191–200 of 364 posts
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Hacker News is pretty minimal in terms of UI. I like it for that.
It is, but unfortunately the HTML structure is quite horrible. It is built less like a web page and more like an Excel spreadsheet. Makes it terribly hard to parse automatically.
Kidding aside, I love you HN. Don't ever change.
I think the weirdest way is using React. I mean, it feels so unnatural for me, compared to the jQuery way. You have to download thousands of packages, keep track of various dependencies and their security holes, adding an overhead for auditing them. HTML5 with jQuery IMHO still beats everything in simplicity and getting work done fastly
Having dependencies might not be a huge problem. But I've made some pretty complex interfaces using nothing but jquery, handlebars, and other util libraries. All patterns thought-out and written by myself. Not once did I feel I needed something more complex. I get the impression all the hype followers of front end frameworks might not have the best idea of what they're doing. Especially when you see people commenting…
It's just that if nobody except you can understand the patterns you've created the code is not very maintainable in the long run. Sure it's probably fast and slick, but when you're gone can the next guy read your code? And more importantly, build on top of it?
I've heard that some people build UIs with thousands of dependencies, in JavaScript that hits the server for text that is then parsed to object that are then passed through all sorts of classes that each spit out HTML. They also do some weird stuff with events like key-ups in order to re-render input fields based on objects rather than letting the browser manage those kinds of things. Sounds pretty weird to me.
Yes! Web development is "weird" because we (developers) are basically constantly trying to put square pegs into round holes. Over the past ~25 years, a document delivery system has been perverted into a application delivery system. The underlying, fundamental technologies were not intended for "UI" app development.
...and a protocol for inter-object communication. That's probably the most important part, because that's what creates most of the complexity and security holes today. There is no end to this in sight.
Alan Kay warned web developers about this in 1997:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
Nobody listened. The majority of web devs still don't get it. (Can't wait for the arrogant replies here.) We ended up reinventing and re-implementing "internet objects" in the shittiest way possible.
I once worked at Chase Manhattan Bank and one of their internal networking teams had a web site for wiring requests. They didn’t want to work too hard so their UI was designed to make data entry as slow as possible, mostly by using huge multi-level drop down lists where the slightest twitch would make them collapse and you would have to start over navigating through them, repeat a dozen times for every run of cable,…
When intranet webapps came along everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief.
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That has got to be the worst system to not have any type of stop gate in the API.
I mean yes... but recall that the entire point of the system was that it would make data entry slow. I think that whoever set it up probably felt that the clunky form was enough of a rate limiter and nothing further was needed on the back end.
I once worked at Chase Manhattan Bank and one of their internal networking teams had a web site for wiring requests. They didn’t want to work too hard so their UI was designed to make data entry as slow as possible, mostly by using huge multi-level drop down lists where the slightest twitch would make them collapse and you would have to start over navigating through them, repeat a dozen times for every run of cable,…
Whole books could be written on the terribleness of Lotus Notes. For those too young to remember the 90s, LN really was as bad as everyone says, turning what should be simple (email, maybe a few custom forms) into swampy morasses of pain. When intranet webapps came along everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief.
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No! It cannot be that Agresso was already around at that time. I still have to work with that horrific system, even though it is webbased now. It's still a horrible experience.
> There was an appalling timesheet system called Agresso, the most counterintuitive Windows GUI I ever encountered. I love the idea that there was a terrible timesheet system called Agresso. And that it's still around today! Some things do change with time. If this system was created today, I imagine it would be named something like quiesso or daisy.
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A 10X programmer or 100X programmer finds a way to remove layers of abstractions.
I'm actually shocked at the downvotes. The previous post was discussing the problem of all the layers of abstractions, and I was pointing out that a "10x programmer" could be getting 10x results by finding ways around those abstractions.
Craigslist. Here is something novel: let html and browsers do their job. Let your browser process simple html at light speed. Let GET be idempotent. Let users be anonymous while getting information.