I’m not familiar with the author but something about this post just seems mean-spirited and petty.
Deno might not succeed as a project, especially with strong competition from Bun as an alternative to Node, but I would say that Deno has been more a force for bettering the ecosystem than not.
Many of those at Deno, including Ryan as well as some of those who have apparently left or been let go have been major contributors to the web development ecosystem. Thank you all for your work — we’re better off for your contributions.
Isn't it reasonable bitterness? He invested a lot of his own life on a promise that didn't pan out, and there's probably a lot of people in that community. Leadership comes with responsibility and consequences.
Content marketed at wannabe startup founders tends to be encouraging and panglossian. It's good to see here what you're signing up for if you succeed with some degree of traction.
Deno basically popularized the idea of a standalone JS runtime that primarily relies on standard Web APIs over "in-house" APIs like Node, although we can say that those standard APIs didn't exist yet when Node was created and for most of its rising period.
I don't think I'd go as far as "copying" but Deno was the first to aggressively push for web standards in server-side runtimes and certainly helped accelerate getting them adopted in that environment.
I work at Cloudflare on Workers (but infrequently work on our runtime) and I've always been pretty impressed with Deno. Their recent-ish support for built-in OpenTelemetry is something we've been wanting to do for a while and have been working on, but Deno was able to build a good implementation of that in that time.
(I love cloudflare workers and thanks for that), but I do think that credit is where its due and Deno's push for server side web standards also helped the general ecosystem.
I think it’s fair to say that work on the experimental-strip-types option in Node was inspired/energized by a desire to try to catch up with the DX improvements found in Deno for Typescript-first development that is now the norm.
I always thought Deno was more or less trying to copy the Cloudflare (edge) runtime, but decided incompatibility was a good idea. The ecosystem bifurcation was the mistake, which they came around on, but it was already too late by then.
Bun to Deno is what Zig i to Rust: a much simpler, much easier way to overcome its common predecessor's shortcomings. Not nearly as thoroughly and revolutionarily, but still.
moreover h* is just broken whenever dealing with more dynamic content — it simply can’t reasonably be made to work according to accessibility recommendations — and the accessibility guidelines around never skipping a level themselves are ridiculous given the practical reality that dynamic content exists and we have only h1, h2, etc. to work with — the readers and specs are what need to adapt here, not the entire internet
there should really be one header tag and its level should be based on some nesting depth
and don’t get me started on the maintainability mess that is z-index… better we have a system to centrally maintain an ordering list than a distributed one which only works reasonably consistently if you already know everything in the whole system
I like how z-index works, currently. And though I agree with the article, it should apply to all elements by default, I'm not sure how you'd do stacking differently in a way that'd work any better than the current situation?
You can't do away with stacking contexts, you need those to isolate content you don't control to prevent it from breaking the stacking order of content you do control.
I completely agree with you about h* tags, though. I wish html5 sectioning hadn't been killed by the browser vendors. As is there's no safe way to put headings inside custom elements. We almost had it, it was specified and everything.
The problem with trying determine heading depth automatically is the depth is not something that can be deduced just by the structure. If headings are siblings, for example, the may be on the same level semantically or not.
One way I've dealt with this in react is combine a Heading component with ContentGroup component. Each content group needs exactly one heading, and heading can't exist without it. Content group can contain other content groups. The tag for heading can then be determined by how many content groups are in the tree above it.
This works pretty well ime, but it can be hard to get devs to use (or think about accessibility at all).
That's how html should have been designed from the start. HTML is originally designed as a very flat hierarchy, e.g. h1 p p p h2 p p h2 p p h3 p h2 p just following each other. When really it would make much more sense to have h{p p p h{p p} h{p p h{p}} h{p}}.
That's what sectioning elements [1] like <section> and <article> where once introduced.Opposite to just using <div> elements their purpose was to create a real document outline, where it would have been possible to only use <h1> and their level would be determined by how deep the section is nested, but this approach was never really adapted.
> There’s already more human produced content in the world than anyone could ever hope to consume, we don’t need more from AI.
Even if you think the harms of AI/machine generated content outweigh the good, this is not a winning argument.
People don’t just consume arbitrary content for the sake of consuming any existing content. That’s rarely the point of it. People look for all kinds of things that don’t exist yet — quite a lot of it referring to things that are only now known or relevant in the given moment or to the given niche audience requesting it. Much of it could likely never exist if it weren’t possible to produce it on demand and which would not be valuable if you had to wait for a human to make it.
Just happened to me yesterday. I realized I'd really like to watch a long-form video on Huygens Clock. Something between a short (god damnit) and Quicksilver. Thought there must be something detailed. Nope, at least Youtube let me down. Or the search algo, who knows. Since they removed the "20+ minutes" button it has become basically useless to search on YT.
They're pushing Shorts so fucking hard it makes me sick.
Even worse is that we're banning TikTok because it's bad for the kids (short form algorithmic content), Snapchat (similar thing + strangers creeping) and Instagram Stories (algorithm again).
BUT there is NO WAY for a parent to allow their kid to use Youtube AND block Shorts. (yes there are browser plugins etc, but how do you enforce them on a child?)
And from what I've seen the AI slop on Shorts is so fucking bad that it seems we just collectively forgot about Elsagate...
The generated content is wasting the time of maintainers. How would you solve that?
For your winning argument, what would you use to prevent slop filling up your feed when there is more AI generated content, any sort of protocol that you have?
Strange. I’ve only had really poor experiences with Amazon and Amazon deliveries in Sweden and really good ones in the US. In Sweden the delivery network seems full of other parties that frequently fail to show up at the last minute multiple times in a row. The translations are humorously bad and the selection is small.
> If a nation wants to block certain content, let the nation deal with it by getting their own ISPs to block and make sure the citizen's anger gets correctly placed on their government and not the site operators.
I don’t really understand comments like these. Even if you’re exactly right about how it should work, how would you make this happen in the world we live in? Neither the tech community nor ISPs nor cloud companies decide these things. Just because a matter affects us doesn’t mean we have much of a voice in it especially if it’s legal.
Laws about tech are decided by (idiot) politicians/parties/governments and the consequences are enforced by massive fines, imprisonment, etc. by law enforcement and selective (and often politically motivated) prosecution. In some of the worst places the consequences could include death.
Afghanistan just lost access to the internet almost entirely. China and North Korea are famous for their firewalls. Much of Asia has internet blackouts whenever there are large scale protests. The western world’s government has more legal jurisdiction/economic influence on the companies that run these things and are increasingly leveraging that for their desired censorship.
If the answer to this is democratic influence, the populations of many countries don’t really have that, the majorities in countries that do have it certainly doesn’t know or care about these things and wouldn’t vote for the pro-censorship politicians in the first place if they’d then vote to cut off their nation’s access to uncensored internet while preserving the uncensored variants, and even if the majority ever did care to get the system to work in this way there’s a global trend away from having their opinions on such things matter anyway.
I’m equally baffled by all of these calls for extensive regulation and enforcement of Internet rules on HN. Someone in the comment section is unironically calling for imprisoning parents who let their kids use the internet. There are suggestions throughout the comment section calling for ID checks on websites.
Is nobody thinking about what this actually means? Do you really want the entire internet to require ID validation every time you use it? Do you want your government deciding if your content is okay to view, or okay to post? Do you welcome the level of tracking of privacy violations that inherently come with this much government intervention?
It seems people on HN have a sudden wake up call whenever these rules get too close to reality, like when access to websites gets cut off or ID verification is added to websites that they use. My theory is that they’re imagining a world where only the services they dislike get regulated: The TikToks and Facebooks of the internet. None of these people calling for extensive regulation are thinking that sites they use would ever end up on the regulated sites list, but if you enjoy any site with user submitted content (Hacker News included) then you’re calling for additional regulation and tracking of yourself when you demand these things.
Requiring businesses that provide products or services that we've already decided should be age gated to check ID is not the same as requiring all sites to check ID. Stores that sell porn or drugs or guns in person need to check ID. That hasn't resulted in all stores checking ID, or even stores that sometimes check ID (e.g. grocers selling alcohol) checking it all of the time. They only do for restricted items. No reason web businesses can't do the same.
Sites with user generated content already have to have some level of moderation to remove copyrighted or illegal materials (e.g. child porn). So it's not a big difference to say if you want to have user generated content and not be considered an adult site, you need to take down any submitted adult content (or only allow it in adult verified areas or whatever). If HN doesn't allow people to post their amateur smut stories, it could then be unaffected.
These aren't equivalent though. I can flash my ID to someone to buy cigarettes at my gas station and reasonably believe that no third party is storing my ID. The clerk looks at it (or scans it? I have actually never purchased anything requiring an ID before), and I go about my merry way.
If I go online to consume adult content, I definitely do not want my identity to be associated with my proclivities, and I certainly don't trust any third party to handle my ID with the sensitivity it ought to have.
At least in the US, some grocery stores will scan IDs when someone buys alcohol. In some states they are required to do so. I would be very surprised if they didn't then store that information. As far as I know there's no law against it, and they'll gather whatever they can. Firearms dealers are required to keep information about their customers. In contrast, the recent laws here that I've looked at all make it illegal for the service to store information related to online age verification. So you actually have better privacy protections with online adult content.
Sure, fine - we can agree on the hardcore porn. Maybe we can even agree on exposed female nipples?
What about sex education material? What about any content that includes an LGBT person? Because if you think I'm being hyperbolic, read page five of Project 2025.
That's not in any way unique to online ID checks. If a jurisdiction decides sex education material falls under "adult", then it does, and you have to handle that if you want to serve that jurisdiction. If it doesn't then it doesn't. Same as someone who wants to run a physical bookstore and wants to carry such things. I'm not seeing the complexity. If you don't like the line a jurisdiction draws, the thing to do is complain about that, not say that online businesses can just ignore laws that everyone else has to follow (and sites like imgur are well-resourced businesses with 10s of millions of dollars backing them. They can absolutely be expected to follow laws).
It's also easy for almost everyone to avoid worrying about the lines by just... not trying to exist right along them. If your photography discussion site just has a "no nudity" rule (or blanket puts nudity into its own adult-only section), then you don't have to worry about whether your photo is tasteful art or porn. These are normal rules anyway because sometimes people want to look at their hobby sites in public or at work and just see bird photos or whatever and not have passersby think they're a gooner, or see a surprise decapitation, etc. Even 4chan moderates their hobby boards and separates which ones allow adult material.
I’ve both been rewarded for dissent from leadership throughout my career and had greater respect for and advocated more strongly for those willing to stick out their necks and disagree earnestly and productively when in leadership positions.
Dissent isn’t the same thing as sabotage. There’s healthy conflict and open disagreement which helps illuminate risks and gaps and uncover opportunities in productive ways and then there’s just stirring the pot or trying to tear things down without bringing alternative proposals to the conversation — being unwilling to contribute in positive ways if you don’t always get your way.
The latter kills the ability for the team to work well while the former is key to allowing colleagues bring insights and value to the team
Deno might not succeed as a project, especially with strong competition from Bun as an alternative to Node, but I would say that Deno has been more a force for bettering the ecosystem than not.
Many of those at Deno, including Ryan as well as some of those who have apparently left or been let go have been major contributors to the web development ecosystem. Thank you all for your work — we’re better off for your contributions.
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