panphora

5 месяцев назадdiscuss

Anger about the 2008 bailout makes sense. Yen carry unwind deserves attention. However, the trading call to action fails on market structure.

Key counterpoints:

- Global FX turnover runs near $9.6T per day (BIS, April 2025). A retail wave of calls will not move USD/JPY in a durable way at that scale.

- /6J options settle on /6J futures. When you buy calls, you mostly push dealer delta hedging into futures, then dealers unwind as exposure changes. No sustained spot yen demand comes from that flow.

- FXY calls track an ETF wrapper, not spot.

- “Widowmaker trade” most often refers to repeated losses from shorting Japanese government bonds, not a long-yen crowd squeeze.

panphora

7 месяцев назадdiscuss

Hyperclay: a way to package up HTML files as portable, editable apps that contain their own editable UI. I'm using these simple apps to plan, edit emails, write blog posts, and a lot more. I edit them on my mac and they sync to the web live.

It feels like being able to design my own document format on the fly and display it however I want. It's making it painfully obvious how many editable primitives the web is missing, however.

https://hyperclay.com/

panphora

9 месяцев назадdiscuss

Author here.

I agree that all frameworks require learning framework-specific concepts, but I think there's a meaningful difference in what you need to know and how that knowledge transfers.

With Backbone, jQuery, or vanilla JavaScript, you're learning DOM APIs, event patterns, and explicit state management. These are things that are visible, inspectable, and fundamentally close to the platform. When something breaks, you can pop open devtools, see the actual DOM, trace the event handlers, and understand what's happening. The knowledge you gain is transferable. It's about how the web platform actually works.

With React, you're learning abstractions on top of abstractions: virtual DOM diffing, reconciliation algorithms, why objects in dependency arrays cause infinite loops, why your click handler sees stale state, why your input mysteriously cleared itself. This is React-specific magic that doesn't transfer. It's knowledge about how to work around React's mental model, not knowledge about how the web works.

You mention that batching and DOM reconciliation are solvable problems that justify React's complexity. But the article's point is that for most apps -- not Facebook-scale apps with 1,000 components on one page, but normal CRUD apps -- those problems can be solved with simpler patterns and conventions. We don't need a virtual DOM and a sophisticated reconciliation algorithm to build a form validator.

The real question isn't "does React solve problems?" It's "does React's complexity match the complexity of the problems most developers are actually solving?"

panphora

9 месяцев назадdiscuss

Author here.

The "paleo influencer" comparison is interesting, but I think it actually works both ways here.

Yes, there's a temptation to romanticize the past and dismiss modern tools. But there's an equally strong tendency to assume that newer, more popular, and more widely-adopted automatically means better. React didn't just win on pure technical merit. It has Facebook's marketing muscle behind it, it became a hiring checkbox, and it created a self-reinforcing ecosystem where everyone learns it because everyone uses it.

The article isn't suggesting that a "huge global collective of the world's most talented engineers have been conned." It's asking a much more nuanced question: did all that effort actually move us forward, or did we just move sideways into different complexity?

Look at the two implementations in the article. They do the same thing. They're roughly the same length. After 15 years of React development, countless developer hours, and a massive ecosystem, we're not writing dramatically less code or solving the problem more elegantly. We're just solving it differently, with different tradeoffs.

Sometimes looking backward isn't about being a "retro-idealist," it's about questioning whether we added complexity without proportional benefit. The paleo diet people might be onto something when they point out that we over-engineered our food. Maybe we over-engineered our frameworks too.

panphora

9 месяцев назадdiscuss

Author here.

I appreciate the point about unidirectional data flow solving real problems, but I think we're trading one complexity for another rather than actually simplifying things.

Yes, cascading state changes with Backbone Store were frustrating to debug. But React's abstractions introduce their own set of equally frustrating problems: stale closures where your click handler sees old state, infinite useEffect loops because an object in the dependency array gets recreated every render, mysterious input clearing because a key changed from stable to index-based.

The difference is that Backbone's problems were explicit and visible. When something broke, you could trace the event handlers, see what fired when, and understand the flow. The complexity was in your face, which made it debuggable.

React's problems are hidden behind abstraction layers.

I'm not saying React doesn't solve problems. I'm questioning whether those solutions are appropriate for the 99% of apps that aren't Facebook-scale. Sometimes the explicit, verbose approach is actually easier to reason about in the long run.

panphora

9 месяцев назадdiscuss

This is a really cool approach! I checked out your Mockaton dashboard code and love what you're doing. Here's a simplified example of your pattern that really showcases its elegance:

  // Using your minimal native DOM library (15 lines)
  function TodoApp() {
      return r('div', null,
          r('h1', null, 'Todo List'),
          r('ul', null,
              store.todos.map(todo => 
                  r('li', { 
                      className: todo.done ? 'done' : '',
                      onClick: () => store.toggleTodo(todo.id)
                  }, todo.text)
              )
          ),
          r('input', {
              placeholder: 'Add todo...',
              onKeyDown(e) {
                  if (e.key === 'Enter') {
                      store.addTodo(this.value)
                      this.value = ''
                  }
              }
          })
      )
  }

    // Full re-render on any change - just replace everything!
    store.render = () => document.body.replaceChildren(...TodoApp())

What I love about this: - Zero build step - no JSX transpilation, no bundler needed - Direct DOM access - `this.value` just works, no synthetic events - Brutally simple - the entire "framework" is ~10 lines

You're absolutely right that a native DOM merge API would unlock this pattern completely. I just wish this could happen in the DOM instead of JS, so that we could get the power of the DOM as an intuitive model to think about instead of abstracting it into an amorphous data structure.

The fact that it has no build step and works directly on the DOM is fantastic — very similar to Backbone in terms of being able to understand what's happening under the hood! You can pop open devtools, see exactly what's happening, and modify it on the fly. No virtual DOM, no reconciliation mysteries, just functions returning DOM descriptions that get wholesale replaced.

panphora

10 месяцев назадdiscuss

You're cherry picking the tech titans that made it out of the Dot Com boom alive. The NASDAQ-100 had to replace 36 of its components between 2000-2002 due to bankruptcies and delistings - nobody knew in 1999 which companies would be the survivors.

The NASDAQ topped at 5,048.62 on March 10, 2000. It took 15 years for the NASDAQ to recover to its dot-com peak level. In those 15 years, you got an inflation-adjusted negative annualized ROI.

Annualized return of the NASDAQ from the 2000 peak to today is an inflation-adjusted 3.4%. Even "sure thing" blue chips like Cisco and Intel still haven't recovered their 2000 peaks in real terms, 25 years later.

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