Not to cry sour grapes here but there is not one mention of Merb in that entire blog post. I personally wrote merb in order to show that rails internals could be much better, modular and faster. I did heavy duty politicking to get the two teams to come together and I think the rails merb merger is one of the coolest open source success stories vie heard of.

But not a single mention of merb in this entire post. I'm not complaining but it seems disingenuous not to mention it as the sole reason I wrote merb was to push rails forward. And when it looked like merb might possibly overtake rails I went ahead and gave merb to the rails project and got the two teams together so there wasn't wasted effort. After all to have ruby and rails itself win we needed to compete with java and python and php. Merb was starting to fragment the ruby community as it became a more and more viable option and I did some personal heavy politicking to get it merged back into rails so we could take on the world instead of infighting within the ruby community.

I think it's been a great success story and most of the ideas of merb's architecture have made it into rails.

So I'm incredibly happy to see rails 3 finally come out. And I'm incredibly happy that my little experiment in making rails architecture better has paid off and the two projects merged. But I do think it's a bit weak that merb was not mentioned once in the article.

(Edit) all this being said I don't want to come across as co plaining. My work on merb ended up exactly as I wanted it to, it made rails better.

So huge congratulations to the rails team for making this happen!

(Edit) http://rubyonrails.org/merb

Yes, yes, HN is going to the dogs, it's not as good as it used to be, it's all because of the new users, and so on and so on. It's been like that since I joined two and a half years ago.

There's a hierarchy of immediacy for communication methods:

* Cell Phone: Make me drop everything and talk to you

* Desk Phone: If I'm free, I'll talk to you

* IM, SMS: Maybe I'm jammed and I can't reply right this second, but I'll take a look and get back ASAP. For what it's worth, Bloomberg messaging falls into this category.

* Email: Give me a couple hours and I'll write a thoughtful response

* Physical letters: Probably something important that you need to keep a hardcopy of. Expect a response in a couple days.

Email has a very nice niche that's as much a consequence of social convention as it is of the protocol. If email became realtime and people expected responses within 30 seconds or even 5 minutes, it would lose much of its value.

You had me until "I called the two companies we hired to improve our ranking." Google did not cost you $4 million, the fact that you were spamming Google did. As it very well should.

I find the following long quote a bit of a tangent,but for some reason I find it relevant:

" How long will you need to find your truest, most productive niche? This I cannot predict, for, sadly, access to a podium confers no gift of prophecy. But I can say that however long it takes, it will be time well spent. I am reminded of a friend from the early 1970s, Edward Witten. I liked Ed, but felt sorry for him, too, because, for all his potential, he lacked focus. He had been a history major in college, and a linguistics minor. On graduating, though, he concluded that, as rewarding as these fields had been, he was not really cut out to make a living at them. He decided that what he was really meant to do was study economics. And so, he applied to graduate school, and was accepted at the University of Wisconsin. And, after only a semester, he dropped out of the program. Not for him. So, history was out; linguistics, out; economics, out. What to do? This was a time of widespread political activism, and Ed became an aide to Senator George McGovern, then running for the presidency on an anti-war platform. He also wrote articles for political journals like the Nation and the New Republic. After some months, Ed realized that politics was not for him, because, in his words, it demanded qualities he did not have, foremost among them common sense. All right, then: history, linguistics, economics, politics, were all out as career choices. What to do? Ed suddenly realized that he was really suited to study mathematics. So he applied to graduate school, and was accepted at Princeton. I met him midway through his first year there--just after he had dropped out of the mathematics department. He realized, he said, that what he was really meant to do was study physics; he applied to the physics department, and was accepted.

I was happy for him. But I lamented all the false starts he had made, and how his career opportunities appeared to be passing him by. Many years later, in 1987, I was reading the New York Times magazine and saw a full-page picture akin to a mug shot, of a thin man with a large head staring out of thick glasses. It was Ed Witten! I was stunned. What was he doing in the Times magazine? Well, he was being profiled as the Einstein of his age, a pioneer of a revolution in physics called "String Theory." Colleagues at Harvard and Princeton, who marvelled at his use of bizarre mathematics to solve physics problems, claimed that his ideas, popularly called a "theory of everything," might at last explain the origins and nature of the cosmos. Ed said modestly of his theories that it was really much easier to solve problems when you analyzed them in at least ten dimensions. Perhaps. Much clearer to me was an observation Ed made that appeared near the end of this article: every one of us has talent; the great challenge in life is finding an outlet to express it. I thought, he has truly earned the right to say that. And I realized that, for all my earlier concerns that he had squandered his time, in fact his entire career path--the ventures in history, linguistics, economics, politics, math, as well as physics--had been rewarding: a time of hard work, self-discovery, and new insight into his potential based on growing experience."

http://www.colby.edu/colby.mag/issues/84n3/ivory.html

Right on, swombat.

Last year, upon Iteration 27 of this same subject, I threw something like this together in jest:

                 Quality of HN Comments Over Time
   |                   . .
   |                  .   . 
  q| . .             .     .
  u|    .           .       .               . . .
  a|     .         .          .           .       .
  l|      .       .              .      .           .
  i|       .     .                  . .               .    
  t|        . . .                       you are here -->. .
  y|                                      (that's all)
   |________________________________________________________
    M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A
                    '09                     '10
                    

I must have been on to something because so many didn't realize it was a joke. What fun that was. All I have to do is shift the x axis every n months: some things never change.

Original thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604

I mean, it should only take 15 minutes to build a new one, right? ;)