30 ms·

What makes something "notable"?

34 points by lehgo 14y ago

http://gwan.com/blog/20121027.html

bitJericho 14y ago
This blog is really hard to read. What's with all the colored rectangles around the words. Tiring...
Einherji 14y ago
I hear this a lot. Node.js seems to have gained quite a bit of popularity though, I see developers swear by it like a religion regularly.
- w0utert 14y ago
  > I see developers swear by it like a religion regularly. To me, that signals there is at least something fishy about the technology. I'm not saying Node is bad, but I sincerely have the impression that a large majority of developers who like Node.js are mainly using it because it's 'hot technology' right now, not because it fits their technology problem so well. Event-based asynchronous servers are nice for some things, but definitely not for everything. If that were the case, Twistd and Tornado would have been much more popular before Node.js even existed. My perception is that Node.js is primarily popular because it attracted hordes of client-side developers to server programming, something that used to be too inaccessible before. Hard to dislike something that instantly gives you the impression you can write your own servers.
  - Jare 14y ago
    Node is not everything to everyone, but for a lot of people, it's the right technology at the right time. - Easy to install and use, especially for hordes of client side developers. - Easy to manage packages and dependencies via npm. - Fast and scalable for writing logic around data transportation.
    - w0utert 14y ago
      I would say Python frameworks like Flask or Pyramid offer the first 2 benefits as well, and when used properly in combination with a caching proxy and container server that allows asynchronous processing the 3rd benefit too. So they are not unique to Node.js although out-of-the-box, as a standalone application server, Node will be faster. Which leaves the 'JavaScript comfort zone' as the main driver of Node popularity, which while understandable, IMO isn't exactly a technological benefit, rather a downside (I don't like JavaScript, at all).
  - richardmarr 14y ago
    > To me, that signals there is at least something fishy about the technology. > I'm not saying Node is bad, but... You're giving off slightly mixed messages there.
mikkom 14y ago
That's some really odd text formatting.
- lis 14y ago
  At first I thought he used some kind of text-generator, where you just have to fill in some blanks with buzzwords.
notallama 14y ago
how is this website so ugly?
p3drosola 14y ago
Lol, nice try at a bit of self-promotion there. This guy obviously doesn't know node. He's comparing node.js to a dedicated webserver, when they are completely different things.
- dccoolgai 14y ago
  Agreed - the article content is misleading at best..and some of the other comments on this thread smell like astroturf.
tmitchel2 14y ago
These guys sound like cry babies
benjaminRRR 14y ago
Like others I couldn't get beyond the formatting - the website looked like it was shouting at me. Hard to take something seriously when it's displayed like a ransom note.
olalonde 14y ago
tl;dr: Guy is angry at Wikipedia because his web server doesn't meet Wikipedia's "notability" requirements while Node.js does. Ah, also his server is faster than Node.js. Here's a HN comment thread about G-WAN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113514 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113514
boothead 14y ago
I've seen some comments/postings to HN about g-wan, and I still can't work out if it's some really elaborate troll or not. Has anyone played with it? I can't imagine that this very strange license section in the FAQ: http://gwan.ch/faq#license http://gwan.ch/faq#license, is going to help people want to try it! edit Grammar
- Torn 14y ago
  The formatting and the delivery on that site are confusing; both feel somewhat aggressive. It could just be a chinese / cultural / marketing thing we're not used to, or maybe the author's a little too confident. Based on a quick google, it does appear GWAN is massively fast at serving static files, and it does appear to be gaining traction for script-based use-cases. I'd be interested in seeing more real-world benchmarks.
  - FooBarWidget 14y ago
    The guy is from Switzerland: http://gwan.ch/about http://gwan.ch/about Is anybody actually using G-WAN in production?
- MetaCosm 14y ago
  It isn't a troll, the performance numbers are real and it is a fairly slick product. Bad marketing, bad licensing, crazy (ala Tesla) developer and owner being allowed to dump his brain onto the corporate site are the main problems. When we deep dove on it, we were driven off by the site oddities and authors nonsense more than the tech (which impressed us) -- but you don't put your corporation in the hands of crazy -- even with "Source Insurance" (which is a great idea, but needs a little more explanation for US lawyers). That said, I am reviewing it again because I am dealing with an actual CPU bound problem domain.
klearvue 14y ago
The aggressive tone is off-putting, the formatting is distracting and the target of criticism seems to be Wikipedia, as well as Node. Talk about concurrency.
FooBarWidget 14y ago
I modded this submission up not because I agree with it but because I want a discussion. The G-WAN author has been known being... confident. He claims to be faster and more scalable than Nginx by a significant factor. He attributes the speed partially to the fact that his code contains few branches, where he defines even function calls as branches. Both statements are bold claims, and I can only imagine how it would take a genius to maintain "branchless" code like that. Leaving that aside, I feel that the article focuses too much on the hype words. Yes some of the hype is over the top and focuses too much on the coolness factor, yes some of the reasons given for using Node is total nonsense (e.g. what he quoted from the Wikipedia article). But none of that invalidates the valid reasons for choosing Node: - Javascript is so much easier to program for than C/C++. This is a fact; he mentioned it several times in his article but then brushes off these claims. Writing Phusion Passenger 4's new evented architecture in C++ has been an extremely intensive effort. There's just so much you need to be aware of and take care of, Javascript would have speeded up development significantly. If course we couldn't and didn't: being system software, Phusion Passenger's core cannot rely on Javascript and must be optimized for speed. - Javascript is fast enough for quite a lot of server software. Of course C wipes the floor with everything. If you don't mind spending 4 times longer to ship your product to market. Oh yeah, good luck recruiting that brilliant C programmer, I hope you live in a place where they are easy to come by. His bold claim that G-WAN's Javascript engine uses 2444x less resources is a bold one, but if in the end you have 2 million users and you can still handle them with 1 or 2 servers, then switching to G-WAN does not give you a lot of added advantage. - G-WAN runs everything in-process!! Of course everything is faster then!!! It's because there's no need to perform inter-process communication and CPU synchronization, which often require (relatively slow) kernel intervention. But if one component dies, your entire web server goes down. Better hope the application programmer never makes a mistake. With Phusion Passenger we've explicitly chosen not to utilize an in-process architecture because it causes to much pain, even if it's faster. There's also at least one logical fallacy in the article: _"Node.js' CPU & RAM usage is so high that the scale had to be resized. The chaotic curves do not give the feeling of anything seriously engineered."_ He puts two separate scales in the same graph and then claims this? That doesn't make any sense. Where is the source code for the benchmark? How did the benchmark look like and what's the methodology? No mention of it. I wish the G-WAN author would focus more on the technicalities instead of trying to fight the hype. That would make the entire article much more interesting. Why is G-WAN faster? What's the difference between Node and G-WAN's Javascript engine? Etcetera. G-WAN is a very interesting product but it would have so much more potential if the author communicates in a less inflammatory and emotional way, and behaves more professionally.
FennNaten 14y ago
Managed to get throught the odd formatting, and I don't think the article's worth it. That's too bad, 'cause the idea looked interesting: it's true that parts of developers' community are subject to the "go onto hype" phenomenon, and I'd have read with pleasure a serious analysis of that, which could open a constructive debate. But here it's only a big rant mixed with conspiracy theory, about "why does everybody speaks about anything but g-wan", made up by somebody who obviously wants to get some buzz for his product.
soup10 14y ago
I see most new developments in web technologies as layers upon layers of frameworks designed to make it easier to create ever more complex web-based applications that will ultimately become irrelevant when people realize that the complexity and the scaling requirements of the applications being created are much better served by normal non-web focused programming languages. With the success of the app store on iOS, vendors are realizing the value of eliminating the friction involved in installing native 'apps'. The sooner this happens the better, since it will mean much better software overall. Mail clients, word processors and mapping applications should not be written in javascript. It's a damn shame that the OS vendors refuse to work together to make easily cross-platform native applications a reality. Thankfully though, if they create frictionless ways to use native code, frameworks and what not should be able to bridge the gap between OS specific API's and the hardware without performance issues. Moore's law will never make javascript word-processors good. Javascript on the back-end just makes no sense to me whatsoever. Why not pick a programming language that was designed for the job, not something that was hacked together so it's somewhat passable at the job? (by native i'm referring to languages traditionally used to bulid complex software, not just c/c++)
FooBarWidget 14y ago
This submission was originally called "Node.js is all just hype"! Apparently after 10 comments, the submitter renamed it to "What makes something notable?". At http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113514 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113514 I read that: "Pierre (the sole G-WAN author) says some funny things. He also defends G-WAN using dummy accounts all over the internet (StackOverflow, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc)." The submitter, lehgo, happens to be created a week ago, and his only submissions have been about G-WAN. Coincidence?
- lehgo 14y ago
  I just found the gwan topic interesting and the blog posts even more so. To eliminate any sort of crazy conspiracy theories, I am in no way shape and or form associated with gwan,nginx,msql,mongodb ect ect. I enjoy using gwan for my projects. So far my stack is usually nginx+gwan+mysql+mongodb.I use nginx for it's modules and it's PHP support. I use gwan to write C scripts and which is basically the original PHP scripts just converted to C for way better performance. I'v used PHP for a while now so much that I have grown to absolutely hate how slow it is. Still, PHP is easy to dev with so I keep it in my stack. Also i did not rename the topic someone else did as stated in one of the first comments by the person who actually did the change. That being said you are incorrect on your first point "submitter renamed it" and paranoid on your second "Coincidence?". I usually post about gwan that being only 2 topics so far because it just so happens to be my current interest in my field of work.
  - FooBarWidget 14y ago
    If what you're saying is legit then I encourage you to continue doing what you've been doing. I too am interested in G-WAN, but I just wish the documentation and articles have more technical substance, and I wish someone with a long, good track record can comment on it.
scotty79 14y ago
They really should make this open source and switch to community model of development. Same thing I've seen with Rebol. Freeware but closed source = no trust from users.
- MetaCosm 14y ago
  It is kinda sad. The performance of his stack is second to none (in my testing he undersells it). I really do like configuration via directory structure, and it has various cool tooling in it. That said, yeah, the freeware / closed source seems to be the worst combo. But who would buy a web server they couldn't test first? Also, the guys crazy (ala Tesla, crazy smart) personality is allowed to shine though on his site. He needs a marketing person to keep him the hell away from the customers. Make an ultra cheap or developers "trail" (no freeware), etc.
  - klue 14y ago
    > "who would buy a web server they couldn't test first?" G-WAN is a freeware that can be downloaded from its web site. How "neutral" in a debate is such kind of false claims that G-WAN can't be tested?
    - FooBarWidget 14y ago
      Klue, calm down. The website's navigation isn't exactly the most intuitive. I can imagine that to a lot of people it isn't immediately obvious that they can download and use it for free.
bulletmagnet 14y ago
I got a strong time cube vibe from that site.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
dano 14y ago
There are various 'tells' in the user documentation that indicates a lack of flexibility in the product and its authors. That aside, it is a very fast server and if you write your servlets in C, those too will be quite speedy. These are some of the points in the documentation that give some discomfort. There are legitimate reasons to have additional flexibility and I really don't care to have language rants in otherwise objective and factual user documentation. - Log files are set to a fixed naming convention - Log files are rotated at midnight - it appears there is no method of adjusting this time period - On mime-types "As this list is hard-coded you cannot add MIME types in G-WAN but we will add any type that makes sense if users ask for it." - "How many languages do you need to learn if one of them works better than all? C made Unix, Windows, games, PDF viewers, Web browsers. C servlets will be limited by your sole imagination. C survived 40 years for a reason: it fits the task." - "And take Javascript's optional semicolon to end statements (that was the case in some pointlessly complex parts of the JS code of the demo: a JS function defining a nested function as a parameter...). When a carriage-return replaces a semicolon then G-WAN's JS minifying (also used with HTML embedding JS) breaks the code by removing carriage-returns that 40-year-old C can safely ditch (not the more 'modern' Javascript which is far more commonly reformated to lower network latency). The mark of pure genius at work: creating problems that have no reason to exist."

34 points by lehgo 14y ago

http://gwan.com/blog/20121027.html

bitJericho 14y ago

This blog is really hard to read. What's with all the colored rectangles around the words. Tiring...

Einherji 14y ago

I hear this a lot. Node.js seems to have gained quite a bit of popularity though, I see developers swear by it like a religion regularly.

w0utert 14y ago
> I see developers swear by it like a religion regularly. To me, that signals there is at least something fishy about the technology. I'm not saying Node is bad, but I sincerely have the impression that a large majority of developers who like Node.js are mainly using it because it's 'hot technology' right now, not because it fits their technology problem so well. Event-based asynchronous servers are nice for some things, but definitely not for everything. If that were the case, Twistd and Tornado would have been much more popular before Node.js even existed. My perception is that Node.js is primarily popular because it attracted hordes of client-side developers to server programming, something that used to be too inaccessible before. Hard to dislike something that instantly gives you the impression you can write your own servers.
- Jare 14y ago
  Node is not everything to everyone, but for a lot of people, it's the right technology at the right time. - Easy to install and use, especially for hordes of client side developers. - Easy to manage packages and dependencies via npm. - Fast and scalable for writing logic around data transportation.
  - w0utert 14y ago
    I would say Python frameworks like Flask or Pyramid offer the first 2 benefits as well, and when used properly in combination with a caching proxy and container server that allows asynchronous processing the 3rd benefit too. So they are not unique to Node.js although out-of-the-box, as a standalone application server, Node will be faster. Which leaves the 'JavaScript comfort zone' as the main driver of Node popularity, which while understandable, IMO isn't exactly a technological benefit, rather a downside (I don't like JavaScript, at all).
- richardmarr 14y ago
  > To me, that signals there is at least something fishy about the technology. > I'm not saying Node is bad, but... You're giving off slightly mixed messages there.

mikkom 14y ago

That's some really odd text formatting.

lis 14y ago
At first I thought he used some kind of text-generator, where you just have to fill in some blanks with buzzwords.

notallama 14y ago

how is this website so ugly?

p3drosola 14y ago

Lol, nice try at a bit of self-promotion there. This guy obviously doesn't know node. He's comparing node.js to a dedicated webserver, when they are completely different things.

dccoolgai 14y ago
Agreed - the article content is misleading at best..and some of the other comments on this thread smell like astroturf.

tmitchel2 14y ago

These guys sound like cry babies

benjaminRRR 14y ago

Like others I couldn't get beyond the formatting - the website looked like it was shouting at me. Hard to take something seriously when it's displayed like a ransom note.

olalonde 14y ago

tl;dr: Guy is angry at Wikipedia because his web server doesn't meet Wikipedia's "notability" requirements while Node.js does. Ah, also his server is faster than Node.js. Here's a HN comment thread about G-WAN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113514 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113514

boothead 14y ago

I've seen some comments/postings to HN about g-wan, and I still can't work out if it's some really elaborate troll or not. Has anyone played with it? I can't imagine that this very strange license section in the FAQ: http://gwan.ch/faq#license http://gwan.ch/faq#license, is going to help people want to try it! edit Grammar

Torn 14y ago
The formatting and the delivery on that site are confusing; both feel somewhat aggressive. It could just be a chinese / cultural / marketing thing we're not used to, or maybe the author's a little too confident. Based on a quick google, it does appear GWAN is massively fast at serving static files, and it does appear to be gaining traction for script-based use-cases. I'd be interested in seeing more real-world benchmarks.
- FooBarWidget 14y ago
  The guy is from Switzerland: http://gwan.ch/about http://gwan.ch/about Is anybody actually using G-WAN in production?
MetaCosm 14y ago
It isn't a troll, the performance numbers are real and it is a fairly slick product. Bad marketing, bad licensing, crazy (ala Tesla) developer and owner being allowed to dump his brain onto the corporate site are the main problems. When we deep dove on it, we were driven off by the site oddities and authors nonsense more than the tech (which impressed us) -- but you don't put your corporation in the hands of crazy -- even with "Source Insurance" (which is a great idea, but needs a little more explanation for US lawyers). That said, I am reviewing it again because I am dealing with an actual CPU bound problem domain.

klearvue 14y ago

The aggressive tone is off-putting, the formatting is distracting and the target of criticism seems to be Wikipedia, as well as Node. Talk about concurrency.

FooBarWidget 14y ago

I modded this submission up not because I agree with it but because I want a discussion. The G-WAN author has been known being... confident. He claims to be faster and more scalable than Nginx by a significant factor. He attributes the speed partially to the fact that his code contains few branches, where he defines even function calls as branches. Both statements are bold claims, and I can only imagine how it would take a genius to maintain "branchless" code like that. Leaving that aside, I feel that the article focuses too much on the hype words. Yes some of the hype is over the top and focuses too much on the coolness factor, yes some of the reasons given for using Node is total nonsense (e.g. what he quoted from the Wikipedia article). But none of that invalidates the valid reasons for choosing Node: - Javascript is so much easier to program for than C/C++. This is a fact; he mentioned it several times in his article but then brushes off these claims. Writing Phusion Passenger 4's new evented architecture in C++ has been an extremely intensive effort. There's just so much you need to be aware of and take care of, Javascript would have speeded up development significantly. If course we couldn't and didn't: being system software, Phusion Passenger's core cannot rely on Javascript and must be optimized for speed. - Javascript is fast enough for quite a lot of server software. Of course C wipes the floor with everything. If you don't mind spending 4 times longer to ship your product to market. Oh yeah, good luck recruiting that brilliant C programmer, I hope you live in a place where they are easy to come by. His bold claim that G-WAN's Javascript engine uses 2444x less resources is a bold one, but if in the end you have 2 million users and you can still handle them with 1 or 2 servers, then switching to G-WAN does not give you a lot of added advantage. - G-WAN runs everything in-process!! Of course everything is faster then!!! It's because there's no need to perform inter-process communication and CPU synchronization, which often require (relatively slow) kernel intervention. But if one component dies, your entire web server goes down. Better hope the application programmer never makes a mistake. With Phusion Passenger we've explicitly chosen not to utilize an in-process architecture because it causes to much pain, even if it's faster. There's also at least one logical fallacy in the article: _"Node.js' CPU & RAM usage is so high that the scale had to be resized. The chaotic curves do not give the feeling of anything seriously engineered."_ He puts two separate scales in the same graph and then claims this? That doesn't make any sense. Where is the source code for the benchmark? How did the benchmark look like and what's the methodology? No mention of it. I wish the G-WAN author would focus more on the technicalities instead of trying to fight the hype. That would make the entire article much more interesting. Why is G-WAN faster? What's the difference between Node and G-WAN's Javascript engine? Etcetera. G-WAN is a very interesting product but it would have so much more potential if the author communicates in a less inflammatory and emotional way, and behaves more professionally.

FennNaten 14y ago

Managed to get throught the odd formatting, and I don't think the article's worth it. That's too bad, 'cause the idea looked interesting: it's true that parts of developers' community are subject to the "go onto hype" phenomenon, and I'd have read with pleasure a serious analysis of that, which could open a constructive debate. But here it's only a big rant mixed with conspiracy theory, about "why does everybody speaks about anything but g-wan", made up by somebody who obviously wants to get some buzz for his product.

soup10 14y ago

I see most new developments in web technologies as layers upon layers of frameworks designed to make it easier to create ever more complex web-based applications that will ultimately become irrelevant when people realize that the complexity and the scaling requirements of the applications being created are much better served by normal non-web focused programming languages. With the success of the app store on iOS, vendors are realizing the value of eliminating the friction involved in installing native 'apps'. The sooner this happens the better, since it will mean much better software overall. Mail clients, word processors and mapping applications should not be written in javascript. It's a damn shame that the OS vendors refuse to work together to make easily cross-platform native applications a reality. Thankfully though, if they create frictionless ways to use native code, frameworks and what not should be able to bridge the gap between OS specific API's and the hardware without performance issues. Moore's law will never make javascript word-processors good. Javascript on the back-end just makes no sense to me whatsoever. Why not pick a programming language that was designed for the job, not something that was hacked together so it's somewhat passable at the job? (by native i'm referring to languages traditionally used to bulid complex software, not just c/c++)

FooBarWidget 14y ago

This submission was originally called "Node.js is all just hype"! Apparently after 10 comments, the submitter renamed it to "What makes something notable?". At http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113514 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113514 I read that: "Pierre (the sole G-WAN author) says some funny things. He also defends G-WAN using dummy accounts all over the internet (StackOverflow, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc)." The submitter, lehgo, happens to be created a week ago, and his only submissions have been about G-WAN. Coincidence?

lehgo 14y ago
I just found the gwan topic interesting and the blog posts even more so. To eliminate any sort of crazy conspiracy theories, I am in no way shape and or form associated with gwan,nginx,msql,mongodb ect ect. I enjoy using gwan for my projects. So far my stack is usually nginx+gwan+mysql+mongodb.I use nginx for it's modules and it's PHP support. I use gwan to write C scripts and which is basically the original PHP scripts just converted to C for way better performance. I'v used PHP for a while now so much that I have grown to absolutely hate how slow it is. Still, PHP is easy to dev with so I keep it in my stack. Also i did not rename the topic someone else did as stated in one of the first comments by the person who actually did the change. That being said you are incorrect on your first point "submitter renamed it" and paranoid on your second "Coincidence?". I usually post about gwan that being only 2 topics so far because it just so happens to be my current interest in my field of work.
- FooBarWidget 14y ago
  If what you're saying is legit then I encourage you to continue doing what you've been doing. I too am interested in G-WAN, but I just wish the documentation and articles have more technical substance, and I wish someone with a long, good track record can comment on it.

scotty79 14y ago

They really should make this open source and switch to community model of development. Same thing I've seen with Rebol. Freeware but closed source = no trust from users.

MetaCosm 14y ago
It is kinda sad. The performance of his stack is second to none (in my testing he undersells it). I really do like configuration via directory structure, and it has various cool tooling in it. That said, yeah, the freeware / closed source seems to be the worst combo. But who would buy a web server they couldn't test first? Also, the guys crazy (ala Tesla, crazy smart) personality is allowed to shine though on his site. He needs a marketing person to keep him the hell away from the customers. Make an ultra cheap or developers "trail" (no freeware), etc.
- klue 14y ago
  > "who would buy a web server they couldn't test first?" G-WAN is a freeware that can be downloaded from its web site. How "neutral" in a debate is such kind of false claims that G-WAN can't be tested?
  - FooBarWidget 14y ago
    Klue, calm down. The website's navigation isn't exactly the most intuitive. I can imagine that to a lot of people it isn't immediately obvious that they can download and use it for free.

bulletmagnet 14y ago

I got a strong time cube vibe from that site.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

dano 14y ago

There are various 'tells' in the user documentation that indicates a lack of flexibility in the product and its authors. That aside, it is a very fast server and if you write your servlets in C, those too will be quite speedy. These are some of the points in the documentation that give some discomfort. There are legitimate reasons to have additional flexibility and I really don't care to have language rants in otherwise objective and factual user documentation. - Log files are set to a fixed naming convention - Log files are rotated at midnight - it appears there is no method of adjusting this time period - On mime-types "As this list is hard-coded you cannot add MIME types in G-WAN but we will add any type that makes sense if users ask for it." - "How many languages do you need to learn if one of them works better than all? C made Unix, Windows, games, PDF viewers, Web browsers. C servlets will be limited by your sole imagination. C survived 40 years for a reason: it fits the task." - "And take Javascript's optional semicolon to end statements (that was the case in some pointlessly complex parts of the JS code of the demo: a JS function defining a nested function as a parameter...). When a carriage-return replaces a semicolon then G-WAN's JS minifying (also used with HTML embedding JS) breaks the code by removing carriage-returns that 40-year-old C can safely ditch (not the more 'modern' Javascript which is far more commonly reformated to lower network latency). The mark of pure genius at work: creating problems that have no reason to exist."