I could have said chat clients, games, maps or other things that absolutely require JavaScript. I said upvote on HN to illustrate that even the most basic site still needs some JS to create a sane experience. Having the page reload every time you upvote a comment is not a good alternative.
It's been working for me for years just fine without JS. As for chat clients and games, those things absolutely do not belong in the slow pile of abstractions that is a web browser. They should be native applications and they are on my computers.
But you're right about maps. They're extremely well suited to being viewed in a browser with javascript.
