peterangular

100% they are not a normal web user, I am stating this as a fact.

> WebRTC: "real-time communication capabilities", in a web browser. Pepperidge farm remembers when chat apps weren't running in browsers.

It seems to me that they want media/experience/communications-rich features removed from the browser, in-lieu of your local OS/software suite. To me, the core feature of "the browser", and the web for that matter, is open standards communication + cross platform dissemination of information... rich-media included (video, audio, RTC).

This list would take us back 10-20 years to when the browser was still a fledgling platform for development by ripping out a TON of features that people use on a daily basis.

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Overall the article feels like a daily Gentoo user trying to call shots on what their ideal version of Windows would look like:

1. Your ideals vs. the product the world uses are two very different things.

2. Sure it's a valid thought experiment, but I personally wouldn't spend the time writing/marking-up/citing a 152-item bulleted list expressing an ideal that will never happen.

ISPs typically block 80 and 443 and have clauses in the service contracts that put some nasty language around self-hosting.

In the US we have a society where people walk around wearing suffering like a badge of honor. We worship work. I was brought up in a Midwest culture where "work ethic" was everything - if you worked hard enough, you would be successful. In contrast, if you were not successful it was because you didn't work hard enough.

Then, I got into tech. I hear "war stories" from people about sleeping under their desk at their cubicles. I hear people tell jokes about how their career strains their marriage. I hear about people wasting their 20's working every hour they can for a FAANG to get ahead... It was like that whole "work ethic gets you ahead" culture from my childhood got turned up to 11.

I'm meandering here but overall that poem reminded me of a blog post from long ago stating "Never Save Anything for the Swim Back. Ever." [1] which was introduced to me by a manager using it as justification to work a 60+ hour crunch week. I guess where I'm going here is these sort of idealizations of fiction where "work ethic trumps all" really clash with this poem. I feel like idealizations like this serve the interests of those who are capitalizing off of labor more than they do the general worker/person.

[1] https://joshldavis.com/2013/08/31/never-save-anything-for-th...

Anecdotally, the "II. Overcoming Student Misconceptions" section really rang true to how I've experienced working with highly academic engineers - ie: wanting to put blinders on only working on their component, late is assumed OK, not anticipating + coordinating with other teams interfaces/integration boundaries, not designing with real-world implementation in mind.

Just got the order in for the Seeed Studio board. I'm sure I have a good wait time with shipping but looking forward to replacing some Ubiquiti gear after their drama.

Thanks for the reply as it totally inspired me to build my own router like it's 2003 =)

Oh holy cow. It's that guy ha. Will dig deeper - thanks for the links!

Super interested in what boards you are using and/or if they're custom! Would love to have a Pi 4 based home router with the 2nd NIC on the PCIe bus.

For me, I see an open source project that probably has limited resources/time/volunteer effort to support it.

I read that comment as, "rip huge chunks of Bootstrap and jQuery out of it - should be quick"... well I am guessing given Bootstrap design patterns that they used these tools as a core library in-which they built their site around. They may be planning to leverage these tools in the future, or even just want to give themselves the option to... It's an over-simplification. Likely, this site got them to where they wanted to be... a much more modern-looking site without a ton of effort sunk into development.

It's also completely disingenuous to talk about these filesizes in pre-gzip numbers vs. post. When you look at these "optimizations" without taking into account gzip you are looking at a "worst case scenario" that doesn't exist - this site is gzipping it's assets over the wire. The jQuery gripe is more like 33.6Kb vs 96Kb when you look at it through the gzip lens.

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This sort of response (and subsequent defense) is why I would never show my creations here. It's emotionally difficult for me to see such a stable and mature project as Munin accomplish a bit of modernization only to be nitpicked like this. Munin is a great tool.

"Raise a PR" is perfectly valid here when it comes down to it. I think the internet will handle the extra ~100Kb/page load just fine.

Ha - the last comment on that CREDITS list is pretty funny =)

Definitely worth the full scroll.

> I don't understand what is impossible about this.

Agree, and as someone who's done these conversions both ways I wanted to just say that you don't have to use complex tools to do what you're describing really. Those things are definitely in my toolbox, but simply just going by-hand and duplicating applicable styles from one site to the other with Chrome/Firefox devtools is a breeze.

I say this as a developer who embraces/studies CSS

Second this - it's an incredible resource and I have seen many people go through this book go from zero to competent. My old private art instructor 100% openly admitted to her classes being heavily influenced by the book to the point she considered it "required reading". Betty Edwards' methodology works!

Once I got to college I took two drawing courses at two separate institutions. They both ended up being a total "class-version" rip-off of the book. We progressed through the exercises in the exact same order. It makes me incredibly unhappy that my college professors didn't credit Betty Edwards like my private art instructor did.

I've been running Svelte with esbuild and it's incredible, and doesn't bring along all of the above overhead. I get to target modern browser stacks which is a huge plus that keeps a large amount of complexity out of my toolchain.

Mileage will vary =)

> It all seems so crazy to me, but this ship has long sailed.

Nope. And it's why Svelte is something that I've been hard adopting because it looks the closest to old-school JS/CSS/HTML while still bringing some of the same capabilities over that I love from React and VueJS. It also runs without a VDOM or a constantly running event loop - both things are incredibly attractive to me.

Although it's not a perfect solution (nothing is) I would strongly suggest you checking into Svelte as it looks more like traditional web development vs. highly complex Webpack + TS + React + eslint + Babel etc etc-based development.

The ship hasn't sailed. Your instincts to be weary of such a complex, constantly re-invented toolchain to get traditional development tasks accomplished are a natural response to the craziness that these tools bring to the table.

> I've wondered about how much of outsiders' responses have been driven by their own prejudice against Texas and our current political representatives.

Californian with family in the Midwest - lots of folks are too dense to realize there are people on the other side of natural disasters when these horrible situations are happening. That prejudice happens to some degree, I've lived it =/

Regardless of politics, best of luck to you and your own.

Yep. And that's better for both parties involved. Just don't be offended when I turn you away at the door to not waste either of our time.

I'm slightly more conservative - I've had people show up in t-shirt and jeans and have turned them away because I feel like they're breaking the social contract of what an interview is. Like - totally clean/non-offensive t-shirt and jeans.

In a lot of my engineering roles I have had to be internal/external facing and do things like budget presentations, work with partners, etc. Before that, I was a general web/app dev and we would get pulled along to client meetings all the time to collect spec, ensure that it was a good sales fit, etc. I'm not saying I had to be fully decked-out but being able to throw on a button down and tuck it in means that you "fit-in" to these situations.

For me, if someone is showing up in a t-shirt and jeans it's a red flag that you can't be bothered to dress semi-professionally which has been an occasional (but hard) requirement of me since day-1 of my career. 100% this all is anecdotal, and specific to my own needs/experiences.

> I wore a suit to my very first interview for a dev position and very nearly didn't get the job because they were worried I wouldn't fit in

Yeah - I hate this. I had people at my last position give candidates negative points because they wore a suit and I went $%&#ing ape. In positions that I've held in the past it's been the appropriate action to wear a suit due to heavily corporate environments, and I see it as 110% normal that someone puts on a nice suit for an interview. The action of wearing a suit (or tie for that matter) to an interview should never be seen as a "cultural fit" problem - I'm looking at you SV...

Sorry that almost happened to you. That's some bullshit.

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Overall a nice well-fitting button down + a pair of well-fitting dress slacks is what I would recommend. Personally, I wear a slim fit brand new white button-down (ironed), nice dark blue chinos (ironed, not pleated), and not-scuffed brown wing-tips. Often I also wear a tie, but am considering not thanks to a derelict SF "big-wig" grilling me in an interview as to "why are you wearing a tie?" All I wanted to say is "does it matter?" (offender: you're reading this don't do that again.)

Also get a solid hair cut, ensure you're shaved if male, and yeah - sit up and be confident while you're in the chair. Body language does matter, and your interviewer will subconsciously notice regardless if they're giving you a "pass" or not.

> My experience from being on both sides of the desk has been that devteams are relatively tolerant of candidates exhibiting personality quirks during the interview process - it's the candidate's skills that are in demand, not their winning personality.

I'm growing further and further away from this mentality in hiring because the sad truth is most of those folks who come in with "quirks" lack maturity. To me, quirks are "yellow flags" in the interview stage because it means that you're not able to put your own weirdness aside to fit socially when you arguably need to the most. Invariably these same "quirks" come up down the road in the employment with output problems, copping attitude with superiors, weirdness in internal/external meetings, and just general antisocial behavior.

I get that we're all in hella demand right now but I'm starting to go back on my, "I'm just hiring for the engineering skill/talent" as an excuse to overlook yellow flags.

The other thing is contextually, what are the quirks? If the "quirk" is someone being super shy/timid it doesn't even register on my radar as a problem unless it's extreme... I'm talking about the stereotypical "oh so cute dev quirks" like: not dressing appropriately for an interview, interrupting me/talking over me, talking down to me, comparing their last junior position to being Steve Jobs, being sing-songy, inappropriate jokes in any way/shape/form, getting in arguments with themselves... etc etc.

I'm at a point that if you can't act 95% professional in your first interview you're done as you're not capable of being "on".

> Why assume ignorance/difficulty when the reality is not everyone is going to focus on adding/maintaining accessibility when they haven't even built out their beta MIT licensed side project?

Yep as someone who's done a significant amount of front-end development ARIA and accessibility is more billable hours, more time involved into project, and more testing. When it's my own consulting I literally add it as a line-item to the bill and let customers take it off if they want to save cost, and when it's for professional work the only industry that has actual regulation around it is education/government.

Truth is most companies are pushing the cost of development down however they can, and to cater to the accessibility market you're sinking significant dev/testing time into doing it right. Also, you can't blame me in a capitalist society for dropping this on the floor when my customer/employer wants me to... in most situations the hours invested into accessibility will never turn around into profit.

The other problem is I do accessibility right. And most devs don't... I'll actually go through and do UIX experiences on-screen, then replicate it "blind" using a screen reader. This testing/tuning takes real time. Like - I can go through and do best practices with ARIA tags, well thought out HTML5, etc and still it's a total cluster once you actually use the application.

It very much may not be "ignorance/difficult" - looking at what this dev has accomplished with this editor I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say it was just extra time for a tiny fraction of their audience that they haven't invested yet. Harsh reality is they may not have that budget of time to go the extra steps for something as complex as this.

Just throwing this out there - any highly regulated and/or political entity has the bottom-dollar solution for tech/IT. Got out of the education software sector because of it myself.

The problem is that it takes real budgets and effort to build these highly complex systems. It requires teams of competent engineers that are willing to take the extra steps to ensure the systems they're building/connecting are managed in a security-positive manner. When these sort of projects are bid out it's usually the bottom-dollar bidder and/or whoever has the most "good ol' boy" connections; this often doesn't correlate to the previously stated need for technical competency.

Also there's the problem of talent. Private vs. public sector development firms typically pay out on different scales for similar work/stress loads.

All of this is anecdotal but I'm so not surprised.

> These are cops willing to aggressively threaten lethal force when they are experiencing fear/anxiety/uncertainty based on what the suspect looks like, be it their skin color or their clothing.

There are also a fair amount of bully cowboys out there hiding behind the badge.

I was a teenage passenger in a car when a friend of mine held up his wallet in the light of the back window to see if he had his bank card or w/e. Cop car was behind us in traffic, pulls us over, and two cops get out guns drawn instructing everyone to get face down on the pavement.

Turns out they thought they saw a knife/gun when my friend had held us wallet up in the light, and they figured we were brandishing a weapon at them. We all got searched and when they found half of us Boy Scouts were carrying pocket knives things got really stupid really fast. We had to beg them to be rational with us, nose down on the pavement. Still makes my blood boil.

This is anecdotal in rural small-town Iowa.

Yep - 100% this. Once you get a household name on your resume you're golden if you can do a simple whiteboard interview.

Putting my # and email address on a blacklist in their CRM shouldn't be too difficult for a company with resources such as FB. If two-bit recruiting agencies can do it in the middle-of-nowhere Iowa then FB can do it.

Sorry, not changing my opinion here.

Sure, but it's still not enough.

FB recruiters are super aggressive and I have zero qualms unloading on them for their BS behavior, every. time. I've asked five (5!) times to be taken off their list and added to a blacklist for candidates and I still get emails, calls, and LinkedIn messages. The first two "buzz-off" messages were polite, but now I'm just downright rude and respond with my actual opinion on their employer (and subsequently what I think about them working for that employer).

Facebook is a bad company that does bad things. If you work there, you're gross.

> it's very strange to force someone out right before their equity vests

If the business-minded folk don't fully value the tech solution I can easily see this happening. This "devil's advocate" hypothetical is not an unheard of occurrence.

> I often wondered if it's just because these folks want free lunch and some socialization.

In over 50% of the careers I have had in the US I can honestly say that it was more about the ceremony of "work" that it was ever about the work. So much of this is the middle-management dilemma where as a producer/IC I find myself more worried about the outward appearance of my work vs. the actual substance of it.

> I don't spend my workdays socializing

I'd advise against this in most places. I've done the whole "work not socialize" thing and it comes up in 1:1's as anti-social behavior. I'm not saying I disagree with you _at all_ but I've learned to go through the motions and begrudgingly participate in "dev beers" at 2:30pm on a Friday, or Go-karting, or the lavish meals... I've had to go to dance clubs for my job, I've been pressured to go to strip clubs (never went), I've been pushed to perform for talent shows... It infuriates me. It makes me mad enough to punch a wall. I am here to work. My culture is work. Let me work. I am a god-damned engineer - let me perform the work I am paid to do, then let me go home afterward...

Socializing is largely the new American work culture. It's pathetic, and it's a bubble that will pop. We didn't get to the god-damned moon knocking off at 2:30pm on a Friday for "dev beers"... =|

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Also, as a drop-out I totally feel you. Self-learning was the only way to getting a successful career after a very toxic "education" experience I went through in the middle-of-nowhere Iowa. I legitimately do not know if I would be OK if it wasn't for the internet. It allowed me to self-learn whenever I could, and allowed me a platform/audience to hone skills.

Yep - I have the HTTP error code detection dialed into an extreme because it's dumb to run a broken scrape anyway.

Frankly just any errors - if I see more than say 5-10 jobs fail within a 2-3 minute time period things are designed to wait X time, try again... and stop if they're still encountering errors and ping me to come in and investigate.

Faulty retry logic is just as dangerous as the forked/distributed run-off situation.

Yep I can come at someone with datacenter/residential/mobile/etc. IP addresses, all incredibly configurable to slip around network blocks. Luminati and Proxy Bonanza are the services I've used with the most success.

Getting source proxy lists of high-reputation networks is just $$ and a simple API integration game anymore.

Also - as someone with a ton of experience on the other side of this coin:

Puppeteer etc. are nice and all but if you can get away with raw HTTP requests grabbing and parsing the HTML without pulling down stylesheets, JS, etc. do it. It is WAY more efficient than requesting the full overhead for the user experience from these folks and threading out 5-10 workers to gracefully crawl a site this way doesn't typically cause things to melt down on your target's end.

You may be saying "well I need a browser-stack or evaluated JS to do my work" and you may be right... but honestly though 90% of this stuff is reverse-engineer-able with Charles Proxy and some basic webdev experience. Heck - I've even sandboxed JS from a target's site to generate tokens/etc to cut down on repeat requests. Even CAPTCHA stuff can easily be done without having to pull down full UIX overhead these days.

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"Save a sysadmin: don’t snowball."

Implement thread limits, rate limiting, throttling, intelligent caching, and try to fit within your target's hosting capabilities without being disrespectful. Often I will "smear" large jobs over weeks worth of time so that it's only a trickle of traffic here and there (and to also fly under the radar... sorry).

Also - on the custom UAS: Unless you're trying to make it easy to get blocked/identified then don't take this advice. Let's face it - this is a gray area for most. The best way is to not "snowball" and to make your scrapers indistinguishable from a reasonable stream of real users from real networks. I would never expect a sysadmin to contact me because frankly they aren't paid to.

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One last thought - the people who are out there writing these bots/crawlers/etc. are often the lowest common denominator. They're the type that will get something "working" and hurry onto the next job because the nature of the work tends to be a ton of low-paid contract stuff. Also, at almost every place I've worked at in ecommerce that has scraping involved it's the bottom-rung dev talent that's assigned to the work.

Sucks, but near-100% I attribute your "snowball" situation to that.

Yeah - they admit that they're mixing it with two other sources of entropy... All I could think when I saw this was "not enough entropy - what the heck..."

My guess is they have a couple of quantum HRNGs in those "Linux systems" they discuss that are actually doing the majority of the entropy.

Cool gimmick though.