modglot VS hn-search

I started a small hobby project. First with TypeScript and Modern Web Dev Server (https://modern-web.dev/guides/dev-server/getting-started/). I don't want bundling and for a while life was good. But then I had some npm packages that didn't support EcmaScript modules. I found a workaround but suddenly I lost motivation. I then thought, okay, perhaps time to change to Deno.

Half a year later I changed to vanilla Rust, trunk, Webassembly and some JavaScript glue code and suddenly a lot of things got easier. Of course as a Rust programmer it is easy for me. But I am also a JavaScript programmer.

This is just anecdotal but it really seems to me that the JavaScript ecosystem is so deeply flawed to burn out people. Let me list two main points which are broken:

- Types are wonky. TypeScript does a huge work to "fix" JavaScript and I love TypeScript. But TypeScript cannot fix the soundness holes in JavaScript. There will be always things that don't work out of the box.

- The missing dependency story. Node introduced CommonJS, but it didn't work on browsers. Browser just added objects to the browser's Window object. Later there are EcmaScript modules but too late. I wrote a hacky polyglot which does both UMD and EcmaScript modules, but I feel the polyglot to be brittle. https://github.com/nalply/modglot

I am still thinking about it, but I feel JavaScript could go the way of PHP. Still important, but too much a mess to be taken seriously. Perhaps in about ten years. I don't know.

One problem I encountered with ESM TypeScript development on the browser without bundling: many Node packages aren't set up for that.

You might ask why without bundling?

Sometimes you just want to start something simple on the browser and compile to JavaScript on the fly.

I tried the dev server from Modern Web [0], and I liked it. I program in TypeScript and the browser reloads whenever I save a file. Of course I could set up a bundler and for a small program waiting times are negligible. But I hate bundlers. I know it's irrational, but nowadays I program for fun so I think I should have the choice to reject bundlers.

This fails for many Node dependencies. There is a conflict between CommonJS and ESM. I am not 100% sure that what I want to achieve is impossible without forking dependencies and making a small change.

I even found a way to have a CommonJs and ESM polyglot, but this hack is extremely ugly, so my intellectual curiosity is satisfied. I named the hack modglot [1]. I don't think this is a good idea and I don't understand enough to propose something. I am somewhat dejected about the current state of TypeScript development for the browser and paused development.

Now I am programming in Rust again just for fun, but if I return to TypeScript, probably I will try out Deno.

[0]: https://modern-web.dev/guides/dev-server/getting-started/

[1]: https://github.com/nalply/modglot

- Ads with Psychological tricks

Truly good websites have around 2 facts per 10 word sentence, and get instantly to the chase. Also: good websites give you the names of all their competitors/alternative websites before showing their own stuff, and give you further reading.

Right now the world of technology is supposedly more innovative than ever, but somehow Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.org/) and Search Hackernews (https://hn.algolia.com/) beat billion dollar search engines.

Articles written decades ago are still unsurpassed in terms of quality and ease of understanding, but the best modern websites can do is textbook explanations. It is time society graduates from boilerplate buzzword textbook culture.

Now the gems of the internet are slowly being buried beneath mountains of trash.

If something sounds boilerplate it isn't good enough.

Don't bother saying something that has been said before, and better.

>for more detail: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Oh, I see. We actually discussed Pound about four years ago - just a little back and forth about the ABC of Reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196681

>What's your explanation of why Pound went Fascist?

I'm not sure I particularly have one; I haven't read any of his longer political or cultural (i.e. non-literary) works. I just think it's silly to correlate an approach to translation that you dislike with fascism. Especially as I'm not sure it even makes sense on its own terms: I can only read your comment as 'lazy translator? Figures that he would be a fascist', but if I imagine the type of translation a fascist would approve of, the approach I picture is fastidious, fussy, concerned with fidelity to the point of stickler-ishness. (Isn't that from where we get 'grammar nazi'?)

And oh, well, since you ask I'll take a shy at it: my vague sense is that he became fascist because saw a society in decline due to it becoming more and more a sham society: opulence without virtue, power without vigour, money no longer tied to actually existing goods. (Of course, all of this shades easily into antisemitism.) He saw fascism as the answer; It's easier to see in retrospect that it wasn't.

"multiplayer notepad" goes back 15 years at least - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... notepad&sort=byDate&type=comment

it was used back with a popular website which opened a text document and anyone viewing could type, but I can't remember the name. That became a thing in Google Docs, Microsoft Office, Floobits, and lots of self-hosted and cloned sites.

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at [email protected].

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

I understand the reason for repeating these sentiments—it's the same reason why they get upvoted to the top of threads*—but repetition of this kind is what we're most trying to avoid here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* I've marked this one off topic now.

I was looking for it in the guidelines. There are a couple of conventions for postings. Consider a bit of prior examples: [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=show+hn]

yeah there are only three stories coming up from the site search

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=postgres+clustering

only one is semanthically correct, the other pick up the wrong version of clustering (i.e. k-means instead of multi master writes)

but yeah if one doesn't test the hard cases, how does one know it preserves semantics :D

Like dismissing the work of Feyerabend or Wittgenstein without seemingly having read either:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...