Hacker News Reader

Comment by douche | Hacker News Reader

I miss the days of the plain-old html web. It might have been ugly, and there might have been marquees and blink tags, and under construction signs, and webrings and webmasters, but it loaded over my 56k modem, nobody was screwing with my back button, or messing up scrolling, or popping modals in my face, or pestering me with anti-anti-anti-ad-blocking nag modals and interstitials.

View on HN

I was just reading a blog post where a guy had written about Steve Reich and Brian Eno's experiments and his attempts at replicating them. It was posted on HN a few days ago: http://teropa.info/blog/2016/07/28/javascript-systems-music....

There are embedded YouTube videos, MP3s, and code samples to illustrate what he's writing about. He's implemented their ideas using the Web Audio API and you can run the code from within the page and listen to the music being generated in real-time. It's a real testament to how great the web can be.

I think being able to do things like that is worth all the annoying parts of the modern web, in the end. For the developer and the end user. I wouldn't want to go back to the old way. I think it's easy to focus on the annoying parts and take the good parts for granted.

> It's a real testament to how great the web can be

Doing something in a browser that we could do 30 years ago on a desktop isn't that great a testament.

But you're clicking on a link, not downloading and installing an application.

You are downloading an application, arguably installing one temporarily too.

Is this that much more efficient than "apt-get install foo"?

Yes, because it means all my users can install the same application and I only have to write it once for all platforms.

Not every platform/OS even has a (good) package manager. So I think this alone is what makes the web great.

True. But users don't care. Not only that, such ease had only created more noise and less expertise. Piss all you want about MS and Apple back in the day but they understood quality control. Today? Ha. We just have lower expectations. We accept shite because we have no other choice.

Furthermore, free isn't free when my privacy is sold and/or my eye balls are subjected to even more ads. This is progress? No fucking way.

> Piss all you want about MS and Apple back in the day but they understood quality control

I don't know what you are on about as there weren't any app stores controlled by Apple or MS. Anyone was able to release crap software on floppy disks or BBS, and they did.

Which platforms don't have good package management? Linux has, if anything, too many. Windows has chocolatey. Apple has homebrew. Writing portable applications can be done in a variety of ways and packaged for each platform.

Windows might have chocolatey, one among a small number package managers for Windows (including the bleh Windows 10 Store), but not being baked into the OS distribution means the average user isn't going to install it. Users want what's already in the Start menu/page, not something they have to go to a site, copy some (as far as they know) random text, paste it into a power shell, and then hope it works. You effectively need a package manager to install the package manager. That might be ok for your power users, but the average person what wants to install GIMP because he's been told by his mate down the pub that it's "like a free Photoshop", would rather go to the GIMP site and download it, he won't even know about chocolatey because he's so used to using Windows without a package manager that he'll just Google "GIMP" and hope the fist link is the right one. Windows missed the boat on package managers and the Windows 10 Store definitely does not make it any easier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com