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Comment by spankalee | Hacker News Reader

Your definition of astroturfing doesn't seem to match mine. Seth states several times on his blog that he works on Dart developer relations at Google. Blogging about Dart is part of his job, and in no way is he being deceiving about that fact.

I on the other hand am simply an engineer on the Dart team, as I must disclaim in this context.

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Where does he mention that other than the sidebar? I completely missed the fact that he works for Google while reading the article since it's never mentioned in the body of the article itself, and the article is written as if he's completely new to Dart and trying it out for fun. If he's not trying to present that image, then it's a really awful writing style.

Do you imply a conflict of interest? If you do, please state it explicitly. Your criticism as it stands doesn't add to the discussion and one could say that your writing style is really awful, too.

Sidebar is not an unusual place to place author bio and it is definitely enough for me.

Please don't insult his writing style. That's an ad hominem attack and it is the only thing in this conversation that doesn't belong here. You don't have to agree with his concerns, but please cut that out.

Okay, I'll state it explicitly: I feel that the article is actively deceptive about the background of the author, which makes me distrust the content of the article as well. The sidebar with his background is not visible on the first page of the content, so I would have had to interrupt reading the article to read it.

I say that it is a bad writing style because I am assuming good faith. I assume that the positioning of his bio is merely unfortunate and not specifically chosen to reduce the number of people who read it, and that the article is not actually trying to deceive me about the author. I think it is obvious that coming across as astroturfing to some subset of your readers when that isn't what you're trying to do is a bad thing.

The header of the layout says "Dart DevRel @ Google,", as you mention the sidebar has a bio (which I will move up), and I just added a note to the beginning of the article. Thank you for the feedback, and thanks for reading.

> I assume that the positioning of his bio is merely unfortunate and not specifically chosen to reduce the number of people who read it, and that the article is not actually trying to deceive me about the author

Oh please. Most blog authors barely manage to fill out an About page, let alone a sidebar and a big subheading at the top of the page that says who their employer is. If you're going to claim to be "assuming good faith", how about actually doing so?

I agree. This is getting your panties in a twist because a writer hasn't spelt out his putative conflict of interest in a way that conforms to your norms, when it is certainly plain enough for many readers (I had no problem at all figuring it out and wasn't at all offended by it).

The very top of the page:

Seth Ladd's Blog

Dart DevRel @ Google, web engineer, author, conference organizer.

What irks me is that the things he picks on have long since been solved. So the fact that he works at Google tells me that he knows better and is being intentionally deceitful. He picked a project that doesn't use any modern (by modern I mean in the last 5 years) practices like module loaders. It's fine to say that JavaScript doesn't have this by default, but that's not what he did here. He pretended to think that it's hard to know what the entry point file is.

I hope I didn't "pick on" anything. My attempt was to do a before/after and then list out what I, personally, learned. I thought I did say "JavaScript doesn't have some of these features like modules or promises by default" at the bottom of the article.

I picked a project that was written this year, and because it used Web Audio API and looked pretty. I was inspired by the original app, and I wanted to see what a Dart version would look like.

To be clear, I did find it hard to know where the entry point was. I literally opened each file, in order, to see where the program started. I find it hard to believe that other seasoned developers could look at the file names and instantly know exactly, to which line, where the app started.

The problem is that you picked a project that doesn't reflect current (again, defining current as in the past 5 years at least) development practices. Any decent JS project these days is using a modular loader and has a bower.json that has a 'main' property telling you the entry point.

I'm sure someone could look at early Dart projects and find things unpleasant about them compared to today.

This makes me curious... what's the adoption of module loader, bower, etc, today for new small-ish apps. That is, what is the archetype JS project look like? Is there such a thing?

So perhaps the question is, why didn't the original app use bower.json, module loader, etc. Was it that the startup cost is too high? Or was the app too "small" to worry about that?

What do we need to do to help all web devs to use all the awesome that does exist "out there"? It's all "built in" with Dart, what can we do for our JS devs?

The startup costs to using a module loader are the same startup costs to using Dart. That's the point I'm making, Dart is an alternative to JS tools, but it's still a choice that has to be explicitly made. You don't get Dart for free in any browser but Dartium.

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