> It's evidence that the company has found speeding up linking to be worth millions of dollars.
It really isn't. You're buying into the fallacy that a FANG can never do wrong and all their developers are infallible and walk on water. All you're able to say is google did this and google did that, and you're telling that to a guy who has first-hand experience on how this and that is actually made. You never mentioned any technical aspect or more importantly performance differences. You only name-dropped Google, and to a guy who already worked at a FANG.
> So although you might not encounter issues with link times (debug or otherwise), it is a multi-million dollar problem for big companies like Google and Apple. Both in resources and engineer time.
I appreciate your appeal to authority, but I worked at a FANG on a project that had over 20 GB worth of static and dynamic/shared libraries.
> The problem being tackled here is link time in debug builds. This affects all platforms.
I've worked on many projects, big and small, and the link time of debug builds was never a problem that was worth fixing.
In fact, even today I was discussing with a coworker the inefficiencies of the project's build process, we literally commented that having to only link a huge subproject is a major blessing.
> But I still think it's important to note that this isn't really advancing the state of the art like Apple would like you to believe. It's just a new middle-of-the-road approach with its own possibly-positive tradeoffs and pitfalls.
It also seems that this new library format barely solves any problem and in the process bumps up the number of library types that developers need to onboard and possibly support.
> Rerendering and recomputing too much (ever encountered these chains of map() and filter() in render()?), many API calls, huge icon sets, huge custom fonts, CSS frameworks and JS frameworks, huge dependency trees with many instance of the same lib running sometime in several versions, big bundles...
This hits the nail in the head.
A single high-res background image weights more than all the code in a complex webapp. If that image is required to pull the first contentful paint then the page will feel slow.
It matters nothing if your JavaScript is just a hello world console log. That background image is in the critical path.
> The entire internet is slower because it's being squeezed to oblivion for monetization and tracking purposes.
Bullshit. All you need to track a user is data you send as part of a HTTP request. Pushing metrics is a fire-and-forget HTTP request away.
The internet feels slower because we're using way more of it, not only in the increased complexity of webapps to improve user experience and implement features but also in the volume of data we're transferring around.
> running A/B tests
A/B tests just means settings/feature flags and metrics. Feature flags is used in way more things than behavioral studies.
> include recording user sessions
User sessions are recorded since ever with zero performance penalty. The very same HackerNews page you're now browsing is tracking your user session whenever you login. That's not it.
> Back "before SPAs" we just weren't doing as much crap in the browser.
Right, and life sucked back then. Why do you think Flash was so popular?
It's trendy to shit on the status quo but it also is low-effort and lacks any insightfulness.
> Ironically, many modern SPAs are significantly slower than the traditional apps they replaced.
All software becoming slower is a already a meme. This isn't exactly a SPA issue.
> Sometimes it's regrettable that the webdev truck has no rear-view mirror.
The "software is getting slower" meme was the Hallmark of Java in the server when it was released in the 90s. This is nothing new, or specific to web dev.
Also, I feel you're grossly misrepresenting the problem. Reddit's mobile page is considerably slower than the old reddit page, but it's perceived performance is quite good. All posts are cached and instead of full page reloads it just switches content virtually instantly.
It might be fancy to shit on everyone else's work, but this only happens if you lack objectiveness and sincerity.
> Um, I don’t think I was advocating any particular level of moderation, was I? More like visibility into its processes amd motivations, and that providing those convincingly and to an appropriate extent is the moderators’ responsibility.
If you are not advocating for a particular type of moderation then why are you all bothered about how any type of moderation is applied? What would be the point of your suggestion?
> And nowadays you can deploy apps really close to users so latency is really low.
That sounds like blindly throwing money at the software architecture problem you created for yourself. Supposedly SPAs became popular because your line of reasoning was embarrassingly absurd, in the sense that you do not mitigate the penalty of a network call by microoptimizing the cost of a network call.
> The original point of this thread is that they'd like to be able to get an M2 PC like that.
Not really. The point is that Apple's products are overpriced, and in particular the Apple Mini underperforms and simply isn't competitive when compared to today's alternatives. I repeat, a mini PC with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB HD on the market for over 700€ simply doesn't compete with miniPCs with Ryzen or Intel i7 or even i5 that ship with 500GB HDs and at least 16GB of RAM which can cost 200 or 300€ less.
I don't see the point of your comment. It matters nothing if you underline design differences if in the end you can get a cheaper minipc that's upgradeable and ships with more memory, and you can't do anything about your Mac mini other than scrap it and buy a more expensive model.
> The mini is a perfectly decent Apple Silicon Mac
That's all fine and dandy if you artificially limit comparisons to Apple's product line.
Once you step out of that artificial constraint, you get a wealth of miniPCs which have a smaller form factorz are cheaper, have more RAM and HD, are upgradeable and maintainable, and in some cases have more computational power as a whole.
> I think to compare prices you need something with adequate GPU performance (which the M2 has).
I feel your comment reads too much like fanboy excuses. CPU is not the only or even main requirement. I personally want to max out on RAM and HD. I can buy a mini PC with 32GB of RAM and a 500GB nvie for 400€. With a Mac, I need to spend almost twice that to only get 25% of te RAM and 50% of that HD space.
This was the norm since Apple shipped Intel core i5 Mac minis.
There is no way around this. Apple price gouges their kit. It's irrelevant how you feel they fare n artificial benchmarks.
> (...) leads you to the conclusion that they’re not spiritual gateways. I find this surprising as those are one in the same to me.
How does that surprise you? I mean do spiritual gateways exist at all? Is there even a concrete definition and concept? Or are they just a conjecture without any basis whatsoever?
It seems you start from baseless beliefs and blindly assume they are require no validation and afterwards feel surprised others don't share your wild assumptions.
> The products do come at a bit of a premium, but, in my experience, it's well earned and is a premium experience as well.
As a long time Linux and macOS user, I don't agree. Even though macOS is more polished than your average Linux desktop environment, it's really very hard to ignore the unjustified markup. Nowadays I can buy a miniPC with a Ryzen5 and 32GB of RAM for around 400€, but the cheapest Mac mini nowadays sells for over 700€ and comes with 8GB of RAM and an absurd 256GB SSD. Moreover, a Mac mini tops up at 24GB of RAM, and for that you need to pay an additional 460€ for your weak 256GB HD box.
The worst mistake these naive proponents of free speech absolutism make is assuming that everyone is arguing in honest, good faith instead of exploiting founding liberal democratic values to undermine it.
Time and again we see fascists demanding their fascist and outright racist views are entitled to all the air time they can possibly get because "to defend free speech you must defend our right to defend our views everywhere we can". Yet, when the subject of defending views they oppose pops up, they are quick to try to silence those with threats of violence and intimidation as they see entitled to it.
Worst, when their threats of intimidation are faced with threats of violence, they cynically hide behind the very same liberal and democratic values they undermine, arguing that their oppression campaign should not be subjected to any form of oppression because they are only defending what they believe.
This loophole is known for ages, and so is the antidote.
> There is also the issue that it seems safe to assume that many people at the CIA etc consider him a traitor and would like to assassinate him, given the opportunity, even if he could be assured of immunity from prosecution.
The US is known for supporting or conducting extrajudicial executions, but they all served a very specific geostrategic and geopolitic goal.
There isn't a single case of a political assassination case conducted out of spite, such as the one in the conspiracy theory you fabricated. There is also no goal to achieve, or win to be had, or position to be improved by assassinating Snowden. Snowden's relevance ended a long time ago. In fact, any of those conspiracy theories would represent an unequivocal loss for the US.
If anything, the CIA would be involved in protecting Snowden in the US from the likes of Russia to avoid a false flag assassination to embarrass the US.
It is, and a very weak one considering Google has a history of getting people to work on promotion-oriented projects.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261488
> It's evidence that the company has found speeding up linking to be worth millions of dollars.
It really isn't. You're buying into the fallacy that a FANG can never do wrong and all their developers are infallible and walk on water. All you're able to say is google did this and google did that, and you're telling that to a guy who has first-hand experience on how this and that is actually made. You never mentioned any technical aspect or more importantly performance differences. You only name-dropped Google, and to a guy who already worked at a FANG.
Linking was never an issue.