Ask HN: Best place for tech blog? - <AUTHOR>

There's no lack of options for a general purpose blog — Medium and Ghost and WordPress all seem great — but it's unclear what the best choice for a tech-focused one is. In particular, I'd like to include code snippets with syntax colouring and embed D3 visualizations. An enjoyable reading experience is the primary concern; ease of authoring less so.<p>Is a static site (say, using GitHub Pages) the best choice? The built-in discovery and sharing features of Medium are attractive, but I'm unsure if a blog about niche programming topics will benefit from them. Any options beyond the mainstream blogging platforms that I should consider? <comment><USER2> I run [http://breakingbits.net](http://breakingbits.net), my security consulting blog, on WPEngine.

I highly recommend it. Wordpress gets a very bad rap with security but as long as you generally disable comments, are paranoid about plugins and themes, and update as soon as possible, you're about as safe as any other platform.

It also gives a very nice platform for customization and development, which unfortunately a lot of blogging platforms don't support. I can quickly sftp or ssh for whatever I need, and setting up Bigfoot.js footnotes was a breeze (among other code snippets).

I recommend WPEngine because, while they are a bit pricey, they have generally excellent customer support and take away a lot of the mental overhead of running Wordpress. I first started using them after a glowing recommendation from Patrick McKenzie (patio11). They're also great for managing backups, security updates and plugin safety. The only caveat I can name is that if you want SSL for your blog, you'll need to jump to their second plan or higher.

A bit off-topic, but good advice for this is to just generally not stress about it too much. You're not shipping blog posts, and while you'll get consulting leads or job offers from it, it's secondary to your main work. Maximize on content delivery.

Find something you're comfortable with and stick with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ease of authoring could affect your posting frequency and dedication to the blog.

I recently was in the same dilemma when looking to start a technical blog and looked at Jekyll, Octopress and Ghost. I avoided WordPress because I don't need plugins or pain of setup, etc. and I wanted to host the blog myself.

I used Octopress before and was seriously considering it. The problem I had with Octopress (and by relation Jekyll) was the effort to create or edit posts. I had Octopress files locally and would publish via sftp to my server. It just felt clunky and became a barrier.

I chose Ghost for my blog and the authoring process is awesome compared to Octopress. Ghost uses Markdown and has a live preview. I can create posts anywhere via authoring on a tablet. Since I'm hosting it myself I feel like I can put other things on my server if I need to (like D3.js, etc.)

Now I'm no expert on blogging but I do like using Ghost over the past month or so. If your blog has good content that people find value in, as long as it doesn't have a horrible design then what it looks like won't matter much.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a highly unscientific sampling, but most deep-tech blogs I follow seem to be on gh-pages these days. Medium, less so - I get mostly essays from those.

Jekyll gives you a lot of bang for the buck (including making static assets relatively easy to deploy) and Github provides syntax highlighting in their hosted service.

The drawbacks (as far as I'm concerned) are that Jekyll is overly temperamental, and that even "modern" site generators like Hugo ([http://gohugo.io](http://gohugo.io)) require switching off too many defaults or tweaking many knobs.

Besides, even if you _now_ feel ease of editing is less important, a couple of years down the line it will be paramount.

I've long felt the need for something "better" myself, and run my site off a Dropbox-synced folder using a custom engine (which I'm currently re-writing - see demo site at [http://sushy.no-bolso.com](http://sushy.no-bolso.com)).

But I'm OK with reinventing my bit of the wheel (it's been nearly 13 years now, so I know what I want from a CMS).

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding editing (and I think you make a good point that ease of editing _is_ important), I often find myself frustrated with WYSIWYG editors that make such a mess of the markup that you end up modifying the raw code anyway. Ghost and GitHub Pages look like they take the right approach by making Markdown the default and not attempting to hide it behind a GUI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I switched to Hugo (gohugo.io). It was easy to learn, I use git for revision control, and I have complete control over formatting (including code blocks).

I plan to host it starting this week on S3 which involves me scripting the deploy process (which shouldn't be hard given everything is on the command line).

The extremely fast builds in Hugo are nice. I have one monitor with my editor and watch my site update instantly in the other.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you use medium or any other site without your own custom domain, you lose a potential audience. Especially if you have something interesting to say. How many people do you think will click through to the link at the bottom of your medium post?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was afraid that the opposite would happen, that hosting on a custom domain gives up traffic that a network like Medium provides. But then, I'm not actually sure how much traffic this is, or if it's only helpful for authors that write about mainstream topics.

<comment><USER6> Let me clarify. If your post gets popular on medium, you may get lots of views. Views that won't necessarily translate back to traffic on your own linked custom domain and accumulating SEO credibility organically. Views from viewers who might never care about the source (you) and just care about the content fix of the day. By publishing on medium, you are in many ways an unpaid freelance writer. Yes, they offer a potentially far-reaching platform. However, it is a walled garden. The equivalent of people flipping channels looking for something interesting to read or repost in social media to burnish a certain image v. people who want to subscribe to what you write and link others to your content. The Internet is about niches. Take the time to slowly build your own niche v. being one of 500 channels on Medium.

Imagine if patio11 had started posting on medium (if it existed back then).

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, I see what you're saying, its magazine-style collections prevent you from building a dedicated following of your own. Very good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Consider a tool like [http://prose.io](http://prose.io)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link, Prose looks like it might be the perfect bridge between ease of editing and the control and flexibility that GitHub Pages provides. I'll give it a try.</comment></comment>


Kids want to own music - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdigest.tv/2009/08/turns_out_kids.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Frankly I'm not sure it's just the 'kids'. I'm 39 and whilst I like the Spotify service, I also like the knowledge that I've got my own music stored. I'd hate to think I'd built up a series of playlists with an online service only for them to disappear overnight for a variety of reasons

<comment><USER2> Why go online ? Just set up a media pc with a backup at a friends house in the neighbourhood (have them backup to each other). Cheap, reliable and no overnight disappearances.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm talking about the online service. If you rely on a service, and put time and energy into organizing what you like, then the fear is that at some point it might disappear. Possibly a little irrational, but thats why I like to 'own' and store myself

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This link causes FF 3.5.2 to start allocating ram at the rate of 15MB/sec until it crashes. Anyone else?

<comment><USER4> Yep. FF 3.0.12.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> At my startup, psonar, we believe in mp3s vs streaming - particularly for the 'kids'. I sit in front of a computer all day so streaming is ok for me, but teenagers spend far more of their time listening to music away from a computer. ipods, phones etc play a bigger part for them than computers.

Its also not just economically that streaming falls down, technologically the battery life and network bandwidth isn't there either - and doesn't show a lot of signs of improving rapidly

</comment><comment><USER6> This article isn't about _owning_ music at all!!

In my mind the issue is: do people want to own music _or_ do they want to pay for a subscription--these are _not_ one in the same.

The point by the way is valid. People get value out of listening to all-you- can-eat music, so they would pay. The tricky bit is making the transaction simple and automatic.

</comment><comment><USER7> Makes sense: people download far more music than they listen to.

</comment><comment><USER4> These kids actually think they own the mp3s they download?

</comment><comment> onreact-com This page has almost overwhelmed my Firefox browser taking up huge resources. Also it's not the original source, just a comment.</comment>


Secure hash competition down to the final 5 - <AUTHOR> http://gcn.com/articles/2011/01/10/sha-3-secure-hash-finalists.aspx

<comment><USER2> Ths is old-ish news; here's what I wrote about this when it happened:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1994085></comment>


Court: Google and Bing Don't Have to Censor "Torrent" Searches – TorrentFreak - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/court-google-and-bing-dont-have-to-censor-torrent-searches-160719/ <comment><USER2> If it were successful, it would have been fucked up.</comment>


Hackers steal card data from Neiman Marcus - <AUTHOR> http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/01/hackers-steal-card-data-from-neiman-marcus/

<comment><USER2> Notice the pattern to all of these - the hacks are only discovered _after_ the cards have already been charged and the card companies piece together where the possible source could have been by looking at common purchases.

That is the state of security at the moment, not only is it easy to hack into sites, but it is easy to cover you tracks and not be discovered.

Vendors have resorted to trawling the carding forums and buying up dumps to figure out who has been hacked.

I can't remember the industry ever being so imbalanced towards the black hats.

<comment><USER3> Is there any reason why these stores need to store the full magnetic stipe details of the card in the first place?

<comment><USER4> I would expect the credit card companies would require that they _not_ store the entire card swipe data (or the PIN for that matter).

<comment><USER3> That is what I thought as well, but details on the Target hack suggests they managed to get hold of the cards' entire track data (I'm on my phone so can't link to the article directly, but it's on the same website as OP's link) I'm guessing NM has the same data policy.

<comment><USER5> I thought the theory was that the target hack was targeted at POS card- readers, not recovering numbers after the fact from a database.

<comment><USER6> It was.

But in order to pull it off on the scale they did, the bad guys must have broken into Target's corporate network. Apparently, the level of access they achieved allowed them to raid the marketing database as well as to hack large numbers of POS terminals to leak the card swipe data.

The marketing database, BTW, contained name and contact information, but not credit card details. The bad guys might find it useful for phishing attacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> All these revelations are timed too perfectly. It is obviously a crypto- currency conspiracy to drive credit card transactions out of the comfort zone of mainstream Americans, and subtly migrate the shell-shocked populace into accepting the underworld's own spawn -- a hoarded and cracked crypto-currency. Well, it would be if I ever finish my sci-fi distopian short story on it.

</comment><comment><USER8> ...this is getting ridiculous.</comment>


Bay Area suburbs see heated real estate market in July - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/networth/article/North-Bay-home-markets-sizzled-in-July-SF-showed-15490651.php <comment><USER2> This news article gives the impression that a chunk of the "SF exodus" comprises people buying country estates in North Bay and California wine country, instead of the often-voiced HackerNews narrative that SF is losing people to flyover country with a negligible cost of living.</comment>


How a guy used a scheme to become a startup "millionaire" in three weeks - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/54990/guy-got-rich-using-jet/ <comment><USER2> The whole story is just brilliant, company that has theoretical valuation, theoretical business model, it could work, or not, a guy who has theoretical money or not, and a theoretical stock. Everything is just air, except well... that $18 000 he spent.

</comment><comment><USER3> Couldn't he also sell the options on the Second Market for a bit of a discount?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I had to edit the title to make it fit on HN and I kinda hate it, but due to HN policy, didn't want to editorialize too much. The underlying story is pretty interesting though.

</comment><comment><USER4> I misread "a scheme" as "Scheme"</comment>


Why a Decentralized Reputation-Based Society Is a Sensible Approach - <AUTHOR> https://cryptolo.io/cryptoblog/index.php/why-a-decentralized-reputation-based-society-is-a-sensible-approach/ <comment><USER2> 1\. complaint versus disputes. There was a problem(maybe outside vendors control) it got resolved.

2\. gaming the system ie. paying to play, feedback for sale, etc.

3\. reputation isn't really portable. If I'm a great developer do you want me building your home?

4\. people tend to be too easy on reputation feedback.

5\. some people complain about everything.

6\. what if you want to start over. should reputation fall off over time.

</comment><comment><USER3> No "reputation" feedback system has worked to date. Not a single one. There is nothing that blockchain adds to this.</comment>


Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/react-native-future-mobile-shopify <comment><USER2> Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites.

What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality?

\- Accelerometer and all sensor support (some of these are already supported on various browsers on various OSes)

\- Background support

\- Bluetooth

\- WiFi

\- Better notifications

\- etc.

Sure there will always be a need for native, but 99% of apps don't need any of that stuff, really. Though I suppose both Apple and Google have an inherent interest to gatekeep.

Looking at my own most used apps:

\- Messenger

\- Mail

\- White Noise

\- Teams

\- Google Maps

Literally all of them could be implemented as responsive pages with acceptable performance. There are a small number of companies that don't bother with mobile apps, Craigslist being the most notable of them until a few months ago. Part of the issue though is that the app stores give you a lot of visibility and to get that visibility you need to be in the app store. Sure you can use a web view, but in some ways that's even worse than just a responsive website because now you have to deal with the abstraction of your site that is a WebView. Not to mention the temptation to try for "best of both worlds".

<comment><USER3> Ten years ago Facebook fought this battle and lost. [1] [2] [3]

[1]: [https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/using- ht...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/using- html5-today/438532093919) "Using HTML5 Today"

[2]: [https://appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/11/facebook_admits_h...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/11/facebook_admits_html5_not_competitive_with_cocoa_touch) "Facebook admits HTML5 not competitive with Cocoa Touch"

[3]: [https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android- faster/](https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/) "Facebook Speeds Up Android App By Ditching HTML5 And Rebuilding It Natively Just Like The iOS Version"

I have always rooted for mobile web apps, but the lack of feature parity and distribution challenge ("Add to Home Screen") puts them at a constant disadvantage and companies who control mobile OS's have little incentive to change this.

<comment><USER4> It strikes me that, more than anything, it is the lack of an efficient "Add to Home Screen" flow, that has doomed mobile websites.

...and it's intentional. By having an app store, mobile OS distributors know that they have control over a massive revenue stream.

<comment><USER5> A good part of it is their absolutely _massive_ 30% cut. The only reason they get away with it is that when Apple's app store first came out, most of the online casual applications were games. Hosted by a few gargantuan aggregators ( _cough_ newgrounds _cough_ ) who charged 70%+ of the revenue for their ... service.

Against a backdrop of above-criminal-rates extortion, 30% must have looked like a bargain.

To put these numbers in context, very good agents get 15%.

<comment><USER6> Most of the money being made on the App Store is for in app consumables from pay to win games. You'll have to forgive me for not shedding a tear for them. I hope Apple Arcade takes a huge chunk of their revenue.

It's not indy developers trying to make a living.

The other types of apps that use to make Apple a lot of money are streaming services. But most of those are now not allowing you to do in app purchases.

I'm looking through all of my apps, and I only have two or three that I actually paid money via in app purchases and those were to turn off ads.

All of the rest I had to buy subscriptions on the app makers websites or buy content in the case of Amazon for Kindle books.

<comment><USER7> As a developer of a pro app in a niche market trying to make a living on the app store, i can tell you those 30% are what prevents me from working full time on my app.

<comment><USER8> There are thousands of desktop app developers that never got out of the hobby stage because they couldn't get past the costs of processing payments, managing refunds, managing download servers, implementing licensing frameworks, implementing a smooth upgrade process, search engine optimization, establishing enough trust with users that they are confident they aren't installing malware infected software, marketing, push notification infrastructure, and probably a few other things I'm not thinking of.

It's probable that 30% is too much to pay for help with all of that, but people too often act like Apple's just taxing them and providing no commensurate value at all.

<comment><USER9> Part of what makes it so galling is because Apple has those competencies in spades anyway (SREs, designers, datacenters, bizdev.)

Another aspect is that the App Store feels like a value-add for the actual marketed products — iPhones and iPads — and not something you are ever explicitly buying. It doesn't show up on the receipt. People talk about buying a new iPhone, or getting then latest iPad. No one ever goes to the Apple store to buy the lates _access to the App Store_.

As such, Apple's cut feels like it's everything from cheeky to an abuse of their "monopoly" in the _providers of iOS devices_ marketplace.

<comment><USER10> > Part of what makes it so galling is because Apple has those competencies in > spades anyway (SREs, designers, datacenters, bizdev.)

But what do you mean 'anyway'? If Apple suddenly said 'you know what, App Store is EoL, do your own distribution' (because of legal or whatever reason) surely there would be a spade or two of those competencies that were consequently redundant?

I don't imagine they're hiring people to work on say Apple Maps; who subsequently say 'cor, good thing I'm here, someone should take a look at that unstaffed app store project'!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised no one is mentioning this:

"At the beginning of 2019, we did a 6-week experiment on our flagship Point of Sale (POS) app to see if it would be a good candidate for a rewrite in React Native. We learned a lot, including that our retail merchants expect almost 2x the responsiveness in our POS due to the muscle memory of using our app while also talking to customers.

In order to best serve our retail merchants and learn about React Native in a physical retail setting, we decided to build out the new POS natively for iOS and use React Native for Android."

So it's okay to build Android and less important apps using RN, but their flagship iOS POSS is off limits?

<comment><USER12> That really just says it all doesn't it? It's basically an admission that the use of cross-platform frameworks is worse for customers/users, but they're going to ignore that to optimize for their own software engineering org.

<comment><USER13> All this says to me is that they wanted to limit their risk exposure by doing an experiment on Android while maintaining native on iOS. Why is that hard to comprehend? Their move to RN this year should underscore the success of that experiment.

<comment><USER14> The thing is, you can rephrase:

> by doing an experiment on Android while maintaining native on iOS

as:

> by throwing their Android users under the bus

It may be a cynical take but it's not an invalid one to take when the thrust of the rest of the paragraph comes down to "the native app's performance is so good, we couldn't dream of changing it".

<comment><USER13> I don't know if you read the article or not but the title is very clearly: "React Native is the Future of Mobile at Shopify". So the Android experiment was successful.

<comment><USER15> Also, ios is "easy" when it comes to doing react-native. So by doing the hard one first, they have a lot more confidence in the rest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Shopify is right to use React Native.

I build an app with React Native Web and we produce Android/iOS/web from the same code base with 3 developers.

No, it's not perfect. Yes, JS can be awkward and confusing. Yes, a truly native app built by expert platform-specific developers would be better.

But I'm able to ship this product with less than half the team size I would need for native development. JavaScript developers are cheap to hire, and they don't need to know any objc/swift/java/kotlin to build the product.

Our product is consistent, because it's the same code across platforms. The business people paying us to build the app are thrilled at how quickly we can turn around features.

We've been shipping this way for 2 years and I would strongly recommend it to everyone.

Also, before people jump in with "But RN is slow and bloated!", it's actually not. The performance is just as good as truly native and the binary is small. The real downside is having the app not feel native, but only developers seem to notice. Pragmatically, most apps are so bad that if your Android app has an iOS look-and-feel nobody seems to care.

<comment><USER17> Don't know last time I tried React Native and wanted to use some cool feature of iOS. I either had to write my own RN plugin in Swift/ObjC or wait for someone else to do it.

<comment><USER18> You say that like writing plugins is hard or undesirable.

<comment><USER19> That's what I don't understand when people criticize frameworks like React Native... "I didn't like that I had to build 15% of the app in native code, so I ditched RN and now have to write 100% of the app in native code, but twice and in two different languages"?

<comment><USER20> React Native isn't the only abstraction out there. You could use Flutter, Ionic or similar.

Or do they have the same issue?

<comment><USER16> They all have the same issues, but RN has the largest community.

<comment><USER21> Flutter has a larger number of "star" on Github. It also has more issues and more pull requests. React Native has 3x more followers on Reddit. So I guess it depends on your definition of community.

<comment><USER22> Flutter is only in beta for desktop and web. And it's emulated UI, not true native UI.

RN is ready now and today for all platforms, including Window via react- native-windows.

Microsoft is choosing React, I wouldn't go w/ Flutter.

Why would you choose a Google only language and framework... unless you like rewriting code when it dies.

Also, w/ React you can use TypeScript or JS, you don't have to learn a new language.

From my perspective, it looks like Google pays a lot of money for these tech articles and stars, it's not a really good way to look at things. There's always a Flutter campaign going on.

<comment><USER23> As much as I hate that google kills stuff often, the above comment is missing the fact that facebook also kills stuff often, they just never had any adoption in the first place so you don't notice

<comment><USER22> But React is more open source and flexible. Microsoft has embraced React and RN via their react-native-windows project, they are currently rewriting it from C# to C++, so it must be important.

They use it for Skype and other products.

Google isn't built on Flutter, not the important parts. Facebook has been building their stuff w/ React. They have over 10,000 components, I doubt they'll abandon it.

Even if they do, React is much more flexible and open, it doesn't have a compiler or language tied to it either. If Google drops Flutter, you're fucked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't understand why so many large companies use platform abstractions. At a certain size you're big enough to have an iOS team that develops natively in Swift/ObjC and an Android team developing natively in Kotlin or Java. Developing directly for the platform, with expertise in that platform, is a proven long term bet. Screwing around with platform abstractions seems much riskier.

The situation is a lot different if you're a small organization (or individual) and just don't have the resources for platform specific experts.

<comment><USER25> Headcount is the biggest expense in almost all companies. Larger companies also have larger and more complex apps, so while a small company may have a small iOS development team, large companies have massive iOS development teams. Massive team * number of platforms = serious money.

You also get into all kinds of platform and feature parity issues. "Why can't we do X on Android but only on iOS?", "Well because they're two different teams, with different PMs, developers and release schedules. And please don't ask about the web team, who are in <different city>".

Using abstractions you can have one massive "core" team, and several smaller platform expert teams. On the face of it, it makes sense.

<comment><USER24> But developer headcount doesn't scale to the size of the installed base. Whether you have hundred-thousand users or a million users, you don't need a larger development team. Once you have a reasonable-sized team that can make the app, you don't need any more developers, no matter how successful your app is.

Having different teams for different platforms might result in a slightly larger headcount my point is that risk isn't worth that meager benefit if you can afford it. You're still going to need platform-specific knowledge, and then the abstraction knowledge, and you're still deploying to multiple platforms!

You also don't need to let the technology choices drive the team structure. You can share a huge number of resources between iOS and Android including planning, management, assets, etc. Sure you're building two different apps but you don't need to keep those teams in different cities.

<comment><USER25> But the question was why large companies use platform abstractions. Because they are large in headcount, by definition. Because the apps are already large. Because they _have_ massive platform specific teams, and they would like not to. Because the teams are geographically spread out, for a myriad of reasons.

The large companies are what they are, and you cannot apply the same type of thinking to their problems as if you were designing the organization from scratch. There's problems they have, and the team structure they would like to have, and based on that the technology choice to favor abstraction makes sense.

<comment><USER24> Yes, many large companies seek technological solutions to political problems. I've worked for dysfunctional organizations; they want technology to provide the decisions bottom-up because, for whatever reason, nobody wants to make any hard calls. These projects fail because you simply can't have success that way.

If this is a political and organizational problem, then this choice of technology is entirely not about the pros and cons that have probably been debated to death in this topic. I agree. I think you've added some really good insight in this conversation. But I think that solution is dumb.

It's especially dumb for a software company because software is their core competency. That's where they should be spending their resources on. They should be minimizing costs but not at the cost of their core product.

<comment><USER25> I wouldn't class this as political problems. Is Facebook having a gazillion developers on their app a political problem, or necessary given what they want it to do? How is replicating that for each platform a good solution, in any sense (political or technical)?

Tech companies core competencies are the service or product that they provide. Making it N times for N platforms is a hurdle that doesn't improve on the core, it's a cost of the fragmented market. I'm arguing that it makes perfect sense both technically and politically to focus your vast majority of developers on your core, and only having specialized platform teams were necessary as a cost of doing business. How is developers re-implementing every UI screen and feature across iOS and Android helping Shopify customers sell more merch?

<comment><USER24> > Is Facebook having a gazillion developers on their app a political problem, > or necessary given what they want it to do?

Yes. How is it not a political problem? It's not a technological one.

> How is replicating that for each platform a good solution, in any sense > (political or technical)?

It doesn't change anything politically but technologically platform abstractions are never 100%. You always need an expert for each platform _anyway_ and by targeting the abstraction rather than the platform you're just targeting a crappier experience for your end users and often your developers as well. React Native is not without it's issues.

So what's the benefit? You're not saving expertise. Even sharing code isn't that important -- once decisions have been made, features planned out in detail, server APIs created, the actual platform specific code is a pretty small part overall. You still have to test on each platform individually. Fix platform specific bugs even in non-platform specific code. And you're not creating a dependency on a 3rd party that you don't control.

> How is developers re-implementing every UI screen and feature across iOS and > Android helping Shopify customers sell more merch?

How is it not? I mean the argument here is that there is a huge savings to justify the risk but I don't think that's true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > The first is a tooling team that helps with engineering setup, integration > and deployment. The second is a foundations team that focuses on SDKs, code > reuse and open source.

They have a whole team to set up tooling for React Native. I wasted many days trying to do this work on my own.

They also have a whole team for evaluating 3rd-party libraries that provide functionality missing from React Native, such as letting the user hide the keyboard on iOS. I wasted weeks on this and finally gave up on React Native and switched to Flutter.

I think React Native needs some attention from user-focused PMs and engineers before it is ready for adoption by small teams.

<comment><USER27> How has flutter compared?

<comment><USER22> It emulates the UI, so the fake is noticeable, and it will be hard for them to maintain perfect 1:1.

RN on the other hand bridges the native UI w/ your code via a JS bridge. The downside is the bridge can be a bottleneck so you have to be careful how much you congest it. The result is being able to expose every native functionality and abstract it anyway you want using React extensions.

Flutter plans to target desktop and web, but RN is ready for this today.

Flutter requires you to learn Dart, a Google only language. RN you can use JS or TypeScript.

Are you really going to trust that Flutter & Dart are around tomorrow w/ Google's record? Why oh why would you build your project with something that risky.

<comment><USER28> Don't know why you're being downvoted. These all are perfectly reasonable concerns. I've seen many GUI frameworks fail because of a mix of these reasons.

<comment><USER22> Either Google or someone else w/ a vengeance follows me around and downvotes me haha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Arguably the biggest concern with React Native is that it is controlled by a single entity, Facebook, and that they are not one of the leading mobile platforms who from a business perspective have strong incentives to ensure the future of their respective app eco systems.

Facebook's incentives with React Native are somewhat unclear. This is a big, yet often unspoken, reason companies are vary of depending on React Native for their mobile stacks. With more large companies such as Microsoft, and now Shopify getting behind React Native those incentives will have to please a larger group and should become much more aligned with mobile developer communities at large - and not just Facebook's desires.

If Shopify manages to play an active role in the development of React Native and expand the project beyond the sole control of Facebook then React Native will become a much more viable option for companies who for political reasons have refrained from using the technology.

<comment><USER30> >>> Facebook's incentives with React Native are somewhat unclear

I always figured this conversation happened:

1: "We have all these engineers who write javascript but users are switching to native apps. what do we do?"

2: "We could retrain them all."

1: "That would be expensive and time consuming."

2: "We could fire them all."

1: "Also expensive and time consuming."

2: "Wait, what if we made it so you could write native apps in javascript?"

<comment><USER31> 1: "Great idea. Which version of Electron should we use?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The web and its ecosystem are huge. The browser is essentially the new OS and no matter how complex and quirky js, react and the rest of the tools are, we're gonna stick with them for a long time. Big technological advances like PWA's, WASM and rendering engines like servo and webrender are only gonna shorten the gap between native and web UI experiences. Look at what happened to the desktop. Native UI development became a niche and even apps like photoshop are now just websites(figma) or electron apps. This is eventually gonna happen to mobile development as well. There will be no need to create native apps for most cases and no need to use those centralized app stores to "install" apps on your device.

That being said the web is not quite there yet and that's why solutions like react-native and flutter exist. I don't believe that react-native is the future. Many people have explained in great detail why the idea and the execution behind RN are just flawed and why it makes development hard and complex. Heck, it doesn't even eliminate the need for native developers. React-native is just a transitional tech we'll use until the web and PWA's become good enough for 95% of the cases. The future of RN is the Web.

On the other hand, flutter and dart seem to solve all of the problems we have with UI development. It's an amazing tech that combines all the best ideas from QT, flash, java swing, delphi and react-redux in one project that is completely free and open source. It's what we've always dreamed existed in the UI world. The development experience is great and designers seem to love it as well. Despite its advantages, flutter is still a huge bet and i can't see a world where everybody writes in Dart.

If I had to make a guess, I'm still betting on the web in the long run and hope flutter captures a small market share among frustrated mobile/web devs and designers. I just can't see react-native anywhere in between.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think one of the coolest things that Shopify is doing is this:

 _We're sponsoring Software Mansion and Krzysztof Magiera (co-founder of React Native for Android) in their open source efforts around React Native._

and

 _We are working with Discord to accelerate the open sourcing of FastList for React Native (a library which only renders list items that are in the viewport) and optimizing for Android._

Basically RecyclerView for React Native.

<comment><USER34> Without synchronous view layout, it's not really possible to have a truly recycling view without many warts. We've (Wix) been hacking at this for years, and it's not possible. You either block the UI or view flash for the user if fast enough scrolling is performed.

Facebook engineering promised synchronous layout will come at some point, which will open the door to that.

<comment><USER33> What about Flipkart's [https://github.com/Flipkart/recyclerlistview](https://github.com/Flipkart/recyclerlistview) ?

<comment><USER34> No web-only solution will give you a fully satisfactory result. It's just not possible. If you scroll fast enough, you will see either flickering or empty zones.

<comment><USER33> there are demos - [https://github.com/Flipkart/recyclerlistview#demo](https://github.com/Flipkart/recyclerlistview#demo)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> React Native sounds like a mistimed bet now. Maybe 3-4 years ago, but at this time? There are a number of better alternatives.

I spent some time working on a RN project, and even though the whole idea of declarative interface, state update, etc is interesting, it is not exclusive of RN - and there is the whole rest of the story: RN libraries are a mess and usually buggy, there is virtually very little compatibility between native and web, and.. have anyone ever tried updating a RN codebase?

I remember we had to recreate the full project and copy the files manually because everything was broken beyond any hope, this after spending a full week trying to fix the build.

For Shopify seem that even a PWA could fit, and would be much more compatible, reliable, etc.

By the way, one of their justification is "in-house know-how", which I heard so many times before... This is usually how you justify crappy decisions by using inferior technology and then spending 2x the effort to try to fix it. I hope it doesn't happen with them, but it does like like that's the way they are heading to.

<comment><USER25> It's interesting how differently you can look at things. I would consider the best time to start a React Native project to be sometime next year, and after 1.0 ideally.

It's exactly when you jump on the bleeding edge that you end up with cuts and bruises. For every new shiny thing you'll be trading your current known problems for a set of unknowns and the inability to even Google-search for the solution. Let the tinkerers do the bleeding, and only once they've buffed the sharp parts can you as a company like Shopify start to bet on it.

It seems module and library handling was just revamped in React Native (not a user myself yet, perhaps next year), so thank you for your sacrifice. Developers picking up RN today will hopefully have a smoother experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I thought the cool thing to do was declare React Native dead for your org, not the new hotness?!?

I try to re-evaluate my opinion of the mobile ecosystem monthly, and would love to know how people agree / disagree with my rankings:

1\. Just make a web page

2\. Native iOS & Android

3\. Flutter

4\. Some ordering of remaining cross-platform tools depending on requirements. (React Native, Vue Native, Xamarin, Ionic, Titanium, PhoneGap, Kony...)

<comment><USER37> I have a different order:

1\. Just make a web page (specially since many apps are just pretty CRUD ones)

1.1 For certain devices WebGL/WebAssembly can eventually also be an option

2\. Native iOS & Android

3\. Native iOS & Android with server side driven code for the business logic (maybe even UI layouts)

4\. Native iOS & Android for the views with C++ for business logic

5\. Your point .4 regarding cross-platform tools

I don't have high hopes for Flutter, with Chrome and Android teams also pushing for their own solutions, and its dependency on Dart.

<comment><USER38> Apollo Server and it's associated iOS and Android clients can make your 3rd option really easy to pull off as it generates your CRUD logic and model code.

<comment><USER39> if only they could figure out their caching...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm always scared of these headlines for companies who aren't greenfield.

Shopify is a perfect case for RN. Write once deploy both platforms. The issue that gets glossed over is for existing apps that have to do the data and abstraction layer on top of native codes. It starts to become prohibitively expensive to maintain the native, RN, and data layers unless you're willing to rewrite the native side.

Airbnb fell into this problem[0] and so did my old company.

I love RN for what it is and can do, but big companies that hop on and then are forced to hop off because of internal politics makes it a difficult case for RN because then it becomes "look, RN didn't work out for Airbnb or Shopify..."

I hope for the best of luck and success to the RN engineers.

[0] [https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/react-native-at- airbnb...](https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/react-native-at- airbnb-f95aa460be1c)

</comment><comment><USER41> We're moving away from react native at Papa. Too brittle, too cumborsome to iterate with, feels slow and every build required a prayer and small sacrifice to Cthulhu.

We're using Ionic 4 now with capacitor, the dev workflow is much better, literally testing on the browser with autoreloads when code changes. Couldn't be simpler. So far I like it a lot. We're using React so it's just like writing a SPA, only Ionic has a ton of UI elements out of the box like tab navigation.

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder if Shopify did their homework and looked at Flutter. Flutter seems to meet their objectives more than React Native does.

And as an added bonus, Flutter is easier to reason about, has edit and continue, and is more performant.

Perhaps the use of Dart instead of Javascript was a deal killer though?

<comment><USER25> It would be pants-on-head insane for a company like Shopify to go all-in on Flutter. Is Flutter going to be around 10 years from now? Can Shopify support Flutter on their own if nobody else is using it 10 years from now? I don't mean that technically the license would allow them to, but can they in practice field the manpower and skills to do so across all the platforms they need.

<comment><USER43> I don't know much about RN or Flutter; but why is it "insane" that flutter cant exist in 10 years but RN will still be king?

Why can't RN die within 10 years? Because it's been around since 2013 vs 2017? Because you like one more than the other?

I have concerns about Google's commitment to Dart/Flutter, but I'm not sure one scenario is pants on head insane and the other just fact.

<comment><USER25> React Native could very well fall out of favor in the next 10 years, but the amount of companies using it today means there is a sufficient base to share the maintenance burden with, of which Shopify could potentially carry a large amount because of the significant overlap with the rest of their tech stack. If Google becomes disinterested in Dart, could Shopify step up and maintain it? Seems unlikely, and why on Earth would they want to, it's nowhere close to the rest of their competencies?

If for one technology you can extrapolate from today out to the next several years at least, and the other's path is effectively entirely opaque and at the whim of another party, it's a company-killer level risk to bet on the latter. Put it this way, if Google drops Dart/Flutter tomorrow, Google will be just fine as they have very little skin in the game so to speak. Technical reasons one way or another are completely overshadowed by the business risks, as the landscape is today (which will change over the years, but Shopify is making their decision today).

<comment><USER43> Not to be TOO snarky but... I'm sure there are a whole bunch of Angular 1.0 people who said the same thing.

I'm not convinced it's a worse idea to guess lottery numbers than to guess what will be successful languages. To that point however, React isn't a language (or a framework) it's a library.

I would say Google has more to lose by dropping Dart and Flutter as a language and frame work than Facebook has/had by dropping React.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Shopify is associated with e-commerce shops. It would be much bigger news if this would be about an app for core e-commerce journeys, but Spotify builds Apps mostly for the merchants or in-store use cases where customers physically are already paying for a product. Performance matters less in such use cases as merchants or customers are already locked-in in the purchase flow and a drop out would be more costly for them (no sale). This is in no way comparable to AirBnb use cases.

The use cases they migrated to React Native are rather simple - a list of orders, which customers will choose to use in order to get the status of their order - the customer's need is very high and optimization here does not bring much business value (conversions). The POS use case is stronger due to the expected responsiveness that is required, though it can degrade slowly over time and will not be noticeable (boiling frog) like in phones.

<comment><USER45> So what? A customer facing e-commerce app is nothing but search, a list of results, filtering, a product page, photo gallery and checkout forms. RN has no trouble hitting full native performance all around (I've watched multiple apps built in this space).

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Can anyone from Shopify directly address the points brought up in the Airbnb posts.

<comment><USER25> Shopify CEO expressed his thoughts on the matter quite succinctly [https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1222551057798090752](https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1222551057798090752)

<comment><USER47> The Shopify CEO is going to be pretty disappointed when he finds out all of those diamonds are actually just npm audit fixes, dramatically out of date packages, and strange platform specific behavior regardless of the "write once, run everywhere" tagline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am always wondering what the difference is between writing three differents targets, iOS, Android and Web using RN (even Flutter is a better choice imho).

Basically you want to share the business logic between them. You still need to spend time to write UIs for iOS and Android which following interaction paradigms of the platform.

Personally, I can't stand iOS apps that look like Android.

Currently, I am happily working on a project where I write all the business logic in Swift and share between the web app (WebAssembly) and the iOS and Android app. The only bit that I customise is the UI part. I quite enjoy this approach.

(I have to admit for me writing native mobile app in JavaScript/TypeScript feels wrong. Guess, I don't like that language enough)

</comment><comment><USER48> the example react native code they give in this image would error out: [https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0779/4361/files/ReactJSvsR...](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0779/4361/files/ReactJSvsReactNative.jpg)

Text has to be in a <Text>

<comment><USER49> You cannot see the imports.

import {Text as View} from 'react-native';

All good!

<comment><USER48> this is truly evil

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Airbnb said the same back in the day. Guess what happened then? [https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react- nativ...](https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react- native-1868ba28e30a)

<comment><USER51> it's almost like different companies make different tradeoffs based on different organisational needs and priorities

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Anyone know where React Native stands in modern development - especially when compared to Flutter and the upcoming Compose.

All the native frameworks are also React inspired.

I personally love the work done by Airbnb for its Android MvRx framework. Again, React inspired

<comment><USER38> React and it's model are great. React Native on the other hand is leaky, heavy and you'll spend a bunch of time fiddling with packages, upgrading them, tracking down weird linking issues and ultimately writing some Objective-C / Java code to debug / glue / fix whatever native API you're dealing with. Thats only from my experience though. I would much rather the Compose / SwiftUI direction.

<comment><USER52> This is exactly my experience too. It's an absolute nightmare juggling three package managers at once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Meanwhile Shopify's CEO. [1]

[1][https://mobile.twitter.com/tobi/status/1222551057798090752](https://mobile.twitter.com/tobi/status/1222551057798090752)

<comment><USER53> Oof, not classy. I think every developer has had the experience where you think you're so close to the finish, just one more thing... and then hours, days, weeks have gone by. How can he be so sure they're going to strike it big?

This is a pictographic sunk cost fallacy.

<comment><USER54> I read it as "they didn't continue long enough to get to the benefits, as we did", i.e, they already reached the diamonds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> << Flutter vs React Native: A detailed Comparison 1\. Performance Mapping down the performance is the best way to find the ideal framework for mobile app development. Flutter is ahead when it comes to performance among other frameworks is due to Dart. Dart code is compiled to native machine code. And also the JavaScript layer is helpful when integrating with native components and eliminates the JavaScript bridge.

React native offers exceptional performance for developers while developing an application in a native environment. But developers sometimes face issues while running the hybrid application architecture. On the other hand, Flutter allows developers to reuse the existing code. Flutter is in the leads in performance in comparison to React Native which uses JavaScript Bridge. >>

Source: [https://dev.to/agiratech/flutter-vs-react-native-what-to- cho...](https://dev.to/agiratech/flutter-vs-react-native-what-to-choose- in-2020-49ej)

</comment><comment><USER56> > As a contrast, none of the Top 10 most valuable Y Combinator companies use > Java; largely considered the battle tested enterprise language.

I'm not sure what this is based on, but Airbnb uses Java pretty extensively.

</comment><comment><USER57> We did multiple experiments on server driven UI for our mobile apps.

1) Using native app - Sending layouts in JSON and using Flipkart Proteus library in Android to render them. This only enables appearance changes and not behaviors. So we really didn't server driven LOGIC.

2) Using Flutter - Wrote the wrappers for Flutter widgets. Those wrappers basically just converts JSON to Flutter widgets at run time. And also enabled actions to be server driven. The complete app was made server driven using this approach. The only problem is, too much of abstraction in the client made the code base very messy and hard to reason.

3) Using React native - The biggest selling point for using react native is, codepush feature. We didn't have to write dumb client wrappers which expects JSON from server. We can just write normal JS code and deliver it to client devices without making app update. This enables really rapid experimentation for product features. We are currently developing this.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'll just leave this here.

[https://devrant.com/rants/320156/i-hate-react-js-with-a- fuck...](https://devrant.com/rants/320156/i-hate-react-js-with-a-fucking- passion-it-sounds-great-on-paper-but-once-your-pr)

</comment><comment><USER59> I guess I'm old, but I can't believe that many people shop on their phones. You have limited screen space and your ability to input data efficiently is limited. It just seems like a really poor medium for researching a purchase. Guess I'm a dinosaur.

<comment><USER60> I shop on my phone, mostly Amazon. Probably not for serious/expensive purchases, but there's tons of things that don't qualify for that.

I buy a lot of kids' books, for example, I just look at the cover and description, read some reviews, and pull the trigger. Lots of little electronics too, like cables/adapters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> And in a couple of years, "Why we are moving away from React Native at Shopify".

Not slamming React Native but the sensationalistic headline. Anyone with a bit of experience in software should know better than making this kind of silly proclamation about the future of your software stack.

<comment><USER62> I have not seen one good app for android that has been written in react native. Can anyone show me one that doesn't suck in performance?

<comment><USER13> Instagram.

<comment><USER63> Instagram has very limited parts of the application written in RN, like 'Edit Profile'. [1]

The vast majority of the app is implemented natively.

[1] [https://instagram-engineering.com/react-native-at- instagram-...](https://instagram-engineering.com/react-native-at-instagram- dd828a9a90c7#.3h4wir4zr)

<comment><USER13> That article is 3 years old, but it mentions "Photos Of view", "Post Promote", "Save Posts", "Checkpoints", "Comment Moderation", "Lead Gen Ads", "Push Notification Settings", and "SMS Captcha Checkpoint". At any rate, I'm curious to see how this has evolved over the past 3 years and I remain impressed with their seamless integration of RN and native.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> This is an interesting read and may be the full story, and a completely justified strategy.

But at the risk of sounding cynical, I'd be interested in any political motivations - if he's a new VP, it wouldn't have been unheard of for unnecessary swashbuckling Transformation Projects to be kicked off under the new regime for no obvious reason.

Complete conjecture, I have no inside knowledge, just have seen this happen time and time again.

<comment><USER65> It happens all the time. At a large corporate place I was working frontend at, our dpmt manager spent almost no time with the teams and all time concerned with outout metrics. When his boss looked to be retiring and the prospect came up to get his job, he started a new year by—seemingly with no knowledge of how things were working—by shuffling all the teams based on how he thought people should be organized. He then kicked off two or three major tight deadline high budget projects with those new teams, and proceeded to take a vacation. Needless to say there was a lot of turnover, I got terminated, projects failed, and he got his promotion somehow.

<comment><USER64> Yep. I'm more than a little sceptical these days when these big projects are announced - especially with new managers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> As a solo/indie developer I love React-Native. Attempting to develop for Android and iOS at the same time is absolutely daunting. Maybe someone out there can do it, but it was simply too much for my brain to handle. But with React-Native I don't have to worry about any of that. I just write code and it doesn't matter what device people happen to be using.

</comment><comment><USER67> Is there a reason that the web is not a target of react native?

It seems somewhat insane to have a cross platform approach and leave out the biggest platform of all, the web.

Or - looking at it the other way round - what approaches are there to take a working pwa website and turn it into an app? What advantages over such an approach can react native bring to the table?

<comment><USER68> The Ionic team recently released React support so you can build a PWA using React and target iOS, Android, web, and electron. Uses Capacitor under the hood for full native access. It's been getting a lot of usage since the release: [https://ionicframework.com/blog/announcing-ionic- react/](https://ionicframework.com/blog/announcing-ionic-react/)

<comment><USER69> Also you can use Capacitor with any PWA-style web application without using any of the rest of the Ionic Framework. [https://capacitor.ionicframework.com/](https://capacitor.ionicframework.com/)

It's currently the best maintained successor to PhoneGap/Cordova.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py low quality of tooling in mobile has been a reality forever and the vendors are not only unwilling to change, they've doubled down on poo-flavored buildsystems that are impossible for the community to fix

this stuff is life or death, and also _impossible_ without giving up on native:

> React Native on both iOS and Android and shares 95% of the same code

> less crashes on iOS than our native iOS app

> an Android version launched

> team composed of mobile + non-mobile developers.

( _impossible_ on native because of the multi-day process required to build an ios app for the first time)

> The team also came up with this cool way to instantly test work-in-progress > pull requests. You simply scan a QR code from an automated Github comment on > your phone and the JavaScript bundle is updated in your app

code updating is illegal on the app store, but it's hard to kick out shopify. this is a shot across the bow

<comment><USER70> "(impossible on native because of the multi-day process required to build an ios app for the first time)"

What??? how is it multiple days to build an app for the first time? It takes minutes and if you are being pedantic by including App Store review it tends to be under 24 hours for new apps and under 6 hours for app updates now. Plus you can distribute to your own team instantly through TestFlight.

<comment> awinter-py installing the right version of xcode & getting required libraries -- my experience may have been particularly bad because of the ios 13 / swift 5.1 release, but the fact that these tool versions are linked to the xcode version is the root cause here

<comment><USER71> Devils Advocate:

Fiddling with React Native tooling on day 0 is just as terrible. I may argue it's worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Strange that they didn't mention hiring as a reason, it's maybe even the main one. React is for the frontend what PHP was for backends in the 2000s, that's what most frontend devs know. Svelte would be a better fitting comparison to Rails in 2004.

</comment><comment><USER73> All I can is, as a RN Developer, I love it. I love being able to use 1 language for both app platforms. The RN community is amazing. Many of the comments here talking about outdated packages were likely burned by RNs early days when it was <0.40. RN has come along way since then. Its been a while since I ran into an issue updating packages or couldn't find a lib for something I needed. There is also great resources when you want to handroll something yourself.

Migrating an existing native stack to RN might not be the answer, but anyone looking to get their startup off the group should consider RN. Its fast development and converting a React web dev is super easy.

<comment><USER70> And I as a mobile native developer for both android and iOS on the other hand now know to skip talking with Shopify for future jobs as I hate RN and the performance hits and non standard UI it introduces. So we both win!

<comment><USER74> The sad thing is, all* their tier 1 mobile apps are still ios/android native and are not going to be rewritten, so they still need native devs. But after this blog post native devs will be a lot harder for them to find and hire.

* except for POS for Android which apparently has been rewritten, but not yet released, in RN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Let's see directly couple UI front end to OS updates...yeah that will really speed up cross mobile platform development won't it?

Or one could decouple completely which is Flutter's main mission as a front end framework

Sounds like some CTO-type in over their head

</comment><comment><USER76> I used to be a cross-platform framework skeptic _(Disclaimer: I have written a LOT of cross-platform, low-level code over my career)_.

I am less of a skeptic, nowadays. I think that it makes good business sense for most connected apps. Also, the quality and stability of the frameworks has increased.

It really stinks to spend two years training your team on a framework, only to have said framework suddenly float to the top of the tank, belly-up. React seems to have settled in for a long stay. It's kicked its shoes off, and grabbed the remote.

That said, it won't affect me. I tend to write stuff that controls devices, so my code needs to be pretty "bare bones" native.

</comment><comment><USER77> I'm a bit bullish on ReactNative. Well on UI controlled by JavaScript that work a consistently across different platforms.

I acknowledge Flutter from Google is making rounds but Dart simply doesn't have the ecosystem and reach that Javascript does.

Standard web html always seems to be quite laggy in mobile browsers. Basic things are quirky like the location bar is conditionally visible when scrolling up but not scrolling down. This changes the viewport.

Web rendering doesn't seem to be as efficient and rich as native UI.

</comment><comment><USER78> 15 years in the industry has taught me to always have an exit strategy.

React is the cool thing now but it wont be in 5 years. Make sure you can decouple and reuse your APIs with whatever comes next.

And always remember that a native app will always give the best experience. Cross-platform tools aren't perfect and sometimes the cost of 'write once debug everywhere' is higher than 'write everywhere' especially if you suddenly need to do something niche.

<comment><USER79> I don't know about that. React was the cool thing 5 years ago, and 5 years later it's still the cool thing judging by how many jobs are out there for React and React Native developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> There is really no technical reason why mobile can't be predominantly web- based now. Electron applications like vscode and figma show that you can make great software without any native code. Combine this with the fact that newer mobile phones are extremely fast, it just doesn't make any sense from a technical perspective why we need to use native all that often anymore.

</comment><comment><USER81> Curious to hear more about their deep dive into Native, Flutter and React Native as possible technology choices.

Hopefully, React Native is not a nosedive ;)

<comment><USER82> Flutter and React-Native are different directions, I think.

For higly customized UIs (think Ableton Live, Photoshop, Excel, etc.), I'd say use Flutter, because of the non-native rendering, it will look the same everywhere. Otherwise use React-Native.

<comment><USER83> Exactly this. They are very different systems.

Flutter renders onto a "canvas" and has a completely custom implementation of "native-like" views for each platform. They need to reimplement everything about platform views from scratch.

React Native lets the native OS render actual native views, but lays them out and controls their properties using Javascript. You get the native behaviours "for free", but you do sometimes end up in the lowest common denominator position.

<comment><USER82> Yes. The common denominator isn't as low as one might expect. I'd guess at least 90% of all apps could be easily done with React-Native.

<comment><USER43> Sure. But what if the entire world doesn't want to learn JavaScript? What if you don't already know HTML, CSS, and JS? RN makes ZERO sense at that point.

As a C developer, man, Flutter looks pretty damn logical!

<comment><USER82> [https://mobile.twitter.com/LinguaBrowse/status/1220695261246...](https://mobile.twitter.com/LinguaBrowse/status/1220695261246382080)

<comment><USER43> I don't know if you read your own link or not, but he's first off complaining about a community plugin and not an official one.

There is some truth that overlapping isn't well supported in Flutter CURRENTLY, but I can think of things that were well supported in RN 4 years ago either.

I can't think of a single reason I would want an overlay EXCEPT an alert, and even then, I don't think he's right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Shopify should stick to making ecommerce sites and leave the mobile engineering evangelical space to those who's businesses are dependent on mobile and have the necessary experience.

In short, the future isn't React Native, unless you have a time machine that will allow you to go back and rewrite it.

<comment><USER85> So even though they develop apps that have millions of downloads or that businesses rely on for their in-store point of sales, you don't consider Shopify qualified to speak on mobile development?

<comment><USER84> No, I don't consider an established tech company with "millions of downloads that businesses rely on" choosing a webstack devkit for their mobile development serious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> Why was the title changed? It differs from the original article's, which I believed was the guideline.

</comment><comment><USER87> Why do they begin justifying by talking about 70% of buyers using mobile? Completely off topic

<comment><USER43> Isn't that them starting by declaring that mobile is really important to them so they didn't take this choice lightly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Why not ionic react? [https://ionicframework.com/blog/announcing-ionic- react/](https://ionicframework.com/blog/announcing-ionic-react/)

<comment><USER89> > Why not ionic react? [https://ionicframework.com/blog/announcing-ionic- > react/](https://ionicframework.com/blog/announcing-ionic-react/)

React Native uses the Native Components of the platform for UI. Thus Native. Ionic React is basically a web app, this is Ionic with React instead of Angular.

So basically React Native == use native GUI components.

Ionic React = uses HTML/CSS in a webview embedded in a Native App, just like Phone Gap/ Cordova, Ionic is just a framework on top of HTML/CSS, React Native is not.

<comment><USER88> Most react native apps have a custom UX but needs native plugin access. This is the point of ionic react.

<comment><USER89> > Most react native apps have a custom UX but needs native plugin access. This > is the point of ionic react.

No, most React Native apps use the Native platform UX, that's the point of using React Native. As for plugin access, well I don't see how Ionic React solves anything, since a plugin by definition needs to be developed in the native language of the platform (Java or Swift).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> I keep putting off learning React Native, largely because I don't really do a lot with JS anymore.

I know that there exists ClojureScript bindings to React-Native...does anyone here have any experience working with them?

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm really eager to hear how they deal with data in their RN apps. To me that's always the place where the most complexity and bugs lay hidden.

</comment><comment><USER91> Why emulate facebook's app strategy? Their apps are a UX nightmare Accessibility is horrendous as is power draw.

</comment><comment><USER92> Good for you Shopify, but I fully expect you'll switch to some new hotness in a year or two.

</comment><comment><USER93> J'aime beaucoup l'application merci

</comment><comment><USER94> This is amazing team for spotiteam and all users! Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER93> Notification

</comment><comment><USER95> I wonder if that mean Rails will be moving to React Native as well?

DHH [1] said they will reveal a major new technical direction for building web apps.

[1] [https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1214962255785119744](https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1214962255785119744)

</comment><comment><USER96> Good luck, lol

</comment><comment><USER97> Good luck, you'll need it

</comment><comment><USER98> Translation: we don't see mobile experiences driving our growth.

<comment><USER99> Why is that an equivalent statement?

<comment><USER34> If mobile was important enough for them, they would have invested in proper mobile development. Clearly it is not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> "In order to best serve our retail merchants and learn about React Native in a physical retail setting, we decided to build out the new POS natively for iOS and use React Native for Android."

Unbelievable, really. The previous paragraph literally mentions the importance of performance.

 _facepalm_

<comment><USER17> Why do they use RN for Android but not for iOS?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Apple really needs to start using the stick more with respect to the inferior- to-native cross-platform frameworks. I hope that's the strategy after SwiftUI matures.

</comment><comment><USER75> Hahaha ahaahah

gee what happens when Android Fuchsia hits oem devices this year? CES surprise coming..

<comment><USER25> In the unlikely event that Fuchsia ever makes it out without being strangled by the rest of the Android organization, or someone high-up waking up and taking a look at it (eye of mordor style)... absolutely nothing? For the next 5-10 years at least as Android devices are slowly replaced in the marketplace with Fuchsia through device turnover rates alone. You think Android version upgrade stats are abysmal today? And you want to replace the whole base OS? Good luck with that.</comment></comment>


Dark Side Arises for Phone Apps - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703340904575284532175834088.html

<comment><USER2> > The apps were more useless than malicious, but could have been updated to > capture customers' banking credentials, said John Hering, chief executive of > Lookout, a mobile security provider.

Seems like more fearmongering aimed at Google's open market. The article reads like "open == insecure" and subtly implies that Apple's market is _too_ open. Um, what?

</comment><comment><USER3> Would you buy a bank app from an app store? I think I'd rather get the app directly from my bank. On the other hand, I'm having trouble reconciling that last statement with Quicken downloading data from my bank; I didn't get Quicken from my bank.

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe now is the time for systems that audit and protect phones possibly?</comment>


Confirmed: Only Microsoft Edge Will Play Netflix Content at 1080p on PC - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/3095259/browsers/confirmed-only-microsoft-edge-will-play-netflix-content-at-1080p-on-your-pc.html <comment><USER2> What I'm missing is this: will MS Edge play that _because it 's the only one capable_, or _because Netflix sniffs the browser and only allows sending 1080p to Edge_? The tiniest bit of a difference...brings back the memories of User- Agent switching, because everyone and their dog was looking for the string "Trident" :-/

<comment><USER3> This seems to be more about the DRM plugin used: Google Widevine (720p) -vs- Windows PMP (1080p) -vs- Apple Fairplay (presumably also 1080p?)

IE seems to also get 1080p so their linking this to Edge performance seems like fallacious marketing. Seems like an OS feature, not a browser feature.

 _also, I don 't think the string "Trident" was introduced into the UA until relatively recently_

<comment><USER4> There is no way it's a performance thing if it doesn't matter what kind of hardware it runs on. It's just a marketing deal of a company desparately trying to remain relevant.

<comment><USER3> In fairness to MS, if you read the referenced blog post (instead of the PCWorld OP), it doesn't actually link the 1080p serving to Edge or to performance.

Their implication is that Netflix are serving lower quality content to Widevine because they believe the DRM is inferior and are afraid of their premium 1080p streams being copied.

<comment><USER2> So, a marketing trick, as I suspected. "Let's explicitly deny other browsers the capability - and claim them inferior for it." Circular reasoning at its worst.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Quality curated programming articles, delivered every week - <AUTHOR> http://coderweekly.com/

<comment><USER2> This is a nice idea, as you grow it, you should consider soliciting readers preferences and using it to tailor the curating. If the article quality was good enough and tailored enough I would be willing to pay a few bucks a year (probably no more than $10) for such a service. Sifting through the slog of noise out there to find a gem, is time consuming.</comment>


Intel about AMDs Competitive Profile - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/c5nb01/amd_competitive_profile_where_we_go_toetotoe_why/ <comment><USER2> Lots of talk about challenging times ahead. I always thought that Intel had an ace up their sleeve that they just needed to polish a bit for the release, but it looks like I was wrong.

<comment><USER3> If they could Intel would have launched 10nm desktop cpus by now. Also there was a leaked Roadmap until 2021 which didn't show any desktop 10nm parts. The next few years are going to be dominated by AMD.</comment></comment>


Man makes own dialysis machine, displays amazing will to live and ingenuity - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2266412/Chinese-man-kept-alive-13-years-HOMEMADE-dialysis-machine.html

<comment><USER2> This is amazing. My mom is on dialysis in India so I can appreciate the perspective of the person in the article. This guy is really gusty and much respect to him.

In Mumbai where my mom stays, It costs 1500 Rs per session ( around 25$ per session) now, it used to cost 700 rs couple of years back. My mom doesn't have a travelling issue as the dialysis center is within walking distance of our apartment complex. There are lot of people who travel 2 hours by bus/train everyday to reach her center :( . I really feel for them.

It would be awesome if someone manufactures a portable dialysis machine and / or a artificial kidney . I know there has been some progress but not sure how far is it from actual productization.</comment>


Ask HN: Wouldn't it make sense to calculate karma on comments, not submissions? - <AUTHOR> It seems irrelevant and unrelated to a specific user that an article that is picked at random and heavily discussed gives the submitter a large number of karma points while the submitters not 'chosen' but who have contributed in equal measure ( and often earlier than the one upvoted ) receive nothing.<p>One would think, this being a community, upvoted comments would be a much more useful measure for karma, possibly the only one needed ? <comment><USER2> Completely disagree. The articles are the most valuable part of the site.

Regardless of personality or politics, most can rightly agree that things like " _Fancy Euclid 's "Elements" in TeX_" or " _Text rendering using multi channel signed distance fields_ " are noteworthy accomplishments.

What some asshole thinks about those things, and what a bunch of other assholes think about his thinking, are neither here nor there--this comment included.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not my point. Of course articles are the most valuable part.

But how does it make sense to give 400 points to a submitter out of 5 who posted the same thing ? And often to an article which may not be neither the first, nor the best about the issue. That's what I mean by entirely random.

Furthermore, without threads and comments HN would just be another link aggregator from some relatively fixed sources.

And you prove my point about comments mentioning a-holes, in that useless ones would be downvoted while useful or informative ones would be upvoted, and quite rightly bestow karma and benefits to contributors deserving it. That would make sense. You wouldn't see actual a-holes, they'd be downvoted to oblivion.

<comment><USER2> Giving the big points to submitters encourages people to keep submitting. Maybe one of the other five will get lucky next time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I upvote _every_ submission of the same article that I find interesting or useful, but it gets ridiculous after a while. And not to do so seems utterly wrong from my point of view, since points are given to submitters, and receiving points grants them benefits.

Maybe if HN consistently registered the first submitted link and marked all others as dupes automatically. Even so, still seems a flawed reward system.

<comment><USER3>
      I upvote every submission of the same article that I find interesting

... then you are intentionally rewarding submitters of dupes?

<comment><AUTHOR> So I should vote only the first submitter and to do so hunt down all the instances of the article posted before, to find out who was the first ? And that'd be the value in karma -- who submits first ? Sure, it'd make at least more sense than it does now, which is randomly giving hundreds of karma points to anyone.

Still wrong in my view, and worth giving more value to comments. I've already commented anyway, not sure why HN does not automatically register the first time a link is submitted and redirect the rest to the first one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That would depend on how karma is used, right? I'm not sure if it is well known how various HN algorithms depend on karma.

</comment><comment> chupa-chups I thought the point of HN is to share intellectually interesting stories and points of view, with karma etc. just being a (maybe) necessary by-product.

I feel your proposition would not affect this goal in a good way.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is the point of karma then ( which is another and perfectly valid question -- why not just get rid of it... ), and why it grants benefits as it goes up when it is ( seemingly ) given entirely at random ?

<comment><USER5> To get karma, you need to have had some level of participation in the community (posting useful articles or making useful comments).

By putting a karma threshold on actions like flagging or downvoting, HN ensures that these actions can't be done by someone who has just created a throwaway account to harass people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Karma is given to reward good contributions. There is perhaps an optimal scaling of each type of upvote, but without further study, a 1:1 ratio seems pretty reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER7> Upvoted comments do get karma, just as upvoted stories do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Upvoted comments are directly related to the user's comments, and thus the user, so that makes sense. Articles are not related to the user* posting them. It's basically random unless I'm missing something.

Like I said, I upvote all submitters of the same article because otherwise it seems wrong given how karma works now. But we shouldn't have to do that.

Edit : * With the exception of Ask HN or Show HN, I suppose. But the vast majority of links are from external sites and submitted several times by different users.

<comment><USER7> Stories are the life blood of HN. Without stories, no comments, and no Hacker News. So it doesn't make sense to reward them less.

I agree that there's an issue with randomness about which submission of an article gets the karma. It's on our list to do something about that. But it does even out in the long run for anyone who submits many good stories. And I don't think most HN users care about karma too much.</comment></comment></comment>


North Korea's military has stolen more than $500m in cryptocurrency - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/613099/north-koreas-military-has-stolen-more-than-half-a-billion-dollars-in/ <comment><USER2> Innovation happens everywhere, at the core but also at the fringes.

Have you ever heard of the Superdollar? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar)</comment>


Ask HN: Alternatives to HN less web-focused and more technical/professional? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Yes, I would love to find that. Less web, less startup, less silicon valley, less brogrammers, but more C++/Fortran/Java, more depth, more performance, more BigCorp, more career. With people who are not impressed by the latest fad, because they have seen the same ten years ago.

Unfortunately, the interesting guys to fill such a forum do not hang out on social platforms and bikeshed a lot. They are busy. Usually you can find a few on project specific forums/mailinglists.

<comment><USER3> I suppose Quora could have filled this niche - real people providing candid, real life answers. But for whatever reason, Quora is full of fluff and unfriendly business practices

<comment><USER4> Quora seems dedicated to the age-old question: how many ways can we ask the question of how amazing Elon Musk is?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Your question is far too vague. For example, how do you personally define "web-focused" or "technical" or "professional"? All of those definitions matter a whole lot. Also, you left out an important aspect, namely if you're looking for a discussion forum or an aggregator?

Since I'm blindly guessing at what you mean, the following suggestions might not be what you want, but they're the best I can do.

[https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/)

[http://slashdot.org/](http://slashdot.org/)

[http://www.datatau.com/](http://www.datatau.com/)

[http://skimfeed.com/](http://skimfeed.com/)

[http://hackurls.com/](http://hackurls.com/)

[http://filll.com/news/](http://filll.com/news/)

[http://talll.com/news/](http://talll.com/news/)

A similar question to yours, with lots of subreddit answers:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7254884](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7254884)

There have been other "Alternatives to HN" type posts over the years, and a quick search will find them

If you're in the mood for skimming to find interesting titles, you can even skim the big HN rss feed:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss](https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss)

Lastly, on HN you can see the submissions from a given HN user, so if you find someone who regularly submits stories that interest you, you can check their submission history. For example:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jcr](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jcr)

<comment><AUTHOR> To clarify:

\- I am looking for a discussion forum, not an aggregator.

\- By "web-focused" I meant posts about website development technology used on client and/or server side. Some of this technology is still interesting, like databases, but there is a lot more, e.g. desktop sw technologies, algorithms etc.

\- By "technical" I meant in-depth technology reviews and discussions. More posts by people that are not about "how to use x" but "how x works inside".

\- By "professional" I meant posts not about computer science basics (stuff a person knows when going through formal education and/or long years of practical experience).

Thank you for your suggestions. I looked through the websites you posted. Do you know what the purpose of [http://www.datatau.com/](http://www.datatau.com/) is? They do not really tell on their website (or do they?).

<comment><USER6> The problem with discussion forums is endless September. I find the database forum because I want to discuss CAP. I post "Let's talk about CAP" thread. The discussion forum has had 1500 CAP threads over the last ten years. It's boring answering the same questions and getting into the same arguments, so either all the experts have moved on, or they find entertainment in inside jokes or political discussions or flaming the freshman.

What I don't see mentioned is behavior. That's the hard problem for discussion. Reddit, StackExchange, and the Linux kernal mailing list all have different norms. For me, their behavioral norms don't make them _viable_ alternatives to HN. Lambda-the-Ultimate seems to be generally well behaved when I've encountered it, but it may be more technical and narrower than the enterprisey topics and level of depth you describe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lots of HN articles are not about the web, we have lots of science and technical items. I'm not sure what you mean by "professional", I think many if not most people on here do software development for a living. It sounds like most of what you're looking for may already be here. Upvote articles that interest you and comment on them, that should help shift the focus in the direction you want.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess what I meant by "professional" was more people with a formal education in computer science and some years of practical experience. It is just my impression that this is not so much the case here at HN.

This being said, I do not mean to be disrespectful towards someone who "only" has practical training (they may be older so that when they studied there was no formal computer-specific education).

edit: nice typo "sad" -> "said" ;)

<comment><USER7> _> "I guess what I meant by "professional" was more people with a formal education in computer science and some years of practical experience. It is just my impression that this is not so much the case here at HN. This being said, I do not mean to be disrespectful towards someone who "only" has practical training (they may be older so that when they studied there was no formal computer-specific education)."_

I have to admit this reply does leave me a little speechless. On many levels. Anyway, good luck finding what you're looking for!

<comment><AUTHOR> My impression may very well be wrong. Maybe the (education of the) people behind are even less relevant.

The community I am looking for should focus on professional software development. The occasional "look at this new framework" and such is ok but HN is just bloated with posts around web startups, becoming a web developer and finding out about computer science basics.

edit: clarified "education"

<comment><USER8> You've made a few submissions. None of them seem to be relevant to what you're asking for in this post. (Maybe the mature software one does?)

I suspect that HN would like some deeply technical post. Perhaps you could try writing one and submitting it? Or find your five favourite blog posts by other people and submitting those?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it boils down to this: Hacker News is a "news" site and what I am looking for is a discussion forum where people discuss software development topics.

<comment><USER8> > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes > more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the > answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Software development topics seem to be solidly on-topic.

Try submitting a few software development articles and seeing if they get any discussion?

A long time ago I submitted this, which got some traction: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4898691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4898691)

Is that the kind of thing you're talking about, or more technical software computer science stuff?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How about creating your own? :)

[http://postatic.com](http://postatic.com)

Disclaimer - I run this site - shameless plug, I know.

<comment><USER10> Does it also have a algorithmic ranking model and is the algorithm customizable? Any chance of a self-hosted alternative?

This looks awesome, I would love to talk more, I have been looking for something like this

<comment><USER11> > Any chance of a self-hosted alternative?

You could use code which powers HN itself [0]. Or you could use Telesco.pe [1].

[0] - [https://github.com/wting/hackernews](https://github.com/wting/hackernews)

[1] - [http://www.telescopeapp.org](http://www.telescopeapp.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think lobste.rs might fill that niche. It's certainly less trendy and quieter.

And you need an invite to post iirc.

<comment><USER13> Hello,

If you are interested in lobste.rs invitations send me an email with your "keybase profile" and at least 1 public network identification that will let me know that you're not a self-destructive troll and I'll be happy to help you.

UPDATE: Since I received a lot more emails than I thought and it's time consuming, my offer stands for another 24 hours.

regards

<comment><USER14> As keybase is an invite only alpha system right now this flagged in my mind as a decently disguised advert. Seems interesting but can you really require someone to have a profile on an invite only system?

<comment><USER13> Anything that can prove that you are a _adequate_ for lobste.rs community and not a troll will do. Keybase offers a quick way to identify someone. I know it's not perfect, but my time is limited. However, feel free to drop an email and that I'll see what I can do.

ps. I'm not affiliated with 'keybase' in any way.

<comment><USER15> >Keybase offers a quick way to identify someone.

Could someone please explain this statement? I know Keybase is a way for people to publish public keys, but is there any cost for a troll to create an account on Keybase with a pseudonym? Does creating a Keybase account require a lot of un-automatable steps or a waiting period or something?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Something worth checking out (partly because the cost of checking is so low) is simply the "new" section here on HN.

I find a lot in there in the areas you're looking for that the general populace here doesn't vote up. At a minimum, it's similar to the front-page but it moves faster (so you don't have to see the "pong written in go" type posts more than once)

</comment><comment><USER17> For clojure I frequently check

[http://planet.clojure.in/](http://planet.clojure.in/) and especially [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/clojure](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/clojure)

I suppose there is something similar for most languages

</comment><comment><USER18> I've been wondering about this as well. I mean, there's lots of interesting stuff here on HN, but the deeply technical stuff is far and inbetween. And due to the way topics very quickly drop of the first two pages it's hard to discuss more technical stuff.

More often than not I find there was an interesting discussion on some entry, but all the discussion ended 8 hours ago, and nobody will read it now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I found this too. This is probably due to the fact that Hacker News is (mainly) for sharing news not discussing topics. The discussion part is not supported well by the mechanics of the site.

<comment><USER19> > The discussion part is not supported well by the mechanics of the site.

It's actually discouraged. Non-URL posts are penalized and greyed out by default to discourage lengthy discussion, because pg was worried that would lead to blog-posting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd love to find the hardware version of this, with content relevant to mechanical/electrical engineers.

</comment><comment><USER21> [http://www.slicedham.co/](http://www.slicedham.co/) for articles on software development. It pulls posts from the list of a few hundred blogs, [https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering- blogs](https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs). There's even a weekly mailing list.

<comment><USER22> I don't like the design of it at all. I would prefer just using some RSS reader to get the latest news posted on those blogs.

<comment><USER21> It would be helpful if you could tell me what about its design you don't like at all. Is it the font size or something else?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wish there were something similar to Hacker News for IT. I work at a small nonprofit, and I handle both the web side and the hardware side. One day I'm making a data visualization with D3, the next I'm trying to understand why the printer won't print random chunks of a PDF. One day I'm configuring a new VPS, another I'm trying to figure out why the ClearOne in the conference room hates our VoIP system. I've found tons and tons of resources for web development anything. Similar resources for IT have been practically non-existent by comparison. Maybe I just don't know where to look?

<comment><USER24> I thought IT had SpiceWorks, have you ever tried that one?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> [https://dzone.com/links](https://dzone.com/links) \- more technical although probably not much less web

</comment><comment><USER26> I would suggest [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming) or [http://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions](http://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions)

</comment><comment><USER27> Install selfoss[1] on your own server. Then add RSS feeds of authors you like to read. Many sites with RSS feeds have their own commenting system for discussions.

1\. [http://selfoss.aditu.de/](http://selfoss.aditu.de/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Usenet. There are any number of very specific areas.

These days usenet is either a paid service, or Google Groups.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet)

</comment><comment><USER29> [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming)

</comment><comment><USER30> For JavaScript related tech there is echojs.com

</comment><comment><USER31> so web focused is not technical or professional?

</comment><comment><USER32> Slashdot.org is a bit quieter, but better moderated and in general a higher level of knowledge.

<comment><USER33> Slashdot was brilliant about 15 years ago.

<comment><USER34> It is kind of sad to see the decline of slashdot - I hope hn does not go the same way.

<comment><USER33> First post!

:(

<comment><USER34> I hope you have a 4 digit id making that joke :P

<comment><USER33> Sadly not. I was #203094. One of the funniest things I remember about /. were the times someone would post that they had a lower ID than a previous commenter, and that would spark a chain of decreasingly low ID posters replying to say theirs was lower still. You probably had to be there. It was a simpler time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>