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Comment by retSava | Hacker News Reader

But that's moving the goal posts...? It's significantly easier to launch a website from scratch today, there are even more frameworks with very easy to follow tutorials and hello world-examples to extend to also make it look good. One simple one-liner copy for eg bootstrap.

What's changed is that it is today even _possible_ "for a 10 year old in the 2010s to grab terabytes of data and process it". Wait a little while for the "easy" part :)

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> It's significantly easier to launch a website from scratch today,

Write HTML, copy to server, press f5/open URL. It doesn't get easier than the 90s in that regard. You didn't even need a framework for that, so ... I'm not so sure.

I was mostly thinking of the "copy to server" step. I was about to say that now there are many providers and platforms etc, but now thinking about it, there were plenty even back then. Perhaps, if you just have a small nugget of something you want out there, today you can just paste it on pastebin/twitter/instagram or any other platform...

I think you've really forgotten how hard the copy to server step could be in the 90s

I'm pretty sure I've used a ftp client back then too, which wasn't so hard, but sure, it's been a while, my memory may be faulty here.

I was more thinking about getting an internet connection and a server

Sign up with ISP, fill out phone number & info into modem settings, click connect, wait, use ISPs server space they provided for free to each customer. Done?

In many ways I find that easier than dealing with cable companies and their systems.

A basic internet connection was easier in some ways. There were disks with free hours all over the place. And hosting wasn't hard. Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire, ISP-provided hosting were all available, and easy enough for me to figure out when I was 10 years old. I had a few sites up on Geocities in the mid-to-late 90s.

Uhh... Write HTML, git commit, press F5 ? No frameworks needed.

We have to move the goalposts, otherwise we'd still be talking in terms of attaching stones to sticks.

The comment was about the reduction of progress, which is like talking about derivative functions. The value of the function is the goalpost, and it moves.

My point is more about the rate of change. If computing power continued to increase in the 2010s at the same rate it was increasing from the 1950s through mid 2000s, that 10yo kid would be playing with terabytes of data on his laptop.

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