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Minified versions of most JS libraries include a copyright notice as a top or bottom comment. How hard is it to respect this basic requirement?

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Hey, Substack CTO here. We actually link directly to the jsdeliver CDN to use the files that get built for distribution in the sodo-search npm library. We make no modifications to the files (including not minifying them anymore than they are). The files actually do have a link at the top to the license file, which is hosted in the same directory on jsdeliver.

understood

> The files actually do have a link at the top to the license file

That's not actually the license for the file; it's the license for the resources it includes. The license for the file is available elsewhere but is not directly linked. See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33959622

Quite hard. Isn't the whole point of the minification to remove non functional parts to make the size smaller?

Not really hard... for one there's a convention of putting an exclamation point at the start of comments that should survive the minification/compilation process, for this very purpose.

Not hard at all. A couple of comments won't make any difference. Here's the minified version of one of react components for example:

https://unpkg.com/react@18.2.0/umd/react.production.min.js

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