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As bad as it is it offers a good insight into minds of a large portion of the population.


I know many people are sceptical about EU these days but you have to give it more time. And jailing the people who created it would be not fair, those were simply different times!


> The reason Google never hired an HBCU student straight out of undergrad into one of their key engineering roles is because they didn’t believe talent existed at these institutions- until I showed up.

I pity white working class American males: no classic class privilege and no modern victim privilege.


Ironically, my understanding is they're also the most likely to vote against minimum wages, social security, universal health care, Pell Grants and so on, and to have bought into specious arguments about meritocracies.

Hat tip to this book[0] "issues of race point to underlying problems in society that ultimately affect everyone, not just minorities".

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Miners-Canary-Enlisting-Resisting-Tra...


Not ironic when you consider people don't always just vote for what will improve their present financial position. Wouldn't you agree that some vote based on their principles?


Maybe they aren't looking for an easy way out like others.


[flagged]


Federal spending per person is $14,652. If you’ve ever earned less than ~$70k you’ve accepted a dime forcibly extracted from a stranger.


That's disingenuous. Federal spending isn't spent on persons, it's spent on infrastructure. If the city decides to renew or clean the sewer pipes running under my street, how many dimes have I accepted, personally?


That is the only reason.

If your entire career is built around solving a problem, then actually solving it is against your personal best interest.


> ...at university, you are being taught how to teach yourself, not necessarily how to perform practical things.

vs getting a self-taught junior role early and not being $100k in debt?


$100k in debt may be typical for the US. In several countries in the EU, you'd pay much, much less.


It is not typical for the US either. Average is something like $30K. It's a lot but it's not $100K.


Where are people going to college (in the US) for $30k after 4 years (community colleges excluded)?



Very few students borrow, or at least need to borrow, 100% of the cost of attendance.


What bothers me is that they actually never apologised. A simple statement of acknowledging the damage caused would do!


Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


For what? Imagine a world without Javascript? You have mini extension in browser to just auto refresh gmail


Imagine a world without Javascript?

What a dream.


Be the change you want to see. Your personal website linked to from your HN profile consists solely of a Javascript game ... :)


If we had a world without Javascript it would probably be some nightmare with SaaS companies building their apps in Flash or something.


This notion always makes me laugh. Which is better, Google Maps or the old MapQuest pages that had arrows and reloaded the entire page when you wanted to move the map? I know which one I prefer.


I'd be afraid flash would come back. Ah, those flashbacks...


Flash is better than JS to be honest. JS still hasn't caught up with ActionScript. The only bad part about Flash is that it's proprietary.


When flash was focused, my keyboard shortcuts didn't work. I hated it just for that.


Hm. I think it was a bug in some browsers but not others? I remember encountering it but I don't remember it as something persistent.


I've used lots of different browsers. I never found a single environment where it ever worked right.


I would agree that Actionscript 3 as an implementation of ECMAscript is more of a delight than JavaScript as a language which conforms to whatever version of ECMAscript. But compiling to VMs in the browser? Never again.


Out of curiosity, what language would have replaced Javascript in you dream?


> You have mini extension in browser to just auto refresh gmail

That existed without JavaScript (and IIRC it was somewhat common back when JavaScript was a novelty): <meta http-equiv="Refresh: 60">


Periodically tearing down the entire UI while the user is in the middle of using it is a terrible user experience.


That’s not how it was usually implemented though, you’d have frameless iframes that refreshed - eg for chat rooms etc


Did it preserve the scroll position when refreshing? If so, that might be OK for a chat room. But an email inbox is more interactive, so I think it would be jarring to have that refresh as you're poking at it.


That was called an IMAP client. It was fine.


It's still fine.


I'm pretty sure the GP was joking.


Development would be so much faster without JS. It could be done in a Flash.


It was supposed to be Scheme in the browser, not an inconsistent typeless error-prone mess.


>For what? Imagine a world without Javascript?

What a pleasant way to begin my day. Thank you for this moment of bliss.


> You have mini extension in browser to just auto refresh gmail

Why would I ever want to touch a webmail interface with a 3 m pole?


> Imagine a world without Javascript?

That would've been a better world. Imagine the web that isn't an application platform. (it still isn't, but it's being actively shoehorned into becoming one)


Web browsers were not invented to be application platforms. They were intended to view documents and click through them.

Server-side applications (CGI) started the trend of the web browser becoming an application interface. Javascript made the web browser the application platform. But of course it was not designed for this, so a million hacks have been added to shore it up. To the point of literally including a standard to ship arbitrary binary executable programs into it. There used to be another tool and language which allowed you to ship arbitrary binary executable programs to remote systems... it was called Java.

The Web is the best example in history of how successful turd polishing can be. The global economy now rests on it.


> ...not invented to be application platforms.

Phones were invented to only make phone calls.

Coca-Cola was originally created as a way to counter morphine addiction.

Listerine was originally a floor cleaner.

None of those were turds and neither is the web as an application platform. Quite the opposite- Native apps suck compared to web apps. The only native apps I personally use besides the browser on my phone are Maps, Messages, Slack, Camera/Photos and those are only because there's no other choice. Imagine having to use an app instead of popping open the web browser to order from Amazon? Yeesh


Right. Because Slack is such a joy to use in browsers that there is no native app needed.

Oh wait. Yes there is. It's the web app as a native app, because the browser experience literally wasn't good enough.

Saying web apps are superior to native apps is like saying a bicycle with a 2-stroke is superior to a motorcycle. Maybe for your use case it's better, but objectively it is literally a crappy imitation of the real thing that can't even do things the real thing can. A web app is the Visual Basic of applications (but not really since VB is so much more useful!)


> Saying web apps are superior to native apps is like saying a bicycle with a 2-stroke is superior to a motorcycle.

Nope, it's not like saying that at all.

Your entire argument rests on denying that Electron is a browser too. That's incorrect. Electron is just another browser, one that the web app developer happens to have more control over than they do Chrome. Every Electron app is a web app. Browsers have always handled the native bits for the web app and that's exactly what Electron does. (On the mobile side of things, React Native via something like Expo would be the equivalent of Electron on the desktop.)

Together, the browser and the web app form a native app because a browser is basically a scriptable native app. So, your argument is that "native apps > scriptable native apps" which makes no sense.

> Maybe for your use case it's better...

Web tech is absolutely better for every user-facing (GUI) use case. Even with 3D games which are streaming via browsers right now - performance might not be the greatest right away but since browsers have all the capabilities that any other native apps has (because they're native apps themselves) - it wouldn't be inconceivable that 3D web games could perform on par with native 3D games.

Personally, I develop all of my CLI/server apps with web tech as well (that'd be JavaScript running under Node.js). There's really nothing better - and that's why JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world by far.

> A web app is the Visual Basic of applications (but not really since VB is so much more useful!)

Having started my career with VBA I couldn't disagree more. But even so, is VB (VB5/6/VBA/VB.NET?) your go-to native development environment? Any of those choices are laughable IMO, but okay - I guess enjoy developing all of your apps in VB then :)


I have trouble imagining all the things folks don't like about JavaScript ... not still being a thing if there was something else.


I assume you have never used VBScript, which was the major alternative back then.


VBScript is actually a later development, in reaction to JS (or "DHTML", as we called it back then). But yeah, it was pretty bad too.


Not by much. VBScript was available with Internet Explorer 3.0, which was released in 1996. It was only a little later than early JS.


I worked at a computer store/ISP - the owner was a VB guy, and coded up some stuff on our intranet in it. I recall his shock that it didn't work in Netscape.


Apologized because a scripting language is inherently a bad idea for the browser, or because it was imperfect?


The mother of all sunken costs.


I think they understand the repercussions.

Imagine if you said that the pain and suffering of every developer for the last 25 years was largely your fault. There would be lawsuits. Class action. We'd all travel to come testify.


>Imagine if you said that the pain and suffering of every developer for the last 25 years was largely your fault.

Hyperbole and nonsense. No one was "suffering" under Javascript until Node and compile-to-js languages and the Byzantine nightmare of a development environment that they created came along. No one was shouting "Javascript Delenda Est" when all you needed was an FTP account and a text editor to configure a JQuery plugin.

I mean, Javascript development used to be reasonably simple, straightforward and fun. It's Silicon Valley's fault that it no longer is, not the language.


> Silicon Valley's fault

Personally, I'd lay this at the "copy & paste, boot camp-trained" webdevs community's feet, along with their customers.

Js has an unfortunate ecosystem dynamic where its primary customers (I want to X on the web) don't understand it, so its primary developers don't have any standardization pressure (fragmentation / spaghetti at the wall), browsers are forced to enable this behavior via monkey patching standardization in presentation, so its end users (browser users) are oblivious to everything under the hood.

It's like the perfect storm of hidden sausage-making.


Do you think it would be better if they did understand it?

You can be a Java dev for years (forever really) without understanding how the JVM works. I don't see why the web has to be any different.


"They" was intended to be the customers: the clients paying for development.

Ime, the less visibility and knowledge customers have into an implementation, the more opportunity there is for developers (especially contract) to go off the rails.

When the code behind "it works in my browser" is completely opaque... that doesn't set up the best technical incentives in the market. Past "minimize time-to-deliver".


Struggle sessions were still horrible Maoist actions back then, not the "progressive" thing some call for them to be today. :P


the surface is wide to carry


Its created got fired from his job as CEO for creating it, isn't that punishment enough?


Eich wasn't fired for making JS. He was fired because of some political donations and opposing same sex marriage.


Mozilla didn't fire Brendan Eich. He resigned of his own free will, against the Mozilla board's request that he stay. His own words and the Mozilla FAQ quoted below, I'm not just making this up.

Down the following thread, Brendan suggested googling "constructive separation" -- but I'm not sure if he meant for that euphemism to apply to how he left his job at Mozilla, or to how he wanted to cancel and destroy existing happy same sex marriages in California against their consent. All of the google results have to do with marriage, not employment. Brendan, care to clarify?

As JavaScript proves, Brendan Eich never really understood the concept of equality: https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24127716

DonHopkins 3 months ago | on: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses ...

Eich was not forced out or fired. In fact, just the opposite: the board actually tried to get Eich to stay, but he decided to leave all on his own. Don't try to rewrite history to make an ideological point. It's all very well and unambiguously documented what really happened, and there's no excuse for you spreading that misinformation.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...

Q: Was Brendan Eich fired?

A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said:

“I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of us, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader. I will be taking time before I decide what to do next.”

Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic.

Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board?

A: No. It was Brendan’s idea to resign, and in fact, once he submitted his resignation, Board members tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another C-level role.


Thanks for clarifying. That said the impression I got at the time is that his motivation to leave appeared closely tied to controversy around his past donations and personal beliefs. Hence the "under present circumstances" statement.


No problem -- it's a common misconception which is a key part of the narrative that Brendan's Alt-Right GamerGate supporters were doing their best to spread at the time (GamerGate was in full swing when he resigned, and the Alt-Right jumped on the issue at the expense of Mozilla), in order to help Brendan play the victim (instead of respecting Brendan's own victims and co-workers whose marriages he wanted to terminate) and make him a martyr. (Not that I think you're one of them, but they unfortunately succeeded at spreading the misconception that Brendan was fired far and wide, in the service of their cultural war.)


From a utilitarian perspective, probably not.


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