The Return of the 90s Web - <AUTHOR> https://mxb.dev/blog/the-return-of-the-90s-web/ <comment><USER2> What I miss most from the early days of the Internet is the content. It was all created with love.

My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publishing kept all but the most determined people from creating content. As a result, the little content that was out there was usually good.

With today's monetized blogs, it is often content for content's sake. People don't try, or they write about topics which they are not really interested in, but did just to have a new post. Or often the writing is bad.

Maybe today's problem isn't the blogs, but the SEO that puts the crap blogs at the top of the search results. Or maybe I'm misremembering and the old content was crap too, or maybe my standards are higher than they were in my teenage years.

<comment><USER3> People are still creating great stuff along these lines - you just won't find it through Google or Facebook or most of Reddit. Complex, interesting hypertext creations and web sites are still everywhere. But try typing "interesting hypertext" into Google or Facebook and see where it gets you. You can't search for something that's off the beaten track.

This is where directories come back in. Check some of these out:

* [https://marijnflorence.neocities.org/linkroll/](https://marijnflorence.neocities.org/linkroll/)

* [https://neonaut.neocities.org/directory/](https://neonaut.neocities.org/directory/)

* [https://webring.xxiivv.com/](https://webring.xxiivv.com/) (which led me to this gem: [https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/](https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/))

Competing with Google in search has become an insurmountable task. Personal directories attack from the opposite direction (human curation, no algorithm) in a way that actually puts Google far behind. It's kind of exciting and unexpected.

<comment><USER4> What we really need is a new Google, built on open principles (decentralized / peer to peer, fully free software, backed by a nonprofit), and focused on indexing the long tail of insightful content that is neglected by Google because it lacks SEO, popularity, links, and other metrics that Google find interesting but we don't necessarily do.

<comment><USER5> For a long time I assumed that google indexed pretty much everything it, and it was only a question of providing a specific enough set of search terms to drag up older content.

But what you hint at might be more correct these days. They are running a reverse wayback machine in that anything not changed in the last year gets removed. If you click the advanced search its "updated within" and the max timeframe is a year.

In fact it seems the date range example doesn't even work: [https://developers.google.com/custom- search/docs/structured_...](https://developers.google.com/custom- search/docs/structured_data#page_dates)

If I fiddle with it, it returns a result, but I see an hit from just a few days ago at the top...

<comment><USER6> > They are running a reverse wayback machine in that anything not changed in > the last year gets removed.

Sometimes I _wish_ that were true! Try Googling for, say, PostgreSQL documentation and the top result will often be for a 10-year-old version of the software.

<comment><USER7> Nitpick, that's kind of a non example because the official Postgres docs let you swap versions more or less seamlessly. IME I will click the top result then click the correct version for my Postgres SE queries. 2 clicks, 0 scrolling.

<comment><USER8> You're right. I tend to click back, then revise my search to include the version, and then click the result, so Google gets the message that when I search for Postgres docs, I want the most recent version. I have no idea if this actually works, but I heard Google uses bounces to determine relevancy, so I thought it was worth a shot.

<comment><USER9> Might as well piss in the wind. The number of back-links from different sources probably has a much larger effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can't _wait_ for server-side rendering to take its place in the sun again.

There are many use cases for which a client-side framework like React is eesential.

But I feel the vast majority of use cases on the web would be better off with server-side rendering.

And...

There are issues of ethics here.

You are kidding yourself to an extent when you say that you are building a "client-side web app." It is essentially an application targeted at Google's application platform, Chromium. Sure, React (or whatever) runs on FF and Safari too. For now. Maybe not always. They are already second-class citizens on the web. They will probably be second-class citizens of _your_ client-side app unless your team has the resources to devote equal time and resources to non-Chromium browsers. Unless you work in a large shop, you probably don't.

Server-side rendering is not always the right choice, but I also do see it as a hedge against Google's, well, hegemony.

<comment><USER11> The less stuff on the server the better imo. Whenever I can get away with it I use a static site generator or I use vuejs with a json file containing all the data for the site. Being able to just drop a static set of files in to a webserver without any risk of security issues in my code is great. I also hate the tools for backend rendering since if you need any kind of interactivity it becomes so much easier if you had just built it all in vue/react with no downsides other than not running in someones cli web browser.

<comment><USER12> > Being able to just drop a static set of files in to a webserver without any > risk of security issues in my code is great.

What security risks are removed by using a client side app instead of a server side one?

<comment><USER11> No database, no code running on your system other than nginx which I trust a whole lot more than myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I recently watched the "Helvetica" documentary that was posted here a few days ago [0], where they briefly mention "Grunge Typography" [1], a seemingly dead- end branch of typography that, for some strange reason, became pretty popular for a short period of time.

After some years however, consensus amongst designers formed that what they've created was a pile of illegible garbage, and realized that there was no other way than completely dismiss that branch, go back to the roots, and evolve from a few steps back.

I feel the same kind of consensus is slowly forming around ideas like SPAs, client-side rendering and things like CSS-in-JS.

We saw the same happen with NoSQL and many other ideas before that.

We recently deployed an entire SaaS only using server-side rendering and htmx [2] to give it an SPA-like feel and immediate interactivity where needed. It was a pleasure to develop, it's snappy and we could actually rely on the Browser doing the heavy lifting for things like history, middle click, and not break stuff. I personally highly recommend it and see myself using this approach in many upcoming projects.

[0] [https://www.hustwit.com/helvetica/](https://www.hustwit.com/helvetica/)

[1] [https://www.theawl.com/2012/08/the-rise-and-fall-of- grunge-t...](https://www.theawl.com/2012/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-grunge- typography/)

[2] [https://htmx.org/](https://htmx.org/) (formerly "Intercooler")

<comment><USER14> I have fond memories of creating images with Grunge fonts in some pirated copy of Photoshop and then positioning them with HTML tables and Dreamweaver.

<comment><USER15> This is how I learned web development. Don't forget photoshopping the glossiest buttons possible. Not sure if that fad was before or after the grunge.

<comment><USER16> Gloss was a trend in the mid 2000s, if I remember correctly—around the same time that AJAX started becoming really popular

<comment><USER17> Web 2.0. Such a bright outlook in those days :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not a web developer but my girlfriend needed a website to show her photography work so I decided to make it for her.

It's the simplest thing in the world, basically just three columns with photo thumbnails and the only javascript is some simple image viewer to display the images full screen when you click the thumbnails.

It's really, really basic but I was impressed with the feedback I received from it, many people were impressed by how slick and fast it was. And indeed, I went looking for professional photographer websites and indeed, what a huge mess most of them are. Incredibly heavy framework for very basic functionality, splash screens to hide the loading times etc... It's the electron-app syndrome, it's simpler to do that way so who cares if it's like 5 orders of magnitude less efficient than it should be? Just download more RAM and bandwidth.

Mine is a bunch of m4 macros used to preprocess static HTML files, and a shell script that generates the thumbnails with image magic. I wonder if I could launch the new fad in the webdev community. What, you _still_ use React? That's _so_ 2019\. Try m4 instead, it's web-scale!

<comment><USER19> Can you give more details? I don't think I've ever heard of M4 before.

<comment><USER20> You probably already have m4 on your development machine:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_(computer_language)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_\(computer_language\))

<comment><USER21> OK, I'd never heard of this before and now I'm questioning why we have all these JS templating frameworks like Mustache, Pug[1], and the rest.

[1] I actually use this one and it's just fine - great, in fact - but seeing M4 does make me feel like a lot of people may have spent a lot of time reinventing a wheel.

<comment><USER18> I actually looked into some of these frameworks (in particular mustache but also a few others) before deciding to use m4. They were all either too complex or too limited (sometimes both!) for my use case.

M4 is old and clunky but it gets the job done without having to install half a trillion Node.js dependencies. I also know that my script will still work just fine 5 years from now (or even 50 years in all likelihood).

That being said, don't trash your favourite JS framework right away, while m4 is perfectly fine for simple tasks I don't even want to imagine the layers of opaque and recursive macros you'd end up having to maintain for any moderately complex project. It's like shell scripts, it's very convenient but it doesn't really scale.

<comment><USER21> > while m4 is perfectly fine for simple tasks I don't even want to imagine the > layers of opaque and recursive macros you'd end up having to maintain for > any moderately complex project

I'm not doing anything _too_ clever with Pug, but there are certainly a bunch of things that it makes quite easy that would otherwise be awkward or complex.

Lots of things work really nicely as well: includes, sections, configuration, and it certainly cuts down on typing. I'm absolutely _not_ contemplating a switch from Pug to M4.

I just find it interesting that there's this thing that's been hanging around for decades that would do at least a partial job and is still decent for simpler use cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm glad this is the case. I've been a Rails developer for close to 10 years now, but 3 or 4 years back I got sucked into the React world. I bought right in and my company quickly adopted the "React on Rails" pattern. Looking back, it was one of the worst professional decisions I've made in my career. Now we're back to server side rendering and StimulusJS on the front-end when needed. Productivity is way up, and developer happiness is way up. With new tools like [https://docs.stimulusreflex.com](https://docs.stimulusreflex.com) and [https://cableready.stimulusreflex.com](https://cableready.stimulusreflex.com) I'm very excited about what can be accomplished with minimal JS.

(Note: I still think React is an awesome library! I'm sure there are devs that are super productive with it too. It just wasn't the best fit for me and my company)

<comment><USER23> A company I contract to for backend and server stuff made the jump from static HTML to client side rendering with react. They did it because the consulting company they went to receommended it "because it was the future", and I am sure in no small part because that was what the consulting company specialised in.

It was the worst decision they have ever made. The site they ended up with was incredibly slow, and given the relatively few pages on the site you never really make for that initial load in time saved later.

It's also incredibly hard to write well, requires a special third party service to show _anything_ in Google and is incredibly hard to manage.

They don't realise this of course, and are now attempting to solve the management and initial load issues by splitting the app up into three distinct apps. It won't help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I really like the turbolinks approach - you simply write HTML and then include the script in your head tags. However, I'm still hooked on Markdown. So I am still prerendering HTML - and then doing the routing with Hyperapp. (See [https://href.cool/Tapes/Africa](https://href.cool/Tapes/Africa) for an example - you get a prerendered static HTML page, but it uses JavaScript from there to render the other pages.)

The ultimate approach is Beaker Browser though. You can actually just write your whole site in Markdown (/index.md, /posts/batman-review.md, /posts/covid- resources.md) and then write a nice wrapper for them at /.ui/ui.html. This means you can edit posts with the built-in editor - and people can 'view source' to see your original Markdown! It's like going beyond the 90s on an alternate timeline.

(A sample of this is this wiki: hyper://1c6d8c9e2bca71b63f5219d668b0886e4ee2814a818ad1ea179632f419ed29c4/. Hit the 'Editor' button to see the Markdown source.)

<comment><USER24> I kinda went down the same path to generate my site. I had a static generator, which worked as most static generators, being a standalone program, and moved to having a python script (and it's .venv) in the root folder of my content, that has markdown, that converts it to a HTML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Schopenhauer's 19th century essay "On Authorship" has been a personal fave since discovering it last year:

 _Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little...._

[https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10714/10714-h/10714-h.htm#li...](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10714/10714-h/10714-h.htm#link2H_4_0003)

Brain Pickings articulates my reasons well, though really, just read the source:

[https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/13/schopenhauer-on- aut...](https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/13/schopenhauer-on-authorship/)

<comment><USER26> Yes, the joke is that unemployment benefits are the real Endowment for the Arts. One wonders if we would have a healthier society if those who are capable of creating great art could do so by being freed up from financial constraints.

<comment><USER27> We would also play better golf. Still keen to subsidise it?

<comment><USER26> The "Player of Games" by Ian M Banks takes place in a far-future society in which the abundance is so high that many people do pass the time playing games or whatever else enriches their lives. The question is: since we long since passed the point at which most people could work one day a week and maintain the level of abundance that existed in the 1960s, is that the society that we want to live in?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> My iPad is 10 years old and there are websites that bring it to its knees, especially mobile.twitter.com links. I don't click them anymore, it's too frustrating. Maybe web devs should be given low-end machines to work on so they can experience what their non-desktop users experience. The whole 'mobile web' distinction really shouldn't need to exist, my iPad isn't a mobile phone from 2005.

<comment><USER29> If your iPad is 10 years old, then it's an original iPad. The original iPad received its last update 8 years ago. I really enjoyed my launch day original iPad — it was incredible, just because it was such a new experience, but the hardware was severely underpowered even for the time. Laptops from 2010 are probably much better equipped to browse the web today than that 2010 iPad.

It just seems very idealistic to expect most websites to cater to a browser that hasn't received an update in 8 years running on a processor that has a fraction of the power of any Raspberry Pi 2 or above.

Modern iPads are served the "real" web by default, further emphasizing why you would benefit from upgrading at least once a decade.

<comment><USER30> A 1 GHz Cortex-8 is a ton of computing power. The proof of this is iOS itself. When you bring the GPU into the mix, it's obviously capable of a lot as an operating system. There are no problems displaying high resolution static content and video content on an iPad. But around the same time, it became fashionable to start rendering static content on the fly, maybe inserting some not-so-static content around it to justify this choice.

Add in advertising. And a browser that you might have trouble controlling script execution on.

Add in tracking. Remember that story about how eBay fingerprints your browser in part by mapping the open websockets you have? That costs power and cycles. And the cookies have been piling up since the 90s.

Speaking of storage, it's now much more common to use localStorage. Now anyone with a website on the internet can store appreciable amounts of stuff on your computer if you visit their website. And they can read and write that storage as much as they want while you're on their site, without regard for your computer's performance.

And all of this is just considered normal and regular. This isn't even getting towards abusive behaviour like running a crypto miner in a browser or something. This is just web applications continually expanding their resource entitlements.

The web is a great honking tire fire. Many articles and books have been written about this, many of them are summarily dismissed by web developers as ivory tower nonsense. But the trajectory of system requirements for displaying mainly-text documents is growing at an unsustainable pace, and there is eventually going to be some kind of reckoning.

I have a $3000 1 year old laptop, and sometimes slack gets so slow I have to kill the browser process and start over again. The issue is not hardware.

<comment><USER31> >I have a $3000 1 year old laptop, and sometimes slack gets so slow I have to kill the browser process and start over again. The issue is not hardware.

Keep in mind, the 1st gen iPad was single core and only had 256MB of RAM, which was the same RAM capacity as the then current iPod touch. Compare it to any PC with a single core Intel CPU and the experience will be largely the same, except of course the Intel CPU will require x10 more energy to run.

And yes, it did have a really great CPU for it's time. It's core CPU architecture remained largely unchanged for 2 more generations. The iPad 2 added an extra core (A5), and with the iPad 3rd gen, Apple gave it more GPU power in the SoC (A5X).

<comment><USER32> The issue is that when the GP's iPad was new, it didn't have many problems browsing the web. I know mine did not. Outside of Flash-using sites or extreme JavaScript beasts the original iPad was a pretty capable web browsing machine.

The web has regressed when an old iPad (or PC) can no longer reliably view it. It's not like words got harder to display in the intervening decade.

A blog post, news article, or a tweet shouldn't require a quad core CPU and gigabytes of RAM to be readable.

<comment><USER29> > The issue is that when the GP's iPad was new, it didn't have many problems > browsing the web. I know mine did not.

Those are some rose colored glasses. The first page (technobuffalo) loaded in this video takes 10 to 15 seconds:

[https://youtu.be/caTUPKJ5Zfo](https://youtu.be/caTUPKJ5Zfo)

Based on what was said, that page had already been loaded once, and it still took that long.

Loading a Google Search took only about two seconds, because of how extremely minimal and optimized the search page was back then.

Loading The NY Times took about 8 to 12 seconds, depending on where you draw the line.

So, at the time, maybe we were used to webpages taking a while to load on mobile devices, and it seemed very reasonable. I'm sure there were some extremely simple websites that loaded quickly, but The NY Times was one that Apple promoted heavily at the time (apparently) as demonstrating what a good experience the iPad browser was.

Nowadays, we hold the web and our devices to much higher performance standards.

It's not an apples to apples comparison because the content is entirely different, but the context of this thread is that modern websites are significantly harder to load and render.

Even though content is supposedly much more resource intensive today, my 2018 iPad Pro loaded the technobuffalo home page initially in less than 3 seconds, and subsequent page clicks are even faster.

This iPad loads google search results even faster than the original iPad.

This iPad loads the New York Times in under 3 seconds, with subsequent page clicks taking the same or less time.

Based on the numbers, a contemporaneous 2010 iPad was 3x to 5x slower at browsing the 2010 web than my 2018 iPad is when it comes to browsing the 2020 web, and that's a roughly two year old iPad design, so it should be even more at a disadvantage. My iPad is also rendering more than 5x as many pixels while doing that.

In conclusion, the original iPad was severely underpowered.

> A blog post, news article, or a tweet shouldn't require a quad core CPU and > gigabytes of RAM to be readable.

Conceptually, I agree, but every image and video we use for content in websites now is significantly higher resolution and quality than they were back then. If you just want to read text, then you're correct.

<comment><USER32> Page load times are a trailing indicator for web performance, they're not really the core issue I'm talking about. The original iPad could render even large HTML documents at a usable speed, including styles and inline images. Once a page was loaded and rendered the scrolling, tapping links, and interacting with forms was all usable fast. Even while the content was loading you could interact with the page.

The video you linked _showed_ this capability. That TechnoBuffalo page was a pathological case for the iPad rendering and it was still interactive fairly quickly even if all of the resources weren't finished loading. I had the original iPad and browsing worked just fine on it. Even when pages took a long (multiple seconds) time to load they were scrollable and interactive. I could _read_ the content as everything loaded.

The issue today is there's no page to start rendering in the bloated JavaScript way of the world. The HTML received from the server is just a reference to load all the JavaScript which needs to parse and execute _then_ fetches and renders the content. A relatively low powered device, like the original iPad, needs to do vastly more work to display even just text content than a static HTML document.

It's not shocking that your modern iPad renders pages faster than the model released a decade prior. Not only does it have far more power and memory but the network (both last mile and far end) is faster. It's also got an extra decade of development on WebKit. The web is more bloated but the modern iPad has ramped up its power to compensate.

Look at Reddit versus old.reddit.com. The "modern" Reddit page has poor interactivity even on my current iPad. The old.reddit.com site, which is similar in complexity to 2010's Reddit, renders damn near instantly and has no interactivity issues.

> Conceptually, I agree, but every image and video we use for content in > websites now is significantly higher resolution and quality than they were > back then. If you just want to read text, then you're correct.

Using huge images and video for "content" is part of the problem. Images have been used on the web since Mosaic, older devices can handle inline images just fine. It's the auto playing video ads and tens of megabytes of JavaScript executing to display a dozen paragraphs of text that's problematic.

<comment><USER29> > It's not shocking that your modern iPad renders pages faster than the model > released a decade prior. Not only does it have far more power and memory but > the network (both last mile and far end) is faster. It's also got an extra > decade of development on WebKit. The web is more bloated but the modern iPad > has ramped up its power to compensate.

The main point was that the 2010 iPad was being given the most favorable conditions, and it still lost horribly, because even compared to contemporaneous devices, it was very underpowered, unlike current iPads:

\- your claim is that websites are substantially heavier now (which I agree), putting the 2018 iPad at a disadvantage

\- the 2010 iPad was browsing early 2010 websites in that video, so we've had 10 years of bloatification since then

\- the 2018 iPad Pro is browsing 2020 websites, websites built years after it was released, so surely more "bloated" than they were in 2018

\- being 2010 websites, they were probably much simpler to render

\- the 2010 iPad's screen had 5x fewer pixels to contend with

Nowhere was I saying that the 2010 iPad was super slow to render 2020 webpages in all their bloaty goodness. _That_ would be an _obvious_ conclusion. If the 2010 iPad's performance was so good at the time, but only became slower as the web became much more bloated, why was it still so much slower at browsing 2010 websites than my 2018 iPad is at browsing 2020 websites?

The 2010 iPad was actually slow from the beginning, as the video proves. Since it was slow back then, it shouldn't be surprising that it's slower and more painful now that websites want to support higher resolution experiences by default. Yes, they could put effort into giving old devices a lower res experience, but why? That old browser is one giant security vulnerability at this point, and no one should be browsing any websites they don't control on that thing.

Even with all those advantages being in the 2010 iPad's court, it was still 3x to 5x slower than a 2018 iPad browsing 2020 websites at 5x the resolution. This is not even a 2020 iPad Pro -- this is a 2018 iPad Pro. Imagine how much worse a 2008 iPad would have been at browsing 2010 websites, if it had existed.

You say that it's "not shocking" that they ramped up the power so it can browse better, but the point is that we're loading _substantially_ heavier websites today _significantly_ faster.

How is that possible? Because the 2010 iPad was _severely underpowered_. If it had been running on a chip that was equivalent to laptop processors of the era (as my iPad Pro's chip is), then it would likely have loaded the 2010 websites about as quickly as my iPad is loading 2020 websites.

> Once a page was loaded and rendered the scrolling, tapping links, and > interacting with forms was all usable fast. Even while the content was > loading you could interact with the page.

Yes, it's very impressive how much interactivity Apple was able to give the 2010 iPad with its really terrible processor, once the loading finished.

That interactivity isn't because the chip was any good. I remember very clearly that it was because you were basically scaling a 1024x768 PNG while you zoomed in and out. Once you let go, the iPad would take a second to re- render the page at the new zoom level, but you were stuck staring at a blurry image for a second after zooming in. The GPU was really good at scaling a small image up and down. The CPU was not so good at rendering websites.

It was also very easy at the time to scroll past the end of the pre-rendered image buffer, and you would just stare at a checkerboard while you waited on the iPad to catch up and render the missing content. iOS actually drastically limited the scrolling speed in Safari for many years to make it harder for you to get to the checkerboard, but it was still easy enough.

> Look at Reddit versus old.reddit.com. The "modern" Reddit page has poor > interactivity even on my current iPad. The old.reddit.com site, which is > similar in complexity to 2010's Reddit, renders damn near instantly and has > no interactivity issues.

New Reddit is one of the worst websites on the entire internet right now, if not actually the worst popular website in existence. I really don't understand how that hasn't been scrapped at this point. It's not representative of modern web experiences, except possibly in your mind. YouTube, The NY Times, Facebook, Amazon... these are all modern web experiences that work great on anything approaching reasonable hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This seems to be one developer's wishful thinking, without any evidence presented to back up the assertion. Pointing out "hey, here's a couple websites that do server side rendering" does not a trend make.

We're ripping out webflow, if anecdata counts for anything (it doesn't). Webflow occupies the barren middle ground of "too complicated for marketing people, too simple for technical people". I find it much easier to write html than to figure out how to get their UI to make the html I want.

<comment><USER34> GOV.UK is a good example of a mainstream site that's built in the traditional manner. It's actually a collection of hundreds (thousands) of separate services, the vast majority of which are rendered on the server and use JS only where necessary.

As there's no advertising or images on most pages they tend to be incredibly fast too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I really hope personal blogging becomes popular again!. Speaking of which, I still haven't found a really good alternative to the "horrible" WordPress for blogging. It has:

\- Integrated API, RSS

\- Tons of plugins

\- Accessibility, translations

\- Easy and powerful editor(Gutenberg)

\- Comments sections and forms w/ complete ownership and moderation

\- Easy data imports from multiple platforms.

\- Users and roles

\- 100% open source w/ GPL. You own your data

\- Extremely easy and cheap to host and move around.

I love modern tooling and git based workflows for all my project but my "static" 11ty/Gatsby.js blog doesn't provide all these features out of the box. Instead of writing, you end up reimplementing basic cms features.

<comment><USER36> Have you considered something like Ghost? ghost.org

<comment><USER35> Ghost looks great and very polished! For me though, it provides much less out of the box (no built-in comments etc). It's also harder to self host and manage and the hosted service costs 30$/month which is extremely pricey for an indie blog. 3rd party ecosystem for wordpress (plugins/themes) is huge. I can easily extend my blog to an e-commerce store, an online community etc.

<comment><USER37> > It's also harder to self host and manage

Eh, I disagree. The only difference is that it uses Node instead of PHP. You still hook it up to MySQL/MariaDB/SQLite and you're good to go.

Plus I consider its Members feature ([https://ghost.org/members/](https://ghost.org/members/)) to be a game- changer, though it's powered by Stripe, so you'll have to be in one of 39 countries supported by it to make it work without extensively hacking your theme.

<comment><USER35> That's a big difference. I can't use a cheap shared hosting and managing a VPS (os updates, database backups etc) is too much for a small blog. Node.js is fine but it turns out after all these years, php is still the king in crud,blog,cms type of application, which is the 99% of the websites out there.

As for the members feature, wordpress has tons of "membership" plugins. Still though, Ghost landing page for members[0] does a great job explaining why i need this. Excellent design and copywriting

[0] [https://ghost.org/members/](https://ghost.org/members/)

<comment><USER38> Hey! John from Ghost here :) here's a direct comparison of setting up self- hosted WP vs Ghost, just as a point of reference: [https://youtu.be/rMKNgV1gTHg](https://youtu.be/rMKNgV1gTHg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It never went away, those of us old fashioned devs on Java and .NET stacks, it has been our bread and butter for the last 20 years regarding Web stacks, SSR with some JavaScript on top.

I guess what it happening is the newer generations re-discovering that actually it makes sense to generate static content once, instead of redoing it in every client device across the globe.

</comment><comment><USER40> Social networks are failing us and we want independence and community. The web used to be that, then it turned into a gated gossip community.

</comment><comment><USER41> Funny that he started with the claim that the dancing baby gif wasn't coming back. Turns out, it's already back. [https://twitter.com/JArmstrongArty/status/122590192989894656...](https://twitter.com/JArmstrongArty/status/1225901929898946561)

</comment><comment><USER42> > Frontpage and Dreamweaver were big in the 90s because of their "What You See > Is What You Get" interface. People could set up a website without any coding > skills, just by dragging boxes and typing text in them. > > Of course they > soon found that there was still source code underneath, you just didn't see > it. And most of the time, that source code was a big heap of auto-generated > garbage - it ultimately failed to keep up with the requirements of the > modern web.

If you do not see the source code it doesn't matter if it is garbage or not or if it is following any "modern web requirements" or not - all it matters is if it does what you expect it to do. Besides, it is a bit of a hypocrisy nowadays to complain about the code underneath a WYSIWYG tool when many web developers use transpilers that target CSS, JavaScript and pretty much all sites rely on dynamically generated and altered HTML that doesn't let you make more sense on the final output than something like Frontpage or Dreamweaver would generate.

Sadly the closest thing i could find nowadays to something like a WYSIWYG site editor is Publii[0]. It suffers greatly from the 'developer has a huge screen so they assume everyone has a huge screen' syndrome and i really dislike pretty much all of the themes available for it (everything is too oversized). And it is an Electron app because of course it will be an Electron app despite not needing to be one (it doesn't offer full WYSIWYG functionality, only for the article editor which isn't any more advanced than Windows 95's WordPad and it relies on an external browser to show you the final site). But it does the job (i tried on a new attempt for a dev blog of mine[1]) even if i dislike how oversized everything is.

[0] [https://getpublii.com/](https://getpublii.com/)

[1] [http://runtimeterror.com/devlog/](http://runtimeterror.com/devlog/)

<comment><USER43> I first hardcoded kleinbottle.com with handwritten html; over 20+years, I've gone through several tools. One by one they've evaporated - Home Page, Front Page, GoLive, Dreamweaver 5. I'm now hobbling along with BlueGriffon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'd love to use a search engine that simply didn't index websites with moderate or excessive amounts of JavaScript, images, and video.

You wouldn't need AMP because it would load quickly, ads would be minimal, and the text content would probably be forced to be higher quality because it would have to stand on its own.

Does such a thing exist?

<comment><USER20> Even better. Blacklist all sites with ads. I'm guessing google will never implement that.

<comment><USER45> How would websites create revenue then? People are very unwilling to pay for online articles.

<comment><USER46> Maybe websites should stop spamming junk for SEO and don't rely on clickbait to create revenue? I am very happy to use adblockers and have very little sympathy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I've been playing around with this for several years now; building more or less elaborate frameworks for server side rendering and dividing the interface into separate pages.

I blame Seaside [0] for corrupting me. Never used it to build anything, but once the idea of building the user interface on the server was in my head there was no way back.

Though I have to admit I still find JSON really convenient for submissions compared to using fields for everything as it allows massaging the data on the way.

Besides that I've found the approach to be a total success. Pages load instantly, bookmarks and back buttons work as expected and most of the application stays on the server.

[0] [http://www.seaside.st/](http://www.seaside.st/)

</comment><comment><USER48> Webflow is touted as "the new Dreamweaver". Of course, it's "software as a service", about 3x as expensive as basic web hosting.

<comment><USER49> Can you self-host Webflow-generated content?

<comment><USER48> You have to pay $192/year before you can export what you created.

<comment><USER46> That's very expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Another point to this, I equate the modern fediverse with all the old message boards.

Message boards are still around but it used to be an integral part of web culture. They essentially took over from dial up BBS.

But now community boards have moved to cloud services like Discord. The self- hosted boards are still around in the shape of federated ActivityPub instances.

It makes a lot more sense than hosting an isolated island of PunBB or vBulletin.

I just hope more communities host their own small localized ActivityPub instance, using AP relays to create a vibrant fediverse.

</comment><comment><USER51> For a lot of internal corporate web applications, server side rendering is what makes most sense. These applications are always used from browsers on a company provided laptop. You don't need to worry about multiple frontends and "web scale"

Back in the day, it used be that internal apps were shitty to use, and had slow service layer code. But once the data got to the view layer, at least the pages rendered fast. Now with proliferation of SPAs, we have shitty user experience, slow backends and slow UI renders.

</comment><comment><USER52> Preloading on button-down, nice detail optimization. It's possible that you have to abort that request, but it will be the rare exception. It's my favorite thing I learned today.

<comment><USER53> See previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23203658](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23203658)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Wow, Hey.com has none of the lag that modern websites have. Is the email client as responsive?

<comment><USER55> It's created by Basecamp which makes Turbolinks [0], Turbolink iOS [1], and Turbolinks Android (deprecated) [2], so there's a good chance that snappiness you're seeing is due to those awesome tools! (In fact, this Github issue comment [3] seems to confirm that HEY uses Turbolinks.)

On a related note, really wish things had gone this direction. Instead, it feels like React, Angular, etc. re-created the backend in the frontend, so now for most apps you essentially have two backends plus one frontend to maintain. I think as soon as our frontends started requiring controllers and routes to work we should have been like, "Hey, wait a minute..." But I guess design folks tend to know JS, so I can see how that combo won.

My $0.02 from 5+ years in the industry is that you probably don't need React, but Godspeed if you think you do - just maintain extreme discipline or you'll end up with spaghetti code (esp. if contractors are involved) faster than you can blink.

Long-term, I hope things move back to sanity. React and company work OK for some problems, but 95% of websites/webapps can probably get by with either straight HTML/JS/CSS or server-side rendering/templating.

[0] [https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks](https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks)

[1] [https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks- ios](https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks-ios)

[2] [https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks- android](https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks-android)

[3] [https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks- android/issues/111#...](https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks- android/issues/111#issuecomment-631617956)

Edit: Formatting

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Actually it depends on the kind of website you'll build.

Some years ago, i made an app with Rails and turbolinks and some "tricks" to make ajax work smooth. The first version was built in 6 month, then i rebuilt the second version with React in 3 weeks !

The pain is in refactoring and adding new features as well as speed of development.

That's the day i discovered React. The way i develop Rails app is just make api json response to match mocked json on the React frontend, nothing more to think or trick!

There's a reason (or many reasons) I and many other chose React (or similar libraries/frameworks) to get the job done.

</comment><comment><USER57> One idea I've been thinking about building is sort of a hybrid SSR where you make use of server sent events to continually render more on the page based on the users interaction (most obvious would be scroller).

Of course I have yet to investigate how modern browsers render a never ending index.html, how I wouldnsend the client events and correspond them to the existing open original request, how this would scale to multiple hosts behind a load balacer (but maybe that's getting ahead of my self haha).

<comment><USER58> That's sorta the idea behind server-rendered Blazor. Components are rendered on the server and passed over to the client via websockets.

Unsurprisingly, input lag and scalability can be major obstacles, but I expect it to make large headwinds in enterprise apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> One of the things I say (when I think some poor bastard has no choice but to listen), is _"The September That Never Ended was the best thing to happen to the Web."_

That was what changed it from a niche community of geeks to a true "everyman's town square."

It was also the worst thing to happen to it. It heralded a tsunami of money and God-awful content.

Money tends to be a damoclean butterknife. It will spur tremendous growth and energy, and also reduce the moral structure to a septic tank.

I'm glad the BLINK tag is dead.

</comment><comment><USER60> Along these lines, does anyone have any recommendations for a service or framework to create a simple personal site? I just want a basic blog, project pages, and photo gallery. I use Jekyll at the moment to statically generate pages to host on github.io, but frankly, I don't have much webdev experience and I'd rather just have something work out of the box at this point.

<comment><USER61> I would say: start by doing pure HTML, then progressively work with PHP to include header.php/footer.php on every page. Then create helper functions for a few things you don't wanna repeat.

You'll be surprised by how good it feels to know your website from A to Z.

This is what I do for my own site: [https://www.juliendesrosiers.com/](https://www.juliendesrosiers.com/) . Almost every URL ends with an old-school .php for that very reason lol. But I like the fact that every time i want to modify something, I simply SSH into my dreamhost account and use vim to edit posts and pages. But om your case it could be [https://www.panic.com/coda/](https://www.panic.com/coda/) .

And if starting from nothing seem scary, you can always start with a basic themeforest theme, or a framework like Bootstrap. Having the html-css already done goes a long way.

<comment><USER62> This is exactly what I did a few weeks ago after getting fed up of Wordpress for my personal site. Static HTML pages and some php for the header the and the blog homepage. It means I need to write in plain HTML but that's fine, the only js is prism syntax highlighting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> If we're going back to the 90's let this be your reminder we still don't have something for web dev as easy to use as VB6.

<comment><USER64> We no longer have anything for the desktop as easy to use as VB6 (nor for mobile).

<comment><USER65> Plus ça change. :) I was just reading an article ("APL since 1978", [1]), which recounts the complaints of mainframe programmers when microcomputers were introduced in the mid-80s, because of how much harder it became to design application interfaces:

> Worse, the technical skill required to write applications suddenly increased > dramatically. You needed to know about networks, how to deal with the poor > reliability of shared files on a LAN — or how to construct client/server > components to achieve the security, performance, and reliability that you > needed. User interfaces, which were so simple on the mainframe, became an > absolute nightmare as an endless procession of new GUI frameworks and UI > "standards" appeared and then faded away.

[1] [https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386319](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386319)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> > at some point our kids might think frosted hair tips are totally cool

you shut your face sir! my hair was the BOMB when I was 14!!!

</comment><comment><USER67> I want a good webpage; -Clearly written like a Navy manual, -but using well made animated gifs alongside flat pictures, -with a few videos thrown into the mix, that are short and concise, no longer than 3minutes, -and short audio clips to learn to properly pronounce something.

</comment><comment><USER68> They need to bring back Gopher. It has a good chance to become very hipster today.

<comment><USER69> Gopher still exists. There is even a new protocol, which is similar to gopher: gopher://gemini.circumlunar.space

<comment><USER68> I have actually tried a gopher HN mirror. And it was an interesting experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I haven't even adopted the more modern JAMStack type techniques yet, and now this guy is saying those are old?! I still consider those closer to the holy grail; clients scale indefinitely, servers you still have to pay for.

</comment><comment><USER71> What I can confirm is that old fashioned html tags such as <fieldset> or <iframe> are coming back and are underrated. So much can be done with just plain html.

</comment><comment><USER72> I did get a chuckle out of a page extolling the virtues of 'html over the wire' asking me if I was

'interested in things like front-end dev and the JAMStack'

</comment><comment><USER73> Won't work, now there is one search engine and the first page is all ads and all pages are over optimized. No one will see any new sites or blogs generally.

</comment><comment><USER74> This is so adorable. I wish more people and companies were using/designing/serving web sites the way that was meant to be done.

</comment><comment><USER75> I've been counting down the days until it's okay again to use <tables> . I think I have a lot more counting to do ...

<comment><USER76> It's never been wrong to use <table> for its intended purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Why people miss the simple solution, off with the ads on with micro-payments. You like the content, pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER78> I was totally expecting the content of this post to be "return to html leading to JAMstack"

</comment><comment><USER79> This is a legitimate question apropos of OP's web ring: Who qualifies as a nerd of the 90s? Is it nerds born in the 90s or people who were nerds during the 90s?

</comment><comment><USER80> The indieweb is so great. I ultimately turned back off webmentions though because I was worried about GDPR liability, as well as wondered if people who liked my tweet actually intended to have their name and like appear on my website.

My site is otherwise marked up for the indieweb, I've got indieauth working, and it's a cool community.

</comment><comment><USER81> Serverless is the new CGI

</comment><comment><USER82> i'm getting a ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR in chrome?

</comment><comment><USER83> Good.

</comment><comment><USER84> swings and roundabouts

</comment><comment><USER85> please don't call it server-side-rendering. The http server was always meant to respond with hypertext content. Serving json is the oddity, not the other way around

<comment><USER86> For document-oriented stuff, you can serve HTML or plain text. For data- oriented stuff, I think that it is not so wrong to serve JSON, CSV, RDF, SQLite database, or whatever format it is, although such things should not be hidden from the user (especially if scripts are disabled); this is independent of whether or not there is also a HTML version of the data (if so, the HTML could be generated either ahead of time or on demand; which is best may depend on the situation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Maybe I'm missing something, the article isn't very clear. One of the reasons why we have front end apps pulling from an API is because it allows for interoperability.

The same API that serves data to the web browser can serve that data to mobile apps and to third parties as well.

The idea of bringing HTML rendering back on to the server just doesn't seem useful to me.

<comment><USER88> That's if you're making an application, sure, but on the web I view all sorts of sites and most of them are just styled text containers, maybe with an optional way to mutate things. HN, Reddit, News, recipes, forums, galleries, these are things I regularly consume that don't need APIs to return content. For applications, like Facebook, it's understandable, but if you don't spend all of your time in Social Media, then you probably are not really using an application.

<comment><USER72> You must use old.reddit.com

<comment><USER88> On mobile I just use a client that requests data from the API and renders it for me. On desktop, yes, for now, but I'm in the process of writing views that load faster and don't require a browser.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Beautiful Complexity of Naming Every Living Thing - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-scientists-name-everything <comment><USER2> Every Living Specie*

I'm sure we'd run out of names, unless we just re-use Dan a million times.</comment>


A Long Time Until the Economic New Normal - <AUTHOR> https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-long-time-until-the-economic-new-normal/ <comment><USER3> It seems people don't realize how much $6T is and the effects of that kind of money being injected into the economy. Consider the 2008 housing bubble and financial crisis which was ultimately corrected with two stimulus packages totaling less than $2T...that money turned the economy around, put the economy into the longest bull market in history, resulting in a record stock market and corporate profits.

Now its not to make this sound good, the 2008 crisis had real victims, millions lost jobs, never returned to the workforce and became homeless...but with the stimulus money in play those people were systematically swept under a rug and hidden from public. This was done through cooking the unemployment books (basically if you exhausted your unemployment benefits, the government no longer counts you as unemployed but removes you from the job market on the basis that you will likely not become employed again).

$6T is over 3x the 2008 stimulus packages and it will be spread to an even smaller group of people and a much more significant number of people will become unemployed (already over 20M) and they to will be swept under a rug in time and disappear from economic data when they exhaust their unemployment benefits...the rich will become richer and the government will go on to brag about the drastically falling unemployment numbers.

<comment><USER4> It's amazing how the unemployment rate gets treated as gospel in the media. I never see the actual jobless rate reported anywhere. Why is that?

The incentive for politicians to prop themselves up with the unemployment rate is clear. But why does the media never push back? Does "jobless" data - <USER2> is ACTUAL unemployment- not exist?

<comment><USER5> Of course the data exists. See eg. [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25TTUSM156S](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25TTUSM156S)

The issue people are talking about unemployment rate and not the joblessness rate is that people care about ability to get a job if you want one. The joblessness rate includes people who are looking for job but can't get any, but also people who are supported by their spouses, retirees, and people living on government benefits who are not looking for job, because they are disabled, too busy with childcare, or care for other people needing it, or ultimately too lazy and having too little self-respect to stop living on charity of others.

This wide aggregation makes it very difficult to understand what actually causes changes in it: are more people jobless because of expansion of disability benefits? Or maybe there was a surge of people retiring early? You need to look at other indicators to understand it. For example, good amount of growth of employment rate in recent years is a result of many people, who previously drew disability benefits to compensate them for their inability to work, actually going to work, once the work became better option than government check.

For this reason, unemployment rate is a better metric to look at, because it tells you something more useful and has better signal to noise ratio.

<comment><USER4> Sure I agree that the typically reported unemployment measure is best for measuring how easily people who want jobs can obtain them. However, so often this is touted not only as an indicator of the overall economy, but even the well-being of society. The categories of people you mention that shouldn't be counted... all of those people live in and have an effect on society. If we're worried about the economy, it seems like we would want to know how much of our population (not just job seekers) are working, and how many people depend on the system without employment. And if we're worried about aggregate well- being, a number that takes into account the massive prison population seems better.

I'm not saying that the common unemployment rate is useless. Only that it's over-used, and used to answer questions it has no business answering. It feels like we're sweeping a lot under the rug and everyone is playing along.

<comment><USER6> > The categories of people you mention that shouldn't be counted... all of > those people live in and have an effect on society.

Those people are counted. I'm not sure why you're flaming someone attempting to educate you about how they are counted. Hint: it takes more than one number, and, the government publishes more than one number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Strapline: "A full economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic is unlikely, and the new version of normal for work and organizations is further off than we think"

2nd paragraph: "...it is likely that full recovery of economic activity, including GDP growth, jobs, and unemployment, will take at least a year, and likely much longer."

At this point we are used to shoddy economic analysis and predictions that are so woolly as to be meaningless, but this article is in direct contradiction with itself. Surely MIT of all places could place a bit more rigor on its output.

<comment><USER8> To quote Randall Munroe ([https://xkcd.com/1052/](https://xkcd.com/1052/))

By dubbing Econ "Dismal Science"

adherents exaggerate;

The "Dismal"'s fine -- it's "Science" where

they patently prevaricate."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're in the fortunate position to have some capital during this crisis, this is an ideal time to start a soft-tech or low cost R&D intensive startup that can be seeded remotely. Competition will be largely wiped out relative to supply of dollars and plenty of market share will be there for the taking when the world opens back up for business. I imagine there will be a disproportionate number of big winners that were founded in 2020.

<comment><USER10> > to start a soft-tech or low cost R&D intensive startup that can be seeded > remotely

Can you unpack what you mean by that? I get the general gist of investing in the future, but think those are some interesting thoughts to explore.

<comment><USER9> I basically mean a tech product MVP that can be built from your garage (or a few remote garages) in a few months without a huge amount of capital.

So I'm not talking about hard-tech startups where social distancing and less investment capital will be affecting you, too (like automobiles or nuclear reactors), although if you are well positioned to build something in the crisis, then why not? But specifically, this is a tremendous opportunity for new software startups or hardware startups that can be built from off the shelf components.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The points made are fine insofar as they go. At the same time, the current economic situation is, very literally, unprecedented. It has aspects of a war, a natural disaster and a secular recession. Economists should try to estimate its effects, but in this case their predictions need to be taken with an extra large grain of salt.

<comment><USER12> How is it very literally unprecedented? Spanish flu had much deadlier properties, "work from home" wasn't even possible, there were no antibiotics and almost none of the modern med tech, yet there is no mention of a "1919 economic collapse". Death toll in the US was <700k, which is not great, but actually less than some of the insane apocalyptic predictions you hear about this time around, especially considering that in 100+ years we probably improved just a bit.

So I'd say it looks very much "precedented", and during the last precedent the situation was much much worse, and the world moved on just fine for another decade after that.

<comment><USER13> Spanish flu was very closely intertwined with the war, because of which people were kept in the dark almost everywhere. Lack of reporting translates to lack of awareness of the pandemic which translates to people working and shopping fearlessly.

The difference now is that people know there's a pandemic, and many would be averse to go out working, or shopping even though the scale is much lower than that of Spanish flu.

Random tidbit:. It's named Spanish flu because that's one of the few places where it was reported, because it wasn't involved in ww1 and had no reason to shut down the press. Everyone thought the flu epidemic was in Spain.

<comment><USER14> During the Spanish flu pandemic, entire cities and towns would get sick and everything would stop. There were also shelter in place orders given during this time. 1918 wasn't the dark ages, we had telephones and radios. People knew what was happening.

<comment><USER15> > and radios

According to wikipedia first news on radio came in 1920.

"The first radio news program was broadcast August 31, 1920 by station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan."

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio#20th_century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio#20th_century)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's a succinct and plausible set of positions held by the author, but I'm not sure this one holds up:

"The disruptions in face-to-face work will be a drag on economic efficiency, leading to slower growth in revenues, lower profit margins, and reduced cash flow."

Maybe I've been doing business remote/virtual for so long already that I see actual face-to-face as the economic inefficiency more often than not. Earlier, the author espouses the obvious benefits of being in person, but I think those have been outweighed by the trade-offs for many years already. What many will simply need to adapt to going forward is the type of communication differences required for successful remote/virtual/verbal interactions.

Quality listening skills and straight talk are more important than ever!

<comment><USER17> I suspect that we here on HN may suffer from selection bias, in that many of us do work that is most amenable to moving to remote.

There is also an issue of transition, where there plausibly is quite an efficiency lag (months, at least) before people become get really set up, even assuming they are able to be as (or more) efficient.

<comment><USER18> When it comes to actually building a product there is definitely face to face benefits.

However, I'd point out that many software companies have far more sales people than engineers. There has been this expectation that salespeople should fly out, and have meetings, meals, and expensive drinks with the companies they sell to. Now magically that's all vanished, but sales are still happening. The cost of some sales efforts has presumably plummeted.

<comment><USER19> The problem with your comment is that you're forgetting all sales are remote now.

Once the lockdown is over, I wouldn't bet on the company that keeps doing remote sales versus the company doing normal face to face sales.

<comment><USER18> I'm not forgetting. That's my point. The sales are remote, and thus cheaper. No plane flights, no crazy expensive wine at dinner with customer.

And sure, they'll revert back, losing the efficiency gains once the government stops accidentally intervening in sales practices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> IMO things aren't that bad. Yes restaurants and some small businesses are suffering, but look, people are cooking at home more, spending time with family, being healthier.

People don't need cosmetics or new clothes or cars or gasoline, and some luxury flashy items take a hit because there's no way to really flaunt your wealth inside your own home. People aren't traveling as much, tourist hotspots that were getting trashed from so much traffic are getting a reprieve. People take joy in simple mundane things like boiling some tea or tending to some house plants instead of enduring a miserable struggle chasing their wildest ambitions fueled by what they see on social media. People who work from home or remote are no longer second class citizens, they are now first class citizens just like everyone else who is also working from home. And a result of this, I find people are more tolerable, and I even find myself caring more about the plight of homeless people, because these are the times when one really needs a home more than ever.

Not every business can survive this, but most can if they are built with the assumption that this is the new normal. That's how you protect yourself.

Fuck man, this is a way better world, and frankly I'm not sure I really want to go back to what we used to have. I actually get depressed thinking this will all go away and I'll never experience anything like this again in my life. I hope the pandemic lasts long enough to make some of these things permanent.

<comment><USER21> > I hope the pandemic lasts long enough to make some of these things > permanent.

PEOPLE ARE DYING. This is A DISASTER. Have some fucking compassion, good grief.

<comment><USER22> People die every day. Malnutrition has killed more people this year than covid. Where's your perpetual handwringing for those in impoverished far off countries? Or are you just emotional because it's YOUR people dying right now?

Keep your myopic melodrama to yourself.

<comment><USER23> This is the most out of touch, bizzare, sad, and disgusting comment I have read yet regarding this pandemic. You should be ashamed of yourself.

<comment><USER24> Please don't.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you would like to try to get "the new normal" to show up faster, I suggest you focus on solutions.

If you want to be part of the solution and are looking for a startup idea, I have tried repeatedly over the years to suggest that we can try to develop gig work platforms that are actually a good deal for the worker. I work for such a platform and I've written about that (again) here:

[https://writepay.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-textbroker- solutio...](https://writepay.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-textbroker- solution.html)

Discussed on HN and some of the comments there are important: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22734447](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22734447)

Edit: And if you do create a gig work platform based roughly on the Textbroker model, you are invited to post the announcement to r/GigWorks. I'm the mod there.

</comment><comment><USER26> My stupid country just went back to pre-2008 levels, and now this. My entire adult life is basically one long period of stagnation.

<comment><USER27> The US spends $7 for seniors for every $1 they spend on minors.[0]

[0] [https://www.brookings.edu/wp- content/uploads/2016/07/1_how_m...](https://www.brookings.edu/wp- content/uploads/2016/07/1_how_much_isaacs.pdf)

<comment><USER28> I'm not an expert, but I'd imagine that's related to seniors voting much more reliably than the youth.

<comment><USER29> Darn those millenials, they shouldn't have had a smaller voting-block, shouldn't have spent so much time in low paying hourly positions with no time off, and should have voted before they were 18! /s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> We could be about to see a massive re-pricing in goods & services, salaries, rent, commodities with disrupted supply chains, food, wipe out of businesses no longer viable, new business models suddenly viable

Or not, but if not, why not?

<comment><USER31> I am tempted to think of crises like these to be the economic equivalent of a forest fire. It makes way for new vegetation to grow and is part of the normal cycle of many forests.

<comment><USER32> I disagree. It's more of a drought where the smaller trees with low reserves die out, and in the recovery the large trees grow even larger and take up the remaining canopy space.

The economic consequences of the pandemic will make things fundamentally worse for the average person. The wealthiest entities will accumulate even more wealth, because they have the resources to survive, to petition the government for assistance over smaller players, and to buy out the leftover pieces of those who couldn't survive. In the end, the majority of the bailout will go to the rich, because they are the ones with the bargaining power. The result is lower competition, which is worse for almost everybody.

The only upside could be a shifting technological landscape. Work-from-home and physical distancing could create demand for new solutions which would be capitalized by smaller, agile companies, creating new competition. That's what I'm hoping for anyway.

EDIT: I don't know if that's how a drought actually works. The demand for new tech is already here, it's a question of whether it will stay long-term.

<comment><USER31> In many forest fires, the underbrush burns but the canopy remains intact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Everyone" says and knows it is going to be bad economically. But thats typical behavior when problems are coming to an end. Is it so? I don't see how we are at the end of those unrealized problems.

Or may be we are looking at an upcoming false silver lining before the real economical problems show up.

</comment><comment><USER34> TFA ignores how much shorter everyone's attention span is in 2020 vs. 1930.

</comment><comment><USER35> Predictions are hard. Especially about the future.

</comment><comment><USER36> > The first is that it overlooks the negative impacts on consumer sentiment > and spending, which are likely to persist for many months, if not years.

I sense a kind of broken-window fallacy here. If consumers want to spend less on things they don't essentially need, then why is that a problem? Isn't that a net-win for everybody (since what people don't want doesn't need to be produced) and the planet (for obvious reasons)?

<comment><USER37> That's getting at fundamental problem in our economics, where it's considered a good thing that some wealthy people will buy over a 100 pairs of sneakers and 3 or more IPhones in only a few years. Buying lots of things, barely using them, and then sending it all to landfill is fantastic for GDP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> People saying 6 trillion should remember that the assets being bought are probably worth more than zero but less than one so actually amount is in between the two

</comment><comment><USER39> Regarding the economy, we are basically in the woods. It can go either way, the economy might recover or it may not, we have limited understanding and control. Same regarding the pandemic: we might find a vaccine or another solution, or the virus might mutate into something more deadlier. Again, limited control. We should be more scared about this. Despite our degree of civilization development, we are still clowns pretending we understand and control what happens around us.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think it's incorrect to blame the current depression entirely on Covid-19. Economists have been predicting a depression by the end of 2020 or 2021 for a while - on HN I remember lots of discussions around the inverted yield curve. There's been a tech bubble for the past couple of years, and covid was just a catalyst for this bubble popping.

<comment><USER41> Even if there was a tech bubble, what's the evidence of that bubble having affected the entire economy to that degree? This sounds exaggerated.

<comment><USER42> There are lots of bubbles going on all at once. The tech bubble is one thing, but the bubbles in China being popped right now are much more significant, on the scale of the great Japan bust that set the world into recession in the late 1980s. It isn't weird that many bubbles would pop during the same incident of stress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm beginning to think about it in a new way. The economy hasn't changed since we were all OK with it six months ago:

* No surplus sufficient to ride out a crisis

* No safety net

* Barely functioning public health system

* No preparation for a major disease outbreak

* Etc.

It's the same economy today, but slightly different operating mode, like a car with the same engine but in a different gear. I'm certainly hoping for a new normal.

</comment><comment><USER44> The source is credible, but looking rationally at this, the cause of the interrupted economic flow was not some underlying or unstable monetary/country factor.

This is a self-induced economic freeze.

Yes, an unfreeze won't immediately revive the world, because some capacities will have been lost along the way. But once demand ramps back up, you'll have entrepreneurial individuals and companies findings extraordinary ways to meet that rising demand, including who knows, repurchasing/rebuilding the required capacities :)

</comment><comment><USER45> While I agree that it will take longer (and wind up different looking) to full recovery, having governments and business plan for the next pandemic will not happen. Short sighted people do not waste time on long term thinking.

<comment><USER46> I'd also point out that planning for "high risk" events like this is not something small to medium size businesses should be doing. Government yes, but I don't expect my mexican restaurant to have a plan in case of a global pandemic :). Just like I don't expect them to hedge pork futures so my pork tamales don't go up 8 cents.

Gov is insurance and I want them to be building resilience into the system. That is done with proper unemployment systems that can help people get back to work, but also are ready to go in cases like this or recessions. The delay to pay people is crazy. The EU and Canadian unemployment systems are designed for this more than the American system and it is showing.

<comment><USER47> A Global Pandemic is NOT A BLACK SWAN. As matter of FACT, it was predicted by Taleb and according to him it is a WHITE SWAN.

The true problem here is the so called Risk "experts" do not understand Risk, and that is the core problem.

<comment><USER48> The CDC had a pandemic team, they were let go. California had a reserve of ventilators, which were liquidated due to "budget reasons".

The problem isn't risk experts; the problem is that government representatives elected have no domain expertise nor leadership fortitude to put domain experts into the driver's seat when the situation dictates.

China, for all its failings, gets this right. Their leadership is more STEM and less lawyers and politicians.

<comment><USER49> China spent 3-4 weeks covering up evidence of human to human transmission of the virus (Singapore started screening travelers Jan 3 due to a pneumonia cluster in Wuhan; China started acting Jan 22...).

That's not getting it right, it's a different type of shit show.

<comment><USER50> Something doesn't stack up here. If China's response is such a shit show why don't they have widespread transmission around the country? The US and Europe have had more warning than Chinese regions, but have been far less effective at managing the disease.

<comment><USER49> Their reaction to the massive outbreak has been effective.

My point is that they reacted the second half of January, after trying to cover up the outbreak for weeks/months. If the local and regional officials had acted effectively in late December, there might not be a global pandemic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> How can they say nobody knew? 170+ CEO's of major corporations resigned right before the outbreak.

Something is fishy with the current narrative.

<comment><USER23> Not that I find that comment totally unbelievable, but citation please?

<comment><USER52> He is correct. "October's 172 departures is the most in any month in the last 15 years." (that's Oct 2019, article from Nov)

[https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/why-have- more...](https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/why-have- more-1-000-ceos-left-their-post-past-n1076201)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> The articles states as fact there will be negative impacts on long term consumer sentiment and spending without really providing any evidence.

Most Americans are about to receive a $1200 check and unemployment benefits that pay more than their job did for the next 6 months. I don't think consumer spending is going anywhere soon.

<comment><USER45> How many people on a single $1200 check and unemployment will go out and buy a car, a house, a washing machine or visit a Disney park?

<comment><USER54> For many people outside the highly paid HN reading bubble that's a huge windfall.

<comment><USER55> It's really not. Even in a low cost of living area, $1.2K is about one month of basic living expenses.

<comment><USER56> ...which is a huge windfall.

Has anyone on here ever actually been poor before? Genuinely curious.

<comment> frosted-flakes I grew up in a poor family. Not poor enough that we ever went hungry, but that was partly because of the generosity of friends/family who would sometimes buy us groceries. Us kids certainly never got new clothes (there was a steady stream of hand-me-downs from the older kids and other families we knew).

Being self-employed, my dad's income was irregular and often came in $5000 chunks. You might call that a windfall, but my parents were disciplined enough with their money that it automatically went into a savings account for the next mortgage payments, or to pay off credit card debt[1]. We weren't suddenly going out to eat when a cheque came in (in fact, when I was 10 or so, I remember helping my mom enter receipts into her big accounting book, and the total restaurant expenses for the entire year was something like $30).

I don't think we were ever officially under the poverty line, but with a family of 11 in a high cost of living area, the money had to go a lot farther than normal.

[1]: Unfortunately, they weren't disciplined enough to build up and maintain an emergency fund to carry them through rough times, so they relied on a low- interest credit card for essentials way too often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> From the article: "The first is that it overlooks the negative impacts on consumer sentiment and spending, which are likely to persist for many months, if not years. "

Yeah, right. Citation needed. My to-buy list of pent-up demands grows longer by the hour.

<comment><USER58> They are not talking about electronics or haircuts.

For example, many people have vowed never to step on a cruise ship after this and attending large scale events in person will probably give a lot of people anxiety for some time.

<comment><USER59> Heck even a crowded bar or restaurant is going to give people pause.

<comment><USER60> Pause? There is no way I'm taking my family to a crowded restaurant until either full scale frequent testing (with intra-region travel quarantine) proves it's gone or an effective vaccine is deployed at scale, or lastly if some medicine which means you get mild symptoms and no after-effects is developed.

<comment><USER59> Exactly, this a whole new ballgame in terms of what kind of businesses are going to be viable.

The restaurant and bar industry might be toast and that's going to have big social and cultural impacts.

<comment><USER57> Man I do not believe this. The restaurant and bar industry cater to the reckless youth segment. Seeing "nothing bad happened" to people you know who are less risk-averse than you is enough to coax people back into herding into bars and restaurants. We herded for a century before anything happened and those are clear memories everyone has, too.

What is going to change is the world's attitude toward the Communist regime currently running China. I feel pretty confident in saying that that regime is slated for death, even as public officials and famous people act, in public, like they're willing to get back to normal.

This is where some of us have been for a long time. You cannot permit an intolerant, racist, minority persecuting, citizen murdering, dictatorial, totalitarian government armed to the teeth with the latest in biowarfare who is inclined to make aggressive noises towards everyone who is not like them and some who are (Taiwan) to exist, period.

I think COVID-19 finally brought that home to everyone who is not just outright anti-Western in their outlook.

People are going back to bars and restaurants and jobs, the stock market is going to go up, but the Communist regime in China is going down.

That's what the near future looks like.

<comment><USER61> > that regime is slated for death

Care to put a date to your prediction?

<comment><USER57> Sure. Communists gone from China by 2035. Latest. 15 years across multiple administrations across multiple nations.

It's just like before WWII. Some people see the mortal danger and realize by hook or by crook something HAS to be done. Some people are suing for "peace in our time". Only one of these camps is right. Guess which one.

Say what you want, this is something we DID learn from WWII. Know the signs and don't kid yourself about them. However bad your situation is now, it will only get worse in the future.

Covid-19 onboarded the majority of the population in all nations to this little project. Have no doubt.

<comment><USER60> The USA won't even have most of its supply chain under domestic control by 2035.

The response to the virus was typically disorganized and indicative of wider issues. The last 40 years have seen a huge slide in power and credibility, what is going to stop that?

<comment><USER57> I don't agree with any of your characterizations.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


U.S. Airlines Unbowed by Beijing's Demand to Call Taiwan Part of China - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-airlines-arent-complying-with-beijings-demand-they-call-taiwan-part-of-china-1528968606 <comment><USER2> I think it would be awesome if Trump tweeted outright that Taiwan is not part of China and that China should man up and deal with it.

It seems like there is a long history of the US verbally appeasing China over issues like this while actively supporting Taiwan. Tough talk seems to get their attention way better than verbal appeasement.

</comment><comment><USER3> Paywall bypass: [http://archive.is/rUMsN](http://archive.is/rUMsN)</comment>


See who's buying drugs, booze, and sex on Venmo - <AUTHOR> http://www.vicemo.com

<comment><USER2> I don't think people realize how public their venmo transactions are. That being said most of these are jokes.

This was my favorite: [https://venmo.com/story/p/1UwfC](https://venmo.com/story/p/1UwfC)</comment>


RIM should get in bed with Microsoft, Nokia style - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/111371950917126537254/posts/FTez6hH8dUc

<comment><USER2> Wouldn't that give RIM an even smaller market share? They've already been working with Android and Android apps. They should just go full Android and focus on enterprise apps and services to differentiate.

<comment><USER3> >They should just go full Android and focus on enterprise apps and services to differentiate.

What enterprise apps and services will make their version of Android a must- have for enterprises that is worth 10/mo per device? Fighting with Android OEMs for marketshare will erode their margins in a cut throat market. Just see how HTC is struggling now. Not to mention no one knows how Google buying Motorola is going to mean for Android OEMs. Atleast with MS's history, there is no danger of that.

<comment><USER2> And what exactly will fighting over 1 million devices per month with Samsung, HTC, Nokia and a few others accomplish, especially when they all have to use the exact same UI and almost the exact same hardware? That sounds like an even higher commoditization level to me, and it's not even in a big market - it's in a tiny one.

Nokia has already cut the price of the Lumia 710 by $100 a month after it started selling in US. And besides it's not like WP phones can live in their own bubble. They have to compete with Android phones, too, and they usually have lower specs than Android alternatives at the same price level.

<comment><USER4> >And what exactly will fighting over 1 million devices per month with Samsung, HTC, Nokia and a few others accomplish

The point is to fight for the entire smartphone share.

>Nokia has already cut the price of the Lumia 710 by $100 a month after it started selling in US

Really? Then why is it the same here? [http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/Phones/cell-phone- detail.aspx?c...](http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/Phones/cell-phone- detail.aspx?cell-phone=Nokia-Lumia-710-White)

Not to mention that it hasn't been been a fortnight since they started selling it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't have any inside knowledge, but it seems like RIM has some deep structural or managerial issues that are going to hamper any initiative they have in the near-term. Their recent quotes, as reported on in the New York Times and elsewhere today, on the appointment of their CEO, are way beyond corporate spin and into the realm of outright delusion. Markets/investors, developers, consumers appreciate honestly, but that's not at all what we're getting from RIM recently.

</comment><comment><USER6> What if they embraced both operating systems and charged more for their hardware? IMO BB currently has the best hardware and worst software.

If I could have bought a BlackBerry Android phone I would have easily spent an additional $50 on it. $50 upfront is really nothing for business customers who need reliability and a great email app.

<comment><USER7> Are you counting the Storm 1 in the 'best hardware' category? Or just the newest of the new?

<comment><USER8> The current "Blackberry Bold 9900" is definitely at the top of the current generation of hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nope. Amazon should buy RIM:

1\. RIM makes decent hardware, crappy software. Amazon makes great software, not great hardware. 2\. Amazon really knows how to sell stuff. 3\. Kindle and Blackberry products won't need to compete anymore. 4\. Amazon has lots of content to put on RIM devices.

</comment><comment><USER10> RIM's OSes have always been conservative because they're very corporate- oriented. I don't think that WP7 fits into that category- I love it, but it would be a huge, massive leap fro m what RIM has done before now.</comment>


Russia Launches Floating Nuclear Power Plant; It's Headed to the Arctic - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/30/607088530/russia-launches-floating-nuclear-power-plant-its-headed-to-the-arctic <comment><USER2> But dozens of nuclear submarines, with hundreds of nuclear missles floating around are safer? That power plant is literally a drop in the sea.

</comment><comment><USER3> KLT-40S reactor is the same type of PWR used on Taymyr-class icebreakers. So it makes little difference if an icebreaker or a floating nuclear power plant passes through international waters. Also, small naval PWRs like this one are safer than a full scale nuclear powerplant, of which many are scaled up naval power plants.

[https://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/217260...](https://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/21726058-floating-reactors-are-their-way-submarine-ones-may-follow- atomic-power)

[https://www.economist.com/node/17647651](https://www.economist.com/node/17647651)

[http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2008/jun/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2008/jun/09/john-mccain/navys-record-unblemished/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Water is great at containing radiation, to the point that you can safely swim at the top of radioactive cooling pools (just don't go too deep). Should something go wrong, scuttling the boat is a much better containment method than what is possible on land. There are issues with debris escaping from the vessel however - but the problem is much simpler than on land.

<comment><USER5> What happens in the case of a fallout? It can contain radiation, but how effectively?

<comment><USER4> If you sank it before containment was breached nothing would escape into the atmosphere and therefore there would be no fallout. There would be leakage in the ocean itself but its effect is more localized due to water attenuating the radiation.

While research is pretty scant, there have been containment failures at sea. Currently 8 submarines nuclear subs have sank. In general their effects have been much less than Chernobyl the only land equivalent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _" The nuclear power plant has two KLT-40S reactor units that can generate up to 70 MW of electric energy and 50 Gcal/hr of heat energy during its normal operation," Rosatom said. "This is enough to keep the activity of the town populated with 100,000 people."_

I'm glad there's no fuel in it while they're towing it from St. Petersburg to Murmansk.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you call your "users"? - <AUTHOR>

In my organization we are moving away from the term "user" in favor of "client". How do you refer to them in your organization? <comment><USER2> After working at Amazon I'm still in the habit of saying "customers," even outside of the retail context. (For example, the users of an in-house development tool are "internal customers.")

</comment><comment><USER3> I always talk about "Tarsnap users".</comment>


Guy saved $1000 every month by not drinking alcohol/coffee - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tobias-van-schneider/no-alcohol-no-coffee-for-15-months-this-is-what-happened_b_8723958.html <comment><USER2> The social aspect is what hurts the most. If you refuse to spend money (whether it be alcohol, coffee, or whatever) to meet with someone, you quickly run out of places to meet at. At the more metropolitan cities, luckily there are sometimes still parks you can visit (weather allowing, at daytime), or you can go for a walk. But to live in a suburban wasteland felt like the possibility of doing anything outside of your homes together was slim.

I think this has gotten better, as country starts to address how un-walkable, un-natural much of it is.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10678872](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10678872)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10683442](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10683442)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10697744](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10697744)

</comment><comment><USER4> This article may have utility for everyone who is spending more than $33/day on alcohol and coffee while remaining sober and productive enough to read it.

The rest of us, not so much.</comment>


Verizon confirms it's working on a tablet with Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/11/verizon-confirms-its-working-on-a-tablet-with-google/

<comment><USER2> When did "confirms" become a synonym for "says for the first time"?

<comment><USER3> Ever since the explosion of tech reporting based almost entirely on unsubstantiated rumors.

<comment><USER2> That's the thing, though-if there had ever been such a rumor, then OK. I don't remember ever seeing or hearing a rumor about Verizon working on an Android tablet. This is just...news. Why is it being reported as if it was a rumor that came true?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh, but they won't sell the Nexus One for them. Interesting.

<comment><USER5> My understanding wasn't that they refused to sell it, but that they are now selling the Incredible, which was basically the same thing.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, if I had to guess, Verizon told Google that they were free to try to have their $529 device compete with the nearly-identical $200 device that's slightly better (though weirdly shaped and likely to get Android updates slower) and sold in stores, but Google made the obvious prediction that they wouldn't get the scale necessary to make producing it worthwhile.

<comment><USER7> Given that the "$200" device requires an expensive monthly contract, it's really only a better deal for people who are bad at math.

<comment><USER8> There's no bad math here.. having an "unlocked" phone on vzw doesn't entitle you to any discount in your plan (like it does on tmobile), so if you have this CDMA phone you can't switch carriers with, you're not saving anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find it interesting that it is Verizon who is working with Google on this. As if whoever making the hardware really doesn't matter. Why wouldn't it be HTC or Dell or someone who is working with Google on this? Does any other carrier take such an active hand in making devices?

</comment><comment><USER10> So much for iPhone on Verizon :(</comment>


The Saturation Effect in Fuzzing - <AUTHOR> https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1796 <comment><USER2> First fuzzer I wrote (we didn't call them that, we were just trying to find bugs triggered by bad packets in a cable TV protocol suite) made random bad packets - by making good ones and then mutating them past some random point - it found 3 bugs (which was amazing at the time) but the real problem with all these systems is (in terms of my problem ):

\- the number of possible bad packets is literally billions of times larger than good ones \- pretty soon the percentage of those that trigger bad behaviour gets close to 0

<comment><USER3> Modern fuzzing tools are far more effective at probing the state space than just random mutations. It's hard to appreciate just how effective until you see it in practice.

E.g. last time I fuzzed a network element with AFL, it took seconds from it to go from a starting corpus of a single ethernet IPv4 SYN packet to some double- encapsulated IP-in-NSH-IP-in-NSH-ethernet monstrosity that triggered a misparse. And seconds more for it to generate a IPv6 packet with a fragment extension header that triggered some other problem. A random walk would have no chance of finding that.

<comment><USER4> Do you know of any good writeups for this particular kind of process? I too did fuzzing of network devices before it was called fuzzing and am interested in trying it again with modern tooling.

<comment><USER5> The AFL technical details document[1] is a decent reference for one particular subset of fuzzer feedback: code coverage metrics.

[1]: [https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl//technical_details.txt](https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl//technical_details.txt)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Coverage-based fuzzing won't find cases where an extreme value of some variable causes a malfunction but there is no code that treats this value specially, because the coder missed it. The most common case of this is an integer variable with the smallest possible value: 0x80000000 for 32 bits. The problem with this value is that if you negate it, it is still negative. That might cause a computation to go badly wrong, but a coverage-based fuzzer might "think" that it has covered every state your code can reach without finding bugs.

Is anyone aware of fuzzers that take issues like this into account by explicitly trying problematic values, like INT_MIN for an integer variable?

<comment><USER7> Most fuzzers I think have a dictionary of special values they'll occasionally use. I wrote a structure-aware fuzzer framework which uses random values for the initial generation, then on subsequent mutations will perform arithmetic/bit flips with a small chance to grab a special value from the dictionary.

Even without a dictionary if your input is reasonably small it should discover these special values given enough iterations.

<comment><USER6> The dictionary of special values is a good approach to deal with this. Without it, you'd need billions of iterations before randomly trying 0x80000000 for a 32-bit integer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find fuzzing fascinating but it seems to only be used in protocols and tools such as compilers, networking protocol implementations etc. Does anyone have experience using it for business logic?

<comment><USER9> Not sure of your exact definition of fuzzing but our staging environment had real data in it.

I'd always run end to end tests on random real data records.

I don't see many people doing this, not sure?

There seems to be kickback because tests might fail one run and pass another. People don't seem to like this.

<comment><USER10> I think as long as it's reproducible it's Ok... but should be a team decision. The data has to be non-sensitive of course, very often it's not ok to pull data out of prod. Fuzzers in general tend to work hard to make sure crashes are reproducible (usually with a seed at the start of the run, and by saving crashing inputs).

If you can't repro a crash a month or a week later, it's not worth it IMHO.

Usually you can get most of the benefits with data generation, based on a deterministic seed.

Mainly though, you have to ask about the purpose of the tests. Most developers want a test suite that tells them with high confidence that what they just worked on didn't create a new bug, or a regression. That lets them stay focused on their work rather than chasing through the codebase for an unrelated latent issue which might have been introduced by someone else, years ago.

There is often value in separating "exploratory" or "stochastic" tests which might uncover _new_ bugs (previously unknown) from regular tests. To make it really work as part of default workflow you need a culture which understands a feature might take additional time because the team stopped to fix a latent issue to get back to green.

To put it bluntly, letting random-ish testing break your pipeline is making a statement of business priority (we care so much about random bugs that we will stop all other work until they are fixed) which might not align with reality.

"Is this the most important thing for me to be working on for the success of the business?"

I think the "right" way to add fuzzing / random testing to a pipeline is sell the value to the business and have an initiative to rigorously fuzz the snot out of the software. Crucially, have resources dedicated to triage and fix the identified issues. It should be a non-breaking pipeline stage right up to the point where everyone feels confident that any test failures are the result of new code.

The worst case is that an opinionated developer adds stochastic tests, with bad reproducibility, without consulting the team and randomly breaks builds in an organisation that only rewards or understands feature delivery and ticket punching. That is basically going to make their co-workers life hell and is IMHO not the right way to go about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are there any good resources on using fuzzers for the first time?

</comment><comment> j-kent I thought this was going to be about the guitar.</comment>