Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#161

Post by HWR_14 » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 10:13 PM UTC

kgin wrote: post #72

The simple page you could make 20 years ago is the simple page you can make today. With a few minor tweaks, it will work as well as it did 20 years ago. If you want to make a complex web app today, that's easier than it was 20 years ago. The tools are infinitely better. If for some reason you decide to use the tools meant for complex web apps to make your simple page, you're going to feel like everything has gone hor…

> If you want to make a complex web app today, that's easier than it was 20 years ago. The tools are infinitely better.

20 years ago, you could make a complex web app in Java, ActiveX or Flash. (There were also more obscure options.) People would install a plugin for your app.

Now, it all uses Javascript. There are a lot of advantages, but it's difficult for me to say the tooling there is infinitely better. I think a reasonable case could be made that the tooling is worse than any of the three I mentioned.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#162

Post by jb3689 » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

cosmodisk wrote: post #45

I often feel a lot of things became more complex for the sake of it. You'd think by now it'd be just a press of a button and your software is deployed and the clients can start using it,but no, that'd be too easy. Instead,even getting a simple WordPress website up to speed requires endless list of plugins,some undocumented configurations and CSS overwrites in random places. And it just gets worse and worse. When you…

On the other hand the one button experience is as far as it has ever been. I just pushed up a website on Amplify in a few clicks, and the only reason it isn’t less is that some people want options.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#163

Post by secondcoming » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

anthk wrote: post #69

enriquto wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could you shed some light on how it further removes abstractions? By not running hundreds of useless programs, I guess. If you launch htop inside OpenBSD, it'll fill half of your terminal, and the rest is empty. The easiest way to try it is to install it on a virtual machine. You'll see that not much is needed to get to a point to launch firefox from an xterm.

Top itself is enough, you don´t need htop.

I find htop's ability to view the tree structure of a process quite useful. Name your threads!

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#164

Post by II2II » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 10:25 PM UTC

wildmanx wrote: post #80

bestinterest wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish wish wish I could move over to Linux but its font rendering situation is terrible [1] I've tried Manjaro and Ubuntu to no avail. I have no idea what causes it or if people on Linux are not as sensitive to it or its a specific hardware setup which causes terrible fonts but once you read Windows fonts stuff looks so much better to me. Apparently its a hot debated topic but its so obvious to some it seems. [1] ht…

Wow, first time I hear that as the main and apparently only argument to using Windows over any Linux distro. With HiDPI displays all over the place, is subpixel rendering really still a thing? Pixels have gotten so small, I can't see individual ones anymore even if I'm trying. They could leave out anti-aliasing altogether in fonts and I'd hardly notice. Or I'm just getting old.

I think that people are just too fussy. I have anti-aliasing disabled on my 142 dpi laptop screen and it looks better in most applications provided that screen fonts are used. Yes, you can see the pixels and you get the odd rendering artifact. On the other hand, the fuzziness of anti-aliasing is a steep price for edges that appear smoother.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#165

Post by bigwheeler » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

“I wonder if I have twenty years of experience making websites, or if it is really five years of experience, repeated four times.”

This sums up how I feel about my entire career as eloquently as possible.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#166

Post by bnjms » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 10:30 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #84

nitrogen wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rare to see people go the other way I suspect this is literally true, but only because we don't see them. I've heard second-hand the story of a top developer at a famous unicorn who just couldn't keep up with all the stimulants everyone was using to code more and burned out, bought a cabin in the woods, and became a hermit.

> all the stimulants everyone was using to code more That's interesting. Do you mean Adderall/Ritalin? That stuff has a relatively fixed useful half-life. It doesn't work for as long as people might think. It also doesn't actually make thinking clearer. It makes people feel as if they are thinking more clearly. I don't feel like looking for it, but this has been studied and reported, somewhere. If you are referring t…

Amphetamines, cocoon, and modafinil are the likely targets. Other than that look up stimulant nootropics.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#167

Post by megameter » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 10:31 PM UTC

8bitsrule wrote: post #142

riskable wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "the content is what is important" The only problem there is that users have come to expect certain UI elements on any given web page and those things are far beyond "content". For example, let's say you want to allow comments on articles. Now you have opened an enormous can of worms by requiring logins, storing of passwords (hashes! with salts! using modern algorithms!), permissions management, password reset mech…

>users have come to expect certain UI elements on any given web page and those things are far beyond "content". Usually I visit pages to see if the content is worth my time. If the 'UI elements' somehow contribute to that content, great. That's rare. Most pages I hit are hiding poor content in swathes of katchi-vatchi. Do I really care if the headline slides down that big photo? Am I really going to scan those glarin…

Right. There's an element cleaving both ways of the developer being obligated to do complex and disempowering things for users for various reasons, and then users rejecting their disempowerment and trying to work around it.

And I think if there's a future here it belongs to targeted protocols that decouple the use case from the UI, and filters like Reader view that reformat content to the medium the user wants to work in.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#168

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 10:49 PM UTC

dleslie wrote: post #64

mauvehaus wrote: post #37

Confession: as a recovering programmer who made a career change to non-programming, it took at most 30 minutes to say "fuck it" and go with Squarespace. I've never been on the web side of things, but I knew enough HTML in the early aughts to put up a basic informational website. After digging in to some sites I admired, I decided that it was too much distraction from my actual work to roll my own. Granted some of thi…

FWIW, services like Squarespace are devouring the VPS and small-site design industry. Rolling your own services, managing them with cPanel, and paying local kids to build and design it is a quaint throwback.

[deleted]

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#169

Post by kbenson » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 10:58 PM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #99

volkk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what kind of work did you get into after programming out of curiosity? rare to see people go the other way

Not the OP, but I left professional programming to become a writer (in Czech, not in English; pardon my mistakes). It actually has something in common, you still write structured text for living, though your target audience are now people, not machines. Some readers commented that they find my style clear and understandable; maybe it is a carry-over from programming, where you cannot be ambiguous. But I find writing…

> As a computer programmer, you mostly receive negative feedback

FWIW there are different types of writing and different types of programming.

Writing copy for a bank will probably generate a lot of feedback about mistakes that need to be fixed.

Writing code to reduce annoying monotonous tasks for coworkers so it takes ten minutes instead of two hours will get you a lot thank yous from your coworkers, and will also brighten your day.

It's all about what your job is, and how close you are to the people you are affecting.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#170

Post by danShumway » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 11:01 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #144

danShumway wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved Flash, deeply, I learned to program in Flash. But I am slowly in the process of doing a 180 on this, where before I felt like we had lost something with Flash that nobody had ever replicated. People have different things they liked about Flash. I liked the animation-centered workflow (and I still think there's room for innovation in this space with modern tools). I miss the ability to export vector animations…

Roblox is not comparable to flash in the ease of development. You don't have kids creating mini games and sharing them either. Scratch is not comparable either. The ease of creating something is just not there in general. The current tools are harder to use for beginner and beginner achieves less with more effort. And open source have bad track record in terms of creating user beginner friendly tools.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Roblox is literally a game engine, the entire point is for people to create mini games and share them. That's basically all that Roblox is, if you go to the homepage it's just a list of games you can join.

And you can validly complain about the technical quality of tools like Scratch, but as much I personally hate to admit it, Scratch is more user friendly than Flash was. I personally know kids who are making stuff in Scratch that would not be able to handle Flash. It's extremely crude stuff, Scratch is ridiculously limited. But they're still making stuff and sharing it, and getting their friends involved in the process, and sharing hacks with each other to get around its limitations, and finding other projects that impress them and reading their source code.

I do get what you mean about Flash's technical side that made it interesting. I miss an animation-first workflow, I wish someone else would build a tool that experimented with that. There is definitely a hole in my game-dev process that Flash left behind. But in theory, you could still be using Animate today and exporting your games to HTML5. Nobody has explained to me what's broken about it.

But if everyone in the old Newgrounds scene moved to Animate, or if it was magically released for free tomorrow, would that bring back the community? I'm not sure it's that simple.

I don't think that kids stopped being creative when Flash went away. I think that people (myself included) who grew up on Flash got older, and the spaces are different now and we're not being invited to them. Which... I don't know if that's really a technological thing, or even necessarily a problem that needs to be solved. Were there really a ton of 35-40 year olds making stuff on Newgrounds back in the day? I am increasingly learning about community spaces from the kids I know that I would never stumble on by myself on the Internet. And they seem to be pretty vibrant, they're just not my spaces anymore.