dosy

The illogical adoption of React must not be questioned, even in the face of its poor performance and ugly syntax. One must never note that perhaps it is simply a cultish adoration, or faddish adherence to popular mass opinions, that leads to "popularity" mattering more than practicality.

So what if React is massively bloated, stupid syntax, can't use regular HTML, can't use regular CSS, can't use async/await, have to do everything a special way...literally, SO WHAT. It IS REACT! OMG behold it's glory. It came from FB, maybe if we use it we can scale like FB!

Omg the idiocy. But keep on slavishly following the next front-end dev trend. I can't tell whether front-end dev culture is a massive circle-jerk or cargo cult. And don't mention the irrational hate attempted to be heaped onto anyone who dares question the programmatic thinking of the official line of the React Appreciation Society.

Translation: "Let me dismiss and trivialize that which I'm too scared to admit might be true." Good luck keeping on pretending the opinions of a large chunk of the world don't exist, don't make sense or don't matter.

Or maybe it's you who needs to expand your mind, show a bit of empathy and try to understand the other side?

Sure, I guess it's easier to pretend the other side doesn't really exist, than to come to understand it. Keep arrogant and ignorant at your own peril. But I guess it's easier to close your mind and feel better by pretending it's wrong, than to try to know the rest of the world?

All the critical comments on this. Why are all these critics so scared that there might be an easier way to do web dev?

Are they really just protecting their archane methods because they see that as protecting their income and any simplification a threat to that?

Or is it more tribal, cult like adherence to an overbloated way of creating web UIs?

Or is it people don't want to learn yet another tool and they're just resigned to the fact the these are the tools they have because really, they don't get to decide that anyway, their employer does?

Or is it people don't like being reminded that actually, they're "forced" to use these tools (which they perhaps wouldn't if it wasn't mandated), but because the workplace uses them, they use them, so the existence of other options while accurate is a painful reminder of their own limited autonomy to individually decide the tools they use for their work?

Is the same cultish zealotry seen in other languages and frameworks or is it just (what compiles to) ECMAscript and Web UI/state frameworks?

That's like saying because we can't fix everything, we should fix nothing.

There's no need to include everything. HN is selective. It's in English. The reason it can't have posts about the responsibility of SV towards the tech and social impact they make is because that would pierce the veil of fake narrative that supports SVs continued unexamined influence.

The reality is the mods are not the tip of the spear. There are others mods above them who intervene to set policy and crush off plan posts. A truth this place can never acknowledge.

It's not just the women's movement, any postmodern "leaderphobic" group of anti-heroes will operate under this adhocratic masking of power. It's still power, but it's the power-pill that palatable to their sensibilities, suitably masked. Marxist revolutions "of the peasants" pioneered this mass delusion of flattening.

But isn't this just gaslighting people? I mean "flat" is just disempowering existing power structures, to empower a secretive cabal, that pretends to rule "benevolently" by consensus by usurping the existing "oppressive evil" but ends up just becoming worse. Prove you can actually be better, then come back and tell me how to.

This article should have been called: "Afraid of Kings. How we tried and failed to get s*it done when we need to pander to everyone's leaderphobia."

Bottom line is, this is not new hat. It's old hat. What I'd say to the author is: It's an adhorcracy. Read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Then come back and tell me how to.

I really want to read the perspective of some great contemporary thinkers on this. Who were the thinkers writing about this in a compelling way and who it's likely that in 20 years or 50 years we'll be able to look back on and say their essays really understood the zeitgeist?

What shocks me is how companies and organizations have reacted to this. Every time a significant decision is deferred to mob rule I feel a little bit of power departs civil and ordered society and is transferred to the mob. Which seems to me to validate the notion that we ought to be afraid of mobs. That's a pretty scary society to live in and doesn't really mesh with the principle of rule of law.

The only reference point I have for this is historically the utilisation of and empowerment of angry mobs has coincided with times of great political turmoil such as a revolution. And that historically at least you could say that these mobs are created by breaking down the existing structures of authority. I think you can find a reference for that in Western society where the power of traditional moral authority or institutional symbols of authority have declined or been dismantled.

Probably the least controversial idea I have as to a cause of all this is that there must be a huge amount of potential emotional energy present in the population that is being directed towards are tapped by these expressions of outrage and mob outburst. I think it's reasonable to say that this potential emotional energy was not created by these topics it was created elsewhere by foundational issues such as economics but it's being directed towards these topics perhaps as cathartic outlet.

I think clearly author was using "like it's 1999" as a metaphor, not literally.

It's a fairly common phrase (originating from a Prince song I think) that you can take to mean "like a throwback to a more authentic and possibly prior era." In this case the era is prior the explosion of frameworks and div soup.

Which strangely in this case is not necessarily prior but in parallel, as you said. This is English, it doesn't have to be precise like programming. You can use it for effect.

Similarly, as I have skin in the game and didn't want to get blocked by DO, I was expecting a muddy response and ready to make a throwaway account and complain about "keeping processes opaque to give carte blanche to take whatever arbitrary action they like" in the normal complaint about deplatforming and tech censorship, but then I read their document and was surprised and encouraged by how transparent DO were. Congratulations DO!

I really appreciated your your explanation of cause about finding fixes and edge cases, and being incompetently managed, and found your notion of making the effort to search for the positive very helpful, thank you.

The funny thing is when you consider applying this very cool stylesheet to a regular web site or app the result would be a complete mess mostly, because those places are often div soup, rather than neat semantic minimal HTML.

That's an interesting perspective about the behavior not being unique to tech. Thank you, I found it helpful to consider.

Thank you for this. Your comment is useful to me, especially the point on DIY, novelty and Dropbox.

I really appreciate this comment, it's helping me to put it in perspective.

Thank you very much. I found your comment helpful by giving some perspective about why people do it and how that helps to not take it seriously. It's reasonable.

Most HN comments are gratuitously mean or incorrect, but it has good technical comments.

This is so true. Posting work I've done on Show HN is like going back to an abusive relationship with someone who just wants to crush, dismiss and ridicule every creative thing you ever did or wanted to do.

I've spent a lot of (necessary, but still feels wasted) time getting over the trauma of commenters on Show HN and their cruelty. I find their comments contribute to the self-doubt inner narrative I have and I hate that, particularly the idea that some random abusive person on the internet can influence your future choices by convincing you you are stupid, or your work is bad or whatever. But I consider I just have to find my own way to get stronger about this and to somehow be resilient to that. Because people are like that every where you go.

In processing this emotional/comment abuse trauma, I also have spent quite a lot of time thinking about what makes each person say something mean, when they could have pointed out something in a considerate way. I think the path to become an abusive HN commenter is different for each person who goes that way, but one thing I think must be behind it is people who feel crushed, or dismissed creatively themselves, and wanting to perpetrate that on other people as a substitute for making something themselves. It's common that the meanest commenters don't have any "submissions" or at least no personal "this is something I did" submissions.

Creative communities don't have to be like this. OpenProcessing, Glitch are some very supportive places I've seen for creative work. IndieHackers, Product Hunt, the same. Here it seems that the community "tolerates" this behavior and possibly views it as some sort of sport or entertainment, as unhealthy as that is. I'm not dissing entertainment like that, it has its place, I just wish/expect it were not here.

But that leads to a second theory I have about abusive commenters, that this is a "tech" or engineer thing, and not a creative person thing. Tech has an asshole problem, and maybe there's correlation between people who are technically good, but emotionally abusive or lacking in empathy.

I find often mean comments are disguised as not, to give the abuser an "out" or plausible deniability. So they get to perpetrate their cruelty under a cover of just being helpful, or whatever.

Anyone want to share some strategies they have for processing this trauma in an efficient way, or some strong responses they have for it?

hello faithful readers I made this to stretch my data further when I'm travelling.

there's some issues and it still works for many sites and apps including the basic basic HTML version of Gmail including gitlab including many news sites.

I find it saves my bandwidth literally about 10 to 20 times. for example if normally browser session for a couple of hours would use 200 megabytes of data I can do it with this in anywhere from 10 to 20 megabytes of data.

I don't know if this is a product but it's useful for me (and getting more useful as I fix bugs) and I have plans to improve the data reduction even more.

the version I posted is a paid version so I'm including this link to one that you can try out without paying and just using a stripe test card.

test card version: https://staging.stretchy.live (if you don't want to go through the lengthy signup process, just login with username/password: hacker/hacker)

I also want to add that I like how this and extrapolating forward from this, compliments ideas about reducing website bloat in general that are gaining currency at this time.

Safari users on iOS please note: you'll need to turn on Pointer Events in advanced settings.

Nope, nah and no. What happened for you?

You're brave to jump on here when on holiday!

Shouldn't that outage system be aware when service heartbeats stop?

Could this be a solar flare?

Could it not be 4 "super-judicial wars"? haw haw haw

That's awesome. Go Ireland. They benefited somewhat from the tech investment yet they are not scared to stand up to the same. I like it. They're historically neutral so perhaps that sort of fits.

Thank you for explaining / taking me through that. I totally agree that it's in the details.

My factory now makes the same amount of sneakers but uses less energy, and I have more profit which I can spend on more things, maybe making new markets viable. And in the macro picture, that extra energy, lower prices, makes some things become viable. And what happens from there regarding energy depends on the details. Very interesting and good, semi-detailed discussion.

Cool link, thanks I'll read it.

I'm not actually sure right now. Somehow I think that if you make those extra widgets without using more energy, then the extra people who buy and use those extra widgets will end up using more energy in doing so, and their extra purchase and use will, however incrementally, grow the economy as a whole a tiny bit, which will use that much extra energy.

So if it's growth, then it can't be static energy.

But somehow also I think that you can have static energy and not call it growth, but development, or something else like someone said before (maybe you).

What's development? I don't know. But maybe it's something like we produce 1000 widgets with more intricate decorations on them. And use no more energy doing so.

I grant that it's pretty confusing. And that's how it seems to me right now.

Thanks

Right, I think the article was saying development is GDP stagnation but increasing quality nonetheless, does that about match your understanding of it?

I still can't really imagine the other scenario because when I see efficiency gains I think they will lead to growth and more energy usage. Examples like "increasing CPU power should have led to faster software, but instead it lead to slower languages and larger software". Same for memory and bandwidth. Our websites keep expanding to fill the next generation of network capacity.

So the gains from efficiency are quickly consumed by increasing growth and energy use. Maybe you could help me imagine some that are not like that? I'd like that.

It's easier for me to imagine the examples like in the article (more fancy dessert, same ingredients) that are there classed as development, distinct from growth. But growth as defined there, with static energy, I can't imagine right now.

I had to parse that part a few times to get it myself, when I saw you didn't get it too I could relate.

Then I had to think a few times about what you gave in response! It seems this part of the topic is quite involved. I think I get some of it now.

If you drop the assumption that grow takes energy, then no extra demand on energy from growth, then no price increase on energy, then no inflation, and so it's just growth, not inflation. Agreed.

But when you and me are examining it like this...the whole situation described by that sentence starts to seem a little contrived to me. Seems there's a lot of error bars on each of the assumed connections in that causal chain, that could lead that path to branch at each of them into many other possible paths, rather than just the one path that condensed sentence proposes.

I still have a hard time imagining a growth that doesn't use more energy (except the one defined in that article as "development", which seems to be a more sophisticated/involved use of existing resources, rather than extracting/creating more new (primary) resources.)

If you could elaborate some more on your images of growth that don't consume more energy, I'd find it helpful to understand this whole thing better.

These things are not birds. To call them birds is insane, except if you're using the euphemism for "aircraft". Otherwise you and the other so-called "debunkers" with their convoluted logic are saying "I sitting at my computer am right, but all these government officials, scientific instruments, military personnel and civilians, they're wrong". Definition of crazy.

They're craft from unknown origins reported by multiple highly credible witnesses and systems and now being revealed to the public in a concerted way from the Navy, and former DoD and intelligence officials.

The narrative on this topic has changed, it's time to get up to date on the new perspective which is not ridicule but curiosity.

Take a look at these recent articles:

https://www.foxnews.com/science/christopher-mellon-official-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/28/ufos-exist...

https://nypost.com/2019/05/29/ufos-have-come-out-of-the-frin...

There's others ways to restrict access that aren't pricing. you can't marry more than one person, you can't take up all the space on a beach or a public park. it's not about price, is just laws and enforcement.

I wasn't trolling on the rest, just brave. I don't expect you to be able to respond without name calling tho, as I think you'll see free energy as topic you can't seriously touch lest it taint your reputation.

I think it's a condensed version of saying:

If we have finite energy at a fixed price (of say 1% of GDP in total cost), then either the rest of the GDP (which is not energy) does not grow, and so the demand for that energy (and so its price) remains the same, or it tries to grow (and cannot "is stuck") because growth will increase demand for the energy and therefore drive up prices, but since it is energy and fundamental to everything, all prices will go up, so we will have inflation, but inflation is not growth.

It does seem like physicist enjoys spreading the pessimism of that position in a condescending way, which makes me think the allegedly "faithful" write up of the dinner conversation, was in fact compensating for one where the physicist felt they had been beaten, and was so annoyed by that they have re-written the conversation in this more favorable way where it appears they win the argument.

Besides, I think that pessimism (what the physicist probably thinks is realism) rests on one key point, that the price of energy will have a non-zero floor. If you remove that, everything is possible, even assuming steady that energy use, and requiring continued economic growth.

I think the avoidance / supposed maintenance of the "energy price floor" point was too weak. The assumption was that it will still be a purchasable resource ("someone could buy all of it" and hold everyone else hostage), but what if energy becomes unlike that? What if energy in the future is unlimited and no one can buy all of it because everyone can access it? And the only constraint Earth imposes is that no one uses too much so we don't boil off the atmosphere or whatever.

I think that's likely. Zero point energy, free energy from the vacuum. Some whistle-blowers say our secret space program already drives its ships with this kind of power.

What's interesting is that, based on these projections about hitting critical energy output, we won't need this ZPE for another 250 - 600 years. So maybe that's why, if it does exist, it is not going to be released until then. Kind of sad that 40 years ago or so, some bureaucrat planner may have robbed the human race of free energy for the next few centuries because of the projections of an economist and a physicist, not these two, but some other pair tasked with considering the economic and physical implications of then soon-to-be back-engineered alien technology.

I'm posting this here for feedback, as an alternative to a Show HN, which has no comments.

Of note is that it incorporates the ad blocking ability of AdBlock Fast, but does so using DevTools. There's also a visual mode that uses screenshots, but the main reason I'm using a text mode is to save bandwidth.

I've got 50 issues on this project right now, and I'm hoping posting here will indicate which of the many problems are more important.

So if you want to try it out go through the sign up process and enter the Stripe test card (4242 4242 4242 4242, any future expiry and CVC). Mail me if you have issues.

Hello HN,

I'm posting this to get feedback. I've got 50 outstanding issues on this project and I hope by asking here I'll see which things are important to work on improving.

If you're bothered to go through the sign up process, please note that the payments page is in test mode so just enter the Stripe test card number (4242 4242 4242 4242 and any CVC and future expiry date), also the email address does not have to exist, as long as it has an email format (ASCII for now).

The other tip I have for you is if your browser seems to lock up, go back to the main page, login again and start yourself another browser. Please also note that the server is small so it could get overloaded, and if so I'll just kill all the processes to free up resources to start again.

In case anyone's interested, I think the main use case for this is for travelers who don't want to use all their 1Gb prepaid 4G data browsing the web. That's why I built it for myself.