vcarl

The best I've found is reddit.com/r/neutralpolitics. It's strictly moderated, with minimum comment lengths and required source links when making factual claims.

I'm happy to see particularly interesting pieces that deal with politics here, but I've seen far too much "breaking" political news here for my tastes. I'd much prefer if HN's politics were more deep and analytical, rather than following the same reality show that I can watch on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter.

Did you do the driving class, Octane Academy? It's not well publicized, but the ST comes with a free driving class in Utah (you pay for travel and accommodations), but it's only valid within a year of buying it.

I recently purchased a Fiesta ST, which (along with the Focus ST) bucks this trend. The Fiesta is a cheap car, but the highest trim package, ST, is exclusively available as a manual and adds 70 HP. The Focus ST is the same, with an even bigger HP bump.

Hopefully somebody else decides to compete with Ford for the budget enthusiast market, and we get a bunch of fun manuals :)

There's a fantastic, massively upvoted StackOverflow post that can also provide some insight here. This may be a little more accessible, since it's such a significant runtime difference with very simple source code.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-it-faster...

I have very little formal education in CS, I've had no problems getting a career going. Especially at smaller companies that have less experience hiring, it's not difficult to get in the door with some networking and proof of your skills. Larger companies with a larger volume of applicants are more likely to use metrics like degrees as a filter, with small companies the right experience can matter much more than a degree.

I was able to find a student startup that I was enthusiastic about and overwork myself until I had enough experience to become interesting to larger companies, ultimately tripling my income in a 3 year period. There are many paths, but they're not always obvious.

There's a website, polyfill.io, that does browser sniffing and sends a minimal polyfill. The source is available under the MIT license[1], it shouldn't be a tremendous amount of work to set up a bunch of different builds for different features levels, with a server in front responsible for sending the correct bundle.

[1]: https://github.com/Financial-Times/polyfill-service/blob/mas...

I don't think the past few years will be representative of web development in the future. The community has had a lot of churn because basic questions (How do I ensure my code has what it needs to run? How do I include dependencies? How do I efficiently deliver my code?) weren't answered, but now those questions have robust, widely used solutions, we don't have everyone figuring that out for themselves (and writing throwaway tools).

I think most of the current crop of tools that are in vogue will stick around for a while. There have been a few challengers to Webpack offering feature improvements (Rollup, Broccoli), but the ideas they introduced were added to Webpack, rather than replacing it.

Yeah, from the outside I can understand the "everything keeps changing!!" complaint, but having been involved in JS for a few years, every single tool that got replaced was replaced for completely valid reasons, that couldn't have been solved incrementally by improving what was already there.

    Grunt > Gulp > Webpack
    manual polyfills > 6to5 > Babel
    script tags > bower > NPM > Yarn
    nothing > Flow/Typescript

All of these were significant improvements upon the status quo. If you don't understand why, that's fine! Keep using what you know.

My biggest complaint on most of those sorts of sites are:

    * Tight line spacing
    * Full window width lines
    * Small fonts
    * Sometimes, font choice

When I'm reading something lengthy on a site like those named, I'll usually set a max-width on the body, give it auto margins, and play with line-height, font-size, and usually set it to Arial. Takes me 30 seconds on pages that aren't terrible and makes it much easier to read.

I believe that you're getting that number, but there might be something wrong with your install. I just installed all of those packages and ended up at 6MB.

It caught those! doing `du -ch ./babel` says it's only 20k, babel-core is 148k, and babel-cli is 104k.

Doing

    du -ch ./babel*

from my `node_modules` directory yields

    3.2M	total

so I'm gonna need a citation on that 600MB claim.

JSX is actually a generic transformation of XML like structures to function calls. Since it's mostly used with React, that's the default, but you can use any function you like. It's the "pragma" option in the config for the plugin.

https://babeljs.io/docs/plugins/transform-react-jsx/

It definitely makes sense to have a technical person sit in on later stage product discussions to point out when minor tweaks will have significant impact on the implementation, but there are discussions that don't need technical input. IMO technical people should be brought in when making a wireframe or some other "handoff" from product/design to implementation.

It's certainly a little bit painful, but that's only because these things are brand new. These tools let you create applications most comparable to native apps, and could you imagine developing for iOS or Android without a Xcode or Android Studio? The current trajectory is very, very good, and it's with a bunch of tools and ideas that came from the community.

This is the typical "hatred of the web" that I usually ignore. ES2015 brought a ton of huge language improvements that are still filtering out into usage, Babel means you can use them all now without waiting for browsers to implement them, Webpack gives you a ton of flexibility for packaging it, Eslint allows you to lint in a completely pluggable way, NPM (and now Yarn, which fixes many of NPM's problems at scale) allows you to effectively manage dependencies, Typescript or Flow allow you to incrementally add the benefits of static types, and Javascript's "functions as a first class object" allow it to behave as a powerful functional programming language.

It's very possible to write--and deploy--very high quality Javascript today.

> We're professionals, after all, and TypeScript and React were not build by some teenage hackers.

On the other hand, Babel was :) He did a great writeup of his life during babel's explosion of popularity.

https://medium.com/@sebmck/2015-in-review-51ac7035e272#.nmef...

> One thing I have noticed over the years is that the front end community is becoming more and more a "let me google how to do it" kind of community.

Odd, I have the opposite impression. I view a lot of web developers as the self taught, figured it out for themself kind of folk. I see React as a counterpoint, pulling in ideas from more academic or enterprise-y parts of the field (functional programming, significant tooling, emphasis on correctness).

My only complaint with Leaflet is that they haven't done anything to support older versions. At an old workplace, we were stuck on an older version for a while due to incompatibilities, and having never used Leaflet before I needed to see how to use the specific version we were on.

I ended up having to clone the repo where the docs were, checkout the commit released for that version and build the docs myself. Maybe I'm spoiled by react-router's phenomenal handling of outdated docs, but it was a pretty terrible experience.

In our case, the goalposts for what the product should be kept moving every 3 months, which was probably the largest single problem, it caused most of the friction imo. It didn't help that we were a hardware startup, so changes couldn't be made as easily. A solution to that would be to agree upon (and document) what the MVP is, and not change course until you've validated that the idea doesn't meet the market's needs. We had a single client/partner, their desires ended up driving a lot of changes late in development that ended up being incompatible with earlier engineering decisions, but the founder pushed them through. We ended up not being able to do environmental testing because of the time those changes took, and the first time it rained the cases for our electronics filled with water.

I'm also now a solo-ish founder and I only have technical/team management experience, so I'm learning too :)

I absolutely relate to Klara's response. I joined as a "founding employee" of a startup, and over the next 3 years the team's biggest problem was being meddled with by the founder (just one, the second founder ducked out after about 8 months—with a sizable percentage of the company).

Eventually I was spending a solid quarter of my time running interference between the founder and pretty much every other team member, and when he eventually fired me over our disagreements (there was nobody to run interference between him and I, when it came to that) the rest of the team quit within a month. Solo, first time founders are a big red flag to me now.

But this isn't a post written by a women nor is it part of a walled garden, it's a question posed to several women, with their longform responses.

If it were titled "Ask an engineer" and all the people asked were women, I wonder what the response would be? I ask that without any snark or presupposition, I'm not sure and I'm curious.

On the other hand, Flow is removed from the code transformation, so it doesn't have to bother with keeping up with the spec. That's a pretty strong point in Flow's favor in my opinion, single responsibility principle and all that :)

Good call, that's a very different chart.

https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=babel-core&package=...

I love these posts. I don't properly understand the majority of what's being done, but a step by step of somebody solving a difficult problem in a space I know nothing about is so fascinating.

Awesome to see GraphQL get some mainstream adoption, hopefully this leads to some more community tools for consuming it :) Relay is an awesome concept, but the learning curve is pretty steep.

The improvements to code reviews are really exciting. Having comments submit all at once instead of one at a time is a great UX change, I've definitely gotten sidetracked mid-review because somebody started responding to my initial comments when I'm neck deep. Comment threading is super useful for discussion-heavy comments like code review, and an in-UI approve/request changes is great.

Gary Johnson wants to get rid of the Department of Education[0] and is against mandatory vaccinations[1].

[0]: https://www.johnsonweld.com/education [1]: https://twitter.com/govgaryjohnson/status/113419678730301440

I second this. No shortcut to search history, just start typing and hit up. Instead of ctrl-e or whatever it is, it has the same "move by 1 word" shortcut as literally everything else on the computer. The pre-made prompt configurations that you can browse (with preview!) in a web browser is nice too. ZSH doesn't compare imo.