nolanl
Joined 13 years ago
Karma
1,091
Submissions
126
Member since
Aug 13
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/nolanlawson; my proof: https://keybase.io/nolanlawson/sigs/5Udxhb8X1E57tmNkoMyOonOIeiVfEpGPlwm9amgvHMQ ]
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 1 month ago
Glad to see you and the team are still at it! The accessibility guardrails in Svelte are in particular something that I imagine steers agents in the right direction. And it would be sad if the frontend ecosystem converged on React for the LLM benefits given that it's definitely not optimal performance-wise, especially on slower mobile devices.
Comment · 6 months ago
Welp, I fed it the first 3 paragraphs of an unpublished blog post I wrote a few years ago, and Opus 4.7 guessed right. ChatGPT guessed wrong though.
My wife also got the same result, so I'm guessing it wasn't just because I was using my personal Claude account. Spooky stuff.
Comment · 8 months ago
The concept of "AI will review AI-authored PRs" seems completely wrong to me. Why didn't the AI write the correct code in the first place?
If it takes 17 rounds of review from 5 different models/harnesses – I don't care. Just spit out the right code the first time. Otherwise I'm wasting my time clicking "review this" over and over until the PR is worth actually having a human look at.
Comment · 8 months ago
This is 100% my experience. Like, reading this thread right now, I notice the ringing in my ears. But otherwise I go months without thinking about it.
Comment · 8 months ago
I've had tinnitus for almost a decade now. It gets better.
The first six months were hell because I kept focusing on how awful it was. Eventually you stop noticing it. It just becomes part of the background – like how the sky is blue, grass is green, etc.
I strongly recommend reading "Living with Tinnitus" by Laura Cole. Tinnitus is a very poorly-understood condition, but hearing about the experiences of others helps a lot. I hope you feel better soon. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37707931-living-with-tin...
Comment · 9 months ago
I've found Bugbot to be shockingly effective at finding bugs in my PRs. Even when it's wrong, it's usually worth adding a comment, since it's the kind of mistake a human reviewer would make.
Comment · 11 months ago
Right, but you do avoid worries like "will I have to update this dependency every week and deal with breaking changes?" or "will the author be compromised in a supply-chain attack, or do a deliberate protestware attack?" etc. As for performance, a lot of npm packages don't have proper tree-shaking, so you might be taking on extra bloat (or installation cost). Your point is well-taken, though.
Comment · 1 year ago
As someone who has actually worked on JavaScript frameworks, I think Marko is criminally underrated. The compile-time optimizations are extremely impressive: https://markojs.com/docs/explanation/fine-grained-bundling
I was not surprised for example that Marko came out very well in this performance comparison: https://www.lorenstew.art/blog/10-kanban-boards
Comment · 1 year ago
Author here. I actually did some research on CSS selector performance: https://nolanlawson.com/2023/01/17/my-talk-on-css-runtime-pe...
The TL;DW is: yes, class selectors are slightly more performant than attribute selectors, mostly because only the attribute _names_ are indexed, not the values. But 99% of the time, it's not a big enough deal to justify the premature optimization. I'd recommend measuring your selector performance first: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/performance/selec...
Comment · 2 years ago
I use shadow DOM every day, but yes, it is often the part of WCs that baffles people – probably because they don't need it.
Alternative approaches that may work for your use case:
- "HTML web components" [1] - light DOM only, SSR-first, good as a replacement for "jQuery sprinkles"
- "Shadow gristle" [2] - use as little shadow DOM as possible. If you need styling or composition, put it in the light DOM!
Comment · 2 years ago
I cover this in another post [1], but broadly:
- Not every web app is perf-sensitive to every extra kB (eCommerce is, productivity tools typically aren't)
- Plenty of frameworks have tiny runtimes, e.g. Svelte is 2.7kB [2]
- I wouldn't advocate for 100 different frameworks on the page, but let's say 5-6 would be fine IMO
No one is arguing that this is ideal, but sometimes this model can help, e.g. for gradual migrations or micro-frontends.
BTW React 17 actually introduced a feature where you could do exactly this: have multiple versions of React on the same page [3].
[1]: https://nolanlawson.com/2021/08/01/why-its-okay-for-web-comp...
[2]: https://bundlephobia.com/package/[email protected]
[3]: https://legacy.reactjs.org/blog/2020/10/20/react-v17.html
Comment · 2 years ago
Author here. I cover this in another post [1], but basically the interop benefits you get on the client just aren't there (yet) on the server. My north star:
> Maybe in the future, when you can render 3 different web component frameworks on the server, and they compose together and hydrate nicely, then I’ll consider this solved.
[1]: https://nolanlawson.com/2023/08/23/use-web-components-for-wh...
Comment · 2 years ago
Thanks a lot! I was just trying to highlight the cool work that browsers do under the hood, but which wasn't very well-known. So I'm really glad that folks enjoyed the talk. :)
Comment · 2 years ago
Author here! I struggled with the word "modern" – I could have said "current gen" or "post-React" or even "Solid-inspired" frankly, but I thought "modern" was succinct with the right amount of punchiness.
Obviously a lot of these techniques are pretty novel, and maybe they won't stand the test of time. Or maybe a new browser standard will make them obsolete eventually. But for now these seem to be the current wave anyway.