During the campaign I received hate email suggesting that I was gay, the Prime Minister told me that I was "brave", and many, many people assume I'm gay because of Turing.

It's such a shame that people think that way, after all, it couldn't possibly be the case that a straight man thought that treating a gay man badly was the wrong thing to do.

Good on Randi for coming out. Now let's move on to other things that are more important.

Twitter missed that part :)

It's a pity the article is so long, because otherwise you might have encountered this sentence before composing a reply:

It won't be enough to demand an early hour for going to bed. If you ban the late evening Internet surfing, you will just swap a dose of evening education for an idle tossing and turning in bed.

You can't necessarily change your biological clock by an effort of will, even if you know exactly what you are doing -- which few people do. Your biological clock has a "mind" of its own. No matter how much "responsibility" you take for your schedule, and how much intelligence and full-spectrum lighting you apply to the problem, you may find yourself unable to be optimally awake at 7am. Especially if you are a teenager.

Meanwhile, I'm afraid that everything about this reply rubs me the wrong way. It is a textbook example of its kind [1], and it illustrates why broken designs persist for decade upon decade. School day starts too early for the typical young person's biological clock? We survived it, so should you! Third-shift workers causing accidents at 3am? Your grandpa worked third shift and survived with 80% of his fingers intact; so should you! Medical interns forced to work continuous shifts of 24 hours or more, even though studies have shown that they therefore make avoidable errors that harm patients? We survived it, so should you!

It's so much easier to instruct the victim on coping techniques than it is to contemplate changing the system that it becomes a reflex: You poke an adult, and out pops a sanctimonious lecture.

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[1] The world would be a better place if every text editor came with an alarm that rang every time someone typed the word peers. ("Hi! Microsoft Word has noticed that you sound just like your mom! Can Clippy help you with that?")

Quoth the article: "Several million records a day need to be written to a table. These records are then read out once at the end of the day, summarised and then very rarely touched again."

This isn't a job for a database. This is a job for a log file. You might want to use a database to store the summarized data, of course; but bulk data which is written, never updated, and quite likely only ever read once? That's practically the definition of a log file.

Rather, the trouble with Ruby (and Rails) is that you end up having to implement these optimizations much faster than with a lighter-weight setup (like PHP on top of a vanilla database, with no ORM).

Hence all the discussion about your "stack", middleware, load-balancing, front-end servers, merbs, mongrels, passengers, and all the bewildering variety of gems required for the care and feeding of a production app. Rails developers write about armoring their app with all this extra stuff in a way reminiscent of MMORPG players equipping a character for battle.

It's a legitimate trade-off, and many people seem comfortable making it. But posts like this sidestep the issue. It's not that Ruby can't scale, is that Ruby makes you fuss over scaling right away.