I Peeked into My Node_Modules Directory and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next | Hacker News Reader

I Peeked into My Node_Modules Directory and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next

medium.com

13 pointsmartindale13 comments

"Imagine (...) if the car you drove to work had 291 parts."

I'm willing to bet a current car has an order of magnitude more - this is not your great-grandfather's Model T. Moreover, I am worried: only a handful of those parts are user-serviceable, not to mention those parts that are but a blackbox for proprietary firmware. The situation is quite similar here.

The carburetor in your grandfather's car had close to that many parts, let alone the rest of the car.

I'm willing to bet no more than one in five of the commenters in this thread, when the dust eventually settles and the reply links disappear, will have managed to get the joke.

Okay, that was all a joke? Ha ha, then. And get off my lawn!

Mehh, I’m glad this got dupe’d. This first time I read the article I found it interesting & the subject extremely valid.

That said, the article would be better if it alluded to real examples. The fictional ones are funny & they did get me to investigate … but I can where some creators or maintainers would be pissed at the notion they did include some of the cruft reported. There should be some mention of this or a link to each scrutized project’s repo.

Before anyone freaks out and posts a comment after reading the Express and Yummy issue, please keep reading the article.

I did read the rest of it and still didn't get the punchline.

It's total bullshit of a kind that's funny to Node devs tired of hearing about how their stack is terrible from people who like to deride things without really knowing very much about them.

A Twitter API call without authentication?! I call BS

My guess would be that like-tweet.js is a trash file left over in the repo from someone's testing.

Still this post does illustrate the alarming nature of software dependency hell and how who-knows-what sort of code might easily be slipped into repositories these days.

Or, you know, it's not actually there at all because this is absurdist satire and not meant to be taken literally.

I can't tell satire anymore. It's hard to come up with any more absurd than the real world.

Repost.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com