matthewhammond

Geez you think Toni Morrison lived a cocooned and privileged life because she won the Nobel at age 62, and she never had any challenges like those you mention (and much, much more) in her life leading up to that that she can draw on? Get a grip, honestly

If my daughter's around me I don't interact with my phone beyond the odd emergency - I'd rather play and talk to her. I'm not particularly anti-screen time (it's impossible to avoid, working in tech) but seeing what a lot of adults consider normal usage is terrifying.

I feel a lot of our generation take the attitude that screen time didn't harm us (hey, we've done ok) which I'm not sold on - I wonder sometimes how I might have turned out if I didn't spend so much time on video games or messing around online as a kid.

It would be much more interesting to analyse one of the sites in detail and consider what could be done to reduce the code size, looking at where it's coming from and what it does. Or to find out why it might be that some landing pages are shipping a lot of JS (could be because they are landing pages for web apps?). Or consider performance more holistically (are pages shipping a lot of code, but lazy loading or otherwise optimising it so that pages still perform well?). Or maybe compare these web application sizes to mobile or desktop equivalents too (where it's surely easier to optimise amount of code shipped).

The article is just a lot of vague pointing at sites and insinuating (not even asserting) that they're too bloated or not. I don't get a sense of whether it's worse that Medium ships 3mb of code or Soundcloud ships 12. There's a lot of bad faith "this is just a text box" for sites which clearly do much more than that too.

The difference with visual arts is, because of the way the market works avant-garde artists can still be financially hugely successful, and their works are correspondingly feted and displayed in the gallery temples. So people are more prone to be intimidated away from criticising what they don't understand, as you can't really argue with money in this society, and it projects influence and power anyway. If contemporary classical composers were mysteriously making millions from their work, they'd probably be treated similarly. Also, contemporary classical is really just a small slice of avant garde music nowadays, another thing articles like this never seem to get.

Yes the thing is most people participating in the conversation just haven't worked on the problems these tools are useful for. They maybe are an engineer... but they don't touch frontend, so they don't know much beyond the basics. Or they're a CS student... but they made a personal blog with Jekyll, so of course they know everything about frontend dev. Or they work on internal LoB apps with user counts in the two digits and no UX requirements... but they've been doing it for years, so of course they know all about it. It crowds out the discussion with low information takes.

Streaming is really just another payday for the winners of the popular music boom of the 60s, and more particularly the IP holders. They got to have their cake with the original vinyl sales, eat it again in the CD era and now they can rent it out permanently via streaming. And they're not interested in sharing any of that out with emerging musicians.

In the past, there was enough of a barrier to just getting music onto disc and out on the airwaves that labels would have to invest in 100 acts just to have one breakthrough. So they'd need to take some of the winnings from their biggest selling artists and reinvest them in new acts to stay in the game. But now they can get income from streaming rather than sales - there's much less incentive to keep new records and artists coming through. If anything it makes more sense for them to just sit on their back catalogue and squash anything new.

So nobody's going to invest the comparatively large amounts needed to get unknown bands into good studios to record albums any more, let alone fund them through the difficult second and third albums often necessary to get traction. Emerging musicians can only do what they can at minimal cost - hence much more of a move towards electronic and bedroom production. That can have great output now due to tech advances in home recording, but it's not gonna be the same as putting musicians in fully kitted studio. (And things like a shift to high-loudness, low dynamic range are another side effect of the ways that music is distributed and consumed, plus advances in what's possible with digital recording and limiting).

The article kinda touches on this stuff but what it doesn't really seem to acknowledge is this is just what's good for the industry. Big labels are perfectly happy picking the winners that blow up on Youtube - it just saves all their development costs. The whole thing just works for them - their interests aren't in having a diverse range of music produced, allowing for a living for artists that aren't their big cash cows, preserving particular genres or recording styles etc.

The problem is that the definition of 'unavailable' or 'unviable' can quickly expand to include more or less anything. Have to wait a week for the film to be available in your area? It's not available on your chosen streaming service? The file costs a dollar more than you want to pay or doesn't come with the full set of download rights you want? People use all of these and more as excuses for pirating. If a programme owner wants to charge $10 a month to view their one show that's their right, and audiences have a wide range of free or cheaper alternatives to choose from if they don't want to pay it.

Unsurprisingly, HN being full of people who've got rich off Web 2.0 tech that profits from the spread of piracy and its resulting products (ultra cheap streaming at the expense of artists and creators), plus enjoyed tons of cheap/free digital goods and entertainment over the years, has a hive mind that considers all this perfectly ok

For me the point is more around generally pushing things towards the cloud and away from snowflake local environments. One click app generation from templates, one click deploys of your app to ephemeral environments for testing and sharing... all without requiring any setup, and integrated into GitHub for collaboration. Want to onboard someone to working on your app, just send them a hyperlink to the repo.

Well, you only need to use Node now if you want a single language (+ optionally Next, which runs on node/express and will make your UI development much smoother if it's anything beyond super basic).

Brexit (and the confected anti EU sentiment that led to it) has only ever been about pointing blame at the EU to explain/distract from the UK's gradual decline. That's why nobody's happy and it'll never be done with.

Blogposts like this don't really help -- someone knocks up a basic WebRTC implementation for a weekend project, reckons it's better than what the specialists do and wants to show it off. That puts the message out that WebRTC is easy, when in reality scaling it to production usage with a full feature set has a hell of a lot of challenges.

It would be better if this sort of thing was heavily caveated ("this is the Hello World of WebRTC") because otherwise a lot of people (non-technical types, junior engineers) see it and think -- well we can do that, should take us a few weeks max.