I Peeked into My Node_Modules Directory and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next | Hacker News Reader

I Peeked into My Node_Modules Directory and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next

medium.com

Guys, it's satire. Pretty good satire (the code block where he keeps mistyping bash commands should have given it away).

Also note how the author's tagline is 'javascript clickbait enthusiast' :-)

That would be outrageous... if it were true.

There is no yummy when you npm install express and even if there were, the code shown would certainly not like a tweet as the POST is not authenticated.

And the author has described himself as "JavaScript clickbait enthusiast."

A joke? Bad one?

Um, he's making the valid point that none of us have a clue what all is actually in node_modules.

Yes, a valid point. But you can make the same argument against anything really.

Do you know what your language is doing in the background? Or your database? Or your web server? Or kernel? Or your CPU?

To tell obvious lies about node_modules in particular, IMHO, does not serve any purpose in raising the awareness about that particular problem.

If you came to the comments before reading the article, congratulations! I wasted my time reading it so that you don't have to.

> Imagine if the apple you were eating for breakfast had 291 ingredients, or if the car you drove to work had 291 parts.

Someone doesn't know anything about cars.

Someone doesn't get satire. This article is clearly not meant to be taken serious and the number of car parts is therefore by far not the only incorrect fact.

> every time you download express, you favorite this exact tweet from Hot Pockets: introducing their new signature Hickory Ham sandwich pastries

Now I'm curious how many of top 100 popular npm packages include the same shady monetization?

I understand that this article is satire, but I don't understand what it is exactly making fun of.

> The left-pad fiasco

the whole "oh god, excessive dependencies mean js is gonna die!" response that people had at the time, which was imo more due to their dislike of JS as opposed to the dependency management

Honestly, there isn't much a narrative here. I just want to make people put their egos aside and laugh. I've written a few other articles in this style: https://medium.com/friendship-dot-js

In a way, I'm interjecting myself into some sort of "great debate" (dependencies are nuts! web frontend tooling is nuts! CSS is the worst!) and just poking fun at both sides. Planting myself firmly in the middle, without much of an opinion, just making sure we don't take ourselves too seriously.

They're fun to write because it's really a stream of consciousness. I don't edit the posts, I don't fix typos. So it's public therapy in that regard.

Nice. Thanks for the explanation.

Was the part where he can't figure out how to count the number of directories supposed to be funny?

Yeah, did you like it?

  ~> got a light?
  zsh: no matches found: light?

[Quite an oldie]

But it is a true problem, haha.

I know real good programmers, who ride on the "don't reinvent the wheel" train to the max.

And while the code base don't get cluttered with "ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation[s] of half of Common Lisp" we implemented ourself, we now have hundrets of modules, which themself probably contain this "ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp"

Fake(?) A simple post to the Twitter API without any auth can't really do anything.

I'm stunned at the number of people in the comments not understanding that it's a joke...

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