Dr_tldr

The argument that React will be heavier than your own implementation is clearly true.

The argument that it'll take less time to develop, document, and test your own implementation than to take advantage of the React ecosystem is clearly untrue.

As the public demands higher quality images and video, code weight matters less and less. If you're not serving up 3mb+ of high-res images and/or video and making multiple AJAX calls, your site is highly specialized and outside of the mainstream. It's not an insult or a judgement, it's an easily verifiable fact by looking at Alexa ratings.

If you need to save 50-100kb that badly, use a slightly smaller image file or a slightly shorter video, don't add hundreds to thousands of hours of dev time. And if you're developing for mobile, do as much server-side rendering as you can and add a debounce for potentially costly operations, it's really not that hard.

yes, clearly swimming seamlessly between what you think should exist and what actually exists and then only distinguishing between the two when you're called out is both clear communication and rhetorically effective.

Especially on the internet, where everyone has full context of your life and personal views, can see your face, listen to your intonation, and hear the comment out loud in your voice, as it was intended.

Oh wait...

It's not like leaving incoherent posts on HN is a war crime, but it makes the site less good when you do that. So maybe you shouldn't do that.

Rigorous? Citation needed, since a great deal of evidence points to the opposite--that these are politically motivated kangaroo courts with decisions being made by a single individual with no appeals process and no oversight.

Your comment is highly technical, critical, but still very fair. This is why I love HN.

Ask anyone sufficiently conservative/radical feminist which groups of people they think are "probably rapists", and you get the same results as baseless discrimination but through a different explanation.

People tend to think "probably" a lot more often with a lot less evidence about individuals or groups they dislike for any reason.

For instance, I think you're probably a crypto-nazi and should lose your job, but that's almost certainly a totally unfair belief based on my very limited and highly subjective viewpoint.

What if gay and transgendered people "creep you the fuck out", or orthodox jews, or people in wheelchairs?

Once you start making the case for expulsion and the application of a sliding scale of guilt due entirely to other people's beliefs about an unpopular individual or group as fine in principle, you've basically undone the entire enlightenment in law, governance, and ethics.

This is equivalent to an article arguing that 50 mb/s internet isn't fast enough and every community should be offered 100 mb/s internet, even if doing so causes large net losses to the providers.

They don't produce any evidence that the difference between one day and two day shipping has a negative impact on people's ability to increase the amount of available goods and obtain them at lower prices. Is there some mysterious perishable, necessary good that can only be ordered 24 hours in advance that unlocks upward mobility?

My god, how could anyone be expected to overcome poverty and inequality without same-day prime delivery? Sure there's still two-day prime delivery that the majority of Amazon Prime members of all races have, but clearly that's no different than the grim inequality of segregated water fountains and poll taxes.

The implied conclusion is that a business should do something that loses them revenue if the alternative is a vague insinuation of structural racism. By this same logic, luxury car dealerships should build their showrooms in inner-city ghettos and rural areas because everyone has a right to test drive a Ferrari, economics be damned.

Unix isn't for end users, it's for developers to build on top of to give things to end users. Linux on desktop already happened years and years ago if you work for a tech company, and that's probably about as far as it needs to go.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptab...

This is Steve Yegge's understanding of the Lisp community, and I should clarify that I don't think the XML monstrosities we all work with are "all their fault", but that, on the whole, the Lisp community and enterprise coders were mutually antagonistic.

Javascript after ES3 really wasn't broken at all, just most people coding in it didn't know how to take advantage of it. No language can prevent someone dedicated to bad code architecture from writing bad code. A Lisp programmer would've found a lot of comfortable features and powerful patterns and been able to share them, but most of their efforts were wasted denouncing everyone outside of their tiny sect. The end result was that most people learning JavaScript were taught how to code like it was broken Java because most of the resources were written by Enterprise Java devs who didn't understand what a fundamentally impoverished language Java is.

I want to disagree with you more here, but Polymer really does suck.

I would be interested in a detailed explanation of why websockets are a "dumb hack." Duplex streams much more closely map to what web apps actually need to do than dealing with an HTTP request-response cycle. In what way is streaming a hack and making requests that were originally designed to serve up new pages not a hack?

Your takeaway of computers going from niche industry to the single largest driver of global economic activity is that the bad stuff won? What an incredibly myopic conclusion.

The recent cross-communication between JavaScript, Elm, and Clojure has been incredibly fruitful but hasn't been noticed by the bitter die-hards. And really, almost all of it could've happened literally 15 years ago with Lisp if the Lisp community hadn't been dismissive, arrogant douchebags that considered JavaScript a worthless toy language.

What's truly sad is that some people would rather be abstractly right while producing nothing of value than work with the dominant paradigm and introduce useful concepts to it.

If you know C++/Perl/PHP but don't know ES6, websockets, Node, etc, would you not say that your opinion about the web being a bad environment for rich applications might be in some way colored by your personal economic interests?

A common defensive mechanism among people with outdated skills is to try to delegitimize new frameworks and technologies in the hopes of convincing the broader community not to use things they don't know.

I'm inferring this from your arguments being driven by analogies and insinuations rather than concrete critique. It's not my intention to attack you personally, but an aggressively dismissive attitude towards unfamiliar concepts should be properly contextualized.

As for React, isn't it more likely that you don't know React very well, have never looked at its internals, and in general don't feel like you have the time or ability to learn much about modern web development?

If you build a few projects with React and still dislike it, good! Your critiques will be a lot more valid and useful at that point, whereas right now...yeah.

But in this case, they specifically said that the researchers were unable to escalate. How does he know? Either the researchers violated the rules by trying and failing, or they didn't try and he's simply lying to make himself look better. By your reasoning and their policy, those are the only two possibilities.

What are we supposed to conclude from this? Under the current rules and assuming the description of what happened is accurate, it would seem you'll potentially be punished for establishing the full extent of a breach, unless it's not so bad, in which case you're rewarded for failing. In addition to being illogical and unfair, it also incentivizes OpSec to delude themselves and everyone else about their true security risks.

You can read the story from a few months back to find that Facebook apparently has an unstated but non-repudiated policy of threatening to involve the FBI and actually doing reputational damage to researchers who they feel cross a (poorly described and enforced) line: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10754194

In this case, they (correctly) went the other way, which creates even more uncertainty. Given this pattern of inconsistent enforcement mixed with threats, I would feel genuinely unsafe reporting a security vulnerability to Facebook except under very specific conditions. That's probably not what they're going for, but that's the environment they're creating.

They didn't do pure CSS parallax? I guess in this case it's for the best, but generally that's Doing It Wrong.

I may change my tune six months from now, but part of the problem I see is that new people getting into React are told to not learn redux to "keep things simple." While it's a little bit of a pain to set up, redux (+ redux-thunk) ultimately reduces the amount of complexity and magic considerably.

Of you can write stateless functional components and have async and not use them, but the disadvantages of components without lifecycle methods appear much greater if you're just using vanilla React.

This is one of the most delightful things I've seen come out of the tech satire world. It's not snarky or mean, it's not painting a target on anyone, it's just really meaningful and well done. I'll definitely send these to my team, I think they're really accessible stories about common problems in tech culture. Please keep writing them!

Trying to prove the impossibility of something that is never going to go away as a requirement isn't very useful.

An alternative would be to describe potential break-points and conditionals in the planning process. For instance, if a third party library can help you with some core functionality, it takes a few hours to investigate and an hour to implement.

But if it's not going to work for whatever reason, then you know you have to make your own, and the initial implementation could range from 4-6 weeks.

If you say "this will take either 4 hours or 4-6 weeks", that's far more useful and acceptable to management than saying "this will take somewhere between 4 hours and 6 weeks.

No one sane is asking for exact estimates, and no one smart is promising a hard deadline based on the assumption that nothing goes wrong. A good engineer will pad their estimate slightly for the same reason that airplanes carry more fuel than the exact amount they need to reach their destination. It's not a deceptive or inefficient practice, it's managing uncertainty.

There's a difference between a role-model and a self-promoter. The role-model hacks away at lots of projects, has an active github, and develops lots of experience until they're at the top of their field. The self-promoter writes a lot of blog posts about "being" in tech instead of actually "doing" tech.

The cottage industry devoted to writing blog posts about how hard it is to be a woman in tech and all the sexism and hardship all women face along the way seems to be doing their part to continue to intimidate and discourage women from learning to code. But for the self-promoter, this continued imbalance offers basically limitless opportunities for career progression through pointing out sexism rather than through technical ability.

Easily 90% of the female engineers I encounter are from East or South Asia where these blogs aren't widely read. It's an interesting correlation, even if by itself it proves nothing.

I found the initial example of a problem with context and this to be incredibly contrived. If you have people who hate you dropping bind into your code and misusing a function only meant to be used with constructor calls, why wouldn't they do the same thing with your protocols?

By this author's logic, his own implementation is no good, because what if someone comes along and writes Protocol = "foo" in global scope? There's a difference between writing defensive code to prevent mistakes anyone could easily make, and trying to push your pet implementation forward through ridiculous hypotheticals.

Also, no mention of ES6 fat arrow functions and no mention of Immutable.js indicate that maybe this guy isn't interested in solving problems as much as he is in promoting his personal style.

If you feel the value of your life/health is essentially comparable in gravity and scale to buying an apple at a farmer's market, your opinions on healthcare regulation are unlikely to be relevant to very many people.

You don't think there might be a certain information asymmetry between you and a medical care provider? And if there's not, why are you going to doctor at all?

A further problem of assessing value is that the analysis is taking the job postings as an accurate reflection of who actually ends up getting the role.

Pretty much every developer who doesn't get their first job through an internship ends up taking a job that had 2-3 years of experience listed as the minimum requirement, but we would know an article titled "junior developers need not apply" is questionable.

None of your fundamental topics except for graph theory and a tiny bit of distributed systems stuff will ever come up for 90% of developers.

If you happen to be in that 10%, then yeah, maybe some higher education on those topics is necessary.

Again, only in the United States. The word "kikel" is the yiddish word for "circle", and illiterate Jewish immigrants coming to the US didn't want to write an X by their name because they inferred they were being asked to draw a cross.

Once this was figured out as the problem, Jewish immigrants were instructed (in yiddish) to write a circle instead, thus they were referred to as "kikes" by immigration officials.

Since the origin of the term is specifically american, why should the rest of the world have to deal with it? You're not really addressing the original concern. Your theory of offensiveness as being "words with only one possible meaning" is fallacious, since again, that meaning is derived from the very specific mores of only one society. Very disappointing to see this kind of thoughtless "america is the center of the universe" opinion in HN.

Your comment is a perfect example of the kind of incomplete and normative reasoning about names that causes systems to fail. The problem isn't that you're not careful, the problem is that your fundamental assumptions are based on incomplete knowledge.

For instance, you mentioned accommodating Cyrillic letters, but you didn't know you'd need to include a field for patronym, which is not the same thing as a middle name and can't just be included in the first name field without causing potential problems.

But most people would pick the will of the majority making some bad decisions than the absolute dictatorship that would be needed to enforce a highly subjective list of human rights.

This sounds more like a mechanical turk than actual automation. A restaurant without waiters is usually called a cafeteria or a deli, not "pure magic." This article is credulous and obfuscating to the point of dishonesty, even if only through emphasis.

By the dubious logic shown here, if Uber put a divider between the passenger and the driver, it would be a self-driving car. Their definition of automatic seems to be "not seeing a person" instead of "not needing a person."

Your selective and inaccurate editing of the host comment is dishonest,and the emotionally charged adjectives you use make it sound like you're more interested in virtue signaling than having a discussion.

The mistake you're making is that you think one anecdote cancels out another and makes it invalid. Both anecdotal experiences are probably true. Anyone urging us to reject one recounted experience as "gross" and "problematic" is in favor of shutting out information that might be accurate but doesn't fit a preconceived agenda.

In other words, not just a liar, but someone actively pressuring others to deny their own experiences. I can't think of a worse person than that, no matter what worthy cause they think it's in the service of.

There's absolutely nothing to back up the claim that programmer wages rose when more men took on that job.

The basic reasoning in the article is to produce the appearance of a conspiracy so structural and so vast that it doesn't matter if each individual claim is provably false or contextually misleading, the broader narrative remains somehow irrefutable.