3 ms·

Even more surprising, it's been submitted umpteen times before: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=javascript.info https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=j

• codetrotter 6y ago
  I think time of day, novelty, luck, and whether any mods notice the post and decide to give it a second wind. By novelty I mean something that is easily recognized as new and important. It doesn’t help that something is new if no one catches the point of reading about it. Could be a bad title or a bad article. Or bad luck. In terms of good luck I mean a couple of specific things especially: - If a few people see it that are excited about it, either from hearing about it the first time or from knowing it in the past, and these people write positive comments about it, then others who come across the post may be encouraged to check it out and to upvote it too. - “Micro zeitgeist”. If it’s about a topic that recently hit the front page and it adds something new about that, it could luck out. Why luck in this case? Because you probably don’t know ahead of submitting that people will care to read even more about some topic even if it was popular the day before. Perhaps instead people are tired of the topic. - The other things submitted the same day did not gain enough traction to push this thing away. - Evergreen topics that have not gotten traction in a while but that people care about. - Topics that people in university and college are currently learning about so it catches their attention. I dunno how big the amount of people currently in university is versus people that are in jobs. But I remember that I learned about HN from some other students in a student union I was in back then. And I don’t know how students HN reading habits are compared to people in jobs either. I remember reading HN a lot when at the university. But I still read HN a lot. These days I read HN in the morning, the evening and at night though, not when I am working. But even if you have a job you might read HN in the lunch break, or perhaps you have some downtime where you are waiting for something at work and you read HN for a while. There are other possible factors too that I have thought about in the past but these are the ones I can think of right now. Please note that all of what I am saying here is only my thoughts based on my own habits and from what I’ve heard other people say and what I’ve seen.
  • OJFord 6y ago
    To agree with and concretise what your saying - I think (without actually somehow checking) my most popular submissions have all been something that I was led to by another thing(s) I was reading on HN at the time. Whether conscious or not (probably mostly conscious) I think they simply had the same temporal relevance for other people as they did for me. All that said, I don't know what it would be in this case. I expect I'll find it useful though, being not really a JS person who does need to write some JS and would rather maintain decent JS than awful. What it seems to lack, which I find a sticking point whenever I consider some greenfield personal project, is the dizzying array of 'tooling stuff' that JS has, and how it does or doesn't fit together, etc. There's just all sorts of weird layers and not quite equivalents and can be equivalents but could also be used togethers, half the stuff it's not even clear what it is or if it's necessary at all. I really hope wasm brings more different options (hard to phrase that to not sound hypocritical!) one day; that we just have some tiny JS shim that everyone uses, and other than that it's totally arbitrary which language and ecosystem you use, JS an option, but no more obvious than anything else.
    • RobertKerans 6y ago
      > What it seems to lack, which I find a sticking point whenever I consider some greenfield personal project, is the dizzying array of 'tooling stuff' that JS has, and how it does or doesn't fit together, etc. There's just all sorts of weird layers and not quite equivalents and can be equivalents but could also be used togethers, half the stuff it's not even clear what it is or if it's necessary at all. Aha, yes, this. I am [currently] a JavaScript person and it is a shitshow. The cliché used to point and laugh at JS is framework churn, but that's not really much of a thing [imo], it's the tooling. The tools can be genuinely very good if you pick the right combination in the right context, but that's often more luck than judgement. I suspect as wasm usage becomes more widespread, it'll get worse, not better, at least for a while. There's always a shining future to hope for (and despite the gripes, things have generally improved steadily over the years, so not too idealistic a hope). If Rome[1] fulfils its goals (big if), then you might get what you want. Very early days though, and going to be very hard for the maintainers to keep control as the scope of the project expands. Aside, but I think it would be interesting to figure out how much cargo culting is going on with JS tooling. Theory: most configurations of tooling beyond "install CRA/similar" are built up via Googling done when building out highly context-specific configs -> that brings back articles on how to set up tooling that was specific to the author's particular situation -> they are used in lieu of the tool's documentation because Things Just Need To Get Done Now and it's just some dev dependencies, whatever -> those configs are used in a situation they aren't needed -> process repeats. [1] https://rome.tools/ https://rome.tools/