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Comment by fswd | Hacker News Reader

90% of frontend development is gathering the requirements. The other 90% is trying to get CSS to center a div.

This was (sort of) funny 5-7 years ago.

Meta: Stuff like this doesn’t really fit in HN imho. Besides being low effort it just feels weird to read things like this on a site literally called hacker news. I feel like someone misspelled “tired techies complaining about the same thing over and over again”.

Is it that much harder to come up with a genuinely funny or constructive answer or, you know, go outside, and touch some grass instead of posting?

Does that really hold water when some days half the front page is reposts from years ago? Hardly "news" either

I struggled to find a better way to express what I meant tbf. I want to avoid making general statements re the discourse here, so I try to respond with a specific comment in mind (e.g. the joke above). Otherwise it's just more of the same (depressing) noise.

I'm looking for alternatives, but the best I have at the moment is chatting with random people via my Calendly.

Probably about as hard as it is to find a more original phrase than "touch some grass"? Or are you fighting low effort with low effort?

This jokes only works if you never used flex.

this joke is older than flex

The joke is played out and it's time to move on.

Of course, and so it doesn’t make sense to continue using it now that it’s outdated.

Flexbox makes it a lot easier, but it’s not fool proof. I’ve had situations where even flex refused to center something because it was ensured strangely (but out of my control), or because the containers size wasn’t being inherited correctly (again be a use of parent elements out of my control).

Compared to something like Qt/QML’s anchors and layouts, flexbox still feels like a crude hack, to me.

Too late to edit: “because it was nested strangely”

    place-self: center;

There are still days when I wish for a time machine to 20 years ago and table-based layout.

Yes, it was semantically ugly but it %(#% worked every #%#% time.

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