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Comment by throwaway4233 | Hacker News Reader

On inspecting the page where they list restaurants, I can see a several versions of jQuery code like this, for each cuisine.

$('#Fish & Chips').on('change', function () {

  if ($('#Fish & Chips').is(':checked')) {

    $('.Fish & Chips').css('background-color', '#3a606e;');

    $('.Fish & Chips').css('color', '#fff;');

  } else {

    $('.Fish & Chips').css('background-color', '#fff');

    $('.Fish & Chips').css('color', '#3a606e;');

 }

});

I have a good feeling this is more of copy-pasta code from either Copilot or ChatGPT or StackOverflow. That also explains why they handled encryption the way described in the article.

Dev: "Hey LLM, how do I pass data around in a secure way ?"

Bot: "You can encrypt the data before you send it, so that only users who have the relevant keys can read them"

Dev: "Hey LLM, it is not possible to access the data I have encrypted on the frontend"

Bot: "Here is the javascript code to decrypt the data you have passed then"

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I don't think this site was the work of an LLM. I think it was the result of somebody who just learned frontend JavaScript trying to hack together a website and business, with next to no practical knowledge.

There's all sorts of weird stuff, and it definitely looks like the kind of thing you'd see a beginner copy-pasting code and trying things out would create. The site sets a cookie containing the key-value pair "key":"value", for example.

> key-value pair "key":"value"

This reminds me of when I first started programming professionally. I’d write loops in PHP like

  foreach($orders_by_id as $key => $value) {
    $id = $key;
    $order = $value;
    # ...
  }

This was at a small logistics company you’ve never heard of (read: not the best development practices) so the habit was eventually caught in a code review and corrected. I must have written a dozen or so of those prior to that.

This kind of code is very common among folks who learned JS using jQuery ten years ago and never tried to learn anything else since that time.

"This is what you mean by CSS-in-JS, right?"

But seriously, those selectors are making me cringe. Does it even work with the spaces?

  $('[id="Fish & Chips"]')
  $('[class="Fish & Chips"]')

with attribute selectors like what you have mentioned it would work. But `$('#Fish & Chips')` most certainly will not, since jQuery would throw a syntax error.

It makes sense to throw a syntax error but I wasn't sure what the actual behavior would be. Made me wonder if jquery did some magic to understand what is being queried.

jQuery first came-out long before browsers had querySelector: it used a 100% JS reimplementation of a CSS selector parser and evaluator, which was eventually spun-off into its own library: Sizzle.js: https://github.com/jquery/sizzle - Surprisingly, jQuery didn't fully remove Sizzle until 2019 ( https://blog.jquery.com/2019/04/10/jquery-3-4-0-released/ ) - if that seems surprisingly recent, don't forget that querySelector wasn't added to the DOM API until 2013 - with only IE11 supporting it: some places were still using even IE6 well past then, so it makes sense for jQuery to support it for so long.

So using newer CSS selector features, like attribute value selectors, will work fine in post-Sizzle jQuery versions.

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