throwaway47861

JS is necessary. But what do we do about the extensive tracking and extremely unoptimal requests, for which we already have numerous articles out there?

If there's no soft solution, disabling JS altogether is a good fish net for a lot of people -- yes the percent is close to a rounding error but the absolute amount can go to 1 million or more.

As I mentioned in another comment, it was a bit exaggerated example to illustrate a point, not to make the people nitpick it.

The corner-cutting in the current tech culture is a bit too much for my taste.

It was a slightly exaggerated example. Nothing can be infinitely optimized of course, but the corner cutting in today's tech culture is a bit too much for my taste.

There are many people above 180cm.

Again, let's face it -- it's bean counting, some medium-level product manager wants a raise by saving expenses.

That's all it is, that's all it ever was, and it ain't ever gonna change while there are people on these positions.

Counter-counter-point: I am above 180cm (far from 200+ where many basketball players are) and many taxis aren't tuned for me and I bang my head on the ceiling so yes, I definitely call the manufacturers of those cars bad.

Statistical averages are a back-patting technique between managers, let's face that reality, shall we? They very rarely have the customer's interests in mind.

You misspelled "good bean-counting". Good engineering requires you to cover for everything you can.

Case in point: car seatbelts and airbags. Most people don't crash, right? But you aren't seeing the car manufacturers remove seatbelts and airbags.

It's a slippery slope kind of situation. Once they start doing it and see they can get away with it, then they start widening the circle.

Those 0.1% mean absolutely nothing. There was a comment months ago right here in HN about a guy who owned a secure email provider who had his throwaway Android device confiscated, and who was interrogated for 8 hours on the topic of "give us access to your private email admin panel". He refused and was smart enough to not bring any way of unlocking his admin access with him (whitelisted IPs and/or physical keys which he left at home). He described the interrogators as very angry and that they "advised" him to immediately go back.

We get it, people who comment on sweet puppy Instagram posts aren't under threat. Sure. But the IT folk, especially people having access to sensitive information or white/black hats can definitely expect a plethora of insolent questions at the airport, asked in small creepy rooms somewhere at the back, from people who refuse to even identify themselves. Is that even legal?

Shall we also mention the looming danger of own laptops being banned on flights? Either use a Chromebook-like device (which, I have no doubt, will steal your private data, why else would they setup such a honeypot anyway) or GTFO, that's USA's policy.

I've made up my mind. I am not going to the USA for now. There's undoubtedly a huge pool of interesting people who can make some of my business dreams come true there but I am not sure being recorded in an unofficial "special target" list for life and having my devices every time I go confiscated is worth it. I'd say no.

(I exaggerate a bit of course, but to the average guy like myself losing even a $250 throwaway device is something that I will feel.)

The tinfoil guy in me says they know nothing important then. ;)

Being a bit more serious, thank you for the link, it was enlightening. Kudos.

Here are some angrily and hastily written observations:

- No microSD card slot. Yes, 128GB internal storage -- and it being an UFS, which is fast -- is a lot, but there are people who carry data on their phones and require portability and speed. There's honestly no excuse not to have a microSD these days.

- Small battery; 3040 mAh, seriously, shouldn't the OEMs have learned by now? Android is a battery eater, Google doesn't seem interested in making the OS more efficient and keeps thinking of half-assed "solutions" like the Doze mode which is basically "if it's the night and the phone hasn't moved in an hour, please cripple its functions until the owner picks it up", heh. For Android you'd best go for the absolute minimum of 3500 mAh or just admit you're after a quick buck. If you're serious about an Android phone, better just put 4500 mAh or more in your device and then I'll take you seriously.

- No 3.5mm audio jack. Yeah, keep dreaming, Andy Rubin. Parties with rich friends who tell you "things they hear" are not a good indicator about market needs. And you dare call your hardware "essential", lol.

- Display is not AMOLED. Heard about actually having a black color on your display? Guess not. Heard about dynamically turning off parts of the screen to save power while not losing any part of the image (because the turned off part is black)? Guess you haven't heard of that either, nor energy efficiency for that matter.

- No word on planned maintenance period -- 1 year, 2, 4, how much? It's a crucially important element nowadays, how can Android's creator be unaware of that?

- Cameras look good on paper but we all know it's the camera app which makes the real difference. I bet it'll be some default vanilla app which won't make a good use of at least 50% of the device's camera functions.

Overall -- overpriced pretty device. What else is new? The guy is pulling a popularity card to get away with yet another mediocre device and entice naive people to buy it because of his supposed prestige as Android's creator.

Yet again, the charming HN audience shows their true colors by downvoting people who have no proof of what they claim, while conveniently forgetting that if anyone had a proof of what you said they'd be in a secret court, and then prison -- for a long time.

When I see quotes like "Oh my God this is awesome" my sensors go to red flag mode full-time.

Devs are people like everybody else and can be hyped.

Let's give it time. Not sure what's the big fuss about. Yes I've read about GUI toolkits that reduce the development time. This still doesn't mean much IMO. The business owners will simply become more greedy and will demand more work for less money.

I really don't see how the devs will win.

So we're gonna cull the "manager" fakers who probably contribute $10,000 to their company's bottom line over a career of 30 years? Sounds like a double win for WFH to me.

So your answer is micro-management and making people fake activity during the mandatory 8h? You're not a good manager if that's the case.

There are courses that teach people how to focus on results and deliverables.

> Other than Juicero and some sweeping statements about the technology, energy, and pharmaceutical industries benefitting from government research, Tarnoff offers little evidence to back up these claims.

The "debunked" article is not scientific in 100% of the meaning of the word, that's a fact -- but if we go by the message of this "debunker" this means we must doubt every single deduction we make in our lives, on the grounds of what? Oh, none of us can't access all the information on the planet in real time. Legit as hell, lol. Let's face it, none of us is Skynet-like and yes we will always work with sparse data. Trying to make a good use of those is not a bug. It's a damn good feature.

Far too often I am seeing a very perverse and backwards "arguing" on HN these days -- people grossly underestimate our innate human ability to draw rather good conclusions based on incomplete data, and constantly require "scientific proof" about pretty much anything. Science doesn't have data on most of what's happening on this planet however. And that won't change for a long time still.

We make do with what we have. The rest are yelling "give me evidence!" in non-deterministic areas like country/world economics. Heh, OK.

It's not Microsoft's fault that you can't say "no", though.

You pretty much made the entire thread superfluous. Very well articulated and I fully agree, the suits don't care if you reduce their expense if they can skip the expense whatsoever.

I agree with several other commenters pointing out that the comparison is badly made -- throwing Ruby, PHP, Perl and Erlang/Elixir in the mix would make for much more interesting and useful article.

Probably the author needed to let off some steam. We all do it and I think HN is being pretty harsh on people being people. I am convinced every single person criticizing has been flaming in the last one month, in one platform or another.

- Innovation: subjective. People can't even agree on an universally agreed upon definition. Still, care to give an example?

- Available toolset: oh, you mean the dozens of builders, packers, or task runners, being only three examples? Or the `leftpad` fiasco, maybe?

- async/await are syntactic sugar. They solve programmer happiness. Granted that's a big win (no sarcasm), but let's be clear on the semantics. That's not optimizing anything in a technical sense, it makes it more pleasant and quicker to write the code.

- "Within a couple years the problem is fixed". You should communicate with more business people. If I had to pick a technology today, based on what is available today, Node.JS wouldn't even make the top 10. By your logic, being optimistic for the future is a decision maker. That's actually not far off and sadly all of us devs make decisions based on such emotions, but IMO Node.JS shouldn't be judged on that basis.

- "Proposals for OPTIONAL static typing". Great, one more thing to track backwards compatibility on. Can't you see how the JS community is just happy to pile a hack on top of a hack, to infinity and beyond? It's surprising and saddening to me that this isn't obvious to so many JS devs.

--- Apologies, sir/madam, but you lack the bigger picture perspective. You like the stack? Nobody should criticize you over that, we all have fandoms. But you need to be more objective and identify the lingering problems. Shiny new proposals don't necessarily fix anything.