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thesuavefactor commented on What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?   derekthompson.org/p/what-... · Posted by u/mmcclure
neuroelectron · 2 months ago
I'm surprised it was really considered mystery. My grandparents told me straight up, who had four children, that the reason that had such a large family is because they were supposed to. It was their patriotic duty. Did this zeitgeist get lost a time or is it now some sort of secret? Perhaps it's not politically correct the point out that actually, people, there is a class of people who determine what we're supposed to believe. Just like I grew up thinking computers were cool just when we needed a lot of software developers, right before my career was outsourced to H-1Bs.

I suppose it makes sense. It's not like there's any single place that documented where we're all agreeing about what we're supposed to believe. After all, nobody has a date where we all decided that hackers were really cool and awesome.

thesuavefactor · 2 months ago
It's religion. The church pastor would visit the family if a young couple didn't have children within a year to ask what's up.

That being said: I don't get the discussions in this thread. The world can't sustain billions of people anyway. I think decline in the population is a very good thing to happen.

It's silly to think of it as some sort of insurmountable challenge that should be avoided at all cost.

thesuavefactor commented on I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since   medium.com/@mikehall314/i... · Posted by u/mikehall314
zem · 2 months ago
at least in this case one of the ideas seemed to be that if they did an ajax load of the middle section of the page, they could skip sending the fixed elements (header and footer) over the network repeatedly
thesuavefactor · 2 months ago
To be fair, an iframe would accomplish that too, but the loaded content would have its own html header that adds to the amount of kilobytes used. So maybe that's the reason.
thesuavefactor commented on I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since   medium.com/@mikehall314/i... · Posted by u/mikehall314
exiguus · 2 months ago
I really enjoyed the article. I have to say, though: sorry, not sorry, but application size is a poor measure of performance. A 128KB size limit doesn't account for pictures, videos, tracking, ads, fonts, and interactivity. Just avoid them, is not a real world strategy.

Suggesting that an application should stay within a 128KB limit is akin to saying I enjoy playing games in polygon mode. Battlezone was impressive in the 90s, but today, it wouldn't meet user expectations.

In my opinion, initial load time is a better measure of performance. It combines both the initial application size and the time to interactivity.

Achieving this is much more complex. There are many strategies to reduce initial load size and improve time to interactivity, such as lazy loading, using a second browser process to run code, or minimizing requests altogether. However, due to this complexity, it's also much easier to make mistakes.

Another reason this is often not done well is that it requires cross-team collaboration and cross-domain knowledge. It necessitates both frontend and backend adjustments, as well as optimisation at the request and response levels. And it is often a non-functional requirement like accessibility that is hard to track for a lot of teams.

thesuavefactor · 2 months ago
It's not about performance, it's about load time and the restrictions of your client apps.

Also, you're thinking way too much in a SPA architecture. Using just server side rendering with just a tiny bit of javascript like the article states removes most of the problems you describe like Initial load time and cross team collaboration. The load time of the described websites would be instant, and there is no front end team needed.

thesuavefactor commented on Ask HN: As a programmer, How do you take notes while coding?    · Posted by u/abacussh
thesuavefactor · 5 months ago
I use logseq a lot. Not just for development notes, but notes in general.
thesuavefactor commented on Netherlands launches fund to lure top scientists, like those fleeing the U.S.   nltimes.nl/2025/03/20/net... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo
toomuchtodo · 5 months ago
Hydrogen could replace fossil gas in the near term for firm fossil generation, makes it even easier for Europe to disconnect from Russia for energy.
thesuavefactor · 5 months ago
That would be nice. I've always wondered why it's so hard to harvest excess solar power as hydrogen gas by electrolysis, from what I understand the process is pretty inefficient. That would also be a good area for research.
thesuavefactor commented on Netherlands launches fund to lure top scientists, like those fleeing the U.S.   nltimes.nl/2025/03/20/net... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo
thesuavefactor · 5 months ago
ASML is already a good industry leader in it's field of expertise, expanding into other areas like green technologies and defence (lots of finances being freed up for that currently) will be very beneficial. I just read France has found an enormous amount of naturally occurring Hydrogen. Hydrogen powered cars would also be a good area for scientific research. And of course, genetics and medicine in general, the Netherlands started vaccinating poultry against bird flu last month in a world exclusive trial.
thesuavefactor commented on Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?    · Posted by u/julianpye
thesuavefactor · 6 months ago
I ditched my Google account a while ago. That was tricky because I used it to log in to several websites.

I fortunately also got rid of Facebook a while ago. This gave me a lot more time back. It's difficult at first, because there's a little fomo, but now I am very happy.

I never started with all the other social media. No Instagram, no Twitter. So that makes it easy.

My computers have always run Linux, very happy with that.

Streaming services are next. At least the US ones.

Replacing whatsapp with signal also. I noticed a lot of my contacts are already in there, just not actively using it. It's a question of just starting communications and groups there.

It's quite doable, but you have to really want to "vote with your wallet" so to speak. I think it's a worthwhile sacrifice. In fact, it rids you of psychological warfare, reduces anxiety, costs less money and gives you your time back.

If you think about it that way, it's a no brainer.

thesuavefactor commented on I don't like Docker or Podman   blog.liw.fi/posts/2025/do... · Posted by u/0x2a
Uehreka · 7 months ago
So here's the thing: Docker is the best way we have to document how to set up a project/application in a way that can be repeated on arbitrary computers. The alternative was "have a README where you list all of the things you need to do/install in order to get this project running".

That failed. Miserably.

Developers always assumed things like "well naturally, if you're playing in the XYZ space, you've already got meson installed. What, do you expect me to teach you basic arithmetic in this README too?" Developers across the board, across programming subcultures, showed themselves unable to get past this sort of thing.

So now we have Docker. You may not like it, but this is what peak install guide looks like. An unambiguous file that describes the exact shell steps required to get the piece of software running, starting from a base distro. The developer can't omit any steps or the container won't work on their machine.

It sucks that this Hegelian situation calls for such a draconian solution, but that's where we're at. Developers as a whole can't be trusted to handle this on their own. If you don't have a better solution to this problem, I'm not sure there's much point in complaining.

thesuavefactor · 7 months ago
I think there is a point to the authors remark on user-friendlyness.

It should be possible to improve the containerization experience by providing a better UI and maybe even a different syntax for docker files.

thesuavefactor commented on If not React, then what?   infrequently.org/2024/11/... · Posted by u/pier25
quantadev · 9 months ago
The people who don't think React (or Vue) is important are the same ones who have never worked on a large project with lots of screen updates and state changes that absolutely cannot be avoided. React is still #1 in popularity, and the most crucial tool for almost any web developer (aside from using TypeScript, instead of plain JS which is also critical for large projects)

React is reported to be used by 39.5% of developers worldwide, while Vue.js is at 15.4%. The number of "apps" using just HTML+CSS is precisely zero, because those aren't "apps" they're documents.

thesuavefactor · 9 months ago
You can't be more wrong. You're saying that only logic performed on the client side can be considered an application? State can be stored in the server. Screen changes can be done by loading html, it doesn't need a framework. React is far from crucial for web development, but people haven't learned anything else the last decade. Most front end developers these days don't even know what a template engine is, and some don't even know how to create a website without a backend rest api that spews json data.
thesuavefactor commented on Show HN: Dracan – Open-source, 1:1 proxy with simple filtering/validation config   github.com/Veinar/dracan... · Posted by u/k4k4
thesuavefactor · 10 months ago
Won't the fact that it's written in Python make it too slow for high traffic sites or APIs?

u/thesuavefactor

KarmaCake day89August 28, 2022View Original