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

Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

frankchimero.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 269 posts

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#91

Post by vmception »

Everything this author complains about has a purpose.

They don't have to use compiled, minified and obfuscated css, vectorized graphics, and user-agent detected custom fonts

but if you don't, then you are unoptimized for other realities

websites in the past used system fonts, you can still do that.

websites in the past used low quality raster images, or high quality raster images. those websites don't look good at higher resolutions. conditional logic to fix those sites is messy.

you can still make sites like that.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#92

Post by CharlesW »

grawprog wrote: post #26
smoldesu wrote: post #10

The delineation of this argument is what made me switch to Linux. On Windows, things that should have been getting easy were getting harder for me: software management was getting worse, updates were getting worse, and everything that should "just work", just wouldn't. My experience on MacOS was just as bad, with all of the 32-bit apps I used gone in the wind. Now the 64-bit apps are up on the chopping block, and I h…

I love Linux based operating systems and I've used them pretty much exclusively for at least a decade now, and I agree with a lot of your post, but >By cutting away abstraction, I don't think I agree with this take. You haven't cut away abstraction, you've changed to a different kind of abstraction. Linux's 'everything is a file' abstraction is just that, an abstraction. >Linux is arranged masterfully, and makes the…

> Every flavour of Linux uses a different layout for its root directories, stores configs in different places and generally is not consistent from distro to distro.

As a very casual Linux user (macOS is my daily driver), are there any efforts to solve these "death by 1,000 cuts" arbitrary (I assume) differences?

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#94

Post by Jaygles »

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…

Because sometimes you want to learn the fancy tools but only need to make something simple. When the time comes to make the complex web app, you are now more prepared.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#95

Post by grawprog »

CharlesW wrote: post #92
grawprog wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Linux based operating systems and I've used them pretty much exclusively for at least a decade now, and I agree with a lot of your post, but >By cutting away abstraction, I don't think I agree with this take. You haven't cut away abstraction, you've changed to a different kind of abstraction. Linux's 'everything is a file' abstraction is just that, an abstraction. >Linux is arranged masterfully, and makes the…

> Every flavour of Linux uses a different layout for its root directories, stores configs in different places and generally is not consistent from distro to distro. As a very casual Linux user (macOS is my daily driver), are there any efforts to solve these "death by 1,000 cuts" arbitrary (I assume) differences?

Not really no. The differences between distros are essentially rooted in philosophical beliefs defended by near religious zealotry. Entire identies are defined around the differences between distros.

A bit of an exaggeration, but well...pretty much that.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#96

Post by em-bee »

grawprog wrote: post #73
em-bee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i strongly disagree with this: Every flavour of Linux uses a different layout for its root directories, stores configs in different places and generally is not consistent from distro to distro. there are differences, but it's 90% the same in the major distributions. and while you do have a point about user configs, it is getting better. .config and .local are getting used more and more and are an improvement over eve…

>there are differences, but it's 90% the same in the major distributions. Yes and that 10% can cause some unexpected, sometimes hard to fix problems. A poorly written build script or installer that expects a specific distro's directory layout can cause some problems. Especially if it's a large convoluted build system that hard codes the directories in multiple places. I've actually had to deal with this, it sucks. Th…

And yet there's hundreds of apps that will never be updated or changed to conform to standards.

i suspect many of those are no longer actively maintained. at best they receive security patches from distributions.

Tell that to snap. It insists its folder must sit nicely in my home folder and nowhere else.

my (low) opinion of snap aside, the bad here is that the location is not configurable. as a library of applications, i would want snap in $HOME. or i would put it in $HOME/lib or an equivalent. maybe .local would be appropriate too, but i understand it's for app specific user-data, so it doesn't look like whole apps should be in there. (edit: elsewhere i just read that .local is supposed to be like a user specific /usr/local, so snap should fit in there somewhere)

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#97

Post by TheCoelacanth »

winphone1974 wrote: post #76
5cott0 wrote: post #65

No, no it is not. It's somewhat amusing to see people complain about the supposedly increasing complexity of web development. Sorry-not-sorry it's not that bad or even that complex. In fact things are far easier and less complex then they were just a few years ago and improvements continue at a rapid pace (modern browser module support, vitejS, ESbuild). I don't even need to use babeljs anymore whereas just a few yea…

By what standard are you saying things are easier? Certainty not less complexity, abstraction, volume of code, number of moving pieces, raTe of change or configuration. If you don't understand how the foundational technologies work and don't care to learn then things may indeed seem easier. If you have 15+ years of experience and seek to understand today's technology at the same level as when you first learned, thing…

It's easier if you want to achieve the same things. Our expectations have just increased even faster than things became easier.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#98

Post by eliasbagley »

smoldesu wrote: post #10

The delineation of this argument is what made me switch to Linux. On Windows, things that should have been getting easy were getting harder for me: software management was getting worse, updates were getting worse, and everything that should "just work", just wouldn't. My experience on MacOS was just as bad, with all of the 32-bit apps I used gone in the wind. Now the 64-bit apps are up on the chopping block, and I h…

I would love to to use Linix as my daily driver, but keep needing to go back to Windows for Ableton and gaming.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#99

Post by inglor_cz »

volkk wrote: post #46
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…

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 for people much more enjoyable than writing for computers. As a computer programmer, you mostly receive negative feedback: something stopped working and the users are often angry or frustrated. As a writer for people, you receive more than a few thank-you e-mails from your readers, which brighten your day.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#100

Post by smoldesu »

eliasbagley wrote: post #98
smoldesu wrote: post #10

The delineation of this argument is what made me switch to Linux. On Windows, things that should have been getting easy were getting harder for me: software management was getting worse, updates were getting worse, and everything that should "just work", just wouldn't. My experience on MacOS was just as bad, with all of the 32-bit apps I used gone in the wind. Now the 64-bit apps are up on the chopping block, and I h…

I would love to to use Linix as my daily driver, but keep needing to go back to Windows for Ableton and gaming.

I switched to Bitwig, which has a native version for Linux. The workflow is very similar to Ableton Live, with a little bit of extra configuration. As for gaming, it's a case-by-case situation, but Valve Proton is good enough for 80% of the games I like.
Post reply on HN