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Comment by babuskov | Hacker News Reader

> All three components—the Editor, Signer, and completed document—must display accurately

Except they don't, so the whole blog post should be taken with a grain of salt.

I just signed a document a few days ago (on Sept 28th). I didn't like the default font for signature they offered, so I picked some other, script type of font. Everything was fine until I saved it. And suddenly, the signature switched to some completely different serif font.

The document wasn't really that important to me, so I let it go like that, but doesn't look like something I would trust currently.

EDIT: HelloSign people are obviously reading this. Instead of down-voting me, the proper approach would be to ask for details and fix your bugs. For example, I just tried another document on Windows and it worked properly. For the problematic one, I was using Firefox on macOS, so maybe you should look into that. I can also send you the document ID hash if you ask nice.

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I downvoted you because your first comment was "Hellosign is a joke." solely due to the aforementioned bug. Then you edited your comment.

You ran into a bug in some web software. It happens. Sounds like it was already fixed.

Meanwhile, the above blog post is a pretty amazing technical breakdown that is extremely detailed and well constructed. To reduce the entire company down to "a joke" because you ran into a bug once is just rude and dismissive. You might even agree because you changed your comment, although you still found a way to insult the blog post and the author.

And no, I don't work for Hellosign. I'm just a software engineer with some empathy for the hard work that has clearly gone into this. This is great knowledge sharing. Time and place.

Their job is not to make a best effort.

Their job is to provide an authoritative and trustworthy record.

This is quite serious if these documents are to be used in litigation. Generally I'm happy with best effort, but in the case of this situation where a reliable record is required, they've dropped the ball.

If you expect 100% bug free software, expect to pay literally hundreds of millions of dollars for it. It does exist but for some reason people prefer the mostly good stuff that costs $10.

What more effort can one give but best?

Maybe "best effort" is a misnomer, but it's often used to signify a general attempt without guarantee, rather than the absolute best effort possible. Like a delivery service making a "best effort" to complete delivery in 2 days, but there are no guarantees compared to the more expensive overnight service, or UDP vs TCP as far as packet guarantees.

In this case it seems they make a "best effort"(not guarantee) to offer uniform document display across browsers and OSes, which suggests they may only test the most popular browsers and OSes, and edge cases like Firefox on macOS may not get much love.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best-effort_delivery

Just be perfect everytime.

>> To reduce the entire company down to "a joke" because you ran into a bug once is just rude and dismissive.

It depends on the software and its purpose. Signatures are very serious business. They carry with them enormous legal weight and not getting them 100% right can have massive repercussions. Therefore, it’s all about trust. So then the question becomes, if trivial bugs like this were not caught during QA, what else must have slipped through?

> You might even agree because you changed your comment

Yes. I changed it like 5 seconds after posting. Even tried to create a new document to show how it failed, but it was on a different computer and I couldn't reproduce it here. It's probably a browser/OS combination.

> And no, I don't work for Hellosign.

Well, alright then. But you aren't the only one. The score on it has had many ups and downs today.

The 'proper approach' would presumably be to report this bug to them directly, to ensure that the right people see it, rather than assuming that downvotes are coming from the company!

> The 'proper approach' would presumably be to report this bug to them directly

That's rather presumptuous of you, as it implies your goals are more correct than anyone else's.

Perhaps next time the following would be more accurate:

> The 'proper approach' for me would presumably be to report this bug to them directly

Ah, it seems you're either unfamiliar with the culture at HelloSign, or a proponent of it.

With that lot, the assumption isn't much of a stretch.

> The 'proper approach' would presumably be to report this bug to them directly, to ensure that the right people see it

I do that for products where I'm a customer and I actually care about using. I got to sign that HelloSign document because one of my business partners requested it, so if anyone should report bugs, it would be them. This was my first time using HelloSign, and it left a bad first impression.

I just find it amusing that they are bragging on top of HN about a product feature that doesn't even work properly.

> rather than assuming that downvotes are coming from the company!

Who else then?

I downvoted you because of your edit. Extremely obnoxious accusing employees of downvote brigades with no proof whatsoever.

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>Who else then?

Me.

React the client side rendering by attaching dom element to create the html front end tool is really cool idea! Terrible idea in practice. graceful degradation goes out of window. Why are you rewriting the browser rendering implantation in a JS engine? It is clever, and dumb.

For visual consistence just stick with templating model and SSR. Also most tech people mostly turn off JS when they browse the web any way. React people, yes I'm looking at your!

In addition, as React/Redux type of projects gets big, it is a nightmare to maintain. Yes I know it is all about the coder. However, most front end developer (transitioning from jquery css/html) do not have the needed programming skills to develop something like React.

I would say React is more computer science ppl who wants to do front end approach. If that is the case, just go with mithril (they have JSX). Stop this insanity of using React just because hipster sillicon valley ppl are using it cause it is trendy and get high paying jobs.

> Also most tech people mostly turn off JS when they browse the web any way

any public stats that confirms this?

Yeah I really can't imagine that's true at all. I bet the rate of tech people turning off JS is like -- 1 in 100,000. But they _talk_ about it a lot, so it seems more like 1 in 100.

What Trump would sound like as a tech lead.

Seriously, there’s so many fake outlandish claims in this. Most tech people do not turn off JS because they know most of the web will break. They also know React projects scale really well and React is not a trendy project.

I think a lot of people here are running NoScript, more than you may realize. Yes, it breaks a ton of stuff. I give temporary whitelists to sites I actually want to run JS for and permanent whitelists are quite rare. Case in point: google only gets temporary whitelisting.

or ppl uses lynx2 also. Personally web site for informational purposes should always work on lynx2. JS is not needed for web page. Now if you are making SPA or an application on the web then that is something else.

> Why are you rewriting the browser rendering implantation in a JS engine?

Tree models.

Many developers have trouble understanding implicit relationships present in tree models. That is a cognitive barrier acting as a breaking force that eliminates any development. To solve for that frameworks provide an abstraction layer so that developers can envision the DOM more as a graph to be searched.

There are all kinds of performance penalties for superficially reinventing a technology like this, but the bigger limitation is lost creative potential. Instead of operating according to the capabilities of the language or API the developer is operating according to the limitations and most common approaches of the framework. For example templating is mostly easy. State management is ridiculously easy. But, the frameworks would have you think these are massive accomplishments requiring the titanic efforts of a super genius.

The only exception to use React type of front end framework is when one need a SPA like cordovva. Before you do that, be dame sure you need a SPA. Developer and CS people you are not in the fashion industry. Stop it!!!!! Stop chasing the trend.

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