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> And no, the problem is not "Rails" The problem is they abandoned rails for react. The old SSR GitHub experience was very good. You could review massive PRs o

> And no, the problem is not "Rails" The problem is they abandoned rails for react. The old SSR GitHub experience was very good. You could review massive PRs on any machine before they made the move.

DrBenCarson 1y ago
Well yeah, but just imagine how much money they’re saving by delivering a subpar experience!
- gchamonlive 1y ago
  Or how much money they are capturing in investiments or corporate deals because of the tech stack
- zozbot234 1y ago
  They're not even saving any money. Syntax highlighting is a trivial workload, whereas the average SPA spends a lot of time in pointless roundtrips that have the server send more data down the pipe than the SSR equivalent.
  - sidewndr46 1y ago
    I'll play devils advocate - does it save them some storage space or bandwidth in the CDN that delivers Github?
    - Asmod4n 1y ago
      That's a good question, without looking into any of the code id say bandwidth cost goes higher when moving away from server side rendering since you have to send the code for client side rending to each client which connects.
  - scrollaway 1y ago
    Sending data is what’s trivial compared to compute… syntax highlighting is not trivial workload compared to that, you don’t know what you’re saying.
    - sgarland 1y ago
      You say that, until you’re one of the unlucky people who discover that cloud DBs are just cloud VMs in disguise, and those cloud VMs have network throughput limits. A fun part of a retro at my company last year was me explaining to a team, “had all of your pods’ requests succeeded, the DB would have been pushing out well over 200 Gbps, which is generally reserved for top-of-rack switches.” Of course, someone else then had to translate that into “4K Blu-Rays per second,” because web devs aren’t typically familiar with networking, racks, data centers…
      - scrollaway 1y ago
        Serving static files off highly efficient, distributed CDNs is a solved problem. There's no "4K blu-rays per second" when you're talking about gzipped, highly cacheable text data. If github has a million users visiting it per day on a FRESH cache, and all of them have to download at least 10 megabytes of text data (both of these numbers are far too high), you are at ... 0.015 "4k blurays per second". Yeah I think MS's datacenters will survive.
        zozbot234 1y ago
        A single-page app is not serving "static files". It might serve an initial bundle, but literally everything after that is dynamically generated. There's no way you could serve those responses via a CDN.
- Elfener 1y ago
  I guess if you say "we've made the UX worse" instead of "we've reduced costs but made the UX worse" to shareholders, they think of cost savings regardless.
agos 1y ago
if you look at the thread, the explanation is not this easy, as much as it's satisfying to blame React (or any other single tech)
- bob1029 1y ago
  You're right. The technology is not necessarily flawed. It is more about the people who decided to use it and the way in which they used it.
  - agos 1y ago
    exactly. I don't want to do a "no true scotsman" to defend React, but circumstantial evidence suggests that they wildly misused the tool
    - throw-the-towel 1y ago
      A tool that lends itself to misuse so easily is a bad tool, period.
      - agos 1y ago
        why do you say "easily"? it took them considerable effort to make that atrocity, I'm pretty sure. The fact that tens of people worked on this and yet this is the result is way more telling of the team and company culture than it is of the specific tool.
      - sgarland 1y ago
        Not necessarily. Sharp tools are often sharp because someone needs it. I’m not a frontend dev, and have next to zero experience with anything beyond jQuery, but an analogy is shell. Bash (and zsh, though I find some of its syntactic sugar nicer, albeit still inscrutable) will happily let you do extremely stupid things, but it also lets you do extremely complicated things in a very concise manner. That doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad, it means you need to know what the hell you’re doing, and use linters, write tests, etc.
    - 1y ago
a-french-anon 1y ago
We were very few to rant about it, 1 year ago: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/62372 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/62372 Their "solution" was to enable SSR for us ranters' accounts.
- bob1029 1y ago
  > Server-side rendering (SSR) flag has been enabled for each of you. Can you take a look, click around and let me know if this has resolved some of the usability issues that you've reported here? The fact that they have this ability / awareness and haven't completely reverted by now is shocking to me.
  - adithyassekhar 1y ago
    Honestly that's wild. This should be an option in their settings.
- Dragonai 1y ago
  This is actually unreal. Wow.
- galangalalgol 1y ago
  A handful have replied to the two year old thread asking to have the same flag flipped. That seems unlikely to work, but why not ask?
Zanfa 1y ago
I’m pretty sure they used to do syntax highlighting on the server before and it was fast. Now they send down unhighlighted text that seems to choke the browser with anything but the smallest diffs.
- sidewndr46 1y ago
  Whoever had a KPI for improving server performance and decreasing cost got their promotion that quarter, that is for sure.
  - tempest_ 1y ago
    Servers cost money, the client is free (and pays you sometimes)!
    - const_cast 1y ago
      The client costs money too, opportunity cost. Which, unfortunately, cannot be measured :( so no KPIs. Darn! Its all fun and games until you cut quality over and over so much your customers just leave. Ask Chrysler or GE. I mean they must have saved, what, billions across decades? And for free! Well... um... not free actually, because those companies have been run into the ground, dragged through hell, revived, and then damned again.
      - RedShift1 1y ago
        MBA's ruin everything
        jeltz 1y ago
        Opportunity costs is something they are taught about in school but somehow seem to always forget about. I think it is more a question about incentives for the roles MBAs are usually hired into. Either that or the lack of knowledge of the actual product makes them too detached.
shiomiru 1y ago
> The problem is they abandoned rails for react. Which, it seems, was a result of the M$ acquisition: https://muan.co/posts/javascript https://muan.co/posts/javascript
- sunaookami 1y ago
  fyi this page detects a hacker news referrer and sends you in an infinite loop. Have to open the link via copy-paste.
  - adithyassekhar 1y ago
    Lol I respect that https://muan.co/no-yc/ https://muan.co/no-yc/
    - NetOpWibby 1y ago
      Based tbh
      - whstl 1y ago
        I love the explanation in the linked site: > Writing on the internet can be a two-way thing, a learning experience guided by iteration and feedback. I’ve learned some bad habits from Hacker News. I added Caveats sections to articles to make sure that nobody would take my points too broadly. I edited away asides and comments that were fun but would make articles less focused. I came to expect pedantic, judgmental feedback on everything I wrote, regardless of what it was. https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news Which is true. Pedantism is the lowest form of pseudo-intelligence.
        MereInterest 1y ago
        > Pedantism is the lowest form of pseudo-intelligence. You can’t just lay this bear trap of an opportunity and expect me to not pedantically state that the word is either “pedantry”, the activity performed by pedants, or “pedantic”, to describe such activities. “Pedantism” would be a philosophy or viewpoint that extols pedantry. Pedantism would be to pedantry as deontology is to rule-following, a justification of an activity. As such, pedantism would be a slightly higher form of pseudo-intelligence than mere pedantry. But only slightly.
sleepybrett 1y ago
The problem is that they deprioritized everything for more copilot bullshit.
baxuz 1y ago
React is always the problem, as using it in a performant way requires you to basically eject from using it, relying on it only for syncing state, like video key frames. There are of course performant react apps out there. What Steve did with tldraw is amazing. However, the vast majority of the apps out there are garbage since the framework itself is terribly inefficient.
selfmodruntime 1y ago
You can easily do this very fast in React if you don‘t fuck it up. They did fuck it up a bit.
catigula 1y ago
React isn't the problem, the problem is literally every dev I've ever worked with who writes react good except for one or two don't understand or care how to write performant react code at all.
sgarland 1y ago
Glad it’s not just me having faulty memory. I was reading a file - not a PR, just a file in our codebase - that was pretty large, like 15K lines, and it was dogshit slow. I was astonished, and thought I had remembered it being much snappier years ago. Meanwhile, I opened a 100K line CSV in Neovim and while it took a couple of seconds to open and render highlighting, after that, it was fine.

> And no, the problem is not "Rails" The problem is they abandoned rails for react. The old SSR GitHub experience was very good. You could review massive PRs on any machine before they made the move.

DrBenCarson 1y ago

Well yeah, but just imagine how much money they’re saving by delivering a subpar experience!

gchamonlive 1y ago
Or how much money they are capturing in investiments or corporate deals because of the tech stack
zozbot234 1y ago
They're not even saving any money. Syntax highlighting is a trivial workload, whereas the average SPA spends a lot of time in pointless roundtrips that have the server send more data down the pipe than the SSR equivalent.
- sidewndr46 1y ago
  I'll play devils advocate - does it save them some storage space or bandwidth in the CDN that delivers Github?
  - Asmod4n 1y ago
    That's a good question, without looking into any of the code id say bandwidth cost goes higher when moving away from server side rendering since you have to send the code for client side rending to each client which connects.
- scrollaway 1y ago
  Sending data is what’s trivial compared to compute… syntax highlighting is not trivial workload compared to that, you don’t know what you’re saying.
  - sgarland 1y ago
    You say that, until you’re one of the unlucky people who discover that cloud DBs are just cloud VMs in disguise, and those cloud VMs have network throughput limits. A fun part of a retro at my company last year was me explaining to a team, “had all of your pods’ requests succeeded, the DB would have been pushing out well over 200 Gbps, which is generally reserved for top-of-rack switches.” Of course, someone else then had to translate that into “4K Blu-Rays per second,” because web devs aren’t typically familiar with networking, racks, data centers…
    - scrollaway 1y ago
      Serving static files off highly efficient, distributed CDNs is a solved problem. There's no "4K blu-rays per second" when you're talking about gzipped, highly cacheable text data. If github has a million users visiting it per day on a FRESH cache, and all of them have to download at least 10 megabytes of text data (both of these numbers are far too high), you are at ... 0.015 "4k blurays per second". Yeah I think MS's datacenters will survive.
      - zozbot234 1y ago
        A single-page app is not serving "static files". It might serve an initial bundle, but literally everything after that is dynamically generated. There's no way you could serve those responses via a CDN.
Elfener 1y ago
I guess if you say "we've made the UX worse" instead of "we've reduced costs but made the UX worse" to shareholders, they think of cost savings regardless.

agos 1y ago

if you look at the thread, the explanation is not this easy, as much as it's satisfying to blame React (or any other single tech)

bob1029 1y ago
You're right. The technology is not necessarily flawed. It is more about the people who decided to use it and the way in which they used it.
- agos 1y ago
  exactly. I don't want to do a "no true scotsman" to defend React, but circumstantial evidence suggests that they wildly misused the tool
  - throw-the-towel 1y ago
    A tool that lends itself to misuse so easily is a bad tool, period.
    - agos 1y ago
      why do you say "easily"? it took them considerable effort to make that atrocity, I'm pretty sure. The fact that tens of people worked on this and yet this is the result is way more telling of the team and company culture than it is of the specific tool.
    - sgarland 1y ago
      Not necessarily. Sharp tools are often sharp because someone needs it. I’m not a frontend dev, and have next to zero experience with anything beyond jQuery, but an analogy is shell. Bash (and zsh, though I find some of its syntactic sugar nicer, albeit still inscrutable) will happily let you do extremely stupid things, but it also lets you do extremely complicated things in a very concise manner. That doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad, it means you need to know what the hell you’re doing, and use linters, write tests, etc.
  - 1y ago

a-french-anon 1y ago

We were very few to rant about it, 1 year ago: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/62372 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/62372 Their "solution" was to enable SSR for us ranters' accounts.

bob1029 1y ago
> Server-side rendering (SSR) flag has been enabled for each of you. Can you take a look, click around and let me know if this has resolved some of the usability issues that you've reported here? The fact that they have this ability / awareness and haven't completely reverted by now is shocking to me.
- adithyassekhar 1y ago
  Honestly that's wild. This should be an option in their settings.
Dragonai 1y ago
This is actually unreal. Wow.
galangalalgol 1y ago
A handful have replied to the two year old thread asking to have the same flag flipped. That seems unlikely to work, but why not ask?

Zanfa 1y ago

I’m pretty sure they used to do syntax highlighting on the server before and it was fast. Now they send down unhighlighted text that seems to choke the browser with anything but the smallest diffs.

sidewndr46 1y ago
Whoever had a KPI for improving server performance and decreasing cost got their promotion that quarter, that is for sure.
- tempest_ 1y ago
  Servers cost money, the client is free (and pays you sometimes)!
  - const_cast 1y ago
    The client costs money too, opportunity cost. Which, unfortunately, cannot be measured :( so no KPIs. Darn! Its all fun and games until you cut quality over and over so much your customers just leave. Ask Chrysler or GE. I mean they must have saved, what, billions across decades? And for free! Well... um... not free actually, because those companies have been run into the ground, dragged through hell, revived, and then damned again.
    - RedShift1 1y ago
      MBA's ruin everything
      - jeltz 1y ago
        Opportunity costs is something they are taught about in school but somehow seem to always forget about. I think it is more a question about incentives for the roles MBAs are usually hired into. Either that or the lack of knowledge of the actual product makes them too detached.

shiomiru 1y ago

> The problem is they abandoned rails for react. Which, it seems, was a result of the M$ acquisition: https://muan.co/posts/javascript https://muan.co/posts/javascript

sunaookami 1y ago
fyi this page detects a hacker news referrer and sends you in an infinite loop. Have to open the link via copy-paste.
- adithyassekhar 1y ago
  Lol I respect that https://muan.co/no-yc/ https://muan.co/no-yc/
  - NetOpWibby 1y ago
    Based tbh
    - whstl 1y ago
      I love the explanation in the linked site: > Writing on the internet can be a two-way thing, a learning experience guided by iteration and feedback. I’ve learned some bad habits from Hacker News. I added Caveats sections to articles to make sure that nobody would take my points too broadly. I edited away asides and comments that were fun but would make articles less focused. I came to expect pedantic, judgmental feedback on everything I wrote, regardless of what it was. https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news Which is true. Pedantism is the lowest form of pseudo-intelligence.
      - MereInterest 1y ago
        > Pedantism is the lowest form of pseudo-intelligence. You can’t just lay this bear trap of an opportunity and expect me to not pedantically state that the word is either “pedantry”, the activity performed by pedants, or “pedantic”, to describe such activities. “Pedantism” would be a philosophy or viewpoint that extols pedantry. Pedantism would be to pedantry as deontology is to rule-following, a justification of an activity. As such, pedantism would be a slightly higher form of pseudo-intelligence than mere pedantry. But only slightly.

sleepybrett 1y ago

The problem is that they deprioritized everything for more copilot bullshit.

baxuz 1y ago

React is always the problem, as using it in a performant way requires you to basically eject from using it, relying on it only for syncing state, like video key frames. There are of course performant react apps out there. What Steve did with tldraw is amazing. However, the vast majority of the apps out there are garbage since the framework itself is terribly inefficient.

selfmodruntime 1y ago

You can easily do this very fast in React if you don‘t fuck it up. They did fuck it up a bit.

catigula 1y ago

React isn't the problem, the problem is literally every dev I've ever worked with who writes react good except for one or two don't understand or care how to write performant react code at all.

sgarland 1y ago

Glad it’s not just me having faulty memory. I was reading a file - not a PR, just a file in our codebase - that was pretty large, like 15K lines, and it was dogshit slow. I was astonished, and thought I had remembered it being much snappier years ago. Meanwhile, I opened a 100K line CSV in Neovim and while it took a couple of seconds to open and render highlighting, after that, it was fine.