I'm broadly with you on disliking OP's comment because it is needlessly negative, but I don't think it quite rises to the standard of a personal attack.
Accusing the author of introducing slop into the language by coining (or using) a new term is a criticism of the author's work, not the author himself.
It's akin to saying, "Your work has a negative side effect which I don't like." Which clearly would've been the nicer way to say it.
Interpretations differ, of course. I'd say any internet comment of the form "Please $Person. For the love of god stop trying to do $bad-thing" is clearly over that line, and snarky to boot.
I know "personal attack" sounds pretty strong, but the closer one is to being the target of such an attack, the more it feels like that—and there's absolutely no need to make a point that way.
The comments section on Ars is particularly depressing. I've been posting there for two decades and watched it slowly devolve from a place where thoughtful discussions happened to now just being one of the worst echo chambers on the internet, like a bad subreddit. I've made suggestions over the years in their public feedback surveys to alter their forum software to discourage mob behavior, but they don't seem to be doing anything about it.
They don't actually publish the comments under the article, only a link. I've long suspected sites doing that are fully aware of how shit the comment section is, and try to hide it from casual viewers while keeping the nutjob gallery happy.
This goes back a lot farther with Ars. They done this for years because their comments section is driven by forum software. The main conversations happen in the forums. They are then reformatted for a the comment view.
So, their main goal wasn’t to hide the comments, but push people to forums where there is a better format for conversation.
The Ars forums used to be incredibly useful sources of information - many of their best authors "grew" from forum posters; and the comments sections on articles were quite informative and had serious comments from actual experts - and discussion!
Then the Soap Box took over the entire site and all that's left is standard Internet garbage.
Most mainstream news sites around here have by now hidden the comment section somehow, either making it folded by default or just moving it to the bottom of the page below "related news" sections and the like.
Hard agree.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/meta-debuts-playstati... is an example I remember. The subject matter of the is not controversial (just another Game Pass like subscription), but the comment section is full of -- yes you've guessed it -- Meta BAD! There is absolutely no meaningful discussion of the service itself.
I mostly stopped paying attention to the comment section after that, and Ars in general.
HN has also been taking a turn lately. Part of it is a large influx of new users, part of it (I suspect) is just a growing disenfranchisement with the technology scene. I'm partly to blame for this as well. I've tried to stop commenting most of the time since my first and strongest response has just been to express my anger and frustration at the direction most technology is taking.
Philosophically I want to agree with you more but Meta is the informational equivalent of RJ Reynolds. They’ve facilitated crime waves (remember all of the hand-wringing about shoplifting which died down when the government went after Facebook marketplace and Amazon?), supported genocide, and elevated some of the worst voices in the world. Giving them more money and social control is a risk which should be discussed.
I realize it makes you uncomfortable but the harms are done whether or not you ignore them. That’s the problem: people can exploit that desire to be fair, “neutral”, say it’s “just business”, etc. for years until the negative impacts on society are too hard to ignore. Think about how the fossil fuel industry managed to get people to talk like there was a debate with two sides deserving equal respect and parlay that into half a century of inaction after the scientific consensus correctly recognized that there was a real harm being done. We’re going to look back at the attention economy similarly.
I think you're misunderstanding or misrepresenting them. The fight to have the most jaded or pessimistic take, the hottest flame, the spiciest rant, it's all so predictable and it's just a bunch of the same people saying the same things and agreeing with each other for the nth time. It brings nothing new to the table, and the posts that actually respond to the new information get drowned out or worse downvoted for insufficient vitriol.
Perhaps–it’s hard to tell from a single sentence–but I would recommend reading more than the first comment of that thread. The person at the top exaggerated how much it’s not talking about the service or competing options, and the people talking about Facebook are raising what is a reasonable point about privacy and data mining.
Evil deserves to be called out as evil. Why should we constrain the discussion to anything else about them? The absolute best thing they can do for the world would be to disappear, as soon as possible.
The switch to their newest forum software seems to discourage any kind of actual conversation. If I recall correctly, the last iteration was also unthreaded, but somehow it was easier for a back-and-forth to develop. Now it is basically just reactions-- like YouTube comments (which, ironically, is actually threaded).
Is HN really the last remaining forum for science and technology conversations? If so... very depressing.
They should get rid of the fairly extremely prominent badges of years-on-the-forum and number-of-comments. Maybe that'd help quell some of the echo down, because every comment section on Ars articles is 10+ year old accounts all arguing with each other.
Try reading Slashdot these days and it's the same story. I stopped reading regularly when cmdrtaco left but still check in occasionally out of misplaced nostalgia or something.. The comment section is like a time capsule from the 00s, the same ideas and arguments have been echoing back and forth there for years, seemingly losing soul and nuance with each echo. Bizarre, and sad.
Hello HN! I'm Eric, an experienced software developer seeking a coding or engineering management role. I've worked in many tech stacks and I'm always ready to learn new ones to get the job done. Let's make great things together!
Thanks for offering to answer this question. Immigration law is so often an inflammatory topic, but I think your perspective as someone who has to work with the law, the US agencies that enforce it, and the people trying to navigate it could be really valuable.
Not Peter but would like to spur discussion on positive changes that could be made.
- Paper-free overhaul of the entire immigration system.
- Green Card recapture [0].
- Country of Birth caps abolished for Green Cards. Impossible to justify this as it doesn't serve the intended purpose since AC21 was passed.
- EAD/AP premium processing - so many livelihoods ruined and immigration journeys derailed because people can't get work authorization or cannot travel.
- TD holders granted working rights incident of status same as L2S.
Now for the not-so-popular suggestions...
- Diversity Lottery - there's bipartisan support to cancel the program and it's really hard to justify bringing almost 55k with a min of high school education into the country.
- Removal of F2B, F3, F4 family based categories to move inline with other developed nations immigration systems such as Canada [1].
> - Country of Birth caps abolished for Green Cards. Impossible to justify this as it doesn't serve the intended purpose since AC21 was passed.
You are saying that since, for example, Indians can remain indeterminately as long as they are employed, they are de facto kind of like in a green card situation already, therefore country caps don't make sense?
That would mean then that every other country wait will go up for over a decade, with all the backlog that India has (1.2M vs 140k EB green cards per year).
No, it shouldn't. Stuff like recapture has no likelihood of passing. The reason country caps exist is precisely because everyone wants to carve out some provisions for their favorite group in hopes of getting the mythical comprehensive immigration reform. A one sentence bill on this matter has better odds of passing if it were to ever come to a vote. There is really no tenable position in favor of country based discrimination. The challenge is getting it to a vote.
I disagree for the reasons the first reply mentioned. Backlogging every country by 10+ years is effectively shutting down the US immigration system. The backlog will never be cleared.
It will be cleared if everyone is treated equally as Congress will be forced to change the law. Green cards aren't magical fairy dust with a finite supply. Everything is negotiable. You restore basic equality first; the rest is accounting. Your position is tantamount to saying that segregation should be abolished only if it is coupled with increasing the total number of schools. It makes no sense.
The thing is everyone on the queue aren’t citizens, so they don’t vote, so congress doesn’t give a shit if it takes 10+ years for everyone.
There is no downside for them to screw everyone equally. However, if they make immigration easier or make it simpler, a bunch of them won’t be reelected as their bases would hate that.
I’m all in for simplifying the process and what not, but congress taking action I think is very likely to screw things more than they currently are.
The downside is that you have declining birth rates and a slowing economy. Despite all the non-sense from the current admin, you do actually need immigrants. Trump has said so himself as his admin keeps screwing things up (see the Hyundai fiasco). The average American citizen has no idea about how immigration in this country works. People are overwhelmingly in favor of legal and skills based immigration.
>but congress taking action I think is very likely to screw things more than they currently are
Congress' inaction and paralysis is the reason we find ourselves in this morass. Congress has abdicated its responsibility and ceded power to the executive.
That's right. Individuals from every country should be subject to the same set of rules. If the backlog is to be a century, it is to be borne by everyone.
Vanilla JS is very powerful and has the features you need to build SPAs without a big framework. Proxies and mutation observers are great for maintaining state, Updating the DOM yourself is fine, view transitions are awesome, etc. The only thing that's hard is routing, but there are lots of small dedicated JS libraries to handle that. Here's one I made that gives you the Express API on the frontend: https://github.com/rooseveltframework/single-page-express
If you're using Proxies and mutation observers you've probably created your own micro-framework. I wrote something like petite-Vue / Alpine as an excersice and it's really not much to them.
What are you talking about with this talk of implosion? It sounds like boogieman nonsense from small children scared of the dark. I prefer to use vanilla JS when writing large SPAs and it works just fine.
There is a stereotype from the outside world that a great many programmers are autistic. The irrational fear of not using a framework for code in the browser is one of those cases that really screams the stereotype for all to see.
If you are using TypeScript there is inbuilt type checking for the DOM, because TypeScript ships with a very good data type library that describes the DOM in excellent detail.
> What are you talking about with this talk of implosion? It sounds like boogieman nonsense from small children scared of the dark. I prefer to use vanilla JS when writing large SPAs and it works just fine.
It’s absolutely not and it absolutely doesn’t. Inheriting a VanillaJS project is often a nightmare because it screams “inexperienced developer” not to use a framework, so the code quality and build processes are often extremely low quality and undocumented.
The complete irrational fear about writing original code is either autism or low intelligence. You wouldn’t be so reliant on a framework if writing in C, Rust, Zig, or most other languages. Developers are reliant on frameworks in JavaScript because they cannot program and the barrier of entry is low enough that anybody can do it.
You come across as an asshole for professing this opinion “everyone else is autistic or dumb”, and also wrong. I would never want to work with you on a team; you seem like the type to flaunt existing best practices at any opportunity.
First of all I said people who claim to be programmers and cannot write original code are either autistic or low intelligence. The emphasis there is on original code. Secondly, I know something about autism, because I have a child with autism.
Look at the comments in this thread. A guy asked a question about vanilla JavaScript, a completely valid question on a site about comments upon programming links, and yet notice all the comments that are instead not about that.
There are so many comments about writing React, which is not what this thread is about. There are so many comments from people talking about themselves instead of actually about programming, much less anything about vanilla JavaScript. There are also comments like yours that are instantly hostility towards anything about original code, a subject that you seem to find horrifying.
Yes, this is incredibly autistic. Some common traits of autism, among many more that each autistic person may or may not have:
* low social intelligence, which in this context displays when developers are only thinking about themselves, what's easiest for them, and cannot think about anything else such as users or business owners
* fragile ego, which in this context results in hostility at subjects that expose a developers shallow capabilities and results in false displays of high confidence to mask deeply felt insecurity
I got tired of working with immature people who, in a technical capacity, could only do a little more that copy/paste template code and were otherwise generally hostile because of high insecurity. I am now in a different line of work where I don't have babysit people.
Writing original code or writing applications without a giant framework isn't challenging, but the subject certainly feels like the world is caving in for a great many people who call themselves seniors or engineers.
Also personally I do not prefer to play podcasts with a podcast app. I just want it to download the files to a directory which I then sync with another audio player. Does your app make that workflow easy?
Other critiques aside, I wish there was more effort put into developing accessible CAPTCHAs that do not require JavaScript. Whatever its merits or flaws are, this CAPTCHA is yet another CAPTCHA that requires JS.
The TL;DR answer to this question is there is a lot of intellectual junk food out there and our monkey brains are pretty vulnerable to succumbing it just as we crave literal junk food and resisting those cravings is very difficult.
If only we had GLP-1 agonists for our minds too and not just our bodies.
In lieu of that, all we've got is the same as always: nurture your mind by cultivating a good media diet, a healthy skepticism that doesn't drift into reactionary contrarianism, and an openness to new information; especially new evidence that contradicts things you believe.
...Which is basically like trying to solve the obesity crisis by telling people to diet and exercise. It would be nice if we had a more effective tool or technique to help a larger percentage of people achieve it.
I think higher education could help with this if it was de-commercialized, which I guess is just another way of saying what you are saying.
I constantly think about The Republic and Glaucon demanding pastries, fine food, etc and Socrates telling him that he can invent such a society, but it will be a society with a fever. I think capitalism, which is distinct, I think, from free markets, produces a society with a fever and in the grip of that fever everything which can be exploited will be.
These aren’t “forests” like in other parts of the West so much as cliffs covered in dry, scrubby brush. I’m pessimistic that they could be systematically cleared or burned in a controlled way.
Burning in a dense residential area…no. Draconian clearing of all trees and brush except for selective fire-aware landscaping…yes, but you are paying significant money to make the residential area look uglier (in some eyes, it’s just a High Desert aesthetic for others), a hard sell.
Similar climates and geographies both either have the issue or manage it better.
Greece is a good example of also not managing this properly with its own regular massive fires, while national parks around Cape Town and other parts of South Africa do regular controlled burns in very rocky, hill-y terrain.
Accusing the author of introducing slop into the language by coining (or using) a new term is a criticism of the author's work, not the author himself.
It's akin to saying, "Your work has a negative side effect which I don't like." Which clearly would've been the nicer way to say it.
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