I don’t understand what this has to do with the article: are you saying that employees (and commenters) shouldn’t be mad about Meta’s actions because they’ve done other, important things?

Yeah I'm saying they should be grateful this company ever existed

Two points:

1. Being angry at an action doesn’t make someone an ingrate. You can both be grateful and angry; I’d say it’s even common to be both.

2. Meta has had no meaningful impact on my software niche, or many others’. Their only real impact on me has been radicalizing my older family members and firing a few of my friends. They aren’t entitled to any particular gratitude for that.

I don't think you get radicalized by social networks alone. Usually things like economic distress, mental health issues, (missing?) social life irl are much bigger factors here. But yes, if you are already leaning towards it, the internet can probably reinforce any kind of extreme beliefs, as they usually provide simple solutions for complex issues.

I understand the distinction you’re making, but I think the “radicalization” characterization is appropriate: my experience is that Facebook-exposed relatives place both more and more extreme value on policies that they might otherwise have.

Were they primed by other sources of media and culture exposure? Absolutely; what distinguishes Facebook is its place in the timeline, and the abundance of evidence that radicalization broadly tracks with social media engagement.

Yeah, Facebook really turned things up in my experience with the constant 24x7 promotion of increasingly extreme content. Fox News has limited hours in the day to produce new content and some editorial restraint, whereas Facebook would cheerfully take someone who was normally at, say, turn of the century WSJ-level conservative content and feed them stuff which Limbaugh wouldn’t have touched. After a while, they start thinking that’s normal.

It is patently evident that you resemble a Zuckerberg shill who frequents technology discussion boards, disseminating tangential remarks extolling gratitude for a corporation that is, in essence, detrimental and morally unsound.

Also Cassandra, RocksDB, zstd, Open Compute and probably a bunch I'm forgetting. Meta has one of the most stellar open source contributions of any company.

GraphQL and Jest too.

Zstd already existed before Yann Collet joined Facebook.

But also credit for hiring someone and ongoingly supporting good work. Honestly this is one of the more essential things companies could be doing.

You're not wrong, but if we've all collectively decided that companies should be patrons then I think we've made a mistake.

These people are only one reorg away from losing their income, Mr. lz4/zstd should be able to focus on his work without such fears, so great is his contribution to our field.

Yeah it's wildly off the wall how hard it is for enoromously valuable critical people doing amazing things to get support for themselves & their work.

That the direct-corporate-patronage/semi-employeeship model is so prevailing is a sign of brokenness. We need more, collectively, to have a health of our technical ecosystem.

Having these corps willing to hire great folk & have them keep hacking is still often a good option, often. "Create more vue than you capture" is easy to back/do when it's so clear who is out there creating mad value.

And they are an engineer lead instead of wall street lead company, supposedly with an eye on long term value creation over short term stock movements (though possibly Zuckerberg has just capitulated) with its metaverse bet, i.e. the thing that engineers claim all software companies should be. And yet, I think no other software company gets the scorn Meta gets from engineers on the interwebs, it's hilarious.

I don’t think many engineers claim all software companies should bet long on the metaverse, whatever that is.

Because their end products that actually generate their income have been, in the eyes of some, immoral and unhealthy to society?

React is important because they pushed a ton of money into devrel and a lot of people used it because Facebook was using it, not because it was breathtakingly advanced over the alternatives. If it hadn’t happened, something else would have and we might have been enjoying better-performing web pages for the last decade, too, without the mythology around virtual DOMs.

It was a breakthrough in front end development, angular by comparison is pure garbage

I’d agree with an incremental improvement for developers but it came at the cost of fair performance & accessibility regressions and a culture of tool chain complexity which undercuts the productivity gains. If I had to pick, I’d say TypeScript has had a much more noticeable impact on teams’ ability to ship code rapidly and reliably.

ML would have been fine without torch, we would have just used tensorflow instead.

It also allowed foreign entities to unduly influence Americans elections.

And knowingly allowed their technology to fuel at least one genocide. Not many companies have that on their resume.

They also brought PHP into the 21st century (as best they could) through competition via hphp.

Yes, I’m sure the web wouldn’t have progressed without yet another framework.

React is THE web framework. The difference between react and previous frameworks is like night and day. Maybe nowadays people are seeing the rough spots with things like useEffect but pre-react web was literal hell for web development.

This is gonna blow your mind, but most developers don't use React at all. Hell most developers don't rarely if ever do frontend web development.

This is gonna blow your mind, but if you reread my comment, I qualified everything with "for web development"

And there were dozens of frameworks before React that were popular.

I remember when Perl cgi-bins blew my mind. A webpage wasn't just static HTML and images anymore, it could be a program that did arbitrary things! Nothing new under the Sun.

Kids these days.

Developing for the web was far from hell before React…

I appreciate the snark but I was there and it was hell.

Frankly, if React didn’t exist, and assuming none of the other post React frameworks ever came to exist, we would likely have a duopoly of Angular and EmberJS. I personally do not like Angular at all, but EmberJS was awesome. It’s performance was slightly sluggish but nothing having more developers due to higher popularity couldn’t have solved.

If I had to be absolutely honest, the developer experience side of EmberJS was miles ahead of what React is today. NextJS is only just coming closer but I’m not even sure it’s there yet.

If React hadn’t existed, and more people had experienced EmberJS, I think web development would have been a far better experience today than it is right now.

The more I think about it, the more I’m switching to the camp that React wasn’t just not a necessary positive to web development, but was in fact a massive negative.

FB’s devrel dollars completely drowned out EmberJS, which was being pushed by a very small indie team, and web development would have been immeasurably better if we were using EmberJS today, as opposed to React and its bandaged on partners.

React is a web framework. Like everything else it has some good points (popularity) and bad points (performance, support cost).

When you get more experience, one thing you’ll learn is that when “literal hell” isn’t entirely untrue it’s a social problem. If your organization isn’t good at maintaining a large application, a tool won’t save you. It’s very common for people to look at problems and blame the current tools because that’s where the symptoms are and, critically, it doesn’t require saying anyone needs to be doing a better job managing the project.

> When you get more experience

JFC, "when you get more experience". If you people are going to be throwing around this bs you better have your linkedin on your profile and you better have 20 years of experience.

edit: Which you do, touche. That being said, I'm experienced, I'm just hyperbolic and emotional about things. Not everyone that's experienced has that "cool, I've done this a million times before" demeanor ok.

Let’s just say my first for pay project was working with a custom Gopher server and I played around with JavaScript when it first came out in beta with Netscape Navigator…

Okay, I’ve been writing JavaScript since before it had that name so you’re only low by 7 years or so.

Again, I’m not saying that React is horrible – only that people are prone to misattribution leading to overstating the benefits of their current favorite tool relative to other factors. That works both ways, too: it’s not uncommon for people to credit a newer tool for productivity improvements due to their skills increasing over the same time period.

Frameworks come and go. I rather give the credit to the creator not the company. It solved there problem and open sourcing it benefits them more not the community. Now they don't need to train new Facebook developers on some internal framework. Now 1000s of engineers move their framework forward vs only the ones they pay.

React and PyTorch are just libraries, with plenty of competition. The industry wouldn't be that different if everyone was instead using Vue or Angular or whatever other frontend JS library would've come along had React not. You're giving Facebook too much credit here. Most developers have never used any of these (me included).

I agree with the pushing up pay point. That was good, though it appears to be ending now.

React had 2 major contributions which were industry changing on the front end, IMO, and may not have happened or would have happened a lot later without it.

1. Virtual Dom 2. One way data binding

I think one could argue that the virtual DOM wasn’t important, and possibly even led the industry in the wrong direction considering how it’s not as popular, for good reasons, anymore.

One way data binding was huge, however. Every other framework at the time was proudly promoting 2 way data binding. 2 way data binding would be in their website’s hero image and their entire sample app (invariably a todo list app) would be based around promoting the benefits of 2 way data binding.

I think minus React, a switch to one way data binding would have taken much longer, simply because the momentum behind 2 way data binding was so strong.

Can't say much about PyTorch, but I see React as a detriment to the web and the world, like most things this blue company touches on.

I agree but you’re on HN so you should hate facebook and think Zuck is evil.

"Meritocracy" was first used in a dystopian, satirical book.

That whole concept is severely busted. The ancient Greeks knew some part of success was just luck - I have no idea why these ideas which started off being used as a joke, or a dystopian pejorative term, got taken seriously.

"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is another - try it. It's physically impossible! The term started as a JOKE.

But there's this sector of people who honestly believe their success says something about them, but they give nothing back to their community and offer nothing to Luck.

Wild.

Whenever something seems off like that I usually try to follow the money to see who profits from it. In this case, I’m partial to the explanation that it stems back to business opposition to the New Deal pushing a lot of money into promoting libertarian Christianity, with one of the bedrock principles being that the world is just and therefore someone rich must have deserved it in some way.

Kevin Kruse wrote a book about that a few years ago and anyone familiar with American politics or religion will recognize a lot of the people involved:

http://kevinmkruse.com/book/one-nation-under-god/