skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Where to start with getting back into front end?
Gentle creatures of the forest,

I'm a 40-something software engineer who, for the past ten years, has primarily been doing distributed systems backend work. Before that I was full-stack. I'm wondering what your recommendations are for getting back up to speed on the frontend world.

I've dabbled in React, D3, and some of the modern browser APIs (fetch, promises, better DOM selectors). I'm vaguely aware of a thing called Babel. And apparently Node is used for more than just running a server.

My confusion about where to focus my relearning efforts comes from an impression, rightly or wrongly, that frontend dev went kind of nuts and turned itself into a big mess. This is just my impression from the outside, not an informed professional judgment. It has seemed like we've been churning through frameworks, tools, and paradigms on a semiannual basis. Is this still happening, or have things started to stabilize?

What I'm looking for is a standard core that I can focus on, and some best practices, without getting into the weeds on anything superfluous.
Please update this title to reflect that "public availability" actually means a "3 month free trial".
While never widely adopted, VBScript was able to be ran in script tags in Internet Explorer.
Quick and dirty should be a combination of Alpine and/or htmx.
I'd say that the NY Times is pretty good for "at scale".
This looks awesome! And I'd really like to try it out.

2 security thoughts that I couldn't find answers to:

1. how does the input fed into OpenAI codex filter out malicious code pollution? or even benign but incorrect code pollution (relevant research on stackoverflow for example - https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/26/copying-code-from-stac...)

2. In an enterprise setting, what does the feedback loop look like? How do you secure internal code that is being fed back to the model? Does it use some localized model? HE, etc?
Some people think the problem is that we don't have enough code. Anyone that has to maintain code knows that the problem is that we have too much code.
Consumer spending went down drastically during the pandemic, as did consumer debt. Lots of workers who weren't laid off are finding that they have a nice pile of eff-ewe money they can use while searching for a new job, which itself isn't very difficult right now.
This is a brilliant take, explains how to be clear and direct as I mentioned, and all you can think of is “that’s exactly what I said”?

It’s not. If you can’t tell the difference, we’ll, there’s nothing else to add here, the answer is right under your nose.
The gap between concept and working product is still very much in the human's wheelhouse. This is an accelerator to snippets not yet turned into a library and, in fact, a lot like a library in terms of it's day to day utility. This will not end or even change programming that much. The value I provide as a programmer is not about copying and pasting snippets. It's something totally separate different in kind from what copilot does. If it's helpful to do what I already do, sure I'll use it. But it ain't me, babe.
>>Founding members include Target, Schwarz Gruppe, Wegmans Food Markets, Microsoft, Veritone, and Deutsche Telekom.<<
VALORANT, a game developed by Riot Games, which is owned by Tencent, a big Chinese company, also comes with its own kernel-level anti-cheat. Concerns have been raised in the past, and these news do not help.

https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/fzxdl7/anticheat_...
Then why the hell it exists?
No it's not. Not in the United States lol, unless you work at some hospitals. Get vaccinated and wear a mask to avoid the Delta strain and stay at home more. You don't need to know someone else's status when you've got your own protection.

Whenever someone tries to justify something with "but the collective" alarm bells should really start going off. You know that in Florida and other states where there are no mandates like those, cases have been declining since last year and things are back to normal right?
I don't think you and I disagree. Use the tool appropriate for the job. If the team doesn't have the discipline or will to use the cascade as intended, definitely, better to have a bloated CSS-in-JS that at least is usable, rather than a bloated cascade that people are afraid to use.
The article is light on details, but of course there's always this:

> For those concerned with privacy, this means a trip to the office supply store to grab more tape with which to cover up the pesky little lenses.
You can also "hibernate" your account to disable it completely until you log in again. I just did this; my go-forward strategy will be to resurface and collect connections anytime I switch jobs, then hibernate it again when I no longer need it. That way it can serve its only real function of being a face for my job applications, and can be made invisible all other times.
The coronavirus does not mutate as rapidly as the flu, so there was always a good chance we wouldn't need frequent boosters.
We are still supply-limited in Germany. The number of new first doses are currently down because we need these doses for the second ones instead.
36% fully vaccinated, 54% have received the first dose at least. The percentages are of the total population, i.e. including kids which cannot even receive the vaccine yet, so we aren’t doing that bad, imo.

Check https://impfdashboard.de for up-to-date numbers.
Yep. In the late 90s/early 2000s I tried out a complex rich text databased-mediated notes program. And it was pretty great. It had hyperlinks, and inline images, and all sorts of fancy stuff. The one thing it didn't have was longevity. The company went under, the product depends on unsatisfiable depends now, and my old database of notes effectively vanished by 2005.

I've only used plain text for the last 15 years and it has been great. If I want images (or other files) I just put the file path to the images (or folder) in the notes. And since it's just a single text file called "notes" (now a handful of MB large) I can easily search through it with any tools I want.
I don't think you understood the question. HTTP/2 allows for one connection to the server to stream multiple files. There's no more network setup penalty for making a request. So all that remains is downloading the files. Now it doesn't matter if they're in one bundle or 20 files.

You also don't have to tree shake up front because the execution will do it at runtime. If you deploy some unused modules, the browser will never request them and the server will never send them.

For the remaining benefits I can think of - more bundle bytes means more optimal compression; or shaking out functions within a module - I'm not so sure the benefits outweigh the complexity of maintaining and using bundlers. We could be splatting the src directory straight to the server and letting HTTP/2 do the rest.
It’s no use expecting moral behaviour from a for-profit pharma corporation, which is an inherently amoral entity.

You have to utilise incentives and regulation to keep prices down. One option is to adjust patent law to enable generic manufacturers to create competition. The downside of this is the generic pharma companies are usually off-shore (more profit that way) and also seem to just pretend to make the actual drug with some regularity (also more profit that way). Another option is for the US government to negotiate drug prices. The US market for medicine is so large that they would have incredible power to cut good deals. The downside to this option is that it will inevitably lead to some form of corruption eg. the drug negotiators don’t try too hard so they can get a cushy job at the drug company next year in their drug negotiating unit.

Anyway, I am fairly sure the latter option will happen soon, perhaps for some group of essential medicines.
Looks like scraped with additional data from other sources. Linkedin doesn't have your Facebook account, but it included in the database sample
> Yes there are upsides but the hyperbole is that there aren’t significant downsides.

The original claim was that the median American’s lifestyle is enviable to the overwhelming majority of people on Earth today or at any other point. In other words, the downsides are few and far less significant than the upsides for most people today or at any time in the past.

It’s so exhausting to transparently argue that relative to the world, the US is a very nice place and suffer responses like “but there is lots of violent crime!” Of course there is always some referand for which the US has “lots of violent crime” but by world standards it does not. The US homicide rate for example is something like 30% below the global homicide rate. The poverty rate in the US is pretty comparable to European countries (bit worse than western Europe, bit better than eastern Europe) and far, far better than Asia, Africa, or South America. Even our wealth inequality is not “extreme” by global standards.

There is no truth whatsoever to claims that the US is a harsh place to live. According to the quality of life index which does not cherry pick metrics, the US is 15th globally (lower is better). https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...
Get vaccinated and wear a mask to avoid the Delta strain. It's not "anarchy" to tell nosey people and some power-hungry office managers that this is not their business lol.
"You get what you pay for"
I think it's incorrect to assume that your preferred working pattern (remote) is universally good for other people, even setting aside the legitimate concerns about interruptions, daily standups (something plenty of remote teams do), or office politics.

I don't like any of that latter group of things. I still work much better in on a team that I see every day and my productivity suffers immensely when working remotely and not talking to other people.

"This works for me, it should work for everyone." is an antipattern.
> zero scientific evidence to the contrary, and plenty of evidence to support it

We have evidence that vaccination continue to provide broad-spectrum immunity while those naturally immune are e.g. still vulnerable to the Delta variant [1].

[1] https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/06/22/how-immunity-genera...
I have started using a pomodoro timer, not as a way to keep myself working and improve my productivity, but as a way to remind myself to stop and smell the roses.

So far it's been good.
In my personal experiments, I ended up using document fragments. I wasn't doing FRP, just classic MVC, but a view (which was a JavaScript object) had a reference to the DOM elements it was responsible for. If it needed to replace them, it created a document fragment, did anything that needed to be done in there (including having children redraw) and then swapped out that fragment. This gave very nice performance.
This is not quite the same as sending the whole clickstream, is it? Sending what you type into the URL off somewhere to autocomplete is what pretty much all browsers do out of the box, and it’s been the norm for many years. I’m not saying it’s a good norm, or that Cliqz is good, but this doesn’t seem to be an indicator of them being uniquely bad.
There has been lot's of discovering but the big question is, "Does it support life?"
> Consistent moderate savings on top tier income, sure.

Do keep in mind that the context for this thread was software engineers. The median pay makes saving $10,000/year very, very achievable.

> “Software” includes a lot of different occupations, but most of the non-management ones have median compensation around or substantially below $100K; so you are suggesting most people are leaving upward of 10-20% on the table. That's...unlikely.

Below $100k sure, but closer to $60,000 or so which again makes this amount of savings very achievable. My first job out of college was exactly this amount and I was saving about $1,000/month in a MCOL city. And if you're making that amount and living in a HCOL of city you may need to consider changing your location. You might not like it, but that's reality.

> Asserting that that is easy in software would be more convincing if we were more than 20-30 years from a major industry crash, or had some structural guarantee of it not happening again.

This is only a problem if you happen to retire right when a market collapse happens. Even then you adjust your withdrawal rate or try to put retirement off a bit. For those saving 20-30 years, those market dips are buying opportunities as the ROI of the market compounds over time. Given what we know, there's no reason to assume things won't just keep chugging along, at least for the purposes of general discussion. You can say that it won't and give great reasons for that, but I think it's fair to state those up-front.

If you want to discuss specifics I think that would make sense, but given that the person your responding to and myself were speaking generally about the software engineering profession (sure maybe there's some confusion there but for my part I was speaking about software engineers) so obviously there's some generalizations and built-in assumptions that are pretty common in the finance space.
I think your equivalence to sitting at the table and waiting 15 mins for the menu is key. If any audience - say less tech literate - struggles to get the menu up for longer than they would wait to receive a menu from a waiter, then its not worth it, and something needs to change.
This idea that work is required(!) and that rewards of it should not be wasted can be traced to some religious roots, for example.
This view on work ethics has been given rise to interesting theory more than 100 years ago in the birth of economic sociology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...
But gpt 3 won't run locally, so no thank you.
This is a great point. If I recall correctly, prior to Microsoft's acquisition of Xamarin, Mono had to go out of its way to avoid accepting contributions from anyone who'd looked at the (public but non-FOSS) source code of .NET, for fear that they might reproduce some of what they'd seen rather than genuinely reverse engineering.

Is this not subject to the same concern, but at a much greater scale? What happens when a large entity with a legal department discovers an instance of Copilot-generated copyright infringement? Is the project owner liable, is GitHub/Microsoft liable, or would a court ultimately tell the infringee to deal with it and eat whatever losses occur as a result?

In any case, I hope that GitHub is at least limiting any training data to a sensible whitelist of licenses (MIT, BSD, Apache, and similar). Otherwise, I think it would probably be too much risk to use this for anything important/revenue-generating.
It is possible that he is fueled by an anxious drive. Even probable, but there are a small group of people that find meaning in what they do. When the work towards that they get a buzz that is insatiable.
Every American is in a whole myriad of government databases form the federal level on down. Pretending otherwise, or pretending that the next database will be the one to break individualism and lead to autocracy, is just magical thinking.
I built https://www.listenaddict.com/ with Sapper. It was a good experience. That said, all of my other apps are using Kit, and I'm finding that experience even nicer.

What did you find unappealing about Kit?
This is a one hundred percent relevant and accurate comment. I believe in ten years comments like this will be respected for saying it in a time when it was unpopular.
Billionaires absolutely love talking about zero work life balance. Makes it seem like having rich parents, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars of computing time, committing federal crimes, abusing patent law, and blatantly violating antitrust weren't the important parts.

Because they only want you to do the overwork part.
I also went to CMU and had a similar experience. I got into programming because of my love for video games and ended up thinking they were a waste of time. A few years after graduation, my friends tricked me into going to a PC cafe (telling me it was a hip bar) and I rediscovered my love for gaming.
Please do not use the term "anti-vaxxer".

There are countless vaccines with varying safety profiles, unknowns, and underlying risks for the diseases they prevent.

People who make informed decisions about specific vaccines based on the risk/reward (and unknowns) are not "anti-vaxxers". It is not an all-or-nothing proposition.
first HN article had a bunch of people saying there were devices behind a NAT with no port forwarding that had the issue, this doesn't describe what happened there (if that actually happened)
They engage in promotion of their findings, even if only review or survey of other studies. Communicating findings enables replication.
Not bad for an hour a week, eh?
So will natural infection.

Resistance to SARS-CoV1 has lasted more than a decade. Coronaviruses mutates far less dramatically than influenza does.
There is no evidence yet that boosters will be needed for either protection from variants or from diminishing immunity over time.
Like any other similar questions: ask your team. They'll know better than you or any random person on the Internet.
Markdown is a good in between.

It's still mostly plain text, with just enough structure.

Can also be read straight without rendering too.
Is Outlook still using Word rendering engine to display HTML?
>No, "the work you want me to do is trivial and pointless". And the context is college, and even more so high school.

You choose your college and you choose your major, and you choose to go to college in the first place, so I'm not clear what you are referring to here. What entire college department exists to somehow force people to study its subjects? If someone's university is assigning work they don't work to do, they can transfer elsewhere. (They tend not to, because the educational institutions for adults that are strictly focused on a single topic lack prestige. Even a relatively technical "good" school like MIT will try to round out the academic experience of its students.)
Couldn't you say the same for people who choose to be obese? Not only are they consuming more resources, but they're weakening their immune systems, thus furthering the likelihood they'll spread covid and other diseases.

I'm not saying this is a world I want to live in, but how do you decide where to draw the line?
wow huh, never thought of that - just learned about "taxes" being a thing from hacker news, thanks for the insight, no one here ever would have made the massive leap to know that governments are funded through taxation

good thing there are two comments about it!!!
Your fears seem justified, as per the site itself:

Whether you’re working in a new language or framework, or just learning to code, GitHub Copilot can help you find your way. Tackle a bug, or learn how to use a new framework without spending most of your time spelunking through the docs or searching the web.
Very similar experience for me. I have a hard time spending time on hobbies at the moment, because it feels like I should put that time towards my PhD instead of "wasting my time and energy". Yet, I somehow have no problem spending hours every day on reddit, YouTube, hacker news etc. because I think I tricked my mind into believing that those things don't cost energy so it's ok. Unfortunately they don't really bring joy and fulfilment the same way hobbies do.

I think the real problem for me is that the work of my PhD is never fully done until I've defended and submitted my thesis. It means that even though I definitely don't get even close to doing 40 hours of actual work per week, it feels like I am working all the time, which is exhausting. It's bad feeling like you are not supposed to take a break and wind down. It's probably why people burn out all the time...
This is even better! Now we can generate code we might not even understand, without even hitting all the keys.
#2 is the big one for me. I'm hesitant to install this on a work machine where our code could be sent elsewhere.
> Could someone elaborate why this particular comment is being downvoted?

My guess would be that commenter doesn't provide any evidence to support his/her claim. (I didn't downvote it, BTW.)
I don't at all disagree, but this will be the first one openly limiting freedoms via the government's monopoly of force.

I do believe there are others already doing so too, but none of them are open and acknowledged by the public.
I answered that for you already in my OP. But try this:

If a car is broken down, is it no longer a car?

Does it become an airplane?
When it comes to schools, anyone can claim a "religious exemption" to those rules (as if public health is a religious matter...). There's no verification or proof involved in claiming that exemption. It's a major loophole.
Why do people do this?
All that quantum mechanics does is substitute wave functions instead of 'atomic' particles. A future theory might substitute something else, strings, branes, whatever. It doesn't matter, from a philosophical point of view it's just physics. It has no bearing on the relationship between physicalism or materialism and other competing philosophical theories. This is the sort of thing Deepak Chopra gets so badly wrong with his vague mumbo jumbo.

Hmm, I just looked up Capra. Obviously I've not read his book, but it looks like he talks a lot about 'the relatedness of all parts', well that's just kind of obvious. I note you talk about emergent phenomena. Sure of course, that's all physicalists and materialists are saying. It's not like we've never thought of this stuff before. That's not something that disproves what were saying, or something that we've not considered. It's the whole point.
That entirely depends on the quality of the suggestion, does it not?
> a past positive Covid test or a positive antibody test, that is just as good as a record of being vaccinated

Immunity from non-symptomatic infection differs wildly from symptomatic infection. It's also less flexible with new variants.

I agree that there should be a way to document this. But there are still benefits to keeping certain spaces for the vaccinated only, to allow for denser mixing et cetera.
There is simply no evidence we will need booster shots.
Node is required because that's what is used to compile the JS on the command line, it's a nodejs process. Once that's complete, any web server can serve the newly produced JS/CSS/HTML files.

JS is interpreted by the browser, but we compile locally so that the code produced implements workarounds for missing language features. The code produced is typically minified so that the payload sent to the browser is much smaller than it would otherwise be.

Node is analogous to Python, Ruby and PHP... they all can run webservices, power desktop apps and compile/build projects.
When was the last time you read anything? Last century? The government funds as much of its spending through printing as it does taxing.
This is is ridiculous. Check the graph of Nuclear Energy costs once. It starts to increase exactly when huge amounts of regulation was started on Nuclear. Claiming that this was the secret machinations of the Fossil Fuel Lobby and not the works of the openly protesting Green Activists is being dishonest
Yes, I'm very pessimistic about democracy's ability to address the most important questions of our age. We're paying an enormous productivity price, locking young people out of access to the best places to live, and we're dealing with it on a timeline that's totally unresponsive to the scale of the problem. And what's so maddening is that it's a totally invented policy problem.
Why is removing the first element repeatedly O(N^2) while removing the last one O(N)? Is it because its cheaper for the browser to remove things from the end of a NodeList rather than the front? (similar to how .pop() is cheaper than .shift() for larger arrays?)