feedjoelpie

Even though I am a frequent advocate of leaning on more old school techniques for building web apps (even with new school tools), I vehemently disagree that this is a generally worthy cause. A small list of (I think non-controversial) things:

1. You browse without JS. You're a power user. You already know why the page doesn't work. A courtesy message would be nice, I guess, but it seems fairly pointless.

2. Should my HTML and CSS still target IE7-friendliness? IE7 users still have more market share than actual humans who browse without JS. They get treated like lepers in the Year 0, and we all seem to be okay with that.

3. Well-designed use of JS can help distribute computation load that might otherwise all fall on the server. A very contrived-to-be-important (but fairly common) example of this is scaling/cropping an image before it's uploaded. Or, even though I have some other reasons to hate on SPAs, page rendering itself. The no-JS user is more expensive to serve than the typical user.

4. Except for some extreme cases of JS reliance, search engine spiders are a head and shoulders more accommodating to developers' choices than no-JS users are.

I just don't think that making accommodations for no-JS power users, who are not plentiful, and know full well how to turn JS back on, is valuable. Making JS bundles smaller and making them load more efficiently? That's a worthy cause for sure. But people who browse without JS at all are extreme outliers in the 1st world, and all of them know how to toggle it back on. Developing countries? If I were trying to serve those users I would do the research and make choices accordingly.

> Being rated as someone who meets expectations is not a punishment.

On a scale of 1, 2, and 3, where each of these confers different privileges, when I knock you down from a 3 to a 2 specifically because of X, I am punishing you for X.

The corporate words tied to the ratings are not magical.

Cryptocurrencies are valued as low as they are _because_ of the question of which cryptocurrency should have which percentage of the economy. It's arbitrary to make new ones. Even as increased adoption of cyptocurrency _in general_ is highly likely, the adoption of _any particular coin_ is still full of uncertainty.

> but it will be good to read about YOUR ethics

Not just that, but ethical expectations on the users, backed up by legal policy, would seem important for this.

If Beanstalk could compete with Heroku, no one would use Heroku.

Early in my programming career, I got a whiteboard question where, after being asked my hobbies, I was asked to diagram an electric guitar on the whiteboard. I don't know that it was a particularly good question. But all this sabre-rattling against the whiteboard in general just seems like a silly distillation of a legitimate critique down to its stupidest form.

Even when it comes to CS algorithms questions. Yeah, asking someone to whiteboard quicksort might be bad, might optimize for the wrong things for the actual job.

But should it be a red flag that someone expected me to be able to do a more basic operation, that I've more or less purported to do professionally and efficiently, on a whiteboard on the spot?

[Edit: At my company we don't really do whiteboarding. We pre-screen with a time-limited open-book, open-internet test in advance. This helps account for candidates knowing how to quickly read/research/apply openly available information.]

I did some contract work for FB around when this article was written. I don't think that nobody cares about clean code. It's more like... results will vary widely based on who reviews you. And the governing philosophy is more focused on the automated checks and balances that try to keep you from doing harm to the overall system. While human code reviews were pretty lax, the machines would slap you around for all sorts of things, none of which would force you to write beautiful code.

Personally, I like for humans to be pickier than they seemed to be at Facebook, but it really opened my eyes to the value of what I think of as a "keep your garbage in your own trash can" approach to quick-and-dirty coding. As long as you didn't spill your trash into the hallway, the machines were satisfied, and your reviewer didn't find your work to be _insane_, your work shipped.

[EDIT: And I find that this can often be a wonderfully pragmatic way to work if you have the tools to keep you from doing harm.]

Appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy. It's a valid argument unless said authority is false in some way.

I completely disagree that the speed isn't good enough to justify using them.

In fact, my bounce rate is high on AMP because I can near-instantly figure out if this particular article on this topic I searched is the one I actually want to read or if it's uninformative trash. I usually flip through 2-5 before settling on the one I think is good.

These are the same sorts of complaints people have made about every change to search ranking. And while, yeah, I'm sure Google's not being altruistic, the implications of most of their actions in these spaces is pretty consistent:

If you want people's attention, don't ship trash.

I don't see how you could look at what happened and how it was systematically brushed under the rug, then at what has happened since the article was published, and come to the conclusion that anything BUT outrage would drive a change at this company.

To characterize #DeleteUber as a misunderstanding is a quasi-straw man argument. The author of that article picked the most vulnerable argument in favor of deleting Uber and focused on that to the exclusion of myriad others.

Personally, I believe that Uber would have loved to get in on the strike. But Uber's premise, which is anti-organized labor, does not allow for this. So they tried glom onto the protest in a ham-fisted way that only highlighted the problem. Uber can't be part of a positive social protest that is driven by workers uniting and standing up because Uber is too invested in dividing them and pushing them down.

As for what would be the motivation for him to allow it to continue happening... Now that it's been publicized? Nothing. At the time the incidents happened? Read Susan's article again. There were numerous opportunities to address the problem, and leadership instead chose to protect problematic employees that they otherwise considered high performers. The motivation couldn't be more clear.

I had a Nano. I'm like 99% sure all the GP would have to do is tie a wire to the metal tab, and then he could bump the other end of the wire with any part of his body.

Can someone please explain to me why everyone says that Gnome went off the rails? Gnome 3 to me was, except for leaving behind a lot of legacy systems, an extremely usable and downright pretty UI. Menu, search, windows, and virtual desktops all available from one keypress or one hotspot. I thought that was a stroke of genius myself.

This analogy doesn't work because you don't do manual heart surgery on yourself. Whether or not a robot does the surgery, the hospital's butt is on the line.

The biggest difference between an autopilot accident and a traditional accident is fault. Most accidents are driver error. Even if it drives accidents, overall, down (which it will), changing the responsibility for safe travel from mostly the individual to mostly the manufacturer has huge legal repercussions. Not to mention many people's discomfort with no longer being in control of their own safety, even if study after study shows that they shouldn't be.

NHTSA reports that 94% of all auto accidents involve driver error. Autopilot is a feature that reduces the number of decisions drivers make. It would be improbable for the two not to be extremely related.

This is a very simplistic way to look at it. We're in uncharted territory here. Did crash rates go down because driver error went down? Probably. So accidents for which the driver is liable go down a lot. And accidents for which the car-marker is liable go up a little. That last bit is still a very big deal.

I'm struggling to find a less snarky way to say this because it should be so obvious, but it turns out that real estate issues are frequently unique to their locations.

I am suddenly unreasonably angry that this exists. Not because of the product itself, which is clever.

But because this is how normalized the u̶n̶r̶e̶g̶u̶l̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ illegal short term rentals have become, that especially in some tourist-heavy regions are creating long-term housing shortages that displace residents. (See New Orleans, where housing prices have skyrocketed without any commensurate boost in residents' incomes to compensate, and it really is just that homes are being converted into hotels.)

This is why I was so curious. Being a high school kid, you're completely ill-equipped to understand the nuances of these sorts of programs.

This is a stupid reply that has nothing to do with the topic: I had the NMS myself, and I'm assuming some college was going to give you an extra kicker since it's portable. Do you mind sharing which colleges? I'm weirdly curious because while I didn't go to an known elite school, I turned down a full ride to an out-of-state state school (for NMS winners) to go to a private school. So like, kind of the opposite of you. But I also probably didn't fully understand the options.

Are you trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist except for the most hardcore HN users?

Because I haven't lately noticed much of the phenomenon you're talking about. And in the first 3 pages I just skimmed over, I didn't see anything that was so political as to be flamewar fodder.

Are you sure you're not trying to solve a problem that your average user doesn't even have?

Breakdown of article:

    1) Email a bunch of companies
    2) They see the email is from Sam Biddle
    3) They roll their eyes and don't respond
    4) Write article stating that they won't refuse to build a Muslim registry

Poor selection of link. Fortunately the author saw us and pointed us toward the articles instead of the raw notes: http://amasci.com/miscon/whyhard1.html#def

With that new Windows Subsystem for Linux feature, I'm honestly starting to consider a post-Mac future for my dev work. I'm sure there are a bunch of things about Windows 10 that will annoy me, but the value proposition of Mac is starting to disappear as Microsoft does better and Apple does worse. If Apple didn't tie iOS dev to its own desktop OS, I might be taking Windows for a spin right now.

That was a lot of words just to publicly display that they're scared. Who approved this PR disaster?

If this keeps up, a lot of grandparents won't be able to afford to live in NYC in the first place.

He's not an employee.

Unlike some others I do think that the concept itself is interesting/valuable. Proxy objects are going to make things pretty interesting in terms of data access in general. However, I do think it's a bit _too_ cute and clever to be useful without greater flexibility in control flow and error handling. Just the simple fact that it doesn't return Promises degrades its usefulness. (Promise.all parallelization, for instance.) So I think the useful version would necessarily have to give up on some of the "it's just an object" syntax altogether.

  await db.hello.world(['foo', 'bar'])
  console.log((await db.hello.world()))
  await db.hello.world.push('baz')
  console.log((await db.hello.world()))

Just spitballing.

I think a lot of the GPU stuff has been largely solved in recent years, too. I have one and only one reason I will not use Linux on a laptop, and that is power efficiency. I have never managed to get any laptop to even 60% of the battery life it gets with Windows. Those times I've tried to use all of the PowerTOP calibrations, the end result has been unpredictable drops in performance and things like my trackpad just freezing at random intervals.

I'm on Mac for now. I really, truly want to be on Linux because I would like to use docker-compose for development sandboxing (and Docker Mac performance is unacceptable). But until I can get solid battery life, it's just not in the cards.

It's likely just falling down under the weight of HN traffic. I can't get the site to load at all.