Now this is prime Hacker News content! Thank you. The idea of a narrative language is fascinating and I'll upvote anything that's using Haxe.
I took Haxe for a spin years ago and was really impressed, just haven't been able to find the excuse to use it in my day to day work. I find the idea of cross-platform transpilation rather than compilation to be very interesting. Particularly when working with platforms like iOS where Apple can change the ground underneath your feet, being able to continue to use first-party tools while writing in the language of your choice is a valuable niche.
Haxe is such a great piece of tech, which becomes more and more powerful as you get to know it better. I wish it was more used by companies and developers in general, but it's versatility is also what makes it hard to master I guess.
Are you sure it’s not just a government responding to its population? This war is deeply unpopular just about everywhere, it makes sense to anyone who wants to be re elected to avoid any involvement in it.
(an aside but I can’t help feeling like describing being anti-war as “virtue signalling” really highlights what a useless term it is. Of course it’s signalling virtue! It’s a good thing!)
It doesn't matter. We pulled axios out of our codebase, but it still ends up in there as a child or peer from 40 other dependencies. Many from major vendors like datadog, slack, twilio, nx (in the gcs-cache extension), etc...
Fetch has also lacked support for features that xhr has had for over a decade now. For example upload progress. It's slowly catching up though, upload progress is the only thing I'd choose xhr for.
That would show how quickly the data is passing into the native fetch call but doesn’t account for kind of internal buffer it might have, network latency etc
That is a way to approximate it, though I'd be curious to know the semantics compared to xhr - would they both show the same value at the same network lifecycle of a given byte?
AI was trained on Axios wrappers, so it's just going to be wrappers all the way down. Look inside any company "API Client" and it's just a branded wrapper around Axios.
I'm not sure fetch is a good server-side API. The typical fetch-based code snippet `fetch(API_URL).then(r => r.json())` has no response body size limit and can potentially bring down a server due to memory exhaustion if the endpoint at API_URL malfunctions for some reason. Fine in the browser but to me it should be a no-no on the server.
> I'm not sure fetch is a good server-side API. The typical fetch-based code snippet `fetch(API_URL).then(r => r.json())` has no response body size limit and can potentially bring down a server due to memory exhaustion if the endpoint at API_URL malfunctions for some reason. Fine in the browser but to me it should be a no-no on the server.
Nor is fetch a good client-side API either; you want progress indicators, on both upload and download. Fetch is a poor API all-round.
I'm not saying that axios is unmaintained, I'm saying that if you want something like axios from the standard lib, fetch is the closest thing you get to official
It doesn't have a need _now_. Axios is more than 10 years old now, and even before axios other libraries did the same utility of making requests easier
Maybe you missed the bottom section? There's plenty of comments taking umbrage at it.
Alternatively, you think it's okay to make up stuff about young people because they got a seed round. That's stock-human behavior but it's not rational or kind.
I was specifically thinking of Cursor when I said “companies with twenty billion dollar valuations”.
My point, as I think was clear, was that criticising the founders of billion dollar companies via satire is not “punching down” by any means. Nor is it libel. You are throwing words around without meaning.
(and “young people”, there we go with the smolbean stuff again. If they’re too young to face criticism then they’re too young to be CEOs of billion dollar companies. You can’t have it both ways)
"Punching down" was about the watchlist section, not Cursor. You brought up Cursor, I didn't, and only after the fact.
"There we go with the smolbean stuff again": I never said that or anything like it. You're putting an argument in my mouth and then swatting it down. Twice now.
"If they're too young for criticism they're too young to be CEOs of billion dollar companies. You can't have it both ways." Scroll the watchlist. Most of those people aren't running billion dollar companies. That's the whole point. I definitely agree not all CEOs are good people and I generally agree the irrational argument all CEOs no matter of age are more likely to be net-destructive to society. That's the most extreme version of what you're saying, and we likely agree on it.
So we agree the conduct towards Cursor, and whatever other companies you want to name, is fair game. The only question is whether that extends to literally everyone on the list. I don't think it does. That's it.
> The implication that Cursor is a fraudulent company is a little weird
To my reading the premise of the site is pretty straightforward: 30 Under 30 is a warning sign, not a positive signal. Therefore, as a company with 4 founders who were in 30 Under 30, Cursor is a risk.
It’s a silly little satire site, there’s a danger of reading into it too deeply.
Yeah, and the reason 30 under 30 is a warning sign is because the founders that apply to and agree to do Forbes to do "30 under 30" are much more concerned with marketing than actually building a legitimate product. Legitimate under 30 founders are spending their time actually building instead.
They’re pointing out fraud. Is that a bad thing now?
I think it’s fair game to point out that the the 30 under 30 hype list is just that: hype. And there’s often very little substance underneath hype. And sometimes there’s outright deceit under it.
I asked for an insight into their thought process and goals. The assumption that this was something bad did not come from my words but the nature of the page itself.
I have encountered many instances of fraud being highlighted. Generally it is a valuable journalistic service that I have no problem with. Most don't send the message that they have a vindictive axe to grind like this one does.
100% SATIRICAL — SCORES ARE FICTIONAL AND DO NOT REFLECT REAL-WORLD FRAUD RISK
?
Personally I think it’s not a bad thing to be a little skeptical about brand new companies with double digit billion dollar valuations. If they’re legit they can more than withstand a little satirical dig.
Since the November/December Opus and Claude Code, I found I don't need to read the code any more. Architecture overview sure, and testing yes, but not reading the code directly any more.
Me (and my friends similarly) inspect code indirectly now - telling agents to write reports about certain aspects of the code and architecture etc.
I do regularly read the code that Claude outputs. And about 25% of the time the tests it writes will reimplement the code under test in the test.
Another 25% of the time the tests are wrong in some other way. Usually mocking something in a way that doesn't match reality.
And maybe 5% of the time Claude does some testing that requires a database, it will find some other database lying around and try to use that instead of what it's supposed to be doing.
And even if Claude writes a correct test, it will general have it skip the test if a dependency isn't there--no matter how fervently I tell it not to.
If you're not looking the code at all, you're building a house of cards. If you not reading the tests you're not even building you're just covering the floor in a big sloppy pile of runny shit.
> I do regularly read the code that Claude outputs
You probably could have s/Claude/Human/ in your rant and been just as accurate. I don't know how many times I've flagged these issues in code reviews. And that's only assuming the human even bothered to write tests...
What I find is that when I ask AI to write tests it writes too many, and I agree with you that a lot of them are useless. But then I just tell it that, and it agrees with me and cleans it up. Much faster feedback loop and much better final result.
I feel like people that look at a poor result and stop there and conclude it's useless have made up their mind and don't want to see the better results that are right in front of them if they just spend an extra 5 seconds trying.
How do you know whether the tests it’s spits out are bad if you don’t read the tests.
We’re not dealing AGI here. Tests aren’t strictly necessary for humans. They are for AI. AI requires guardrails to keep from spinning out. That’s essentially the entire premise of the agentic workflow.
I’m pretty sure they just meant they do testing not that they read the tests and that’s what everyone else who responded interpreted that as well.
You can get Claude to write good tests but based on what I’m seeing at work that’s not what’s happening. They always look plausible even when they’re wrong, so people either don’t read them, skim them very quickly, or read the first few assume the rest work and commit.
I think Claude is great for testing because setting test data and infrastructure is such a boring slog. But it almost always takes a lot of back and forth and careful handholding to get it right.
I read the tests, it also is really really good to have Claude verify that removing the changes in question break the tests. This brings the quality way way up for me.
I'd understand not reading the code of the system under test, but you don't even read the tests? I'd do that if my architecture and design were very precise, but at this point I'd have spent too much time designing rather than implementing (and possibly uncovering unknown unknowns in the process).
> Me (and my friends similarly) inspect code indirectly now - telling agents to write reports about certain aspects of the code and architecture etc.
Doesn't this take longer than reading the code?
I can see how some of this is part of the future (I remember this article talking about python modules having a big docstring at the top fully describing the public functions, and the author describing how they just update this doc, then regenerate the code fully, never reading it, and I find this quite convincing), but in the end I just want the most concise language for what I'm trying to express. If I need an edge case covered, I'd rather have a very simple test making that explicit than more verbose forms. Until we have formal specifications everywhere I guess.
But maybe I'm just not picturing what you mean exactly by "reports".
I've seen the code these models produce without a human programmer going over the results with care. It's still slop. Better slop than in the past, but slop none the less. If you aren't at minimum reading the code yourself and you're shipping a significant amount of it, you're either effectively the first person to figure out the magic prompt to get the models to produce better code, or you're shipping slop. Personally, I wouldn't bet on the former.
Yeah, these models have definitely become more useful in the last months, but statements like "I don't need to read the code any more" still say more about the person writing that than about agents.
Eh, I don't think Swift would ever have dethroned Python. What pain point would it practically solve? I don't use Python often but I don't hear folks complaining about it much.
I do, though, think Swift had/has(?) a chance to dethrone Rust in the non-garbage collected space. Rust is incredibly powerful but sometimes you don't really need that complexity, you just need something that can compile cross-platform and maintain great performance. Before now I've written Rust projects that heavily use Rc<> just so I don't have to spend forever thinking about lifetimes, when I do that I think "I wish I could just use Swift for this" sometimes.
You're right, though, that Swift remains Apple's language and they don't have a lot of interest in non-Apple uses of it (e.g. Swift SDK for Android was only released late last year). They're much happier to bend the language in weird ways to create things like SwiftUI.
I took Haxe for a spin years ago and was really impressed, just haven't been able to find the excuse to use it in my day to day work. I find the idea of cross-platform transpilation rather than compilation to be very interesting. Particularly when working with platforms like iOS where Apple can change the ground underneath your feet, being able to continue to use first-party tools while writing in the language of your choice is a valuable niche.
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