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Science is amazing because it sucks and yet it's somehow still better than anything else we came up with for thousands of years.


We can't come up with anything better because we're using a term that would include anything better we come up with. There are religious studies in science! And if you suddenly had most of discoveries from revelation, that'd still be part of some old or new scientific discipline. So you're mostly amazed by your own vocabulary papering over all the nonsense it includes


I should have specified for pedants that I meant the system of peer review and scientific inquiry.


You think that's better than the work that preceded peer review, by people like Einstein, Bunsen, Kelvin, Planck, Darwin, Maxwell, Mendeleev, Michelson, Steinmetz, Faraday, Davy, Haber, Tesla, etc.? Because I have to say I find the pre-peer-review papers to generally be of much higher quality.


How did you come to the conclusion that those have not been peer-reviewed? Every uni course that presents the work of these people implicitly reviews it for consistency, and the advanced practices courses repeat their experiments.

Also, survivorship bias.


"The system of peer review" in this context is the system where a scholarly journal editor sends your submitted paper out to other experts in the field to decide whether or not to publish it. This system came into use in the middle of the 20th century, and Einstein was famously outraged by it. It does not refer generically to every time someone reads or discusses a paper or replicates an experiment.

I don't think survivorship bias is particularly relevant for three reasons. First, both papers from 50 years ago and papers from 150 years ago are already heavily filtered. Second, if you look at journal issues from 150 years ago, you will find forgotten papers in the same issue with the foundational ones, and the quality is still much better than today's forgotten papers. Third, what I'm really concerned about is not that bad papers about bad research are being published, but that good papers about good research that would have been done are not, echoing Higgs's remark about how he couldn't have done his work on the Higgs boson today because he wouldn't get tenure. Or, read Freeman Dyson's autobiography, and contrast the years when he was working on nuclear energy to the rather uninspired following 50 years, because, as he put it, it stopped being fun.


We can modify the human genome now, how is that not an order of magnitude more impressive?


Shoulders of giants. Couldn't do that without somebody doing what Bunsen and Maxwell did


You're still too vague. Do you mean the <100 old peer review system? And that it's better than all the scientific discoveries of the past thousands of years?


Science doesn't provide a Priest who will show up and sit with you at your time of grief or despair in handling the unpredictable. Priests in all religions are trained to occupy that space. And that is the prime reason Religions have survived for thousands of years long past the death of empires, kings and nations who all get tired or bored of showing up and occupying the unpredictability space.

Lot of that Despair is thanks to how the architecture of the chimp brain handles unpredictability over different time horizons - whats the system going to do tomorrow/next month/next year/next decades. Confidence decreases anxiety increases. You want to break the architecture keep feeding it the unpredictable.

So we get the corporal hudson in aliens cycle - "I'm ready, man. Check it out. I am the ultimate badass. State of the badass art" > unpredictability > "Whats happening man! Now what are we supposed to do? Thats it man. Game over man. Game over!"

Think about what science offers corporal hudson.


I have considered the problem of how the strong social benefits and cohesion of religion might be reproduced in some way not tied to the very strange attractor of identity based beliefs and shibboleths.

Science, democracy, religion. Three curses. Each embodying ideals. Each the best choice we have for the areas where they do or have functioned well. Each presenting challenges, and dysfunctional local maxima, as maintenance/optimization problems.

Of the three, science's self-correcting basis does make it the least problematic.

In the highest contrast, mathematics foundations are only weak if you look! Whereas the piles built on debatably wobbly foundations hold up extremely well.


So, basically:

Where science can't make you better, non-science can make you feel better.

Where truth is painful, untruth can attempt to provide comfort.

(not sure how any of this relates to the comment or the article, maybe I should have just ignored this)


There are essentially infinitely many JS frameworks. You’ll have to recommend one or two to be taken seriously.


Even the jquery version looks better: https://justpaste.it/3pz1n

But to keep in the good graces of our thought leader overlords, let's start solid or svelte.


Vue.js is better react without hooks bullshit and with actual reactivity. Very nice, stable and mature.


I too prefer Vue over React. I still haven't checked out Svelte, and I'm completely over Angular by now.

React looked great when I first used it for something really small. It looked horrific when I used it on a massive project with ridiculous amounts of data and tons of middleware. Although the real horror was the useEffect spaghetti. Vue keeps looking reasonable in every project I encounter it in. Even when people use it poorly, it's never Vue itself that's the problem. Well, maybe when people start working around the reactivity. That can get really bad.


There is a reason they renamed Coq to Rocq.


Yeah, because people are overly sensitive and can't bear the thought that someone might make some harmless naughty jokes. It's a completely ridiculous name change.


No. Conversions about it were being avoided due to being in a work context and in general. The same goes for coc (vim plugin) by the way.


That's exactly what parent said, people are overly sensitive and that's why the name had to change.


bistrat2003 said:

> people are overly sensitive and can't bear the thought that someone might make some harmless naughty jokes

ironmagma could have said:

> people are overly sensitive and avoid talking about Coq at work and in general

Both can be motivating factors, but not necessarily. It's possible that the Coq development team doesn't care about the jokes, but they do care about people being comfortable saying the name aloud at work.


Not overly. Appropriately. Why would you risk your reputation and job to talk about a theorem prover? The pros and cons are not evenly weighted.


One of my coworkers uses Siri to say what they want to search for. I'm definitely not saying: "Hey, Siri, show me examples of using Coq."

Then, users of search engines will add "training," "in the workplace," "visual guide," "positions," "freelance work with," etc. Everything people use with programming languages or book titles becomes inappropriate with that name.

Maybe if I worked on a chicken farm it would be OK. I'm in the hotel and retail industries doing a mix of hands-on work and customer service. You'll never hear me tell my bosses I was using that on the job. Or spending hours alone with Isabelle for that matter. HOL4 & HOL Light it is!


God help you if you ever need to talk about some children playing with balls in the lobby, or if maintenance asks you to order more nuts.


That probably won't be a problem since the words have known contexts in America. Coq will bring up only two meanings in most people's minds. Of the two, rooster isn't the most, common use in many places.

Far as my above examples, they were things that might lead to porn in a search engine. Especially if it's a newer product that hasn't had as much work go into preventing that as Google did.


What if my best friend Cunty comes to visit[1]?

[1]https://youtube.com/watch?v=Obagb7RQeYo


Yeah, and look how well that went: https://rocq-prover.org/platform

When you go to the downloads, it is actually Coq again. It was a ridiculous name, yes, but that name change is even more ridiculous. Most people are still calling it Coq, past research papers are calling it Coq, and Prince is still Prince and not the symbol.


Yeah, as a paying customer it is annoying that my money is being used to fuel AI hype instead of to get me off of it.


Is not the purpose of Kagi that it isn't like Google/Bing excessively buying into LLM hype? I just want an independent sustainable search engine, that's all.


That’s excellent. Would it be okay to use your poem in a book someday, with the proper attribution (it would be a book about writing C)?


By all means.


Thank you! It may never actually happen, but I'll attempt to post back here if/when it does.


> It just basically does everything React does but better

SolidJS still has some major pain points; the one I found was not knowing whether a prop was a signal or needed to become one. The type system doesn't help much. In React, you know for sure that if your reference changes, the component reading that reference as a prop will re-render. In Solid, it's less clear whether the update will be observed.


> In React, you know for sure that if your reference changes, the component reading that reference as a prop will re-render.

Amen. Data flows down. That, to me, is one of React's biggest strengths.


Amen because of this we have useeffect and calling the whole component tree on a isloading change


isLoading should be a boolean; it will maintain referential equality across renders and not cause a re-render unless it is an actual edge from false to true or vice versa.


what? what does what you said have anything to do with what I said? how does "data flowing down" now related to the use effect dependency cycle? are you new to programming?


Nearly every UNIX command has its own way of formatting output, be it into columns, tables, lists, files, or TTYs (and windows, à la emacs, screen, other curses-based utils...). Even `ls` has a table formatting logic to it. This keeps the UNIX native abstraction relatively simple; everything is "just text." But the ecosystem, being quite rich, actually has a lot of divergent requirements for each utility. If that was avoidable, we probably would have seen some other abstractions appear on top of "just text," but we similarly haven't.


This is definitely a surprising opinion to find on HN. Usually the prevailing thought is that anything that is even remotely heavy on JavaScript is bad design and therefore inherently unusable, unportable, etc. Whereas this is essentially JavaScript maximalism.


Part of it is that so many sites are JS heavy in a way which brings basically nothing to the table.. it's just JS for JS' sake, and sometimes a static web site would work just as well for the user.


I think it depends. I basically see the web as two parts, "web documents" (usually called "websites") and "web apps" (usually just called apps), and it makes sense that web apps that require lots of interactivity (think drag and drop) would use lots of JavaScript, I don't people have a problem with image editors or map viewers being made more simple by the use of JS for example.

The friction occurs when people building a website for web documents think they should be building a web app, so you end up with a scaffolding that requires heavy JS just to serve what essentially is just text + maybe one or two images. The additional JS doesn't really save the user any time or pain, it just makes everything larger and harder to consume.


I write a lot of code myself and am usually against indiscriminate use of JS (so much so that I now recommend old fashioned server side templates over SPAs unless there is a good reason). But for this comment, I was donning my other hat: that of an executive with whom the decision to adopt (and pay for) a product usually rests. The bulk of a SaaS company's marketing budget goes to attracting and retaining the attention of such people, and ultimately getting them to pay. I feel this site does a good job of that without wasting my time.


You are jumping from a discussion about UI design to one about technology and implementation.


By "you", do you mean the typical commenters on HN? Because I would agree. So many assume that because JavaScript is used, therefore there is a bad/overcomplicated UI. But any technology can be used to create crap.


Perhaps the amount of JavaScript used in a website is not a contributing factor into how usable a person finds it /s.

Honestly, you don't judge a back-end by how much code it's built with or what platform it's hosted on. I don't get the obsession people have with JavaScript used on websites. Websites with terrible UX often abuse JavaScript yes, but correlation != causation.


It’s because they can see it.

They can go in the inspector and see “oh wow so many MBs of JS”, but they can’t see the backend.

There is a good point to that: this data that is downloaded is an end user resource. Over a mobile network etc it’ll matter. But the days where it mattered at home/office are long, long gone, at least for the audience of the websites that adopt this strategy.

The obsession I believe is a remnant of these old days. There was a transitionary period still a decade ago (when hn was already not that young) where users would spend time loading a website, then complain about the amount of js on the page and how that is unnecessary. The connections got upgraded but nothing strikes down a habit…


More like they can see it but also can't see it. There's megabytes of JS loaded just to show me a crappy glorified PDF that doesn't even work properly. A page I could have literally made using only HTML and CSS and it would be better, but somehow you've made it take 11mb of JavaScript code and it doesn't even work properly. That's the kind of website I scoff at.

I have no issues at all with this website. It's awesome. I mean it's a bit slow but that's probably because it's on the front page on HN right now - yet it still works pretty well. The design is delightful. Incredibly well done. One of the coolest websites I've seen. Who cares how much JS it takes, it's obviously worth it.


Isn't that because eww refuses to implement JavaScript? Which isn't very e/acc of them?


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