2. This isn't true for apps anymore. Server driven ui is a thing.

3. JS runs locally. You can inspect the network traffic more easily than you can with an app.

4. You can audit OSS websites too.

5. Your personal preferences have nothing to do with the fact that Apple makes tons of money from apps but not websites.

- Steam forces game updates, even for single player games.

- terrible delta updates. Baldurs Gate 3 had 8 patches in 3 Years. That's 800GB of updates.

If a patch drops on the afternoon you planned with your friends, you're not playing that night (actually happened to us). Both decisions should have caused outcries, but I guess people would rather overpay for fast internet contracts.

There are some techniques that aren't immediately obvious. Look into...

- type guards

- pushing constraints up: `function print(i: Invoice & { issueDate: string })` is better than `assert(i.issueDate)`

- discriminated unions

I don't get this. Many things like changing the IP or audio devices were so unintuitive that I just memorized them. They're still burned into my brain. In Win 11, you just search for 'IP', click 'Ethernet-Settings', done.

Same for the signifiers: In the Win 11 Settings, give me an example of an element that is not obviously clickable. Everything has button shapes, or step-in indicators.

To be clear, I'm neutral towards that settings app. But UI back then was nowhere near as good as claimed here, and flat design (at least the current iteration) isn't to blame for Teams being bad.

It took them ~4 years to ship this editor, and it shows. They managed to find the perfect balance between formatting markdown as you type and minimizing content shift. It's feature-rich while still providing the interoperability I expect from Markdown.

"Siri, start a stopwatch" - runs the App "Stopwatch" without starting it

Such errors happen maybe 50% of the time. You can never just ask something without double-checking afterwards.

"We can't bring Time Machine to Europe, because we would have to allow other backup solutions, and that would mean other backups would have unrestricted access to your data"

Maybe there's more to it, but I'm not giving Apple the benefit of the doubt after their hostile strategy regarding third-party app stores.

> Every UI is always some mapping of the state.

Sure, but it previously wasn't described as such. It was described as a list of imperative operations "if x do that" (unless the developer just gave up and had a giant refreshEverything() function). IIRC, at the time, MVC had a common problem of controller bloat, precisely because it was trying to perform the reconciliation between view and model imperatively rather than simply describing it as a function. MVVM solved this partially with data-binding, but depending on the framework, you still had lackluster handling of derived state inside the view-model.

> What does "pure representation" mean to you?

I mean that, the render function of the component is a 100% pure function of the state that the framework injects. By "render function" I mean everything except the statements beginning with `use...`. Those are just React's syntax for defining the component. Another framework such as SwiftUI might have defined them outside the function.

> But can you elaborate the specific advantages you believe the react approach gives us over, say, MVC?

There are so many resources on this, so I don't know what I can say to convince you, but I'll try:

* The Compiler. Regardless of whether you think it’s self-inflicted complexity (I don’t), functional patterns generally are easier to statically analyze and transform.

* Transitions, concurrent rendering, suspense, & time-slicing. All of these are possible by rendering components with outdated state. A low priority update may trigger a loading state and defer its commit. Meanwhile, high priority updates can continue to work as usual. In the past ~2 years, this is easily where I've seen the most UX & DX gains in frontend.

* Most importantly: readability. Even if components are only 90% pure, I still see side-effects and state clearly marked. Even in MVVM, I've seen so much spaghetti from my coworkers. In React & post-React frameworks, when debugging a component, I have a much narrower range of things I need to check. For example, I don't have to worry that an object I'm reading from is being mutated by a component on a completely different route.

Overall, the reason why this post rubs me the wrong way, is that you took a theoretical design document, misunderstood it for the actual, practical implementation and snarked at the authors for not going with the "obviously correct" solution of OOP. Not seeing the bigger picture in 2018 is understandable, but now it's... interesting.

Narrowmindedly worrying about syntactical differences is contributing nothing to the conversation. The point is relinquishing control of state to the framework (be it via props, hooks or @State), and drawing the UI as a pure representation of whatever the framework tells you. Hence ui = f(state). This gets you a metric ton of advantages, which is why every modern framework is doing it.

Classes, by themselves, are inadequate as containers for state unless that state must only exist in memory and never be observed, synchronized or serialized. You can attempt to patch that with decorators, ORMs or whatever, but now you're doing the same thing as React is doing with functions.

Obviously thats not what we got, but I feel like the set of established UI patterns is manageable enough that it could be built.

A great example is the new styling that developers styled in all kinds of creative ways. Now give me that for comboboxes, trees, data-grids etc...

]]>Sat, 23 May 2026 18:24:57 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48249938SebastianKrahttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48249938https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48249938It seems obvious that they plan to eventually drop VSCode. I'd be willing to take them up on that offer. Their agent window is genuinely better as a starting point.

What annoys me is how little they want to integrate with ...anything. Wanna open a link in your default browser? Use our built-in chromium fork, we insist. Wanna open a location in Zed? No, please use our half-baked editor re-implementation. Wanna open a location in Cursors own vscode-based editor? You can't. Managed to work around that somehow? We changed your files to "Worktree TS", disabling all your language servers. It's like programming on an iPhone.

]]>Tue, 19 May 2026 17:52:32 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196697SebastianKrahttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196697https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196697You're conflating correctly targeted ads and useful information.

If you sell gambling ads to an addicted gambler, the gambler doesn't get useful information.

Niche interests might get a pass. But then again: if I’m getting an ad for a 3D printing product on a 3D printing review site, its very likely that the advertised product wasn’t actually the best and is just artificially pushed on me.

]]>Mon, 11 May 2026 07:00:43 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48091866SebastianKrahttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48091866https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48091866Textbook marketing speak: “Don't you want more relevant ads?”.

It assumes that “ads” = useful information, but that's rare at best. Most ads focus on stealing your attention and creating a fear of missing out. NordVPN isn't educating you. They just manufacture a need and then hope that you won't invest time in researching a better option.

Why would I give them more leverage to do that?

]]>Sun, 10 May 2026 14:43:49 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084407SebastianKrahttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084407https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084407