[llm_trw]

>Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn. I see that as an odd goal for a founder of any age but a great goal for an investor.

Looking at the state of open source software today a google is simply impossible because the ecosystem has rotted from the inside.

Look at how much effort it took to write the cgi-bin scripts google started with vs whatever flavour of the week JS framework you have to use now.

Not sure what the solution is but we need fewer sheep in development and less permissive licenses so developers doing unglamorous work can capture more of the value. There's a reason why every shop which supports massive open source projects is running away from legacy licenses as fast as they can and that reason is Amazon.

If you don't care about developers from the user side of things it's just as bad. The GPL in the age of cloud services does as much to protect user freedom as the MIT license did in the 1990s.

[ramraj07]

Creating something from scratch is so much easier today than it ever was, and I’ve been creating crap for decades now. All the fancy JavaScript crap is purely optional. You can still write something in CGI if you want. My last prototype I wrote with Vue and JQuery and as pure html and .js files. It was an absolute blast! And the users loved it! Have you tested streamlit? FastAPI? Everything is so easy now.

[llm_trw]

Today if I were to write a cgi script it would have to send json payloads to the JS front end because round trip latency on phones is between 100 to 500ms to hit a dns server. I was getting lower latency on dialup in 1996. On my desktop it's 2ms on a bad day.

You can't just use HTML because browsers have mutated to fat clients for a X like protocol which is a mishmash of html, css, js, and whatever else someone's decided to throw on top of it.

We're using screwdrivers as axes and everyone is acting like this is some type of acceptable outcome.

[nicoburns]

You absolutely can just use HTML. You're writing this on HN that just uses HTML and is one of the more responsive websites on mobile connections.

You can't make as rich an interavtive experience as you can with JS, but you never could.

[llm_trw]

Just because a site is responsive doesn't mean it's HTML. The fact that a lot of people assume that you can't have a responsive site with JS is all the indictment of $current_year front end development you need.

These are some of the JS functions HN runs in the background, on top of the CSS:

    function $ (id) { return document.getElementById(id); }
    function byClass (el, cl) { return el ? el.getElementsByClassName(cl) : [] }
    function byTag (el, tg) { return el ? el.getElementsByTagName(tg) : [] }
    function allof (cl) { return byClass(document, cl) }
    ...

[nicoburns]

I didn't say you can't have a responsive site with JavaScript, I said that you can have one with plain HTML. HN may use JS for a few things (upvotes?), but it's mostly full page reloads including for loading threads and posting comments.

[niutech]

No need for JSON and JS, you can use pure HTML streaming: https://lamplightdev.com/blog/2024/01/10/streaming-html-out-... and pure CSS interactions like tabs, accordions, dropdown menus.

[xisthesqrtof9]

I agree.

I think the parent poster was referring to how much noise there is, and I'd agree. The moment you start learning, just the fanciest stuff is shoved down your throat. So you just assume its the best and roll with it.

I find myself tinkering more with PHP now that I've been using js for the past 7 years.

[mynameisnoone]

> Looking at the state of open source software today a google is simply impossible because the ecosystem has rotted from the inside.

The Oxide route is one of the better approaches for backend. "Apple" of enterprise OSS, but I think their ambitions are too small. Prefab containers full of seamless and modular amounts of each food groups: CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD, HDD, interconnect, and uplink all in and managed. Not rack-up but dirt-up and totally managed offering IAM, VMs, 12factor PAAS, serverless, volumes, and object storage with multitenancy, accounting, security, data lifecycle, config management, appropriate redundancy, and other cross-cutting concerns harmonized in a way that is necessarily managed but sufficiently customizable.

Frontend, the trick is standardizing on the least fragile tools that are widely used enough. Churn on tools and dependencies is a distraction and a time waster.

[dragonwriter]

> Looking at the state of open source software today a google is simply impossible because the ecosystem has rotted from the inside.

There’s lots of reasons a Google is impossible to start today (the main one being “Google exists, whatever the next explosive startup-to-giant is [0], it will look nothing like Google, and such things aren’t cookie-cutter, each is sui generis), but the explanation you offer above is… unconvincing as a bare conclusion, but maybe could be fleshed out with more description and support.

> Not sure what the solution is but we need fewer sheep in development and less permissive licenses so developers doing unglamorous work can capture more of the value.

The two halves of this sentence are in tension, and the first seems more reasonable than the second.

> Look at how much effort it took to write the cgi-bin scripts google started with vs whatever flavour of the week JS framework you have to use now.

You don’t have to use a flavor-of-the-week JS framework in place of cgi-bin scripts. (And, in some ways, the lowest-friction backend options are lower friction to get up and running than cgi-bin scripts on a server you set up, because you’ve got things like “serverless” FaaS hosts.)

[0] OpenAI?

[satvikpendem]

But, no one is forcing you to use the latest JS framework, you can still write cgi-bin scripts if you wanted...

There is no need to follow the trend du jour, it is some fallacy that you're describing that somehow it's easier then than today when the technology is largely backwards compatible.

[throwaway2562]

> Not sure what the solution is but we need fewer sheep in development and less permissive licenses so developers doing unglamorous work can capture more of the value.

This is the nuts of it.