simjnd (u/simjnd) - Readit News

simjnd commented on Show HN: European tech news in 6 languages europedigital.cloud/en/ne... · Posted by u/Merinov

Merinov · a month ago

Interesting perspective. Can you elaborate? Like: You'd prefer no images at all (text-only)? Or the AI-generated style doesn't work for you? Or something else?

I added them because plain text feels bare, but I'm curious what would work better. Real screenshots? Article-pulled images? Or just skip visuals entirely?

Honest feedback helps, thanks!

simjnd · a month ago

No images at all please. Hacker News feels so good (IMO) in part because there is very little extra fluff. No images is part of that.

simjnd commented on iPhone Pocket apple.com/newsroom/2025/1... · Posted by u/soheilpro

bborud · a month ago

Objects have to earn the right to exist. We make so much stuff. Most of it unnecessary. Stuff that will soon be cluttering your home and then end up in a landfill.

This is not a product that deserves to exist. It is not made from quality materials ( Nylon (14%), Polyester (85%), Polyurethane (1%)). It is not innovative. It is questionable whether it solves its primary use case particularly well.

What makes this particularly objectionable is that it is from a design house that usually makes quality garments. And then they stoop to making this crap, slapping their designer label on it and then exploit ghastly people who don't know any better to waste tons of money on it.

This is pissing on Issey Miyake's grave.

simjnd · a month ago

To be fair a lot of garments from Issey Miyake are made from similar material.

simjnd commented on Valdi – A cross-platform UI framework that delivers native performance github.com/Snapchat/Valdi... · Posted by u/yehiaabdelm

DecoPerson · a month ago

I did this and never looked back.

It’s called a “WebView app” and you can get a really good experience on all platforms using them. Just:

- don’t make any crazy decisions on your fundamental UI components, like breadcrumbs, select dropdowns, etc

- add a few platform-specific specialisations to those same components, to make them feel a bit more familiar, such as button styling, or using a self-simplifying back-stack on Android

- test to make sure your webview matches the native browser’s behaviour where it matters. For example, sliding up the view when the keyboard is opened on mobile, navigating back & forth with edge-swipes on iOS, etc

I also went the extra step and got service workers working, for a basic offline experience, and added a native auto network diagnostic tool that runs on app startup and checks “Can reach local network” “Can reach internet (1.1.1.1)” “Can resolve our app’s domain” etc etc, so users can share where it failed to get quicker support. But this is an app for small-to-medium businesses, not consumer-facing, and the HTML5 part is served from the server and cached. I haven’t thought much about what you might need to do additionally for a consumer app, or a local-first app.

simjnd · a month ago

What is your app? Would love to try it out to get a feel for the experience.

simjnd commented on I built the same app 10 times: Evaluating frameworks for mobile performance lorenstew.art/blog/10-kan... · Posted by u/0xblinq

maelito · a month ago

Thanks for the detailed explanations !

simjnd · a month ago

You're welcome

simjnd commented on I built the same app 10 times: Evaluating frameworks for mobile performance lorenstew.art/blog/10-kan... · Posted by u/0xblinq

jakubmazanec · 2 months ago

React isn't slow. It can be pretty fast (thanks to hooks like useTransition or useOptimistic, and now React Compiler, etc.) - it's just that it takes a lot of learning and work to use React correctly. Some people don't like that, and that's why other frameworks with different trade-offs exist.

The other thing is that React is too big in terms of kBs of JavaScript you have to download and then parse (and often, thanks to great React ecosystem, you use many other libraries). But that's just another trade-off: it's the price you pay for great backwards compatibility (e.g. you can still use React Class components, you don't have to use hooks, etc.).

simjnd · 2 months ago

I want to preface this by saying I have nothing against React, I have used it professionally for a couple years and it's fine and perfectly good enough.

That being said React is slow. That is why you need useTransition, which is essentially manual scheduling (letting React know some state update isn't very important so it can prioritise other things) which you don't need to do in other frameworks.

useOptimistic does not improve performance, but perceived performance. It lets you show a placeholder of a value while waiting for the real computation to happen. Which is good, you want to improve perceived performance and make interactions feel instant. But it technically does not improve React's performance.

simjnd commented on I built the same app 10 times: Evaluating frameworks for mobile performance lorenstew.art/blog/10-kan... · Posted by u/0xblinq

maelito · 2 months ago

> It is pretty established at this point that React has (relative) terrible performance. > it is slow

You're not answering my question, just adding some more feelings.

> The React runtime itself is 40 kB

React is < 10 kb compressed https://bundlephobia.com/package/react@19.2.0 (add react-dom to it). That's not really significative according to the author's figures, the header speaks about up "to 176.3 kB compressed".

> Most frameworks have moved on to use signals to manage state updates. When state change

This is not kilobytes or initial render times, but performance in rendering in a highly interactive application. They would not impact rendering a blog post, but rendering a complex app's UI. The original blog post does not measure this, it's out of scope.

simjnd · 2 months ago

> You're not answering my question, just adding some more feelings.

Well you seemed surprised by this fact, even though it's a given for most people working in front-end frameworks.

> React is < 10 kb compressed https://bundlephobia.com/package/react@19.2.0 (add react-dom to it).

I don't know how bundlephobia calculates package size, and let me know if you're able to reproduce them in a real app. The simplest Vite + React app with only a single "Hello, World" div and no dependencies (other than react and react-dom), no hooks used, ships 60+ kB of JS to the browser (when built for production, minified and gzipped).

Now the blog post is not just using React but Next.js which will ship even more JS because it will include a router and other things that are not a part of React itself (which is just the component framework). There are leaner and more performant React Meta-Frameworks than Next.js (Remix, TanStack Start).

> This is not kilobytes or initial render times, but performance in rendering in a highly interactive application

True, but it's another area where React is a (relative) catastrophe.

The large bundle size on the other hand will definitely impact initial render times (in client-side rendering) and time-to-interactive (in SSR), because it's so much more JS that has to be parsed and executed for the runtime before even executing your app's code.

EDIT: It also does not have to be a highly interactive application at all for this to apply. If you only change a single value, that is read in a component deep within a component tree you will definitely feel the difference, because that entire component tree is going to execute again (even though the resulting diff will show that only that deeply nested div needs to be updated, React has no way of knowing that beforehand, whereas signal-based framework do)

And finally I want to say I'm not a React hater. It's totally possible to get fast enough performance out of React. There are just more footguns to be aware of.

simjnd commented on I built the same app 10 times: Evaluating frameworks for mobile performance lorenstew.art/blog/10-kan... · Posted by u/0xblinq

maelito · 2 months ago

If I trust this article, React is a (relative) catastrophe.

Can someone explain why ? What precisely would make React sooo slow and big compared to other abstractions ?

simjnd · 2 months ago

It is pretty established at this point that React has (relative) terrible performance. React isn't successful because it's a superior technology, it's successful despite being an inferior technology. It's just really difficult to beat an extremely established technology and React has a huge ecosystem, so many companies depend on it that the job market for it is huge, etc.

As to why it is slow, my knowledge is super up-to-date (haven't kept up that well with recent updates), but in general the idea is:

- The React runtime itself is 40 kB so before doing anything (before rendering in CSR or before hydrating in SSR) you need to download the runtime first.

- Most frameworks have moved on to use signals to manage state updates. When state change, observers of that state will be notified and the least amount of code will be run before updating the DOM surgically. React instead re-executes the code of entire component trees, compares the result with the current DOM and then applies changes. This is a lot more work and a lot slower. Over time techniques have been developed in React to mitigate this (Memoization, React Compiler, etc.), but it still does a lot more work than it needs to, and these techniques are often not needed in other frameworks because they do a lot less work by default.

The js-framework-benchmark [1] publishes benchmarks testing hundreds of frameworks for every Chrome release if you're interested in that.

[1]: https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/2025/table...

simjnd commented on Nvidia DGX Spark: When benchmark numbers meet production reality publish.obsidian.md/aixpl... · Posted by u/RyeCatcher

pjmlp · 2 months ago

Media market, Cool Blue, FNAC, Saturn, Publico,.... where?

simjnd · 2 months ago

Online only at https://frame.work AFAIK. I don't think people shelling out 2-4k for an AI training machine are concerned whether or not they can find it at a hardware store locally or online, but I may be wrong.

simjnd commented on Nvidia DGX Spark: When benchmark numbers meet production reality publish.obsidian.md/aixpl... · Posted by u/RyeCatcher

pjmlp · 2 months ago

Framework doesn't sell in Europe and they are sponsoring the wrong kind of folks nowadays.

simjnd · 2 months ago

Framework does absolutely sell in several countries in Europe.

simjnd commented on Nvidia DGX Spark: When benchmark numbers meet production reality publish.obsidian.md/aixpl... · Posted by u/RyeCatcher

pjmlp · 2 months ago

Complete computer with everything working.

simjnd · 2 months ago

The complete Framework Desktop with everything working (including said Ryzen AI Max 395+ and 128 GB of RAM) is 2500 EUR. In Europe the DGX Spark listings are at 4000+ EUR.