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Comment by justusthane | Hacker News Reader

I love this. I’ve had an idea to do something similar for a while, except each visit would delete a random character from the page source. The character deleted might be part of the content, or it could be part of an HTML tag or CSS, so as the page degraded the layout would break and parts of the source would become visible.

We talk about bit-rot, broken links, etc, so I thought it would be interesting to take that a step further and visualize what would happen if a webpage decomposed over time like organic matter.

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You can do something similar with images, pull them into a data string then fuck with a random bit in a character in the list using JavaScript. The interesting thing is how different image formats handle corruption. I find PNG the most lycergic.

I had to look it up, but did you mean "lysergic", as in lysergic acid diethylamide? (Nice usage...)

I wondered if it was maybe "Lycurgan", from Lycurgus, the Greek lawgiver -- "harsh or severe" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, the first time i used it i thought i came up with a new thing lol.

Or delete one character at a time from the web server’s entire file system…

One of the first c programs I ever wrote was an infinite loop that wrote a random value to a random address. Sadly DOS 6.xx did not have address spaces as such, and while I did not know what it meant at the time, upon rebooting I found it had a write through cache... Most of the file system was littered with extended ASCII characters. Time to pull out all the floppies again for a reimage

I was going to respond that DOS didn't have any such fanciness, but then I remembered SmartDrive. And indeed, it turns out it had a write-behind cache [1] that may well have ruined your day if abused in such fashion.

[1] https://www.computerhope.com/smartdrv.htm

I remember itade me learn how fat worked, then I would use debug to make recursive directory trees with large files in them so a dir /s would terminate at max depth with a huge aize reported. I used it to make people in my HS cs class think I had found really good floppy disks.

I lost tons of work when playing with toy assembly language programs in DOS, when I would save and compile and run it and it did something to crash necessitating a reboot, faster than SmartDrive would write the cache to disk. Particularly for anything crash-prone like messing with hooking interrupt vectors.

There is russian kmem-roulette[1] - dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/kmem bs=1 count=1 seek=$RANDOM

1: http://bash.org/?926695

Would that include removing characters from the script that triggers on the page load?

If so, it'd be more interesting if the lexer didn't barf on syntax error, but perhaps just skipped characters until it finds a valid token. And probably some similar "best effort" algorithm for the parser.

feed it through fuckit.js

https://github.com/mattdiamond/fuckitjs/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4157777

This is the funniest GitHub README I've read in a while

You could just do it server side.

Rough prototype: https://self-deleting-production.self-deletion.workers.dev/

All it has is some stupid placeholder text right now. It uses cloudlfare workers and kv storage to keep the current text, so there are lots of concurrency/latency issues. Once the entire page is deleted it will start again.

Code here: https://github.com/ch33zer/self-deleting

Aaaaaand it's dead. Too much traffic to cloudflare. Sorry all.

Did cloudflare block your website? This shouldn't happen right? Or do you mean that due to traffic all the content was deleted?

I just went over the free quota for their kv storage.

Firebase (the old one, not their new database) gives unlimited kv storage free. Just don’t upgrade to the Blaze plan or some fella from HN will spawn 30 wget loops to maliciously charge you a few thousand dollars, which is what happened to me. Never had to pay it, but it took the service down for a bit.

HN traffic is crazy, even a few days after posting:

https://imgur.com/a/zUhkYQT

Oh please make this, it sounds fun!!!

What if we made it show the decay live - no need to press refresh constantly?

If it is a bit rot you want to simulate, change a bit in random file

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