems with this field of research. And I don't "want" to believe it, either -- I loved Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Speaking of which, kudos to Kahneman himself for being (apparently) a more committed empiricist than the other psychologists discussed here.

Correct me if I'm misreading, but I have a hard time seeing how the study supports your hypothesis. In the "Discussion" section, the authors state that their heritability estimate for educational attainment was 31%, and only 20% for SES. That still leaves the door open for significant social influence.

The authors summarize: "Our findings add weight to the view that genetic variation plays an important, but not exclusive, role in educational inequalities and social mobility, which is at variance with views, that still prevail in some quarters, that these are solely the product of social forces and environmental inequalities." In other words, they only take themselves to have refuted the strawman view that observed differences "are solely the product of social forces."

>something about the tone of this blog post is utterly repellent to me and I'm struggling to put my finger on the reason why.

Points for honesty. Drawing from my own experience: sometimes this feeling happens for a reason, and sometimes it happens gratuitously when we encounter a perspective we're not used to hearing. As Daniel Kahneman (among many others) has pointed out: "familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth."

Hold up, you mean teams at Microsoft are "mailing zip files around!?"

Thanks for the links! The tech is absolutely stunning, I can't believe it flew under my radar for months after being announced.

> It is clear that the United States in particular is, especially in recent years, churning out unprecedented numbers of severely psychologically ill individuals.

Is it clear? Or have we gotten better at diagnosing conditions that people have been experiencing all along? (Not to mention reducing stigma and making people more likely to admit to having these conditions.) In any case, citation needed.

Yeah, it reminded me of Spaceballs. "They've gone to plaid!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAWL8ejf2nM

Seconded. Rating TV episodes on IMDb is a very useful feature, especially now that it supports sorting episodes by rating, e.g., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098904/eprate?ref_=tt_eps_rhs_s...

> My rights existed prior to the Bill of Rights and the government

"Existed" in what sense!? Are they deducible by pure reason? Were they written on stone tablets?

Seriously though, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence may refer to the idea of natural rights, but in my opinion this is due to the prevailing state of philosophy and political theory at the time, and doesn't bind Americans to forever understand their own rights in terms of "prior" natural rights that are "later" secured by the government.

    there are indeed universal properties of 
    correct code that you can learn from one 
    set of applications and apply to another 
    set of applications

Pardon the speculative thought, but wouldn't a program that detects "universal properties of correct code" be equivalent to a program that detects whether another program will halt? Hence, impossible?