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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#561

Post by meetups323 »

kevincox wrote: post #500
kelnos wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Slack isn't feature complete in their webapp if they even still have it. It isn't? I use it daily and haven't noticed anything missing, except that voice calls don't work on Firefox, which is fine, because I never use them.

Actually the newest Firefox ships with a user-agent override for slack so that voice calls work now. But same, I haven't noticed any missing features from the web version.

This is something I think many HN'ers don't understand. For a good amount of modern web functionality, being supported in Firefox is less a matter of "do testing in firefox and make sure things work there" as much as it is "have a very popular product and good marketing team so that you can convince the firefox team to whitelist your domain in their internal maps of `what cool things should X domain be allowed to do`". People see that Slack works in Firefox, but Joe's Voice Calls.Com doesn't, and blame Joe for not supporting firefox. In reality it's firefox that doesn't support Joe.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#562

Post by kevincox »

meetups323 wrote: post #561
kevincox wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the newest Firefox ships with a user-agent override for slack so that voice calls work now. But same, I haven't noticed any missing features from the web version.

This is something I think many HN'ers don't understand. For a good amount of modern web functionality, being supported in Firefox is less a matter of "do testing in firefox and make sure things work there" as much as it is "have a very popular product and good marketing team so that you can convince the firefox team to whitelist your domain in their internal maps of `what cool things should X domain be allowed to do`…

You misunderstand, you have the situation exactly backwards. The problem isn't that Firefox doesn't support these APIs, it does support them and the problem isn't that they are limited to specific domains, they aren't. The problem is that the Slack code is `if isChrome() { enableCalls() }`. Mozilla has to spoof the user-agent to bypass this check. Joe's Voice Calls.com will just do no conditional or do feature-detection rather than user-agent checks and everything will work fine.

The exception is the list of domains that allow auto-play video with sound by default (like YouTube) but I think there are very few instances of this.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#563

Post by lucideer »

omgitsabird wrote: post #513
vbezhenar wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is not how mitigate vulnerability. Every vulnerability is trivially easy to mitigate. The question is whether it's easy to write vulnerable code. For PHP it's easy and implicit: For React it's hard and explicit:

While I agree with the overall point, these are different environments. React normally operates in a DOM. It's templates are translated into javascript, and that javascript manipulates the DOM. PHP templates are just outputting strings.

ReactDOMServer also outputs strings; it just works with context-aware objects during template processing.

The point here is that PHP templates work with strings as a design choice: there's nothing about PHP as a language that's preventing you from taking a similarly context-aware template-processing approach.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#564

Post by tryauuum »

Aozora7 wrote: post #443
tryauuum wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me how in one online multiplayer game developers decided to offload the decision of "who's the winner of the match" to client machines. Because there were some problems on server side and they couldn't do it reliably there. Developers said this voting system worked surprisingly well. Theoretically if there were >50 percent of malicious game clients they could all vote for a wrong player but this was hard to a…

You don't have to hunt for rare examples like this, most multiplayer FPS games use client-side hit detection nowadays.

this sounds... unexpected. I thought client-side detection is only to make blood splashes more instantaneous

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#565

Post by tremon »

emodendroket wrote: post #408
Ultimatt wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like everyone is very disinterested in the cost to the user with most "modern ways" of doing things. Many webpages use far too much resource to just communicate text. Web adverts are especially awful for this. I could browse the web with dialup and a machine a thousandth as powerful as my phone. So as a consumer why do I need to "upgrade" what was the added value above Google scale is delivering computationally…

Of course they are, because the user does not reward them for being sparing of resources that are, frankly, insignificant on modern devices. Might be different in you were operating in a market where people were largely relying on very low-powered devices, though.

That's a circular argument, because "on modern devices" moves the goalposts every year. I still have a Galaxy Note II, which I would definitively classify as a modern device. But some webpages have terrible performance on it, because anything older than 3 years is not worth optimizing for.

Same thing with old iPhones: the only reason they don't work reliably today is because each piece of "modern software" is less efficient than yesteryear's equivalent, and the constant redefining of what constitutes a "modern device" is what perpetuates the problem.

This isn't an engineering problem, it's a consumerist dystopia. The computing market is encouraging wastefulness in all dimensions: useful device lifetime, computing costs (bitcoin farming anyone?), software efficiency, framework longevity (jquery, angular, meteor, react), dependency management (NodeJS). None of those problems are new, but every new entrant seems hell-bent on outdoing the wastefulness of its previous incarnation.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#566

Post by tremon »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #316
pc86 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If HN had an equivalent of Reddit Gold, this comment would deserve a couple of them. Engineering without constraints is easy, but it's not engineering.

Engineering without constraints is theory.

Proper engineering also takes into account the end users, even the ones that aren't paying for it. If other engineering disciplines were as hell-bent on cutting corners as SWE, these situations would be common-place:

- "cars older than 5 years are not supported on this bridge"

- "Sure, we can perform maintenance on this bridge, but with every round of maintenance work, the maximum speed across the bridge will be lowered by 5mph"

- "No, I'm sorry, you can't call our office from a landline. We only accept support calls from a Sprint mobile device, and the contract must be less than a year old"

- "What do you mean, you need to replace a fuse? You can't do that, they're built-in. Please contact our office to buy a new house".

- "Sure, our new Model T does 5 gallons to the mile, but look at its color! It's not just black, it's Vanta Black (tm)! And look at these rounded bumpers, aren't they a marvel of engineering?"

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#567

Post by meetups323 »

kevincox wrote: post #562
meetups323 wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I think many HN'ers don't understand. For a good amount of modern web functionality, being supported in Firefox is less a matter of "do testing in firefox and make sure things work there" as much as it is "have a very popular product and good marketing team so that you can convince the firefox team to whitelist your domain in their internal maps of `what cool things should X domain be allowed to do`…

You misunderstand, you have the situation exactly backwards. The problem isn't that Firefox doesn't support these APIs, it does support them and the problem isn't that they are limited to specific domains, they aren't. The problem is that the Slack code is `if isChrome() { enableCalls() }`. Mozilla has to spoof the user-agent to bypass this check. Joe's Voice Calls.com will just do no conditional or do feature-detect…

Ah, indeed I misunderstood. Though to be fair, at $DAY_JOB we had to do exactly the process I described above to access some API (not auto-play) without a litany of obnoxious prompts. If anyone at a smaller company tried to do what we were doing, they'd be 100% unable to provide a usable experience for Firefox users.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#568

Post by rdiddly »

rdiddly wrote: post #221
root_axis wrote: post #23

The author is fighting a strawman. Rather than engage with the specific problems these solutions were built to solve they dismissively regard them as just flavor of the week trends purely for the sake of chasing newness. This is true of the entire post, but I'll tackle just one since it's emblematic of my issues with all the rest: The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper…

I think that's what's offensive to the purist engineer mind. These aren't engineering decisions, they're business decisions (or maybe the closest thing you could call them would be "financial engineering" decisions). The best thing, by pure engineering criteria, is not what gets built. The best thing for the business is what gets built. In that context it's a complaint as old as the hills. ...and not specific to comp…

I knew it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28110790

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#569

Post by Jetrel »

marcosdumay wrote: post #210
SavantIdiot wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shittier performance Depends what you're writing. People aren't going to write performance-sensitive apps in Electron, like FPS games where customers demand 4K 120 FPS with full graphics enabled. But for Image burners (balena), Drone software (Betaflight), and Sophisticated code editors (VSCode), it's hardly a concern.

Hum... We are down in a thread where people are complaining it takes several seconds to see a set of text messages.

Yeah, it's worth pointing out that people are blaming electron for what's wrong with Slack. When, perhaps, it's just Slack itself that sucks?

I use Discord all the time, which is one hell of an oranges-to-oranges comparison (with Slack), and not only does it have none of the perf problems of Slack, it's also faster and snappier than any NATIVE chat app I've used.

There's a lot that can be done wrong in any framework; as recently as windows xp, there were a few atrocious algorithmic-complexity gaffes in basic file viewing (directories with more than a few hundred files would slow to a crawl in the GUI, taking multiple minutes to display). It wasn't the fault of the framework it was written in; it's just that someone at MS had written something that had to scan the directory in a hurry, and ended up accidentally writing an exponential-time algorithm. Slack likely has a few deep-seated goofs in their architecture that are just too big to extract and fix.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#570

Post by moralestapia »

torginus wrote: post #514
moralestapia wrote: post #293

I had a meeting today with a "cybersecurity expert" who was consulting a big company that had no idea what a hash function was. Literally no idea, as in "never heard the term before". I explained the concept to her and she started referring to it as "encryption", I told her it wasn't encryption and she immediately started to debate me about that. Let that sink for a bit, she really thought she knew more than me about…

I don't understand this. When I think of security people, I immediately think of articles where they describe how they made a timing attack which caused a race condition, which allowed them to overwrite the stack, and do arbitrary code execution via return-oriented-programming. I'm reminded that these people exist and can routinely do stuff like this (or even more insane), and even though I've considered myself knowl…

Their "security advice" consists of parroting back stuff they read on blog posts, LinkedIn, and places alike.

"Change your password every 3 months", "did you enable 2FA?", blah blah blah.

Add clueless managers (as other commenter said) and some nepotism to the mix and that's how they get some contracts with big names (Microsoft, Oracle, ...)

Afterwards it only gets better for them because they can advertise they were "part of the security auditing team at , reporting directly to the VP"; even though their only real useful task was to keep warm coffee at hand.

This happens continuously until one day someone in a meeting asks them about a hash function and they are absolutely clueless and the show falls down; or it could be much worse and go on until an entire community has to pay for it with life-long consequences (see Flint), or until billions of dollars become lost/stolen (see Madoff, Holmes, your choice of weekly crypto scam), or until planes start falling out from the sky because of a newly-developed "feature" (see Boeing 737 MAX), ... the list goes on forever.

We live in an era of mediocrity disguised as a (fake) meritocracy, with all the consequences it implies.

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