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Ask HN: Things that suck?

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Re: Ask HN: Things that suck?

#61

Post by xwowsersx »

hellbanTHIS wrote: post #40

There are a lot of terrible things out there but one that really bugs me is all the misinformation/propaganda that the internet causes. I didn't see it coming, I thought the web would make people more informed, not less.

Check out http://grasswire.com (I'm the co-founder). It's a newsroom that's fact-checked and curated by everyone. We're just getting started and have a lot of work to do, but we've had some pretty good success so far crowd-sourcing the news and debunking misinformation/propaganda that tends to spread like wildfire on the internet.

Re: Ask HN: Things that suck?

#62

Post by comrade1 »

Fellow programmers that don't use an IDE and insist on vim or emacs..

I often work on large projects with dozens of programmers and the developers that don't use an IDE are very small-thinking. They don't seem to know any libraries besides the base libraries and can't integrate large systems together.

They're fine for writing algorithms but beyond that they slow everyone else down.

Re: Ask HN: Things that suck?

#63

Post by Thriptic »

1. University procurement systems and methodologies(the PO / cost object etc).

2. The difficulty in finding people with specific technical expertise in a university setting. People spend enormous amounts of time troubleshooting problems which could be easily solved by just talking to the right person for a brief amount of time. Yet, typically people have no idea what is going on outside of their group / lab and lack a mechanism by which to find people locally or remotely with the domain-specific expertise they are looking for.

3. The lack of a wikipedia-esque resource for bio or a resource to onboard new investigators and students into a new field. Textbooks are paywalled, journal articles typically assume a base level of knowledge of the field, and reviews can be very hit or miss. Someone should create a way for leaders in each sub-domain of science to select the top reviews for new entrants into their respective field, and establish a curated collection of such reviews. Going off of citation count or potentially impact factor would be a good start.

Re: Ask HN: Things that suck?

#64

Post by rsp1984 »

na85 wrote: post #28

Javascript. It's possibly the worst language I've ever had the misfortune of coming across, and it's gained this cult-like devoted fan base amongst the startup crowd. Everyone tries to cram Javascript into applications it's completely unsuitable for like desktop non-browser 3D gaming or encryption. It is an enabler of pervasive surveillance by marketers and a huge security risk for the privacy-conscious. Not to menti…

As someone who grew up with C and C++ have to say that I rather like Javascript. Sure it has its hacks and edges but whenever I code stuff in it I find myself being about 5x more productive than using Java or C/C++.

Re: Ask HN: Things that suck?

#65

Post by comrade1 »

comrade1 wrote: post #62

Fellow programmers that don't use an IDE and insist on vim or emacs.. I often work on large projects with dozens of programmers and the developers that don't use an IDE are very small-thinking. They don't seem to know any libraries besides the base libraries and can't integrate large systems together. They're fine for writing algorithms but beyond that they slow everyone else down.

I wonder why the downvotes? This is based on observation on large-team projects. Maybe you have a different insight?

Re: Ask HN: Things that suck?

#66

Post by Thriptic »

enrmarc wrote: post #55

Temperature: I can't stand more than 25 °C (well, I can, but I don't like it). Big software: I missed the old times where you just needed a text editor and a terminal in order to "create" computer programs. Nowadays it seems that you need IDEs (specially in mobile development), frameworks, unit testing frameworks, CI servers; and you have all types of "mini software programs" you have to use just because your team sa…

You can buy pre-loaded credit cards at gas stations in the US, although I'm not sure how they work for online orders.

Re: Ask HN: Things that suck?

#67

Post by dovel »

na85 wrote: post #28

Javascript. It's possibly the worst language I've ever had the misfortune of coming across, and it's gained this cult-like devoted fan base amongst the startup crowd. Everyone tries to cram Javascript into applications it's completely unsuitable for like desktop non-browser 3D gaming or encryption. It is an enabler of pervasive surveillance by marketers and a huge security risk for the privacy-conscious. Not to menti…

Why would your animosity be targeted at the language and the developers.

The market wants what the market wants. Surely most of the time, in most cases, it is the client that signs off a design and a developer follows the brief?

Re: Ask HN: Things that suck?

#68

Post by krapp »

na85 wrote: post #47
huhtenberg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse than PHP? :)

Sure. I'd rather use a PHP site with good, lightweight CSS than a site loaded down with AJAX and jQuery. Any day of the week, ESPECIALLY on mobile. 13-year-old kids still in high school styling themselves as "PHP Developers" is what gave PHP a bad rap. They're the reason PHP-Nuke existed. But novice developers produce mediocre code irrsepective of the language. I'm not saying it's the best thing ever created. I've ne…

Syntactically, I would say javascript is better than PHP. PHP only recently got around to allowing array shorthand, and I don't even know if the most recent version has anything like js' object shorthand. The way javascript handles anonymous functions and closures is better too - it's just easier to write.

Though whenever the DOM gets involve, both break down into awkward messes.

Re: Ask HN: Things that suck?

#69

Post by dovel »

na85 wrote: post #47
huhtenberg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse than PHP? :)

Sure. I'd rather use a PHP site with good, lightweight CSS than a site loaded down with AJAX and jQuery. Any day of the week, ESPECIALLY on mobile. 13-year-old kids still in high school styling themselves as "PHP Developers" is what gave PHP a bad rap. They're the reason PHP-Nuke existed. But novice developers produce mediocre code irrsepective of the language. I'm not saying it's the best thing ever created. I've ne…

In my experience AJAX is used a lot to do the opposite of 'loading down' a site. Often used for staggering page load - preventing a huge download time at first page load and means one page sites can be possible, with many images even, and not take 2 minutes to download on mobile.
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