There Is No Website | Hacker News Reader

There Is No Website

thereisnoweb.site

160 pointsxk4rim84 comments

Note for Firefox users, the "cat video" section is not working, and you will not be able to experience the rest of the app. You are supposed to break the player in a Google Gravity[1] like fashion, but it's broken. They should not "highly" recommend using chrome, but just say it does not work on other browsers.

[1] https://mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/google-gravity...

Should they also specify if it works in QQ Browser? What about Safari? Baidu Browser?

I argue that specifying where it doesn't work is pretty stupid. Just specify what you tested it on. It works on those and may or may not work on others. If you'd like it to work on other browsers you can see if you can contact the author to help them with financial support to get the other ones working.

It’s glitchy af on mobile safari too. Kept freezing up.

(In Firefox) I opened the terminal, then deleted an overlay and I COULD "break" the video like you are describing, which lead me to believe it was a "mess with the DOM" kind of pseudo-game, which seems like it was def not the case when I deleted more things and everything broke.

Edit: added a PR (took just 12 mins to fix) https://github.com/AndreiBalan-dev/there-is-no-website/pull/...

Hey there! I have pushed a fix to make it compatible with Firefox. Thank you very much for the feedback!

If there are any other issues, I am here on a lookout :D

Still doesn't work with Firefox (at least not on my Macbook).

Thank you!

Not sure if I'm normal stuck or if something is supposed to happen past the "Seriously, you need to go."

EDIT: It's the three dots in the top right that are "unbreakable", I guess.

Use the play button to break them

Worked for me in Firefox on Linux!

Works fine on iPad Safari…

Hey guys! Creator of the non-website here. Thank you all very much for the feedback.

This thing that is clearly NOT a website was initially done for a hackathon and I never expected it to get more than 5-6 users.

It's so amazing and a bit stressful, because I want to offer a great experience at the same time!! Today I tried to make it compatible on phone too mobile users. Hadn't too much time to test it out but I'm on the lookout for bugs.

I also found this post randomly, I was trying to find out why did Vercel sent me an email at 4 AM that I am using 100% of the free plan data LOL. I had to upgrade to pro.

Thanks to everyone for trying out this scuffed thing (which is NOT a website!!) haha. I had a deadline and only 26h left to create it, never knew it will get this many users!

Much love, Andrei.

Creator of this what?

Oh sorry! I made a typo there.. Let me change that real quick..

If you put your files on the free CloudFlare R2 storage tier and aggressively cache your site’s HTML, you can get away with the free tier on Vercel :)

This Deployment has been disabled.

Your connection is working correctly.

Vercel is working correctly.

  402: PAYMENT_REQUIRED
  Code: DEPLOYMENT_DISABLED
  ID: iad1::wsp5p-1723935766368-682bf9ce559d

If you are a visitor, contact the website owner or try again later.

If you are the owner, please read this documentation section.

> We highly recommend using Chrome!

Er... what does this mean? Firefox is not supported? If so, the author should just say that.

Ah, yes, the web: Infinitely cross platform and portable, except "this website will only work if you run the js with this specific js interpreter, and also we dont know how to do css so we used very platform specific css, and also our html is not complaint but Chrome doesn't care, and also... but its cross platform. Its the web, it runs anywhere!"

But who is to blame? I, the one who has amount x of time and wants to reach the maximum amount of people? Or the browser vendors for just doing the bare minimum to be compatible with each other but nothing more. The browser vendors do have a lot more manpower (and money) than me…

Firefox is the libre alternative struggling to compete with the Google behemoth which adds things to its browser even faster than they appear in the standard. Safari is the underfunded child of a corporation as wealthy as Google. It is mainly the first that motivates web developer solidarity.

Its struggling in part because it decided it needed to do a bunch of non browser things.

Firefox isn't really making enough in donations to maintain a major piece of web infrastructure. So it gets search revenue from Google, which people complain about (and may not be long term sustainable). So they go make other paid for things looking for revenue, which people complain about.

The complaint is about manhours.

Maybe the search money dont pay the bills but they definitely squandered their improvements

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

It's a little more nuanced than that.

If the user donations aren’t enough, surely their main revenue source—the 100s of millions of dollars they get from Google—is? Or do they need billions just to maintain a competent browser?

Who was to blame for the Internet Explorer monopoly? This is just the same thing again.

How difficult is it to test your site on the 3 major browser engines? I have done some web development before and when I'm on linux, I just test my site with chromium, firefox, and epiphany.

I think the onus is on the developer to use standards that are well supported and to try to avoid standards like webUSB that are niche. To use semantic HTML and such so that the website fails in a more useful way to the end user when the standards aren't supported.

> How difficult is it to test your site on the 3 major browser engines?

Given that one of those 3 requires sending thousands of dollars a year to Apple, I'd say "very".

Also, given that Google is a monopoly, I do place the onus on them to at minimum warn developers that they are deviating from well supported standards.

Mac mini is less than $500. And you can use it for years. Thousands of dollars a year is this around 10 times too high a figure.

$500 is a lot of money even for a west coast SWE and prohibitive in many areas.

That's true but the comment I replied to talked about thousands/year when in fact it is hundreds/year.

Epiphany uses the same rendering engine as Safari. It is FOSS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Web

Unless it's due to Firefox not supporting some reasonable standard, it's Google's fault.

The only thing one can possibly blame on the developer is the wording.

Alas, broqs3rs are unable to do what every other universal run everywhete tech cannot do either.

This isn’t a very scathing point when it comes to hobby projects where someone has limited time to test in multiple configurations, so they recommend the one they use when they developed it.

They chose to publicize their hobby project and put it in front of a bunch of people it doesn't work for, they can expect criticism from people doesn't work for.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to admire the work that has been done here while also critiquing the mess that is our web.

Besides, it's not like this is a website anyway.

Yeah, exactly. They're not being assholes they're making minor suggestions. They requesting minor wording changes and how the thing says it doesn't work outside a chrome. If people aren't allowed to say that then people just aren't really allowed to say anything.

I would rather everything people make that runs in a browser work in every browser but I get that there have to be limits and that I'm not entitled to someone else's labor.

If 98% of your content works everywhere but you've only tested 100% in one browser, I think "highly recommended" is perfectly valid.

They didn’t publicize it, someone else posted it. They didn’t even know about it until they got a notification from Vercel from all the traffic. Check out the creator’s top level comment. It was just a hackathon project that got some unexpected attention.

this 100%

Either Firefox is not supported, or I don't understand what I'm supposed to do. Either way, I was confused.

I read this as "I had time to test it in Chrome so I can confirm it works in Chrome, but I don't have time or money to test on other browsers so I haven't specifically recommended those." Sounds totally reasonable.

> the author should just say that

the author did say that, just in different wording

chrome and firefox are not the only browsers

If you enjoy this kind of interaction with a narrator, I recommend the game "The Stanley Parable".

I'm just seeing ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS on Chrome & Brave on Android 14 - Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36

Same on Safari on iOS. Looks like desktop required?

Hey! We had to do some optimization and it might've turned down the website for some people temporarily.

Should be up now! Sorry for the inconvenience.

That's quite funny! I opened it on Brave for Android, switched to desktop view & got to the portion with the sword where it says "xO" on the screen & I can't proceed any further. Touching the screen has no noticeable effect & it doesn't prompt me to bring up the keyboard.

Bitdefender also popped up and warned me the site is risky, presumably due to what the code is doing. I scanned it on Virustotal & URLVoid and nothing was showing up there. It allowed me to proceed, however.

Web Protection by Bitdefender Untrusted page blocked for your protection http://thereisnoweb.site

Untrusted pages exhibit suspicious behavior or particularities we deem risky, therefore you should avoid accessing them to keep your data unharmed,.

We had to compress assets and optimize the code so I stop using so much File Transfer Data. In about 36 hours I used 1.77TB of this data and when I saw the bill I almost got a heart attack.

But Lee saved me! He is working for Vercel and emailed me exactly when I needed him to assist me. I'll be grateful to him forever.

So yeah, this was the reason it was down. Not sure why Bitdefender deems the website risky. Maybe it's temporary..

Seemingly inspired by There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension

Strongly inspired. That non-game is actually done exceptionally pretty well for something which could work even as a 5min gimmick.

Not only that, something which did work as a five minute gimmick! I remember playing the original "There is no game" on Kongregate back in high school.

Was going to look into non-website code to see what shenanigans are they doing that are not compatible with "other browsers". As expected, someone already beat me to it and created a PR: https://github.com/AndreiBalan-dev/there-is-no-website/pull/...

Formerly no content on Firefox 128.0 PC and Firefox Android, now

< HTTP/2 308 < date: Sun, 18 Aug 2024 00:13:45 GMT < content-type: text/plain < location: https://www.thereisnoweb.site/ < refresh: 0;url=https://www.thereisnoweb.site/

regardless of HTTP version

How did you create the voice? It sounds amazing! Is this a real person speaking or computer generated?

Is that an AI'd David Attenborough? Did they get permission to use his voice?

Cool, it works on Firefox but not on Safari for iPhone. The volume change of the Rick Roll song at the end is predefined. I thought for a second it was automatic once the narrator spoke, which would be cool!

Amazing suggestion! Updated now :D Thank you!

I like this concept. It sort of reminds me of the vibe from the game Portal.

Haha, I was wondering how the author did subtitles for the text to speech. Turns out they painstakingly hard-coded every one: https://github.com/AndreiBalan-dev/there-is-no-website/blob/...

I'm not even disappointed, I'm impressed! That must have been a lot of work.

Thanks for the subtitles. I am Deaf.

There definitely appears to be no website. Just “TOO MANY REDIRECTS”.

Sorry for breaking your website but the play button didn't work so...

Also it looks like it expects a 16x9 aspect ratio or things can get stuck off screen.

On Chrome and Edge, I see: "This page isn’t working right nowwww.thereisnoweb.site redirected you too many times."

The audio took a while to load due to network hiccups, and suddently it started playing all sound bits at the same time

Aargh, you got me. But too bad, I enjoy the heck out of hearing the "meows" at the end ;)

It's down? Or is it supposed to say that this deployment us disabled due to lacking payment?

It's temporarily down while I migrate servers. I almost went bankrupt, glad I checked and stopped in time.

It's back!

Hey, I'm on the team at Vercel. I see a few changes you can make to your app to help you stay within the free tier limits. Sent you an email.

You're my hero!

That was fantastic. The voice host really made the vibe!

Cookie is difficult (

Was easier to use enter + space, rather than a trackpad.

I opened console and did something like:

    setInterval(() => document.querySelector('button').click(), 100)

In Chrome, you can simply click, hold, and hold enter when releasing click.

In mobile it's impossible

With a touchpad, I can get 12 clicks per second without straining myself by alternating between two fingers.

Just hold down enter.

love this. it feels like the Stanley Parable! great job!

It's a React powered feat of minimalism!

worked fine for me in firefox

There is no game was one of my favourite online games as a kid. It's cool to see it in another form

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