Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

justinjackson.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 229 posts

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#61

Post by Cthulhu_ »

dmje wrote: post #33

"WordPress is too complicated! Let's do everything in React" is my current favourite developer anti-pattern :-)

It's even worse; it went from static sites (html) to dynamic sites (Wordpress, PHP) to webapps, and now back to static sites but built using the tools to make webapps with. Apple wanted to make web technology the one for iOS but quickly realized it wasn't fast enough, so they spent time developing a really good native platform, but now it's boomeranging back to webapps, or adding layers on top of the native layers to stay in that web app comfort zone (react native, flutter, etc). It's refusing to use the path of least resistance because of perceived benefits, or something. Same with desktop apps that now all have to be web technology for some reason.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#62

Post by _Algernon_ »

surrTurr wrote: post #15
trevormcneal wrote: post #6

I miss those times. I could spend hours complaining about the depressive current state of the web, I imagine being a newcomer to such world and have to handle the over complexity of the current scenario without knowing that things could be simpler. I remember seeing a team member migrating a project from grunt to webpack, the project was just a 404 page. "You need to compile your assets" they say, just a cat *.css >…

There’s also is-even[1]. It has one dependency: is-odd [1]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even

Now the only right thing to do would be for the maintainer of is-even to rewrite it to depend on is-odd.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#63

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ashneer wrote: post #3

I really wish I could experience the web back then at 1993 (I'm 25). I imagine much faster, and intuitive websites than nowadays. Beautiful UX is one thing but making a website feels natural, that's what I think the internet is missing today.

> I imagine much faster, and intuitive websites than nowadays.

Oh no; they weren't faster because computers and browsers weren't nearly as fast as they are today (iirc it was Chrome that emphasized performance, especially JS performance because it saw how much more that was going to be used (for ads lmao)), and not intuitive because there weren't as much guidelines or awareness of UX as there are today.

There should be plenty of websites from the 90's on archive.org

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#64

Post by Cthulhu_ »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #12
fuzzy2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faster? Not really. Even with ISDN, stuff was slow af. 8000 bytes per second just isn't a lot. Latency was often high as well.

Page loads were slow, but you don't get that weird thing you get today when a page is slow even after it's loaded, or stuff keeps loading in and changing the layout so you need to sit and wait for an unknown period before you can interact with it. It feels like websites are a lot jankier today. The old web was slow, but it was predictable. Like I know a site where if you don't wait for it to finish to load (and it's…

this is true, but it's because developers, designers and marketeers add loads of stuff onto it. Pages that show animated ads, CSS animations and (sometimes multiple) autoplaying videos are slow.

But there's plenty of websites out there still - including HN - that do without all of those extras. And it's up to web developers of today to resist using the fanciest technologies to build websites.

At some point there was the concept of (iirc) progressive web apps, where the basis was all HTML - fully functional, you could turn off JS and CSS and it'd still work - and then use CSS and JS to add functionality on top, but that would be purely embellishment.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#65

Post by golergka »

tomhoward wrote: post #20

My 1996 self feels very seen. I think a lot about the way the web was back in the mid 90s, compared to the bleeding-edge technologies of today, particularly blockchain and cryptocurrency. And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfo…

> And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfort and trust.

I was a 9 year old building websites in the 90s, and while I could write HTML and upload files via FTP, I had no clue about TCP/IP stack, socket implementation on the filesystem, how Windows 95 and Windows NT core worked, how my Pentium processor worked, and about a thousand other technologies that I used in the process. I relied on abstractions.

> The world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies and "web3" feels vastly more opaque and esoteric by comparison

Nobody's stopping you from just as blindly trusting underlying web3 abstractions as you did in the 90s with the web. But we're professionals who learned not to do that and have drastically different approach to technologies that we use. We're not 9 year old kids anymore. We had to learn these things after waking up to an outage, or after our site struggled with 10 requests per second (because we didn't know that database indexes existed), or after any other number of perfectly valid reasons. Now we don't trust tech, we read the whole documentation, and we want to dig in.

The world hasn't changed as much. It's us who's changed.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#66

Post by nprateem »

cookiengineer wrote: post #11
ashneer wrote: post #3

I really wish I could experience the web back then at 1993 (I'm 25). I imagine much faster, and intuitive websites than nowadays. Beautiful UX is one thing but making a website feels natural, that's what I think the internet is missing today.

You had to wait 30 minutes to wait for all those unicorn gifs to load, so I'd say it wasn't as fast as it could've been :D The amazing part was that everyone had a homepage at some point, where they put content online about topics that they thought was worth sharing. Even girls in school had a website with sparkling rainbow gifs and a guestbook, and some pages about topics they liked... like smallville series charact…

Yeah but to be fair you knew when a website was under construction. Now it's a health and safety nightmare, with no warning gifs anywhere

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#67

Post by sjaak »

trevormcneal wrote: post #6

I miss those times. I could spend hours complaining about the depressive current state of the web, I imagine being a newcomer to such world and have to handle the over complexity of the current scenario without knowing that things could be simpler. I remember seeing a team member migrating a project from grunt to webpack, the project was just a 404 page. "You need to compile your assets" they say, just a cat *.css >…

It's funny, the package is-odd has dependencies itself. It depends on a package called `is-number`. Go figure.

I finally understand how `node_modules/` directories grow to 100s of megabytes for the smallest apps

Turtles all the way down.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#68

Post by abrookewood »

scandox wrote: post #9

I know this is kind of negative: but I don't like nostalgia much and I think I like tech-nostalgia least. Don't get me wrong I like old tech, but just for what it is. Text based, simple, fast etc...but I don't like wallowing in a warm, fuzzy feeling about how it was. I mean I personally do recall 5.25" disks. I liked their look and feel as a kid. Fine. But making a big deal out of it feels retrograde...

5.25" disks? I can remember waiting ~30 minutes for a game to load on my Commodore 64 from tape, only to have it crash at the last minute. Disks were amazing.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#69

Post by vaylian »

golergka wrote: post #65
tomhoward wrote: post #20

My 1996 self feels very seen. I think a lot about the way the web was back in the mid 90s, compared to the bleeding-edge technologies of today, particularly blockchain and cryptocurrency. And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfo…

> And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfort and trust. I was a 9 year old building websites in the 90s, and while I could write HTML and upload files via FTP, I had no clue about TCP/IP stack, socket implementation on the files…

> Nobody's stopping you from just as blindly trusting underlying web3 abstractions as you did in the 90s with the web

Except that most web3 technology is property-related. There is no easy undo and try again. And getting off the ground as a minor is probably extra hard with such things.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#70

Post by miguelrochefort »

jraph wrote: post #42
dncornholio wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the issue. You write a function to check if a number is odd. You seem to have this function in every project so you make a package for it so you, and others, can easily include it. This is exactly what npm is made for?

Testing whether a number is odd is done in 3 characters: n % 2 if you don't like the % you can also do it using a bitwise AND, this also handles negative numbers: n & 1 this is equal to 1 if the number is odd, 0 if it is even, and will be converted to true or false in a if statement. You don't need a library for this. And you should not need a library to handle string conversions, you should be aware of the types you…

Before reading your comment, I probably would have agreed with you that isOdd was overkill.

After reading your comment, I'm starting to think that isOdd is not only more readable but safer. I don't think I ever thought about n % 2 not handling negative numbers, and I'm not sure I would immediately recognize n & 1 as equivalent to isOdd. In languages without truthiness, n % 2 == 0 is longer than isOdd(n). Likewise, even with truthiness, n % 2 == 1 is longer than isEven(n).

I suspect that the real problem is the cost of adding dependencies, in terms of package size, performance, and security. All these problems could be solved using linking, inlining, and auditing.

Post reply on HN