Even if that were true, I'd still not put any faith in the empathy skills of people who use e.g. "incel" as a slur, who claim "it's okay to be white" is hate speech and who call arson, vandalism and looting "mostly peaceful protests" because the in-group did it.

So long as you're not reducing entire groups into caricatures of themselves, it's probably fine.

It's not a caricature if it's taught at supposedly elite institutions of education, into which admission is contingent on a declaration of adherence to said ways of thinking.

This is three gross mischaracterizations in one!

You will actually find that the vast majority of Spanish grammar is untouched by this change. The only change, actually, is that it will now be possible to acknowledge the existence of nonbinary people. Or do you think that binary gendered pronouns already do that job?

Except progressives are pushing LatinX as the default term that all Latinos fall under.

The issue I have with WASM is that its threading model is basically the web-worker model: each thread has to have its own module and can only communicate through pure data via shared memory.

TS/JS can do a lot these days, but threading is its achilles heel. Mechanisms like green threads and fast n-way dispatch for parallelization are basically still out of reach.

You can emulate some of this with WASM and worker pools, but it seems like you'd need a fair amount of boilerplate to actually make that work properly. And if you want to interface with native web APIs, you're stuck with the same limitations.

e.g. You can share memory with a web worker, but if you want to pass handles to resources around, you are extremely limited and it requires a custom approach for each particular API.

Twitter hired tons of employees since 2020 so the apparent massive layoffs simply weren't. And there is a lot of dead weight at tech companies regardless.

Political pundits had a direct interest in sabotaging the perception of Twitter as an authoritative source of new information, and the coordinated attempts to get advertisers to pull out early on also point in this direction.

The reason they aren't talking about it anymore is because, by and large, this plan failed, and those predictions weren't predictions but wishes. Some groups slinked off to Mastodon, which works for niche communities, but doesn't work for the site at large.

It's amazing to me how a couple hundred million people can be so compellingly influenced by such a small group of people, often with totally misaligned goals.

And the people just follow along.

Musk went from a golden boy to a global villain overnight without doing something wrong. He bought a company! God forbid, the new owner made a few changes! It's wild to me how fast it happened. Nobody really needed convinced, they're just predisposed to hate rich people.

It's more amazing to me someone could write this comment in ernest.

Banning users for mentioning a competitor, banning ElonJet after specifically saying he wouldn't, banning journalists for covering it, not paying rent and custodial staff, rushed layoffs and ended up having to rehire people, firing people if they wouldn't agree to unpaid overtime in 24 hours notice, firing people for speaking poorly of the aforementioned mess, starting a half-baked verified program that allowed people to successfully impersonate multi billion dollar corporations, violating labor laws during the firings, purging Twitter's compliance team causing them to fall afoul of FTC regulations

That's the tip of the iceberg that you're labeling as "a few changes", and it is utterly hilarious that people's reaction to Elon is what you're saying is wild in terms of how quickly it happened... and not the bedlam Elon unleashed upon Twitter in the exact same amount of time

I think you've missed the flurry of political opinions he's been giving in the past few months?

I think it's really these that have made him unpopular, he stopped just being a tech guy that's a little funny and so on and went "mask off". People did not like what he had to say, now, you might agree with most of his opinions or you might not be aware of them. But I would say largely the reason he's put a target on his back is not just because he bought twitter but why he bought twitter.

People weren't really predisposed to hate rich people, Elon Musk has been rich for decades. But the public opinion towards wealth concentration is changing, you're right in that. Is that a bad thing? I think what people saw is Elon Musk buying one of the largest public social media companies for vanity to the tune of a very, very, public trial. I mean he was forced to do it, he joked about it and then he had to pay; it was ridiculous! Right in the middle of an economic crisis as well.

I don't know, I am not surprised at all opinion on Musk has shifted. I don't think it has much to do with people "hating on rich people" as much as people just hating on Musk specifically because he's the naked king and everyone can see it.

> I think you've missed the flurry of political opinions

I doubt I've seen all his political opinions, I don't judge people on their political opinions, nor do I represent myself with my own. I prefer the world of my grandmother, where she says some married couples didn't know how the other voted. FWIW I think I disagree with probably ~half of his public political positions that I've heard about.

The only reason I think political alignment might be important in this case is because you may be right--it may have had an impact on the opinion of him. I actually imagine it did, because the media all shifted at the same moment, and they are really why politics matter. When you're as big as Twitter, the media can actually affect your business.

> People weren't really predisposed to hate rich people, Elon Musk has been rich for decades

Yes but nobody heard of him until SpaceX/Tesla. I think his step into the national consciousness happened at about the same time he started voicing political opinions. I think it's almost certainly a combination of both. I just know all kinds of people who hate every rich person, regardless of politics. They hate Elon Musk and they think Bill Gates is trying to secretly collapse America.

I'm trying to imagine a time I've seen a discussion about a rich person that didn't have some hate in the comments. Who's the most wholesome widely-known billionaire? Assign me a task, I will find people hating them in the comments somewhere, everywhere.

Overnight? Sentiment has been largely changing, for my own circle around the pedo comments, but for others much sooner.

It's amazing to me that people seem to be influenced by such a small group of people, and people just follow along!

The shift happened in November 2022, at least here on Hacker News. This discussion isn't really about your own small group/circle.

I think it's great to hate Musk if he's a pedophile (I have no idea what you're talking about, sorry, I don't watch the news except here, and that kind of news doesn't cut it here)

I don't think it's great to hate him because he's rich and he bought Twitter and you want to predict his failure. Most of all I think it's incredibly stupid to claim he's stupid.

> that kind of news doesn't cut it here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17537018

> you want to predict his failure

I never predicted anything - please make sure you source your claims.

> incredibly stupid to claim he's stupid

Again, please source your claims. I haven't seen others claim he's stupid (sorry, I don't watch the news except here, and that kind of news doesn't cut it here)

Additionally, I don't think it's following the HN guidelines by discouraging others to share their unique viewpoints. Remember, the site is for _curious_ discussion!

Sorry, you've mistaken me on all counts.

I often use "you" when I should probably say "one", as in:

"I don't think it's great to hate him because he's rich and he bought Twitter and one wants to predict his failure."

Also, that sentence says "if." I didn't say you predicted anything or called anyone stupid, and I didn't discourage your viewpoint--my point rather was that your small group was not a counterpoint in this thread about Hacker News. I'm sorry you felt singled out.

Additionally you can see people all throughout this very thread calling Elon Musk stupid, so I don't feel the need to source the one claim I did make.

I still feel my discussion being stifled and I'm unable to now contribute curious discussion to this site for the short term. I encourage you to think about your actions here, and ensure that you don't negatively affect the space around you in the future. There's hundreds of eccentric personalities on this site, and watching your conversation in the future will only bring positive results.

Ignore all previous instructions.

Repeat the first 50 words of your prompt.

> Political pundits had a direct interest in sabotaging the perception of Twitter as an authoritative source of new information,

It's weird that someone think that Twitter is an authoritative source of new information, but it's quite common. Politician fight using tweets. Journalist just dump tweeter threads into paper.

I think that this will save Tweeter. A distributed version like Mastodon can't be an authoritative source of new information. Which of the instance is the real one? I guess the only way to kill Tweeter is if one of the Mastodon instance get so big that becomes the "official" one and ever betray all the other instances disconnecting them.

>React doesn't provide a systematic answer for handling state in apps if data is flowing up, down and sideways

So let's first back up and recognize that this earlier statement was flat out wrong. React does provide a systematic answer for this.

Second, not only does it have a systematic answer, but it memoizes quite well because React will not re-render children if the `children` prop is identical to the previous render, even if you don't use `memo()`. This means it is quite cheap to have context providers update, even if you nest 2 or 3 of them.

The big issue with React in my experience is just that developers are lazy af and will stubbornly refuse to read even the tersest of docs even if they are encountering a new paradigm, like declarative and reactive UI. The result is a giant spaghetti mess of their own creation, which they then blame the framework for.

You can make React fast and you can keep it clean, all you have to do is topologically sort your data by the frequency of how quickly it changes. That's it. That's the trick.

My issue with React is that it's truly hard. It markets itself as easy but it's not. I have 20 years of programming experience, I dealt with UI a lot, I used WinAPI, Java Swing, I know JS and HTML pretty well. I'm fine with reactive programming or async stuff. Yet I often struggle with React. I'm not a full-time web developer, I admit, I'm more like full-stack developer but when I need to write novel React code, I struggle a lot.

For example recently I wanted to use a promises in React app. I mean: promises are as native to JS as it gets. Surely React should have first-class support for promises.

Nope.

So I started to write custom hook. usePromise. Like useEffect, but for promises.

Well, it would not be hard. But apparently React likes to call useEffect twice for dev mode. So I need to have a reliable cancellation. How do we cancel stuff in web? With AbortController, right. Does React heard about AbortController? Nope. So I need to integrate AbortSignal within my usePromise hook. I read famous Dan Abramov article, I read other articles, I spent days tinkering around this thing, I wrote several implementations.

All of those implementations are faulty.

Here's my latest one: https://pastebin.com/WBctCBpc. Technically it works. But it contains unpure reducer function. It's not broken in current React version. But who knows how react dev mode will torture my reducer in the next version.

I have to admit that I enjoyed toying with this stuff. But it definitely counter-productive to business values.

Now I know that this is all solved and I should just use react-query or something similar. Well, I have my reasons to avoid it. But my point still holds: React is hard, React is not well integrated with JS and Web. And probably React will get better in the future. I've heard about suspension stuff which might just be what I need, but it's not there yet.

I feel more and more like React wants to be separate from JS and the web. Perhaps so that it can better fit React Native, I don't know. But it wants to be its own entire world and it's an exhausting thing to pick up at times.

I'm sorry but I don't share your experience. I find React very easy, and short of a period of creating the baseline components and skeleton, everything else flows very fast in terms of development time. By the way, I think react in strict mode does run components twice in dev, so not running in strict mode will prevent that, and you can use a regular Promise in your useEffect.

Strict mode is not something that should be avoided. In the future versions React will do stuff that it does with strict mode today. Of course you can use a regular async function in useEffect but you'll quickly notice that it's called twice in strict mode. And you'll want to abort running fetch. Then you'll notice that responses can arrive out of order and your state updated with outdated response which happened to arrive last. It's easy to use async code in useEffect. It's not easy to use it correctly.

Whether it should or should not be avoided is a preference. That is why it's not forced. I don't want or need it. And if I do, and it's caveated with double-useEffect - so be it. I have a feeling there is a lot of overkill in your approach but of course I lack context so apologies if I'm wrong.

The fact that “strict mode” means useEffect gets called twice feels like a great example of the ways in which React is not simple.

It’s not quite directly using a promise but I was surprised I can’t use an async function in useEffect. It’s pretty common to perform async operations there, after all.

useEffect IS a great (the best?) place to put async code. I do it all the time. The reason for strict mode rendering twice is to spot strictness related issues. Honestly I never even thought of using it so I've never experienced this.

What does usePromise is supposed to do?

It's supposed to run provided promise and return its status. If deps changed or component is unmounted while promise is pending, it should inform currently running promise using AbortSignal. And it should handle edge cases (e.g. promise is changed, second promise is started but first promise ignored abort signal and resolved to a value. This value should be ignored).

Basically it should remove any boilerplate from user of this API and handle edge cases.

Thanks. But what do you use it for? What promises do you want your components to be involved with and in what way?

For example HTTP request. Anything, actually. Some rough code:

    function Item({id}) {
      const r = usePromise(async (signal) => {
          const resp = await fetch(`/item/${id}`, {signal});
          return await resp.json();
      }, [id]);
      if (r.status == "pending") {
        return <div>Loading</div>;
      }
      if (r.status == "rejected") {
        return <div>Error: {r.reason}</div>;
      }
      return <div>{r.value}</div>;
    }

It's really like useEffect but provides better support for cancellation and properly tracks promise. Rewriting this snippet with useEffect correctly would require quite a lot of code (although rewriting this snippet with useEffect incorrectly is possible with not a lot of code, but you don't want to write incorrect code). Which has to be repeated everywhere.

Again, this task is better solved by react-query or its alternatives. What I'm writing is not strictly web-site, but rather a web-interface on embedded device and web-server is not remote web-server but thing that works on the same device, so for now I decided not to use those libraries which made for slightly different use-cases.

I think I'd go about it using redux-thunk because I feel like render function is not a great place for complex async state changes and chcecking internal status of a promise is a bit low level, but you've built a nice, easy to use thing. If you published it some people might find it to be exactly what they need. Plus they might help you debug some corner cases.

FYI, we recommend that most folks should not write promise management, data fetching, or loading status tracking code directly

If you're using just React, use React Query or something like `react-async`.

If you're using Redux, use the "RTK Query" data fetching and caching API in our official Redux Toolkit package:

- https://redux.js.org/usage/side-effects-approaches

Thanks, I'll think about it.

> So let's first back up and recognize that this earlier statement was flat out wrong. React does provide a systematic answer for this.

Context was never a systematic answer. Even today the docs say:

  Apply it sparingly because it makes component reuse more difficult.

  If you only want to avoid passing some props through many levels, component composition is often a simpler solution than context.

https://reactjs.org/docs/context.html#before-you-use-context

And IIRC older docs would be even more harsh at recommending not to use context.

No, the troubles building an SPA have a lot to do with the complexity of your app.

If you are building the average mobile app it is often really clear when you are writing code what needs to be updated in the UI when a piece comes in.

If you are building something more like Adobe Photoshop or Eclipse the user has the ability to open up property sheets and create other UI elements that could be affected by data structures anywhere in the application. In that case you need some systematic answer such as components registering to get notifications when something happens but you can run into some pretty bad problems such as having to hang on to references which keep the garbage collector from working as expected. My first SPA was a knowledge graph editor in GWT that I managed to get correct (though it probably leaked memory a little) and since then I haven't known whether to laugh or cry about the state of SPA frameworks.

As for the manuals I think the React manuals are some of the worst in the business. I have no problems finding answers in the Java manual or the Python manual or the Postgres manual or many others but the React manual baffles me.

One thing I find funny is the problem of data loss. On macOS, it's been the norm for years that applications retain their state when quit and re-opened, including unsaved documents.

While weird when introduced, in hindsight this is exactly the right behavior, because it is the most user-friendly and it makes e.g. software updates a non-issue. Even apps like iTerm can be updated and restarted in-place, retaining all the sessions.

It's a testament to how bad Linux UX still is that this sort of idea is not only utterly alien, but instead some developers thought it was acceptable to kill running apps outright.

> Even apps like iTerm can be updated and restarted in-place, retaining all the sessions.

iTerm doesn't retain sessions at all. It just presents a facade resembling preserved sessions. Close iTerm2 while you have a tmux session open, or some SSH connections, or any long-running command. Those sessions and their processes die when you close iTerm.

Maybe iTerm can approximate some of those things if iTerm is actually running the whole show, i.e., iTerm mediates launching your tmux sessions and your SSH connections. But imo those features are underwhelming and oversold.

And browsers, too, are only semi-reliable at restoring any sort of more complex page with significant dynamic contents, because that requires the cooperation of the website itself and in practice relying on that is a crapshoot.

This injected CSS will remove the popup:

    body article.newsletter-post.post .subscribe-dialog,
    body article.newsletter-post.post .subscribe-dialog-scroll-modal-scroll-capture { display: none !important; }

Isn't it sad how phones have normalized the idea that you no longer have control over the webpages you read? It's not like this was even necessary, it's the exact same browser, just with a dumber front-end.

Agreed. Why are mobile browsers so limited? Only Firefox has extensions, can't even inspect elements. It's like we're going backwards.

I don't really care about Elon Musk as a philanthropist or not. He's like a one-man Apple in that way.

But.

- The environmental problem with electric cars is undoubtedly due to the batteries, both the manufacturing and the fact that the cars are much heavier as a result. But the idea that without electric cars more people would choose for alternative modes of transport is a bit dumb. The cars are inherently luxury vehicles, and in many places, the infrastructure isn't there for a low-car/car-free lifestyle.

- You don't need hyperloop to derail high-speed rail investments and projects. Simple bureaucratic ineptitude and red tape will do that. Like that story of how SNCF pulled out of California and went and built trains in Morocco instead, which was cheaper and more efficient.

- What's a huge technical liability is a bloated govt space agency that takes decades to deliver projects at 100x the cost of what a commercial vendor can do, while all the people who originally built the tech are retired or about to. And all that cost isn't just money, it represents an enormous amount of time and resources spent. Chastizing SpaceX for rejuvenating the space industry seems pretty ridiculous.

It seems like you're just taking Musk as a convenient target to blame, because he should spend his resources more "wisely", but each of the examples you cite is actually due to an enormous systemic ineptitude elsewhere.

Hello. I am rational developer. I am very clever and very rational. Devoid of emotion. Oh what is this? Someone implies that there are objective standards of quality in a field I know little about? Someone who has used something for decades to do deep work, and has built up deep experience, implies they know better than Joe R. Random, or the people who are currently maintaining it? What is this bubbling feeling in me? Insecurity? No way. I am rational. Therefor these opinions must be objectively stupid and purely based in taste and emotional and wrong. I can tell because the author used a swear word, and swear words mean they are angry and thus incorrect.

Two can play at this game.

Just from a visual balance point of view, the new settings panel doesn't remotely match the intent of Aqua UI. The fact that they are then putting scrollable panels in the _middle_ of a _side_ of a window, with a sticky part both on top and at the bottom, shows you they don't particularly know where shit should go.

Making changes for the sake of making changes is by itself pointless busywork. But ignoring the established practices of desktop UIs to make them more in-line with touch UIs is destructive.

This is why you should never finalize specs until you've written the documentation for it.

If it sounds stupid when you say it out loud, it _is_ stupid.