samhuk

> My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated.

Contrary to the author, for me, over my entire career, I feel like I have been relatively incredibly lucky with my choices of 1) What (web) technologies to invest lots of time into, and 2) Therefore what tools I use in my own projects and at companies I have worked for.

I think that 50% of the reason is down to when I was born and therefore when I started my software engineering career (for example, therefore avoiding lots of bad alleyways that web dev went down), and 50% was just common sense (realizing early-on that X tool was obviously going to be superior to Y tool).

1. I was fortunate enough to be born at a time such that I just about missed the AngularJS --> Angular2 betrayal + debacle.

2. I realized, through playing around with the Angular2 beta around 2014 (IIRC), that it was going to be inferior to React. I remember that at the time React was this tiny thing that had existed for around a year or so, but it was clearly conceptually superior, with more talented Facebook developers behind it vs the Google developers behind the early Angular2.

Not to be too disparaging or direspectful, but at least in the early days, it felt like Angular2 was made by a team of your usual C++ Google engineers who didn't have a lot of experience with web dev. Just being honest here...

This lead me to A) selecting React for my personal projects, and B) advising to pick React at companies I worked for. This meant that there are React codebases that I contributed to ~8 years ago that are still active at companies today.

3. Through sheer luck, I started my true web dev career after the "random crazy insecure web technologies" era such as Flash, Java applets, and all that nonsense.

4. Through sheer luck, I started my true web dev career shortly after Typescript was created, and I just happened to use a framework (now non-existent) which used it, co-introducing it to me in ~2014. This meant that I have been able to create relatively maintainable Typescript codebases, mostly avoiding creating any quick-to-deprecate JS mess-heaps.

There are a couple more examples, but I think that captures why I feel so lucky. I feel bad for the engineers that, through a combination of bad luck (time born, time entering the field, etc.) and lack of foresight, were led down paths causing them to invest a tonne of time into technologies that were just never going to be around for the long-run.

My time will likely come where my luck runs out, and I end up investing a tonne of time into some nonsense tech that initially seems solid but ends up rubbish for whatever reason, but for now, I'm quite pleased :)

My only reason for buying an ASUS motherboard was because, for a while, they had (as far as my research went a couple years ago) a complete monopoly on Thunderbolt 3-compatible AMD motherboard (ASUS ProArt Creator, IIRC?)

Apart from that, tempted to agree.

Thanks! Personally, I have immense respect for Storybook and the engineers behind it. It supports a dizzying amount of use-cases.

Having said that, however, I think that they did go too far down some paths that I would have liked to not see it go down. I feel like them supporting so many use-cases came at a cost of usability. In addition to this, there is quite obviously too much framework-magic, causing obscure undesirable behavior.

However, it's still an awesome tool. Just a little too full-fat for some of my more simpler use-cases :)

TL;DR: A React front-end component workshop, a simple version of Storybook.

So around 5 months ago, I needed a tool to preview front-end (React) components whilst I create them for a personal project of mine. There were two options: Storybook or Ladle.

Storybook is the tool everybody knows. I've used it before quite a lot. It's very big, full-fat, supports loads of use-cases, etc.

Ladle comes out of Uber. It's very small, lean, and doesn't support that much. After trying it out for a while, it just gives me a feeling that it is an Uber engineer's 20% project to learn some new tech.

So I realised that I wanted something kind of in the middle. Something that's a bit more customizable and full-fat than Ladle, but something simpler, less intrusive, and less "framework magic" than Storybook.

This led me to create Exhibitor (https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor) (https://demo.exhibitor.dev).

I worked on it on-and-off for a couple months, and it ended up being something that I'm quite proud of. It's not perfect, and supports only a fraction of what Storybook does, however for a tool made by 1 engineer vs the 20+ for Storybook, I'm quite happy about it!

I didn't follow the Lucasfilm acquisition too closely when it was all going down, but something that has confused me is that Lucas seems like a fairly talented guy with a passion for what he does, so how does it make sense that he actively wants to destroy his legacy?

I'm really doubtful that it's as simple as Lucas one day having a left-wing/progressivism epiphany or some other grand artistic change, sell Lucasfilm to Disney, then participate in the destruction of their IP.

Wasn't he promised "treatments" and general involvement in the latest trilogy, then Disney back-stabbed him last-minute? I vaguely remember some drama about that.

Anyway, long story short, I think that there is more to the story, such as him being promised one thing and another thing happening, etc.

The country I currently live in - the United Kingdom - even got a nickname because of this: The World's Butler.

The reasoning, as far as I understand it, is that the UK gained a notoriety in the 1900's and blair era for always doing (often dirty) favours for the countries that actually do stuff, just like a butler.

I use substack for this (samhuk.substack.com), and all I can say is Substack is better than medium, but absolutely it is not good IMHO. It's support for code snippets is basically non-existent, as one example.

This could perhaps come off as excessively brutal, but it really is just my true experience in the industry - the worst UIs I have seen (both in terms of UX quality and internal code quality) have been made by that particular kind of developer has has never bothered to go a single inch outside of their little Java/C# box that they were given by their CS undergraduate course, and then, due to some reason like the company doesn't want to hire or move devs around, becomes the senior lead on some big UI piece.

The things I have seen...

Personally, I think that creating great UIs is not something that can be taught overnight. There is a certain kind of "feel for it" that I think that I have gained through my years of making them; something that I feel like cannot be taught, at least not in some "bootcamp"/"crash-course" way.

The line between "an advanced, niche concept" and "common sense" is very blurry. It's continuous, not discrete. What you think it common sense is probably not for a considerable proportion of other people.

Regarding the actual topic at hand though, I actually do agree with you (hence disagree with OP), since I do believe that mastering concepts like color theory and typography are indeed extremely low on the extensive priority list of things to master to create great UIs.

I've been building them, and convinced people to pay me quite handsomely for them, for quite a considerable amount of time, and never have I had to deep-dive into typography, color theory, or the like.

> If we have an objective, context-free, helpful truth then why can't it be offered in a way that respects and honors other people?

In my view, this is essentially the key sentence that the entire blog post builds up to and revolves around.

Honestly, I am fearful of this ideology. What I see, is an author who spends a very long time and many words to explain how, sometimes, truths are "too offensive" or "inconvenient", and therefore sometimes need to be "offered" differently. This is frankly just a problematic ideology.

On the other hand, I concede that a "fact" or "truth", in isolation, can also be problemaric. After all, we have all grown tired of the usual race and crime correlation debates that often devolve into "I'm just stating facts and statistics!" drudgery. However, it's my 2 cents that I think that the author has subscribed to and promotes a somewhat problematic censorship ideology.

Delivering "truth and facts" can be a real tough cookie. I personally find that it is the single hardest thing about my line of work, and I like to think I work on some very complex engineering thingamabobs!

If someone really is wrong, provably, and there needs to be proof (data), because, say they are working on building a bridge and are making important engineering decisions, then what is the author saying you do? Not be an asshole and tell the truth but be "nice and kind" about it? Or, are they saying you lie? Wholly or partly?

From the headline I honestly thought that this was some strange take on TempleOS...

I remember buying a Macbook Pro a long time ago (I want to say around 6 years ago? Back in the dark Ive days...) and I can relatively confidently say that it's always been approximately this bad. Inflation plus mental factors are likely the trick that's playing on some folk's mind. They always charged e.g. 200$ for memory increments and 400$/800$ for storage increments, IIRC.

> "More than days away, but hopefully not many weeks away"

I find it amusing how close this sounds to your average run-of-the-mill Early Access steam game. "Next patch will be more than days. And more than weeks. But not more than many weeks! Probably... We hope...I think"

They will likely just discontinue Windows 10 to force everybody onto 11 in good time; like they tried to do with Windows 7.

I'm on Windows 10 at the moment and no way am I upgrading. From what I've seen and heard so far, 11 is an absolute festering nightmare.

Thank you for taking the time to provide the detail. I see now that the subject is quite a lot more complicated than I thought, and it's less about wealthy versus not-wealthy but rather a list of X versus Y, where X and Y are not what you would necessarily expect, such as gvmt versus citizen, etc.

Again, thanks.

Perhaps I should have been a bit clearer on that part. I was thinking of the recent political turmoil in France, which is somewhat related to the economy (rising retirement age is always a response to struggling economies, in part due to ailments like inflation).

I will copy a previous answer of mine to a similar comment:

A 1kg wholewheat sourdough loaf. I'm a bit picky regarding bread and have actually started making my own in the last few months due, in part, to A) rising prices, B) manufacturer corner-cutting, and C) it's fun!

Regarding "A quarter of that", that is, IMHO, very optimistic. 1kg of bread for £1 would be quite the steal.

However I should have been more specific about it being sourdough, which is much more expensive to produce than "regular" bread at UK supermarkets.

A 1kg wholewheat sourdough loaf. I'm a bit picky regarding bread and have actually started making my own in the last few months due, in part, to A) rising prices, B) manufacturer corner-cutting, and C) it's fun!

As a person living in the UK, I have definitely noticed a considerable rise in unit prices. One of many examples is that a loaf of my favourite bread increased from £3 to £4 recently, which was a shocker. Toilet roll prices, as ever what the news loves to talk about, has exploded, increasing by around 70% since 2020 by my anecdotal observation.

A sad thought I have about inflation is the fact that it is, wittingly or not, a weapon wielded by the rich against the middle and lower classes. In an inflationary economy, the winners are rich who have valuable assets whose value skyrocket - think real estate, businesses, etc.

The lower classes rely on A) proportionately much more on fiat, i.e. monthly paycheck going into current and savings account, and B) a blue-collar job, the wage of which always lags further behind inflation than white-collar jobs.

Those two factors combined means that the lower classes get absolutely battered, while the rich just sit gleefully as their asset values balloon and pass down wholesale price increases, etc.

It's the dark, sinister side of inflation, and I think we are all beginning to see the societal tensions that it is breeding, e.g. endless blue-collar UK worker union strikes, riots, protests, etc.

Not saying that it is only one class that is affected, but let's face reality here - the lower class suffers by far the most in this situation.

Thank you very much for the insight. Best of luck with the future of your project.

Just read it. Thanks!

I agree that Streamlit was very limited feature-wise. Basically for extremely simple PoCs, etc.

I like how you dog-food Pynecone for Pynecone's website :)

My only interaction in this space is helping out a friend of mine with Streamlit.

I'm surprised you haven't mentioned anything about it in your HN comment, given it seems, at least on the face of it, extremely similar.

Are you able to go into a bit more detail about why Pynecone and not others?

Did you ever consider contributing to Streamlit instead or forking it? if so, why didn't that work out? What do you do better? Etc.

Disclaimer: I'm not too knowledgeable about this niche, however, so if I'm very off-base here then please let me know :)

Interesting that some on there (snort social) are making very negative comments about the comments here. For example:

> The absolutely retarded state of HackerNews (Then a screenshot of this HN thread, which is here: https://imgproxy.snort.social/48YuDDEW11PoCqbeQ8R25a0kGN3BJe...)

It's interesting how different social platforms foster little pigeon holes for people, that act almost as some kind of militant platoon. Weird.

I was going to see if they imparted any meaning into the angle they chose to CSS transform, knowing Google and all, but alas, they just did 1 degree.

First off, I thought that it would be cool if they rotated a proportion of 360 degrees equal to the proportion of the change in orbital time period to the previous orbital time period of the asteroid. Then I realized that it changed by around 5%, so that would be 360 * 0.05 = 18 degrees. Not really readable.

That's 2 minutes that I'll never get back, but it's left me amused for some reason. Heh.

I've never quite related to the appeal.

My pet (slightly tin-foil hat) theory is that the draws to this kind of behavior is:

A) It's a status symbol of being able to afford a frequent 9.80$ expenditure on something as basic as frappé (or 5 for a normal coffee).

B) The typical sugar content of drinks (that have sugar/syrups in them) from places like Starbucks is addictive, like how fast-food chains add excessive sugar and fat their products (yes, there is a relatively high amount of sugar in their bread).

I really enjoy the occasional nice coffee with a friend or two, but a 9.80$ Starbucks frappé? To me, they often taste and look like some frakenstein of candy-floss, tiramisu, and ice-cream sundae.

One thing I would like to have some data on is what are frequent Starbucks customers drinking? Are the frequent customers predominantly ordering the addictive items, or is there no correlation?

Few of my thoughts:

1. That poster for the benefits of space exploration is quite awful. Side-ways text?

2. It's a shame, because some of the artwork is really nice, especially the one at the bottom.

3. The "what they are doing this decade" section is terribly structured and phrased. The first point is to inspire the next generation of engineers etc. The second point is somewhat DEI agenda (concept of "parastronaut") [0]. The third is...yet again about the next generation of engineers etc. The forth is a vague "we will prepare" statement.

The actually awesome content is buried 5-6 points down, for example regarding the construction of Lunar Gateway modules, the design of Argonaut (worst spacecraft name ever?), etc.

4. Super pumped for Rosalind Franklin

[0] Although I don't view this as inherently bad (since we will eventually need to learn about how disabilities affect space exploration), I just think that there are much more important activities that need to be done right now, all on an already shoe-string budget in a recessive economy. I mean, jeez, they even admitted that it's just a PR stunt..."Demonstrate our commitment".

It's a pretty sad fact of life that sometimes you hurt the most by offering what you think is help.

The concern I have with DEI is that it's the manipulation of the natural function of a market - the jobs market. Just like others in this space such as quantitative easing, printing money, and "stimmy cheques", this often comes with positive and negative effects.

Personally, I have a few thouhts:

* If we didn't have DEI (which in practice is really just the new AA (Affirmative Action)), would hetero-ethnic areas like Europe and US ever have balance in the workforce? Would society naturally trend towards ethnic balance in the workplace without DEI, or would we end up with a Gattaca? Is DEI necessary in that sense? Without DEI-like influences, would we just be stuck with a black valet and a white CEO?

* Psychologists have known for decades about "the tyranny of low expectations" - the tendency for lower expectations to lead to lower performance in humans. I wonder if long-term DEI will lead to performance imbalances as those who are favored by DEI become reliant on it. It's a scary thought to imagine in the long term.

* Personally, I think a small amount of temporary DEI exposure is required to offset the human's natural tendency to be hostile towards those of a different ethnicity. I think that if DEI exposure is either acute (a lot in a small time frame) or chronic (little bit over a long time frame), it is likely to lead to systemic negative consequences, such as performative imbalance and/or aggression/hatred between those favored and unfavored by DEI.

It's a really complex situation!

The Wikipedia article has a tonne of links to studies that link amphetamines to addiction, which is also a primary trait of opiates. Opiates also have negative side-effects with abuse, just like amphetamines.

They have many similarities.

> and extended use can also lead to addiction, memory problems, paranoia and difficulty sleeping

Etc.

I see quite a number of comments making some very wildly inaccurate statements about the pharmacological safety of MDMA.

There have been a number of studies conducted about the health impact of MDMA. In monkeys, it has been shown to leave behind long-term brain damage, serotonin receptor damage for at least 7 years, etc.

Personally, back at University I had some acquaintances who got quite addicted to them and appeared to suffer the mental side-effects. It was really rough.

They are not safe. What they are:

* A potent drug

* Gives you a pretty sweet high (at a big enough dosage)

* Addictive (the addictive qualities of amphetamines has been known for decades)

Oxycontin, anyone?

Truly, I hope that these drugs are studied and science finds out which of these generally "taboo" drugs have great medicinal utility for certain ailments.

However calling these "super safe" is just like calling Oxycontin "super safe". It's a really bad take IMHO.