Hacker News Reader

Comment by solomone | Hacker News Reader

I get that it's trying to be funny, but is it really no longer possible to create a website with a single arrow that doesn't have to pull down all this cruft ?

  <link href="bower_components/bootstrap/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet">
  <link href="bower_components/bootstrap-social/bootstrap-social.css" rel="stylesheet">
  <link href="bower_components/font-awesome/css/font-awesome.min.css" rel="stylesheet">
  <link href="assets/css/ie10-viewport-bug-workaround.css" rel="stylesheet">
  <link href="cover.css" rel="stylesheet">

  <script src="bower_components/jquery/dist/jquery.min.js"></script>
  <script>window.jQuery || document.write('<script src="../../assets/js/vendor/jquery.min.js"><\/script>')</script>
  <script src="bower_components/bootstrap/dist/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script> 
  <script src="assets/js/ie10-viewport-bug-workaround.js"></script>

View on HN

Agreed. I was curious as to how the random numbers were being generated (math.random()? Something else?), so I went to look at the source code. I expected `assets/js/src/application.js` to be the main file (I mean, look at that name. What else would it be?)

I start reading the code, and pretty soon it starts messing with the clipboard, and it even pulls in Flash [1]:

> // Config ZeroClipboard

> ZeroClipboard.config({

> moviePath: '/assets/flash/ZeroClipboard.swf',

> hoverClass: 'btn-clipboard-hover'

> })

In all honesty, this website serves more as an indication of why the TSA spending this much money on such code may actually be justified, rather than effectively mocking the cost, which I think was its intent. How many security holes do you think this website is subject to? Can we know for certain that none of these dependencies are malicious or contain backdoors?

Security can't be taken lightly. And yes - for an app like this, it's much more important that it be secure than that it look good. I doubt a browser application is really the right approach anyway, given those concerns.

[1] https://github.com/arik-so/tsa/blob/master/assets/js/src/app...

> I start reading the code, and pretty soon it starts messing with the clipboard, and it even pulls in Flash

I admit to thinking the dependency overkill for random arrows was part the joke. A la https://github.com/jezen/is-thirteen

Javascript is getting freakishly absurd. What is wrong with the JS ecosystem? This feels like XML all over again.

I know not all engineers do this, but this crap is what caused me to buy a new laptop. I was fine with my existing tools and workflow, but websites have gotten so slow and ridiculous. It's largely Javascript's fault.

I used to get angry about walled garden app stores, but lately I find myself hating the web. I don't dislike it, but I think we went on a really lame detour.

As an aside, Javascript ads are worse than Flash ads ever were.

In this case a few lines of CSS and a few lines of JavaScript would have delivered the exact same result, including all necessary responsiveness. We have gotten so far away from bare bones, non-jquery based development that this kind of heft has become the standard starting point for all projects. It certainly isn't my style, but then I didn't go to Stanford and don't work for a unicorn, so perhaps I am the unenlightened one.

That said, I don't think it's necessary to criticize a satirical project like this on technical grounds. The idea is great; the developer probably just used his boilerplate frameworks that are usually used for much more complex projects in order to save time.

Make a thing responsive, people bitch about how many plugins you're using.

Make a thing vanilla, people bitch about how it doesn't work on their phone.

Make 300k off a website and people make a competitor to mock the value you delivered. People are stupid and you can't win. They will always try to force everyone to race to the bottom, because if they can't have it why should you?

A few lines of CSS could have done the trick. Read:

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

But the app only needs to work on Mobile Safari (let's say 8 or higher?). Not rocket science to make it vanilla.

No it needs to work in any hn readers browser. Different business requirements entirely! The business case here is to get hn traffic to that site and start a discussion.

None of that stuff is necessary to make things responsive. In fact HTML is responsive by default.

width and floats dont need plugins.

I'd love to see a ridiculously over-engineered version. Something like a website running in a browser in Windows 95 running in a javascript DOSBOX emulator.

Saw a company running a thick client in a browser with a remote desktop plugin irl, and a propietary one at that (nx something)

They are probably just using a quickstart file that has all of those things included as defaults.

I have a repo I clone for my one-off projects with all the boilerplate I could possibly need for a weekend project. None of the projects actually end up using all of that stuff, but I'm not bothered by the lack of professional optimization in my "for fun only" projects.

Yes.

But it will hurt your career. How will people know if you keep up with modern development techniques?

Does anyone really give a shit that PG (or whoever makes HN now) is still using tables in 2016?

Upvoted.

Not that it makes the problem of being a developer who may need to convince other developers they're a good developer go away. Just that it puts the problem in context and shows a way one might be able to make it go away.

Yeah, I hear you I get funny looks every time I make fun of 'whatever driven development', 'microservices', etc. It works well as I generally dislike working on teams that are just following fads.

13. Rule of Economy: Programming time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time.

15. Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it.[1]

[1] https://www.slingcode.com/ref/ProgrammingPhilosophies.pdf

Is programming time expensive?

Let's say you have a mobile app used by 1 billion people every day. It sounds crazy, but I bet a fair number of people in this forum contribute to such an application.

Imagine you want to make an optimization that increases battery life by 1%. Assume a 30Wh battery and that it's charged once per day. Over the two year lifetime of the phone, at $0.10 per KWh, that change would save your users 21.9 million dollars in aggregate. Even with a team of 40 people making $500,000 per year working for a year, you still increase the efficiency of society with that change!

(I know, this ignores the opportunity cost of adding a new feature before your competitor, or focusing on something that will bring more user happiness, or the externality that users don't notice the $0.00003 they're paying to supply your app with electricity. But the point is, we have a lot of power, and our time is much cheaper when multiplied proportionally to that impact.)

Similarly, my general rule for optimization is: Add up all the time that will ever be spent waiting on this code by all users ever. If that's less than the time required to implement the optimization, don't bother.

That eliminates a surprising number of tempting gold-plating situations that occur in rarely-executed code.

On the other hand, cutting 1 second of wait from a million daily active users adds up to whole human lifetimes saved rather quickly.

The usual (and frankly convincing) argument is that you won't get to a billion users without using the cruft as a means of scaffolding to help change and iterate and try new features, whatever the behind the scenes architecture looks like

Then, when you have 100 million users, you can afford a team of optimisation specialists to strip out that 1% battery life

But yes, it seems on average npm pulls in 1,000 upstream packages when you just try making a vanilla project of any complexity

Meh, it's probably still less overengineered than the actual TSA app.

Of course it's possible - it's just that no one will take it or the resume of the person who wrote it seriously.

Web app engineers display complexity like peacocks displaying their plumage.

I think what your actual objection is that it's so easy to make a simple website with all that cruft. Much or all of that stuff comes in one of the easiest to find and download "starter packs" from Bootstrap. You can take the time to figure out what everything does and slim it down or just ship it.

Gotta be #responsive

Exactly! My first attempt was just 10 lines of HTML code, but it was a real pain to do the vertical centering on iOS. So I tried a Bootstrap template, saw that even they didn't do the centering on iOS, but was too lazy to change it back.

Modern iOS should support flexbox, which should get you what you want with a few lines of CSS. http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox

IE8 support brotha

Or you can throw this in a table and be done with it.

Haven't you heard? Only noobs use tables. Also your design totally won't scale and isn't internet grade :)

iOS does, but it is a bit funky sometimes and has some weird bugs.

http://codepen.io/shshaw/full/gEiDt

Lol. Please. Let's avoid a discussion about how a useless site could be built better.

I see this as a polyfill for import statements which are not implemented in the browser

Reply on news.ycombinator.com