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> you don't need that full 560kb library

In fact, most web applications only need this 200-line library: https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder

React started out as a simple library, but it is getting more and more complicated (see concurrent mode). 90% of applications don't benefit from React's complexity. This tiny lib has the same templating technology as React, but none of the complexity.

interlocutoron Court: Suspicionless Searches of Travelers’ Phones and Laptops Unconstitutional

This decision only covers electronic devices. All other items can still be searched without suspicion or warrant at the border, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception

interlocutoron Amazon Is Accused of Forcing Up Prices in Antitrust Complaint

My experience has been the opposite. Also, Amazon's deliveries have become extremely fast. I ordered an item at 6pm yesterday. Amazon's guaranteed delivery time was 8am this morning... and it was actually delivered at around 6am. I was blown away. The item arrived in around 12 hours, and the delivery was free since I am a Prime member. This is miles ahead of competitors!

interlocutoron Uber’s self-driving car could not detect pedestrians outside of a crosswalk

This is where Waymo uses deep learning models that can predict the future behavior of other road users in real-time. They are hiring: https://waymo.com/joinus/1235933/

interlocutoron Bivariate Maps with React and D3

Polymer is crap. Web Components are great. There is definitely no performance issues. Ditch polymer and other such bloated libs. Try this 200-line lib instead: https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder

interlocutoron Bivariate Maps with React and D3

There is a better way to create reusable and composable components: Web Components. Read about it here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components

interlocutoron U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year

If you work for FAANG your kids have to pay full tuition because scholarships vanish when you have $250K or more in annual income.

interlocutoron U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year

If you add room and board UCLA is $65,000 for out-of-state students: http://www.admission.ucla.edu/Prospect/budget.htm Compare that to $74,000 for Stanford. Suddenly Stanford looks not so bad! https://financialaid.stanford.edu/undergrad/budget/index.htm...

interlocutoron Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die

> DB, Gui framework and printable report generator all in one sharing the same language front to back, top to bottom.

Printable reports is so 90's. Back then you printed reports and shared reports on paper. In meetings everyone gets a printed copy of the report. Today web is the way to share reports, and you project reports on to a big screen in meetings.

interlocutoron Improving Form Controls in Microsoft Edge and Chromium

Calling these changes "improvements" is a stretch. Still flat, still dreary. They should have at least gone for a "Flat 2.0" look [1]. Flat 2.0 is is mostly flat, but it makes use of subtle shadows, highlights, and layers to create some depth in the UI. This is definitely not Flat 2.0. Look at that button. Looks almost like a disabled text input. Dreadful.

[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/

interlocutoron .NET Core 3.0

See https://kitematic.com/ it is a UI for starting containers.

interlocutoron India to Attempt Moon Landing at the Lunar South Pole Today

There are poor people in every country. Can you name a country where every single citizen has housing, enough to eat, and good health? According to you all countries must stop all spending on space programs, since the money could be used for housing, food or health.

The reality is that the amount of money spent on science is relatively miniscule, and no country can hope to advance without investing anything in science.

interlocutoron Rich Families Are Legally Separating from Their Kids to Pay Less for College

It is easy to see these families as manipulating the system, but then so are colleges that charge $300,000 for 4-year college. College costs are rising much faster than the rate of inflation. In many cases these colleges are raising tuition for the same reason pharmaceutical companies are raising prices to insane levels -- because they can. It doesn't surprise me one bit that smart families are coming up with ways to beat this system. If colleges aren't playing fair why should they?

interlocutoron Yuan falls to 11-year low

>> They can put out bonds

Isn't that what the federal govt does too? The US sells treasury bonds and China buys them.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/040115/reaso...

interlocutoron Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client

Apple used to be known for their amazing designs. That was when Steve was running the company. Since his death Apple has been in a free fall in the design space. Most of the comments here seem to be about their awful hardware design. Yes, the thin macbook is not very usable, and the Homepod which is shaped like an amorphous blob is uglier than any Bose speaker. But what about their software? Their UI design is super unusable too. (See some specific examples here https://uxcritique.tumblr.com/ ) Flat design is a usability disaster; see studies from Nielsen Norman group and others https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design-long-exposure/

I am glad Ive is gone. Maybe Apple can now recover.

interlocutoron Why I don't use web components

There is also robustness. Today you can't take a React component from one application and drop it in another React application and expect it to just work. You may need to also copy CSS classes, make sure the class names are unique, remove any conflicting ids, global variables and so on. Thanks to Shadow DOM, web components are much more robust. You can just drop a web component in an existing application and expect it to just work, regardless of what framework (Angular, React etc) it is using.

interlocutoron Why I don't use web components

When you use radio buttons, checkboxes and text inputs, they have state and that state is in DOM. Web Components don't change this.

interlocutoron Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

Public signal from Firefox: https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/1138980859728531456

interlocutoron PDF Is the World's Most Important File Format

PDF is based on PostScript, which is a Page Description Language (PDL) also from Adobe. The first PostScript printer, the Apple LaserWriter, launched the desktop publishing revolution. The interesting thing about PostScript is that it is a full programming language, with loops and conditionals and so on. When Adobe designed PDF, they kept the same imaging model as PostScript, but stripped out the programming language. Thus they ended up with a dynamic page description language (PostScript) for media (printers) that cannot fully take advantage of a dynamic PDL, and a static PDL (PDF) for media (i.e., computer screens) that could have benefited from a full programming language!

interlocutoron Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

Attitudes towards free speech have changed a lot in recent times. This is related to the rise of social media. The advent of social media had made it too easy to spread hate online. It started off innocently enough, with cat videos uploaded to youtube, but soon extremists were taking advantage of social media for radicalization purposes, and others even live-streaming mass murders. This has caused an upheaval in attitudes towards free speech. There needs to be limits. People started imposing limits to free speech. For example, consider that UC Berkeley, renowned for giving birth to the Free Speech Movement, is now making news for banning controversial/harmful speech, such as that by Ann Coulter. The people (as opposed to governments) have decided that some censorship is in order. This is a natural evolution of societal norms. This particular evolution was causated by the excesses seen in social media. It is befitting to see that a social media company, Facebook, is now in the news for censoring harmful speech. This type of censorship, as opposed to absolute free speech, will be the new normal.

interlocutoron Notre-Dame cathedral: Firefighters tackle blaze in Paris

What is the building made of? Sand, gravel, stone, and cement are fairly inert. It must be made of some other flammable material.

interlocutoron Facebook to ban white nationalist content

Attitudes towards free speech have changed a lot in recent times. I believe this is related to the rise of social media. The advent of social media had made it too easy to spread hate online. This has caused an upheaval in attitudes towards free speech. For example, consider that UC Berkeley which gave birth to the Free Speech Movement is now making news for banning controversial/harmful speech, such as that by Ann Coulter. The people (as opposed to governments) have decided that some censorship is in order. This is a natural evolution of societal norms. This particular evolution was causated by social media, and it is befitting to see that a social media company is now in the news for censoring harmful speech. This type of censorship, as opposed to absolute free speech, will be the new normal.

interlocutoron Ask HN: Is jQuery on its way out?

The best advertisement for jQuery, ironically, is this site: http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ Look at how simple things are in the left column, and how much more code is needed in the right column.

jQuery has many convenience features such as chaining, for example: item.addClass('selected').siblings().removeClass('selected'); and you don't have to check for nulls after each selection.

Many functions such as closest() and remove() have no equivalents in IE11, and other things such as replaceWith() and before() are not available even in Edge.

For simple sites it is easy enough to remove jQuery, but for more complex javascript applications, especially apps that have a lot of interactivity, removing jQuery will result in more code, or you will end up writing a lot of utility functions thereby creating your own little clone of jQuery.

interlocutoron US plans to strip H1B immigrants' spouses of work permits

You're right, turns out it is about 70% https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/17/h-1b-foreign-citizens...

What exactly is the meat of the criticism above?

interlocutoron US plans to strip H1B immigrants' spouses of work permits

Today's silicon valley is not the same as the silicon valley that existed before 1990. Take everyone that was ever on H-1B out of silicon valley, and there will barely be anyone left.

interlocutoron US plans to strip H1B immigrants' spouses of work permits

>H-1B visas had nothing to do with Silicon Valley.

Nonsense. I am guessing you have never been silicon valley. 90% or more of tech workers there were born outside USA.

Edit: it is 70%, which is still very high. https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/17/h-1b-foreign-citizens...

interlocutoron Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Employees

>Why isn't forced arbitration illegal?

The US government was "of the people, by the people, and for the people." Now it is of/by/for big corporations.

Forced arbitration is a whole-scale privatization of the justice system. Americans are actively being deprived of their right to justice, see: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/02/business/dealbook/in-arbi...

interlocutoron US plans to strip H1B immigrants' spouses of work permits

This is great news for Canada. https://www.canadim.com/h1b-riskier-canada-welcome-record-im...

Legal immigration is the reason silicon valley exists. Ask Mark Zuckerberg why he moved Facebook HQ to silicon valley. It is because that's where the engineers are. If legal immigration wasn't a thing Zuckerberg would have moved considerable number of jobs to places like Beijing, Bangalore and St. Petersburg, because that's where he would have found software engineers.

Canada, already a major center for AI innovation, will be the new silicon valley.

Edit: s/H-1B/immigration/g because the exact visa doesn't matter.

interlocutoron Americans Cross Border into Mexico to Buy Insulin

It is not just insulin. Prices of all drugs have been rising in the US, from 2x to 3x at a minimum, to 1000x in some cases.

The reason is insurance. When individuals are paying for drugs, drug companies can only charge what individuals can afford. When insurance is paying for drugs, drug companies charge what insurance companies can afford, and insurance companies are able to pay much higher prices (and they recover their costs by raising premiums.) You can't blame pharmaceutical companies for not leaving money on the table.

The fact that Medicare is legally not allowed to negotiate drug prices (a big handout by Bush administration to Big Pharma) isn't helping either.

interlocutoron How the H-1B Visa System Can Hurt American Workers (2015)

Without H-1B the tech industry would not be a major industry in the US. Think about it: Yahoo would be a Taiwanese company, Google would be a Russian company, Tesla would be a South African Company, eBay would be a French company, Sun Microsystems would be an Indian company and so on. And that list is just founders. Then there are rank and file employees and inventors in tech companies that came from various parts of the world, that made these founders' dreams into real products. Then there are CEOs and executives that ran these companies.

Immigration restrictionists assume a zero-sum math for workers: A job gain for a foreigner is a job loss for an American. By that logic every college graduate who enters the job market would be cause for mourning. But that's backward, given that skilled individuals create, not take away, jobs.

This doesn't mean abuse isn't happening. But the abuse doesn't detract from the fact that the tech industry wouldn't be so big in this country without H-1B.