HN user

jazzypants

684 karma

I'm a web developer.

Posts5
Comments267
View on HN

I completely understand the confusion, but "Progressive Web App" or PWA[1], coined by Alex Russell and Frances Berriman[2], has become a specific term for websites that work normally on a pc but can also take advantage of things like push notifications and be installed on the home screen of a phone. You can see a measurable uptick on Google Trends after this blogpost [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app

[2] https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-t...

[3] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fg%2F11bzxympx6...

Do you think that all ziglings refuse to write idiomatic code, have public fights with the language maintainers, and then write giant blog posts about how they're ditching the language because it just isn't good enough?

Ad Hominem is only a fallacy when the speaker's personal qualities are irrelevant to the topic at hand. When one man has unilateral control over a project, you have to consider it as an extension of their personality.

TypeScript 7 14 days ago

It's still useful for things like onboarding the fourth person to your start-up. Good types get you half the way to good documentation.

Do you read it on your phone? This website's (lack of a) mobile design makes it really hard to read. If I don't use my mobile app of choice (Harmonic), I have to zoom in really close and scroll all over the place. It's really annoying. The font is way too small, and it's hard-coded.

We can only hope she wins her GitHub rate limit appeal soon.

This was hilarious. I didn't know that I needed AI slop satire in my life.

The Coming Loop 29 days ago

Because Microsoft Word doesn't write blog posts for you

Edit: I just realized that Microsoft Word probably does do that now, and I hate it.

The Coming Loop 29 days ago

I think it's insane to suggest that software developers should ever get to the point where they don't even comprehend their code.

Before someone else says it, no I don't read the assembly code that is produced by my compilers. However, I can generally predict what kind of assembly will be produced, and the result is deterministic unlike LLMs. It seems like most vibe coders scoff at the idea of even looking at the code, and it just seems untenable to me when we're working with (usually correct) stochastic parrots.

Yes, exactly! Now, it's all built into the platform.

The first WAI-ARIA specification was published in 2014 [0]. HTML5 became an official W3C recommendation that same year [1]. It includes semantic elements like <nav> and <main> that have ARIA roles built in [2]. The Wikipedia page for WAI-ARIA includes the "five rules of ARIA" where the first rule is "Don’t use ARIA if you can achieve the same semantics with a native HTML element or attribute" [3].

You almost always still need some extra ARIA attributes to be fully accessible, but it's much less extra work than most other platforms and it works (mostly) the same on every operating system (including phones). You don't have to build anything yourself-- you just have to know which attributes to use. Just ask any blind people you know whether they prefer using a website or a native app.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-wai-aria-20140320/Overview.ht...

[1] https://www.w3.org/news/2014/html5-is-a-w3c-recommendation/

[2] https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/html/H101

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAI-ARIA

You think this is the media's fault? The media didn't force Altman and Amodei to tell everyone they were about to lose their jobs. The media didn't force Microsoft and Google to push half-cocked AI features into all of their products. The media didn't concoct secretive deals with municipalities so that residents didn't know data centers were being built in their neighborhoods until it was too late.

The AI industry has caused every single issue that it faces. It's absurd that you can't see this. "The media" barely even means anything anymore as the current landscape is so fractured. Who are you even talking about? Ed Zitron?

Fair enough. Thank you for sating my curiosity. I'm not quite as optimistic as you, but I'm excited at the potential to be proven wrong. :)

Are you ever reading the code? What do you do when the LLM can't fix a bug? Do you not wish you had a more intimate first-hand knowledge of the code when fixing things yourself?

Please don't tell me that never happens-- I've had one just in the last week and I use both OpenAI and Anthropic foundation models.

How would you detect the presence of bugs in this scenario? How would you make sure the LLM isn't adding yet another useless, redundant function to the code base? Even if there isn't a bug in this PR, do you not want to be familiar with the actual shape of the code in case you need to dig through it while bug hunting later?

Every time I try to take a hands-off approach to the code like this, I come to regret it later. The code ends up bloated and labyrinthine. When I let it grow unabated, it becomes gradually more difficult for the LLM to understand the intended structure as the project becomes too big for the model to keep the whole thing in its context.

Yes, it finished. It changed chart.py and styles.css. Do you want me to tell you what specific changes it made to the files?"

A verbal diff sounds practically useless. Does it first read out the entire left-hand base, and then read out the entire right-hand target? Does it say loudly "REMOVING ... ADDING ... "? How would it read out something like Struct->Field? This seems lower fidelity than a visual confirmation, and I just don't think that voice commands make sense with this kind of work.