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You'd like to think that the owners of those sites would fix them. A site shouldn't just not work if it can't access a certain JavaScript file - it should at least warn you of the problem.

> I will just leave you with the most adorable 404 page anyone has ever seen: https://diopitt.org/pray/amen

In the context of your comment, I was amused by how my own ad-blocker failed to properly show the (image on the) 404 page, since it is loaded from a different domain :D

"The Web is an error condition": <http://deirdre.net/programming-sucks-why-i-quit/>

See also Richard I. Cook's "How Complex Systems Fail": <https://how.complexsystems.fail/>

(Latter is an HN perennial, with 55 sumbissions presently: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=how%20complex%20systems%20fail>. Most recent 10 months ago, so not quite ready for a re-up: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32895812>.)

The first one is a 404. I love the irony of there being an error condition in this case of a missing redirect.

https://deirdre.net/2014/programming-sucks-why-i-quit/

I was being lazy and had copied the URL from an earlier comment of mine mentioning it.

The Internet Archive has a copy as well: <https://web.archive.org/web/20200922230737/https://deirdre.n...>

Even their blog has such dead links. I just happened to notice that other URLs included the year, so I tracked that one down to see if that’s all what was needed.

Of course, forgetting about that little backwards compatibility is easy, especially considering it’s a personal blog and they likely have other personal things to worry about. I was just amused by the irony in context. I otherwise appreciated the read. :)

If you happen to remember any of those, drop her a line. I'm pretty sure Deirdre's fairly meticulous about that sort of thing.

I should be able to find it. It was an aggregate post from 2014 titled something like “stuff I wrote this year” which is how I found the year for the post in question.

> Because all my devices use the same configuration, and it's non-trivial to disable it

This is exactly why I do not use a DNS-based ad blocking solution (it’s trivial to disable uBlock Origin and refresh if something feels broken).

I’m not sure if we are talking about PiHole here, but I just log into the web interface and whitelist or temporarily disable blocking. Not as trivial as a browser extension, but still quite easy and fast.

This is why I run my DNS-based ad blocking solution through a VPS. It's trivial to toggle the VPN on/off on desktop or mobile. On desktop I have a single key to swap my network. On mobile, a gesture followed by two taps does the same.

> If loading some resource runs into trouble, it's simply not feasible for the Node.js or React or PHP to surface an error to the user.

In what way? Do you mean not feasible or just lazily coded?

Also was confused by this sentence. I have worked on several Node, React, and even PHP (albeit a long time ago!) applications, and every single one of them caught and surfaced internal server errors. Never was aware there were actually people out there regardless of language who weren't catching and surfacing 500s in a straightforward fashion to the user.

Browsers used to display an icon and beveled borders to indicate broken images. Not sure when they stopped but I wish they hadn't.

They still do. The problem is, as always, JavaScript and how the assets are loaded and images rendered on pages.

> Unless a blocked domain corresponds to the front page I visit in a URL, the unavailable resource represents a silent failure

Is this not intended behavior? Were you not expecting ads to be silently removed?

From the user's point of view, yes, that is intended behavior. But the browser can't know that, all it sees is a dropped connection. For all it knows, there could be an actual issue with the network.

But unless you open the dev tools' network tab, you don't know about that request failing.

TCP RST is indeed considered a transient failure, and the RFCs specify that it should be retried several times before giving up.

My ad blocker returns "0.0.0.0" for A records, which in practice means attempts to connect to 127.0.0.1, which isn't running a server of any kind on port 443/tcp or 80/tcp. So a standards-compliant client would really hang awhile, or hold rendering, until several connects have been attempted and they all failed.

What dns adblock do you use?

NextDNS.

They have a feature where if you're a free user, and you exceed your query quota for the month, they turn off all features and it acts like a normal resolver.

For some reason, there is no access to such a setting to do it manually, and I am a subscriber now, too.

There are profiles that can be configured separately, but even just to activate an alternate profile, one must reconfigure the DNS settings on the devices.

not OP

pihole as cache, with the router as its upstream, with NextDNS as the router's dns server

What's the point of the PiHole in that setup? If the router doesn't have the storage for as large a cache you're still only using the dnsmasq part of PiHole by the sounds of it? (Not to mention most consumer routers support USB mass storage?)