Did they even hang bears? | Hacker News Reader

Did they even hang bears?

lrb.co.uk

32 pointsdiodorus18 comments

If you dig viking history this is a worthwhile read. I almost skipped it. Glad I didn't.

In 1916, they hung an elephant in Erwin, Tennessee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin,_Tennessee

"Erwin has a dark chapter in its history. A group of its white citizens committed an extra-legal “banishment," a violent incident that took place in 1918 and involved the murder of a black man and the violent, forcible eviction of all other black citizens from the town by a white mob."

Why does the fact that a traveling circus visiting Erwin once executed an Elephant, get more page space than this throw away sentence at the bottom of the introduction?

Because the elephant thing is unique and the racism thing is common?

https://archive.is/cnBqC

"Please enable Javascript to read the full article"

No. Go learn how HTML works.

I was with you until about 2009, but I’d be surprised if much of the modern web worked without Javascript anymore.

That's fine, but I'm not running JS unless there's a reason for the app to use JS.

This is a document, not an application, and developers who can't do progressive enhancement on simple HTML documents are the ones stuck in 2009.

They’re almost all applications now. We lost the fight. There’s zero incentive for a develop to spend more than zero time making a website degrade gracefully today.

I use Gemini (https://gemini.circumlunar.space/) today when I want to enjoy an unscripted Internet. You should check it out - it’s fun! But the web is no longer static HTML, however much I often wish it was.

> They’re almost all applications now. We lost the fight.

Please reconsider! I've been using uBlock Origin to disable JavaScript by default, opting into enabling it when I want to (just like camera and microphone permissions). The vast majority of websites work fine, and many work better because they don't have pop-ups for cookie consent, unsolicited chat bubbles, or "wait don't leave yet" crap.

> There’s zero incentive for a develop to spend more than zero time making a website degrade gracefully today.

I couldn't dksagree more. Not everyone is an able-bodied software developer with a 2020 Macbook Pro and Google Chrome. We should continue making websites for everyone.

> But the web is no longer static HTML, however much I often wish it was.

You're right, but JavaScript is still completely optional for the vast majority of websites (and I'd argue that we should keep it that way). Just because a few websites need camera permissions doesn't mean that we should give every website access to our camera -- why should we have a different stance on JavaScript that usually degrades our experience instead of improves it?

In the current era of resume-driven development, Javascript SPA blobs make me angry but I find it hard to fault the dev team for drinking the kool aid.

I'll read the author's content because they probably had zero input into choosing the backend.

It’s easier, for me, to write websites that require JS. Why should I spend time on that 1 lonely user who browses with JavaScript disables when I could focus on maximising value for the other 100,000?

> It’s easier, for me, to write websites that require JS.

Why? You can literally just put HTML on a server an start an HTTP server and you're done. How does JavaScript make that easier?

> Why should I spend time on that 1 lonely user who browses with JavaScript disables when I could focus on maximising value for the other 100,000?

Your webpage will be smaller and faster if you just deliver the HTML. I don't know what your website looks like, but it's not uncommon to see 4 MB of JavaScript transferred just to draw 400 bytes of text on my screen.

Moving HTML from your server to my screen is a solved problem, and using JavaScript to do that is just as silly as using Java, Flash, or Silverlight.

Because my preferred stack is React and I’m the most productive in it.

Insofar that you have reasonable loading times, the fact is 99% of end users don’t care what you use to build software. Use whatever you’re most comfortable with!

React is lovely for interactive applications, but using it for documents is like using a .exe to print some text because you're "most productive" in whatever programming language.

You're welcome to distribute your documents in the form of huge JavaScript executables, but you shouldn't be surprised when other developers point out why it's silly (or refuse to run your code).

They're just hiding the text with CSS. Disable CSS, or enable Firefox's Reader View, which replaces their broken CSS with something readable.

Alternatively: Close the website and don't waste time on websites that have hostile CSS.

One click to close, one click for reader mode. And amount of effort so I'll read the article. Well worth it, too.

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