It is defaced now. Some troll logged in and started posting spam.
I'm really not sure why this is on front page of HN? This is just random messages board without any verification. Anyone can sign in and post message anonymously saying: "company foo is firing". There is no way to know if 'foo' is actually firing.
There was a small discussion recently (last week maybe?) about having a site similar to the old fuckedcompany. I'm guessing that's why it made any traction.
I first laughed out actually, but I think it's a good idea and I helped with a contribution. I like other people also think this would be a helpful tool for recruiters and could also be a good tool just for researching employers current or historical firings.
Glassdoor is as much an advertising/marketing site as it is anything else. It isn't that anonymous and I've seen a lot of evidence that companies can bury/delete bad reviews.
So this seems to be aimed at people looking for a job, in the hopes of avoiding said companie. What about all the poor folks in said companies that will fear of being let go because some disgruntled employee decided to post a fake rumor?
One of the reason of firing people is to align the company with a new goal. Most of this companies are firing because they want and they need new roles in the organization, and are going to contract new people soon. It should not be a negative thing.
Even if they plan on hiring new people it's still interesting to see what kind of people they fire. If you think you match their profuile, don't even bother to apply.
It's got some potential, but it needs a name change or product change.
I don't like the misuse of the word "firing" which has become incredibly prevalent. To fire someone means there was a performance issue. most of the things listed on that site are just lay offs, not actual "firings". It would be good to know which companies actually "fired", vs which ones "laid off". there's a big difference.
It's never cool to experience getting fired. The first couple of times are like gut punches, no matter how many pink slip parties there are, the voice in your head always says "if you were better in this way "they" would not have fired you"
As it goes on you get less gut punched, but it's never nice. It's why companies that don't deserve it have a lot of employee loyalty
I've been fired twice. Both times it was more of a relief. Once because I engaged too much in my work, took it too seriously. Other time was due to me not liking the atmosphere but having made the decision to "make it work anyways". Both times the reason given on the pink slip was cutbacks and I left both jobs with nice letters of reccommendation. Not every layoff is a bad experience.
You know, it's not always a bad thing. Layoffs of course are unfortunate events and have a negative connotation.
But recruiters often use these news to contact people that potentially got laid off or is at risk of being laid off, and sometimes that is of great help.
Probably the website could also offer a job board?
Actually we used this strategy for a company we were grounding. We just connected to some start-up community and the moment we heard a start-up banked up, we showed in the doorsteps and asked for the resumes.
We had really successful hires, picking very good people. Most were happy to continue in our start-up. We had good funding and that helped.
Please pardon my negativity but i'm tired of this trend of taking something that span discussion on HN and making it into an app as soon as possible, then posting it on HN.
It's getting out of control since the old geek jobs article on Indiehackers. There's now at least one of these posts per week and they're less and less interesting. It's not showing cool tech or a cool idea, it's just trying to capitalize on the interest here and using HN as an early marketing channel.
I mean come on. This is literally an app that allows to add an element to a list because there was a succesful "Ask HN : who's firing ?" post a couple of weeks ago.
I actually find this idea very interesting and would love to subscribe to notifications about which companies are laying off workers or see trends about how many people are being laid off per week/month. As an investor, this is a nice data point that shows the health of the tech sector.
What exactly is wrong with capitalizing on interest here? Sounds smart to me - you know you're solving a real problem and you have a free marketing channel... So many people built stuff that nobody wants.
Seriously, uncovering data on lay offs and firings can only better people. I think HN keeps having ideas pop off like this precisely by its nature. If you go to a local automotive club there's going to be a lot of side projects on display. I would worry about HN becoming stale and (worse) irrelevant if it weren't doing these things.
I agree that it's smart and that's why it doesn't sit well with me : it's hacking community dynamics ( know interests and an encouraging attitude toward personal projects) into a revenue channel. A possible long-term consequence - HN slowly turning into a proto-producthunt - and a short-term one - a decrease in quality -concern me.
That being said, i do see the interest of the indicator. My comment is more about the trend highlighted by this post.
I'm actually very excited for this CRUD site; it'll provide valuable macroeconomic data around the tech industry (have we hit the inflection point yet? Is the market popping or slowly deflating? How quickly?). I prefer it far more than the endless stream of Go, JavaScript, Elixr, React, Containerization posts on HN.
It's a canary in the coal mine, and if you work in tech, it should interest you.
Make an app called "As Seen On HN", post about it, then the cycle will be complete and we can go back to the regular smorgasbord of things that get posted here.
Taken a step further, a webapp that tracks businesses that emerge from different online communities would be super useful for improving commercial targeting of social media, and with a delay on content updates baked in for free users could probably find a good group of paying ones.
The best way to kill a fad is to build it up to the point where it loses its novelty.
Please don't build a needlessly bloated SPA obviously thrown together without much thought just so you can say "first" and post it on HN. If you care enough to do it, you should care enough to make it not suck. :)
Better than having "Ask HN: Who's Firing This Week?" threads every week, one for each topic that gets semi-regularly asked about. Think of it as a spam siphon.
Sorry, but I am going to comment on a technical implementation rather than the content of a site.
The site shows blank page without JS enabled. I did not understand why one would need one megabyte of minified Javascript to display a list of 10 items. Probably it is because the developers were too busy learning trendy JS frameworks and do not know about HTML and server side page generation (in PHP this could be done much easier without JS frameworks and API).
And to make page load even slower after loading a megabyte of Javascript they make an additional API request to load a list of links. Hey, you could just send this list as a HTML file from the start.
Also it looks like they do not know about HTML <script> tags and encode configuration as a value of a <meta> tag.
> The site shows blank page without JS enabled. I did not understand why one would need one megabyte of minified Javascript to display a list of 10 items.
It's probably because you opted to disable one of the essential web technologies in your browser. Plenty of websites are written as SPAs nowadays. This is like complaining that pages are black on white because you disabled CSS. Or that you can't see websites at all because you uninstalled your browser.
No, it' because whoever made the site is ignoring the age-old simple practice of showing something (even the text "This website requires javascript") even if not all resources have loaded.
It is entirely unlike the examples you gave. Especially because his browser does show ~99% of the internet properly (with various degrees of functionality, but still something does come up), and that there spiders, proxies, screenreaders, and other useful software which will also see nothing on this page.
All major screenreaders work from the DOM and the accessibility tree nowadays, and have done for a long time at this point. Dynamic content is no problem in and of itself.
I did a lot of tests on this and Google just didn't wait, no matter the configuration. I tested using webmaster tools. The App was built using React, and I ended up implementing SSR to fix the problem. There are a lot of posts that hack this embedding JSON directly on the page. I didn't find any post that figured out a way to make this works through async API requests. I would thank you if you point one in that direction. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.
Interesting, never occurred to me that react-router could be the problem, I will investigate that. But this other post [1] didn't use React at all and made API requests to GitHub with the same problem.
I use mbasic.facebook as my main was of interacting with Facebook. I acknowledge that my choice to disable JavaScript is unusual and will jump through some hoops because of that, but it's not excusable for a website to display /nothing/ pre-script like the OP does.
The great thing about this is that it's paginated. You can literally "scroll infinitely" through feeds without creating a ridiculous scroll offset and filling up browser memory (or losing Ctrl-F functionality due to Facebook's complex memory-saving exercises)
There is a place for JS but most sites don't need it or at least don't need to drive the entire site. The problem is that Jquery now is 'bad' because it, what was it again, is not suitable for structuring big apps (ofcourse it is not; it's not meant to be an MVC or whatever framework; it's helper library to make Javascript easier to use). So it is obvious (and I see it all around me) that people build sites now like they are building Facebook, even though the site might have only 1 or 2 pages and no interactive functionality to speak off.
Still, this guy did it (took a long time between this site being up and the post on HN that instigated it) while the rest of the readers in that thread who thought it would be a good idea, including me, didn't. So kudos for 'just doing it' anyway.
Edit: I checked hours ago and then it was clean but apparently there is no moderation on it either... So this site would've taken literally less than an hour including hosting setup to put together? Still I didn't do it while I did like FuckedCompany and think it's good to have something like it.
See http://webassembly.org/ . While not raw assembly, we have to because of the js nonsense. This will ofcourse also increase the jsnonsense, cause now everything will be more efficient so we can put alot more crap.
In future publishers will probably use web assembly for DRM, for example, to render decrypted article text on a canvas so that it cannot be copied, zoomed, read aloud or viewed without advertisement and annoying popups. Maybe you will change your mind about Javascript then.
You jest, but in one of the discussions for EME, that exact case was brought up.
Only they wanted to drm javascript sent to the browser. We got rid of Flash only to see a new hydra head emerge. People clamoring for javascript applications should be careful what they wish for. They just might get it.
I don't think this is a fair argument. Writing web pages as single page JS apps is _harder_ than writing them as server-side generated html responses. And in many cases (this one as a great example), the user experience is worse for having done so.
This point of view forgets the fact that loading 1MB of JS instead of 10KB of HTML is actually a bad thing. It consumes bandwidth and energy, and thus has an effect on the environment, for instance.
I think the pointless act of watching cat videos and pornography has a much more significant effect on the environment. Driving cars, too. By that reasoning, these things must be really evil.
This is a far stronger argument against JS-driven websites than the environmental argument.
Would you ever make the argument: "this website would be so much easier to use with a little Javascript, but Javascript is bad for the environment, so it should remain without"?
If not, the environment isn't actually a factor in the reasoning process. It's just a club to wield when it supports what you've already decided is the correct answer.
I disagree. The environmental argument is also solid one all other things being equal. It's not just a "club to wield when it supports what you've already decided is the correct answer". Even if JS only website were okay (which they're not) and as just good as plain HTML ones, the fact that the latter is better for the environment totally counts as an argument. And at least for me, trading a 10kB web page against a 1MB JS is not okay if the JS does not bring a solid positive difference.
Now I agree that in the case we're discussing, the JS actually brings a negative difference as it doesn't enhance anything and makes the website unusable without JS and thus a lot less accessible. So here the environmental factor is secondary.
I agree that the environment could in principle be a tie-breaker. But it's such a weak argument that in practice, whenever all other things are not equal, the environment is not going to tip the scales from one side to the other. And all other things are not equal, because the environmental effects don't happen in a vacuum, they're correlated with all sorts of other things. So anyone bringing it up is just using it to support the answer they've already decided on.
Suppose the environmental impacts of the HTML-only page and the JS-driven page were flipped, but the user experience remained exactly the same - the JS-driven page still takes longer to download, uses more memory, and doesn't work unless JS is enabled; but it's marginally better for the environment, by the same amount that the HTML-only page is better in the real world. Do you now think the JS-driven page is preferable?
If not, you don't get to use the environment to argue for the HTML-only page. It doesn't sway you, so you shouldn't use it to sway others.
About your first §: Your way of thinking is worrying to me. Global warming is no joke.
About your second §: your example makes absolutely no sense, and additionally it's not at all an "all other thing being equal" case. But if I had to attempt to answer you anyway, I'd say that in that case the fact that the better environmental impact of the JS-driven version is an argument that it has for it, and at least lessen the difference in the overall evaluations of the two options.
I'm not treating global warming as a joke. I'm treating the environmental impact of javascript-driven webpages as not worth taking seriously.
If you want to take it seriously, I recommend quantifying the impact as a first step. If your calculations show it's worth taking seriously, I'll happily change my mind.
"lessen the difference in the overall evaluations of the two options" is not enough. "This is a serious factor that I care about and you should care about it too, but if it was completely reversed, that wouldn't actually change the outcome": I'm not buying it.
Of course, but the comparison is a bit unfair. If you need a car to go to your workplace you can't really do otherwise. Here it is mostly trivial to make a better choice, and webpage loading and rendering would be faster, it only has advantages.
It's like saying a company should be present in each and every market. It might or might not make business sense to do that. Same with JS - it might or might not make sense to support non-js browsers, based on your target audience.
You and GP are missing the point: the site uses an ocean-liner's worth of JavaScript in order to do anything at all. HTML is also a core web technology and is arguably more "core" than JavaScript.
It's not specifically against JS, it's a matter of parsimony. One shouldn't require more than what's needed for the job. KISS. Of course, most of us fail to perfectly abide by that, but the principle is solid.
But why? Who made the rule that websites should work without JS? Content being accessible without JS is best practice. I get it and it was very valuable a long time ago. It comes in handy sometimes today but for most of the internet accessing world, working without JS is not a requirement. I do not get why people ding products for not working when JS is not enabled.
> Who made the rule that websites should work without JS?
It's not an arbitrary rule, it's just that they always have.
That's the hole point of progressive enhancement, you don't start requiring some technology as soon as it reaches x% market share and ignore the remaining minority. You build on top and offer a better experience to those that can or want.
In the apps world, it's usual to draw a line on a set of minimum system requirements and expect that line to move forward as the years go by.
But this is the Web, being accessible should be a priority.
Pages load faster with JS disabled, show less advertisement and no popups. Browser processes take less memory. Social network tracking scripts (usually disguised as share buttons) do not work. Annoying fixed headers, footers and sidebar usually don't work without JS too.
I got used to this comfortable way of browsing the web and seeing more sites that don't work without JS doesn't make me happy.
I think the disconnect is that people have conflated websites with web applications. I fully expect an application to use JS because essentially you're providing (or attempting to provide) desktop-analogous functionality in the browser.
However a "website" has the purpose of 'displaying information' -- essentially some form of text + images akin to a newspaper page. In those cases JavaScript is an enhancement but ought not be a requirement.
For a web application though, not using JavaScript is like a car pulled by donkeys. Sure you can sit in it and try to steer but it doesn't provide optimal functionality.
However on the other hand, anyone expecting a good web experience in 2016 without JavaScript is fighting a Quixotic battle.
You are right. There are web applications (like Google Docs) and simple collections of web pages (a typical Wordpress blog). I am not against JS or SPA architecture generally but I am against using complicated solutions for simple problems. Using rich frontend application to display just a list of links is obviously over-engineering.
So you're in a memory-constrained environment, you can't be bothered to block social network tracking scripts by another means (some of those still load as pixels so you haven't gotten rid of them entirely), you don't like fixed headers, footers, or sidebars, and you're taking it all out on this site because the fastest way they could bang out their little idea did not include server-side rendering in the initial iteration.
You're making a conscious decision based on the trade-offs at hand and saying that every website should double down on server side rendering to cater to your intolerance of how modern web browsing works. That's just not feasible.
3 billion people are in a bandwith, memory and CPU-constrained environment.
99% of websites can be written with or a minimum of javascript or not at all without losing any meaningful functionality.
But the website is down right not.
Everything is resource constrained environment.
With exposure to larger traffic hitting various services comes experience to not do things like that. Somebody had to keep the world running and some of us do care for proper engineering approaches.
I have a feeling that with Chrome any environment gets memory-constrained pretty fast. I have 3 (three) gigabytes of RAM (that can hold over 3 billion bytes inside) available to OS, is that not enough?
Most technologies can be wrangled to do pretty much anything, but that doesn't mean you should use them. Every browser since I was a child has had a download manager of some kind built in, but that didn't stop the last academic paper website I tried to use from writing their own using a java webapp, of all things, and refusing to let me download their pdf's with anything else.
If your site looks like garbage when I turn the javascript off, fair enough. If your site breaks because it needs to do client side process, then that's on me, fair call.
But if your website can't even load text without javascript, then you're using a carpenters square as a hammer. Loading text is what html does. That's it's one and only job, and it's really fucking good at it. Way better at it than javascript is.
If your website cannot load text without javascript, you're a shitty developer, because you're rejecting the objectively correct tool and shoehorning a far more complex tool into it's place. That's how you get security vulnerabilities and high maintenance costs. It's the very definition of over engineering.
Requiring JS support to display a list of links is like requiring a user to download an application to view the site. No sane person would do this, right? Oh wait...
Complaining that pages are black because you disabled CSS is a legitimate complaint. Plenty of people need to modify or disable or ignore CSS for accessibility reasons.
If you're using tons of bloated Javascript "just because" for something that could arguably work with just static pages, you're doing something very very wrong.
Fair comment that this site doesn't look like it needs a JS framework, but I think it's a little unfair to assume the dev doesn't know about HTML or server side languages.
It's more likely that the OP uses this JS framework a lot and knows it well, so it was quicker for them to build it this way.
I'm someone who builds a lot of SPAs for things that really don't need to be SPAs. The ability to host on gh-pages and to not implement a backend at all seals the deal for me.
That said, I try to load a static version of the compiled result as part of the skeleton HTML. Even if it gets overwritten by the SPA afterwards, it makes things look faster.
Storing and processing data locally in a user's browser without using server API actually can be a valid reason to build a client-side application. But they just use one megabyte of JS code to implement client-side rendering for JSON data received from API. Serving a 10 Kb HTML page is obviously a better solution. I see no single benefit from using complicated JS framework here.
I like to put things together with React. It's surprisingly good for static-ish landing pages because you can shuffle things around quickly once you have a few basic widgets built.
When starting from react-create-app it's also super easy to deploy to gh-pages: npm run deploy
It's really beautiful to work with and getting better every week.
Although I will agree this is bad, I am going to probably use a bunch of non-essential stuff to build a personal project because I need to be able to point to having used these technologies. Sometimes bad technologies get used for social reasons.
Perhaps the developers were thinking about expanding the functionalities of the site in a way that server-side rendering can't help them, so they started doing it all in JS anyway.
In the future, if the site survives and gets bigger, they will surely think about corner use-cases like yours and work some time in server-side rendering.
I looked at Ember documentation and saw a tutorial on building a rental site [1] that could be easily implemented without Ember. They should have chosen a better example that would show clear benefints from using complicated JS framework otherwise it just looks like over-engineered solution for a simple problem.
Also Ember documentation doesn't give any reasoning why (or when) one should or should not use their framework. But they have a mustache on a front page.
I've read several of your comments on this thread and, while you do make some good points, you are extremely condescending. So condescending that it is almost impossible for me to read an entire one of your comments.
In the wild, yeah, js failovers are a good idea. But this is a show HN...the author had no idea if it would even work and just wanted to get something out. Instead of substantive comments designed to help the author build a better application, you instead choose to go on a failover holy war??? That's not only weak, it's uninteresting and absolutely not helpful.
B/c they wanted to do it that way and you're nothing but a negative troll spewing what you think is right. Lets have someone critique all your work and criticize everything they disagree with.
One thing the web has no shortage of is negative trolls. The site requires javascript. What percentage of people have javascript disabled anyway? Just a guess, its really low.
I have several years experience using Rails so that would be my primary reason. Rails 5 has the ability to use Actioncable (a framework for handling websockets) which would be useful for notifications and chat.
I'm really not sure why this is on front page of HN? This is just random messages board without any verification. Anyone can sign in and post message anonymously saying: "company foo is firing". There is no way to know if 'foo' is actually firing.