C++ Standards Committee Meeting in Rapperswil, June 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://botondballo.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/trip-report-c-standards-committee-meeting-in-rapperswil-june-2014/

<comment> r-s Great Write Up. There is a ton of information packed in there. C++17 looks like it will be a major improvement like C++11 was. Very much looking forward to Modules.

The (elem : range) proposal seen here: [http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n385...](http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n3853.htm)

I'm really looking forward to as well. I wish it could have been in C++14. STL (the guy) is right when he says (auto elem : range) is very tempting. Its so easy for a novice user to not understand they are making a ton of potentially (and likely) unneeded copies. Also in code review its quite common, to see (const auto &elem : range) when it should be (const auto &&elem : range).

After getting bogged down years ago in a crappy C++03 codebase I eased off C++ for a few years, but i must say, the language is really getting better. 5 years ago if you would have told me I would be looking forward to writing something major in C++ I would have laughed.

<comment><USER2> It took me some time to recognize the problem with range-for (after testing its implementation in VC 2012), and more time to work up the courage to write a Core Language proposal. I also wish next-gen range-for had gotten into C++14, but that's mostly a formality - compilers can (and often do) ship features as soon as they're voted into the Working Paper.

Note that nothing's wrong with "const auto& elem", except that it prohibits modification. On the other hand, "const auto&& elem" will typically not compile (it'll insist on binding to rvalues, which only proxy iterators return).

<comment><USER3> As I was reading through your "for (elem : range)" proposal I became quite anxious to know how adding const would be handled. I was hoping that "for (const elem : range)" would be added to mean "for (const auto& elem : range)" because I very often find myself within a non-const method having a non-const container but wanting to iterate with no chance of modifying it.

I was at first relieved to see this topic addressed at the top of Q&A, then disappointed to see "Just do it the old way if you want const." I feel that we don't use const enough in C++, and making it easier (yet still clear) to use would be of significant benefit.

If you agree, perhaps there is still time to support "for (const elem : range)" \- it seems to me natural and no more disruptive than the rest of the proposal.

<comment><USER2> I talked about this some more in [http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n399...](http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n3994.htm) Q17. Many people have asked for such syntax, but I am wary of adding more complexity to the Core Language. Ultimately, I believe that this should be handled on the range side instead of the element side. What Evolution/Core needs to do is to fix the problem with nested temporaries in range-for loops - the problem (affecting both C++11's range-for and mine) is that range-for will keep temporary ranges alive if they're the topmost thing returned, but not if you have "const T& noop(const T&)" and you try to loop over noop(return_temporary_range()). They're aware of the problem, which is a start. If and when that's fixed, then what you want can be handled through library tech: "for (elem : as_const(range))".

<comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, how about making `const` the default and requiring `mutable` for mutation?

There's already a Standard precedent in form of C++11 lambdas -- and const-by- default has some technical niceties (perhaps simplicity, too -- arguably making this the default removes some complexity from the language from the beginner's point of view, e.g., by preventing accidental mutation) that may make this worth it.

// I see that you addressed the constness in A17, but I believe allowing the `mutable` opt-in, as in the lambdas, takes care of the "limiting" aspect; "confusing", OTOH, is a matter of taste -- after all, `std::for_each` operates on InputIterators as well (thus, perhaps the similarity with a non-modifying nature[1] of a Standard Library analog is arguably preferable from the consistency / least-surprise-principle point of view?), and, again, lambdas also have constness by default.

Thoughts?

// [1] -- in principle, at least (for completeness, there's an allowance for nonconstant functions w/ mutable iterators)

<comment><USER2> I love const, but I am strongly opposed to adding constness here - as I mentioned, the non-Standard "for each" extension did that, and it caused endless confusion. Note that the lambda precedent is not actually applicable, because it affects only value captures. Reference captures can always be written through. The purpose of next-gen range-for is to operate in-place, i.e. with reference semantics.

for_each() does not add constness, and can modify elements in-place. The fact that it is grouped with the "non-modifying algorithms" is a confusing historical artifact (and was actually the subject of the first Library Issue I had a part in filing) - the algorithm itself does not modify things (unlike sort(), say) but the given functor can.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the reply!

Interesting that the constness in `for each` caused confusion (did it offer a `mutable` opt-in, though?), would intuitively expect it to be the POLS behavior. I guess given that you were probably receiving feedback on that, I will take it as something to be acknowledged.

I can see the reference semantics point, in this context the difference from the lambdas seems to make more sense.

// Just to explore another avenue, again mostly out of curiosity :-), how realistic (from the impl. POV) would be to have value-semantic range-based `for` with _mandated_ copy elision whenever possible?

True about `std::for_each`, that's what I've referred to as the "allowance" for the mutable iterators, wasn't aware about the grouping being merely a historical artifact, though. I've always felt a bit dirty using it for mutation[1], it seems that maybe unnecessarily so :-)

// [1] -- perhaps due to the algorithm being specified in terms of the InputIterator concept; hm, that being said, I suppose that while it only guarantees that we can read (dereferenced) `it`, it doesn't say that `it` _itself_ has to be immutable (right?), so it could be that I should think of a better metaphor to internalize. How do you think about InputIterators?

<comment><USER2> > did it offer a `mutable` opt-in, though?

Nope.

> would intuitively expect it to be the POLS behavior.

If you give me (the implementation) a modifiable range, and I invisibly add constness before giving you back an element, that's surprising. C++ doesn't add constness by default anywhere (with the novel exception of lambda function call operators). If you give me a modifiable range, the least surprising thing to do is to give you a modifiable element, because that's what all of ptr[idx], * ptr, and * iter would do.

> how realistic (from the impl. POV) would be to have value-semantic range- > based `for` with _mandated_ copy elision whenever possible?

If you say "for (auto elem : range) { elem = stuff; }" the write to the elem- copy will be dropped on the floor. Copy elision can't solve that.

> it doesn't say that `it` _itself_ has to be immutable (right?)

Correct.

> How do you think about InputIterators?

The concept is single-pass, read-only, but a given iterator may be stronger. for_each() is kind of special (it's the only algorithm that takes InputIterators, yet allows stronger iterators to be used with modifying functors), but other algorithms are vaguely similar. For example, transform(InIt first, InIt last, OutIt result, UnOp op) permits transform(first, last, first, op) for an in-place transformation - here, first/last's type clearly has to be InIt and OutIt simultaneously, i.e. a mutable FwdIt iterator or stronger.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the explanations!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Making Cairo C API a C++ standard, through automatic conversion, looks all kinds of wrong to me. The result is not properly generified like Boost GIL, and it carries vaguely defined implementation details like for example font hinting style from freetype (not even cairo library itself). I hope this and the ABI proposal will never make it as the C++ TS or standard.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Modules is, in my opinion, one of the most sorely needed features in C++. They have the potential of increasing compile times by an order of magnitude or more, thus bringing compile-time performance more in line with more modern languages, ..."

Presumably that should be "decreasing", not "increasing" (or "compilation speed" rather than "compile times").

</comment><comment><USER7> Shameless plug for my implementation of the Executors & Schedulers TS: [https://github.com/en4bz/executors](https://github.com/en4bz/executors)

</comment><comment><USER8> (cheering)

modules ! modules ! modules !

</comment><comment><USER9> The extern "abi" for an Application Binary Interface would be so useful.

</comment><comment><USER10> The information seems pretty exciting, but I still don't feel like I have fully grasped the changes in C++11 yet. What are some good resources for getting up to speed with the latest and greatest C++?

<comment><USER11> Scott Meyers has an Introduction: [http://www.artima.com/shop/overview_of_the_new_cpp](http://www.artima.com/shop/overview_of_the_new_cpp)

He's also writing a new book that's available in Rough Cuts from O'Reilly that covers C++11/14: [http://scottmeyers.blogspot.com/2014/06/effective-modern- c-s...](http://scottmeyers.blogspot.com/2014/06/effective-modern-c-status- report.html) and has given a talk covering some of the same ground: [http://vimeo.com/97318797](http://vimeo.com/97318797)

Herb Sutter has "Elements of Modern C++ Style": [http://herbsutter.com/elements-of-modern-c- style/](http://herbsutter.com/elements-of-modern-c-style/) and has given several talks, such as [http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-661](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-661)

Finally, you can't really beat Stroustrup's book: [http://www.amazon.com/The- Programming-Language-4th-Edition/d...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Programming- Language-4th-Edition/dp/0321563840)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Glad to see named parameters and introspection on the table

</comment><comment><USER13> What is the motivation behind including Cairo?

<comment><USER14> Herb wants new users to be able to draw graphics without using third party toolkits. It is not meant to be all encompassing, but if you need custom 2d it is a nice feature, albeit very out of scope of a standard library implementation.

<comment><USER15> It is pretty much in scope. We old timers remember the days when compilers came with graphics libraries.

So why forcing everyone to jump through hurdles just to do some simple uses of 2D programming?

<comment><USER14> Because, I guess, Swing. Unless the standard compels implementations to use platform native windowing systems and theming engines (since you can't really leave it out if you want visual output) then its going to be an ugly mess. And, for example, a huge amount of Qt is just native theming on all its supported platforms.

<comment><USER15> The point is not replace WxWidgets, Qt or flavor of the month GUI framework.

Plain simple 2D graphics like BGI, to allow any C++ beginner not to worry which bazillion libraries s/he needs to download to draw some colored squares.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Making the web fun again - <AUTHOR> http://neocities.org/blog/making-the-web-fun-again <comment><USER3> I LOVE this idea, and it's totally fine if it becomes "a vast wasteland of garbage" as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Technically, so is YouTube, but you probably don't look at all the garbage. You look at the good stuff that surfaces to the top. Occasionally, you stumble on a gem.

It may have some struggles getting off the ground. After all, if you just want to put something on the internet, there are now many many ways to do that.

But for many people, the first step beyond their Tumblr page is still a total mystery. I learned HTML and Javascript because when I was 14, I wanted a website for my comedy troupe (no longer active). I spent hours researching free web hosting and stumbled upon Geocities. That kicked off a life of programming and a love for the web that has never died.

There are still people out there who would love to learn HTML and have some more control over what they put online. Bravo to Kyle for making it possible. Make a donation - even if you don't think you'll personally use it. It's worth it if it inspires even one kid to start building something.

<comment><USER4> > "a vast wasteland of garbage"

Accurate description of hacker news right there :>

<comment><USER5> So why are you here again?

<comment><USER6> I'm here because it's like an abusive relationship. You think that this time will be different and sometimes you get a sense that you might be right but then you get disappointed every time and realize that things will never be as good as they used to be. Please don't reply with a Wikipedia link to "Whoever's Law" because that would make the abuse worse. The only thing even worse than that would be a link to yourlogicalfallacyis.com.

<comment><USER7> I was googling "Whoever's Law" hoping there would finally be a law named "Whoever's Law", because holy shit are there a lot of "Laws" now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wanna share a thought I had about this a couple years ago.

I'm 33, so I was 14 in 1994, the first time I got onto the web. It was as bare bones as it got. I think I beat the IMG tag by a few months, maybe. Anyways, don't hold me to facts here, I am just imparting a general time frame.

The idea of the Internet, and the world wide web, was terribly abstract, new, confusing, delightful. It made wizards of us that could navigate it. As a burgeoning geek in desperate need of a personal identity, this digital playground was an infinite resource to push against. Each chance encounter with an online stranger a blank slate. It was exotic and alluring and exciting.

During this era, a huge swath of us all were experiencing this at the same time. It was an overlap of our youth, the loss of innocence, and the explosion of this new universe. It was a hell of a drug.

And we got addicted to the newness of it all. There's a word for this.

Neophilia.

And this concept, I feel, best describes the ennui I have felt for years now, the booming homogeny the web has turned into. The web has long since succeeded, but we were children of the laboratory. We lost our home and we've been trying, in vain, to find a new one ever since. I can't believe I am alone in this sensation.

<comment><USER9> Im 41, I might have been mucking around with the internet before you, and while a hell of a lot is fantastic about the internet now, yeah, Im kinda lost and homeless too. Know what you mean.

Not to say the internet , or web is or has gone wrong, just kinda forgotten something very important, very vital.

What Neocities is doing is good, and I hope it works, but I'm not sure how this addresses that our, er, alienation (not sure if that is the right word) though. I read that they want to, and that is good, but I don't see anything they offer that really does that.

What if we had some sort of SubWeb (have I just invented that word? I really like the sound of it!!!) which you have to use the command line to access? :)

<comment><USER8> I wanted to reply to you because you struck a chord with me - yes, emphatically I must agree that command line interfaces have forever been a sieve that collects a certain mentality. I don't want to label this subset of people because I will not do it correctly, but I believe it is assured that a predilection for CLI invokes precisely some sort of human artifact that is aligned with being a geek.

<comment><USER9> Yup, I agree. Same sort of thing where people put down the use of things like Dreamweaver, claiming note pad is better. Same mentality, I think. And even though I would argue logically for Dreamweaver, I would still sort of feel the notepad advocates had a point. Yeah, typing feels more "real", even more exciting.

I then think is it a generational thing? But only yesterday was I sat there on that genetic car racing site watching live as people tried to hack the chat box. Command line again. I assume these were kids. Yet there they were in 2013 excitedly hacking away using the keyboard.

To tangent even more.... That was great to watch. Kids (I assume) excitedly trying to hack the chat box, by typing stuff, while the admins updated and updated them away. A wonderful race and frankly a joy to watch. YES hacking and defacing is bad, it even pissed me off to start with, but then I realised that there was something so energetic, or alive, about it. It was like sort of watching life or something. It reminded me of one of those movies where we see the "geek hero" furiously typing away at a terminal trying to stop a nuke launch or some such. Dunno how to describe it really. Anyway, the admins won easily and quickly, and that's as it should be.

Edit: All that waffle and I forgot the point...

Basically, those kids reminded me of back in the day. I guess the spirit me and the OP were talking about. So, IMHO, it is still alive. Heh, unless such kids end up in US jails....

<comment><USER10> This is why I loved (the idea of) MUDs/MOOs so much in the mid/late '90s. They were mysterious worlds to explore, and it was exciting to know that the admins ("wizards") were adding more areas purely through the magic of their keyboards. People would do crazy things sometimes to try to mess around with the world or other players. As a newish player, you didn't know what you might encounter.

I still see a bit of that in the pirate Minecraft servers that my little brother sometimes plays on. Micro-communities with their own rules, custom mods and settings, and kids horsing around and building their own flights of fancy. That's the kind of organic exploration and worldbuilding I'd really like to be involved in eventually.

I think I'd like to build a connectable MOO-like world in which people could set up their own areas/rooms and connect them to a limited number of neighbors. Give them item creation and scripting capabilities as well. Simple, hackable, and almost completely user-created. Woops, that'd just be text-based Second Life. Maybe with some unusual features like a resource/power grid that varies according to the average amount of players in each room (to incentivize building interesting, entertaining scenes and scenarios). Or maybe the initial set of rooms could be all these NeoCities pages converted to ASCII graphics and randomly connected. Who knows.

Let me know if anyone's building a fun interconnected playground along these lines and is looking for contributions. I'm probably not good or energetic enough to do it alone.

<comment><USER11> > _I think I 'd like to build a connectable MOO-like world in which people > could set up their own areas/rooms and connect them to a limited number of > neighbors. Give them item creation and scripting capabilities as well. > Simple, hackable, and almost completely user-created. Woops, that'd just be > text-based Second Life. _

This sounds a lot like LambdaMoo ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO)).

An interesting write-up of one's experience in the game: [http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/mytinylife.html](http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/mytinylife.html).

<comment><USER10> I actually read and enjoyed a book in '97 that introduced MUDs, including LambdaMOO, so having you bring LambdaMOO up is no surprise. I read bits of that book you linked, and these parts near the end resonate:

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

..."It's not your fault," he said. "But after you came looking for pelts, and traded trinkets with us, the covered wagons of conventional reality followed along the trails we'd blazed. The trails were cut by animals, the animals have been driven out by suburban sprawl. . . . How could it be otherwise?"

Not surprisingly perhaps, Horton's fellow anarch and rabble-rouser Finn is also unimpressed with Lambda's current state of affairs, though his complaints, typically, are a little more down-to-earth. "There's nothing you can sink your teeth into these days," he says, pointing to a general absence of the sort of MOO-engulfing controversies he once thrived on. "Politics I guess is dead. People have settled into the arbitration disputes; they get a kick out of that for a while, but they're mostly frivolous disputes and people just wanting to get attention." Real life, meanwhile, has taken on more interest for Finn. He finally moved out of his parents' basement a couple years ago, setting out for Rochester, New York, to found an _Internet software business with some other MUDders he knew_ , and once he got there, he also ended up in a serious RL relationship with a woman he had previously known only as Aurea on LambdaMOO. Two years down the road, both ventures appear to be going swimmingly. His company isn't the next Netscape or anything, but it's landed some respectable gigs, including a contract to run the official _Sally Jessy Raphael_ chat room; Finn and Aurea remain happily involved. His days as an online Casanova and all-around firebrand are pretty well over, but if he misses them much he doesn't show it. He still MOOs daily, but he mostly just sits idling in Lambda House's smoking room while he goes about his business at work. "I've still got friends on Lambda, and it's still fun," he says. "But it's not as much of a stage where you can play out your political ambitions and real arguments. It's no longer really a metaphor for real life. It's just not as passionate, I suppose."

...

He'd left his lousy secretarial job as well, his RL in general was gradually getting happier, and the happier it got the less he felt like spending time in virtual reality. "In retrospect," he says, "it's evident to me just how much _the misery of my real life_ (and not my intellectual curiosity, or my gender- role issues, or whatever) was the thing that made VR seem so dazzling back inna the day.

"Then there was also the fact that VR had started to seem tacky," he adds. "By '96 it seemed like _every yutz in the world was on the Internet_ , 'living the fantasy.' Whatever _elitist pioneer spirit_ had seemed to me to permeate Lambda back in '91 or '92 was completely gone. I missed that, and Interzone was marginal compensation at best."

And so he just stopped going, basically. He let his spares die out, reaped one by one as he let them lie, and he now logs on to Lambda once a month, at most, to check his MOO-mail. It's enough for him. "I'm teaching prep-school English and living in Austin with a woman I really like," he tells me. "My life is pretty simple now. _I feel like I 've grown up a lot._"

...

Weary though she may be, however, she doesn't regret her involvement in the political debates that ultimately exhausted her. "I'm way beyond sick of theorizing about cyberspace," she says, "and have become completely anti- utopian about VR, but all in all _the experience has been good for me_. It's made me a much better writer . . . encouraged me to go out and get myself published. It's also given me a social presence IRL in a way I never used to think I had. After all the practice I got taking stands, making points, influencing audiences who were sometimes incredibly hostile, grad student seminars, for instance, came to seem comparatively amazingly easy places to formulate and express arguments."

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>-

Here we see the end of involvement (or infatuation) with a virtual world playing out: with finding real life more interesting and enriching. Maybe that's the lesson of virtual worlds - whether MUDs or EVE Online - <USER2> eventually tire of them and leave, but they change you and set you on new paths (to another career, or a business).

I guess I need to take the nostalgia goggles off and realize things won't be the same the second time round.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sadly, this won't make the web fun again.

So two things that are important to note here, the first is that the 'fun' part of the web was learning new things and static HTML, even dressed up with HTML5 goodies, will be fun if you don't know these technologies but no more or less fun than doing the same thing on a Raspberry Pi or something similar. Its the 'learning' that is fun, and the web was more 'fun' when you were learning it because it was all new, and once you learned enough about it to see it for what it was, the parts that are less seemly start to dominate your vision and it feels less fun. Which brings us to the second part.

The second part, and I don't have a good solution for this, is that folks _will_ use this, and they _will_ put good content on them and they will get page views and searches and what not. Then the 'link authority' of neocities will start to rise because, well it has a bunch of good content.

Once it crosses a threshold (which is sadly pretty low) then a crap ton of SEO types will start creating pages on it to boost the organic rating of various web sites. And then Google will penalize neocities, and the good stuff will become unfindable (on Google at least) because Google won't index it, or they will pump down host rank to the point where it shows up on the results on page 3.

Just prior to that people will build sites on it that do drive by malware injection using javascript. The preferred cloaking vector for that these days seems to be a script reference that points out to something that looks like jquery but really isn't.

Then the owner is going to get a lot of threatening letters from lawyers who were told by people who got hijacked to "get the bastards who did this!" and the bad guys will be well cloaked but the neocities ownership will be just standing there, an easy target (for hassling at least, register your DMCA agent _right now_ if you haven't already to avoid the copyright trolls).

And at the end of the day the _real_ reason the web isn't fun anymore will become apparent. There is too much money to be made by manipulating it, and so its full of bad actors who are chortling away while stealing billions of dollars from hapless 'lusers.'

<comment><USER13> You're thinking like a programmer. Learning HTML is not fun at all, for the vast majority of people.

It's 2013, Google is a lot smarter and there are more ways to explain the varying quality of community sites. Note how Neocities is all subdomains.

You're also assuming that everybody wants to get search traffic. Everything on Facebook has a PageRank of NaN, and yet people still post. What if the whole point is to make pages about your pet cat, just because?

Maybe an interesting strategy would be to make the whole site NOINDEX by default. Turning off NOINDEX could be a premium feature. (Of course this could fail utterly as the customers that Neocities wants probably don't distinguish between URLs and search queries.)

<comment><USER12> I concede the point that I am thinking like a technologist, I cannot help it. But it doesn't work to argue that _this_ site which alleges that the 'fun' of the web was in a large part created by _" the ability for people (both old and new to the web) to easily create web sites"_ applies to your 'vast majority.'

      > It's 2013, Google is a lot smarter and there are
      > more ways to explain the varying quality of community
      > sites. Note how Neocities is all subdomains.

Yes, Google is more sophisticated about how they derank web sites (I like to think that our small search engine, blekko.com, helped them see how poor their results had become on highly contested searches), but the spammers and the crooks have also upped their game such that many innocent sites get caught in the crossfire. (Google "panda killed my web site" for example). Not to mention the new trend of 'negative SEO' where someone might script a neocities site creator that triggered one of Google's anti-rank defenses and to destroy the organic rank of an otherwise pleasant web site.

      > You're also assuming that everybody wants to get
      > search traffic. Everything on Facebook has a
      > PageRank of NaN, and yet people still post. What
      > if the whole point is to make pages about your
      > pet cat, just because?

Actually I'm not making that assumption at all. Facebook pages have a NaN pagerank because facebook has a robots.txt that says "don't crawl us" and legit search engines respect that. Facebook rightly presumes that you will see your friends content because of mechanisms they have in place to put it in front of your eyes. And I also think that people making a page about their pet cat, or their belief in UFOs or whatever is fine and neocities is great for that. I'm just saying that the bad actors won't leave it alone for those people to play in it.

      > Maybe an interesting strategy would be to make
      > the whole site NOINDEX by default. Turning off
      > NOINDEX could be a premium feature. (Of course
      > this could fail utterly as the customers that
      > Neocities wants probably don't distinguish
      > between URLs and search queries.)

Actually the same people who put their pet pictures up will probably not put meta tags in their HTML. The Neocities folks could put a robots.txt file that excluded search engines (like Facebook does) as well. But think through what you are saying.

The person you want to make this "fun" for is a non-technologist putting up a page about their cat, and for people who are looking for random pages about cats. Or perhaps relatives of that person who say "Hey, Mindy put up a web site for her cat!", "Oh really? What's the address?", "I don't know, just Google 'Mindys Many Cats'", "Thats weird it doesn't find it", "Are you sure you spelled Mindy right?"

You see that non-technical crowd has been trained that Google finds everything, and if it doesn't find neocities websites then the neocities guys have to explain to Mindy why that is, which is going to be a complicated discussion because we've assumed for this discussion that Mindy is non- technical. Of course they could offer that as a pay service but that wouldn't work to well either since Mindy isn't going to put up a website for her cats and pay $1/month to do it.

So the neocities folks could curate the sites, and try to delete sites that are bad (they already do some of that) but that takes people and time. People + time == money, and for a free service money is hard to find. And then they say "Hmm, I wonder if Yahoo shut down Geocities not because they were clueless but instead because they actually started to see what they had gotten into and now they were scared they couldn't keep it going."

There is a whole bunch of "web" below the fun part. That the fun part is lacking is not because Geocities was shuttered.

<comment><USER14> You could enforce nofollow tags for unpaid sites, as wikipedia does for all its links. This would mean the free sites couldn't contribute any link popularity to seo recipient sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> grey-area Upvote for a great idea whose time has come around again. The people who used to try their hand at making their own website on geocities moved on to sites with less control like MySpace and then FaceBook, but something was lost along the way - the amateur spark that made the early web fun. Basic HTML and CSS is really quite simple and it'd be better if more people learned to use it. I know social sites add a different dimension to online sharing, but they also come with the illusion of privacy, intrusive adverts, online games, lame jokes, encouragement to comment on the meme of the day etc.

Static html is a great choice because it dramatically cuts the requirements, and because the vast majority of homemade websites don't need to be dynamic, very rarely change, and even a beginner can open a basic html file and start editing.

One little thing I think they could add are some visual controls for editing the look of your site on the fly - for example they could have a simple control panel to change basic attributes of the page like background colour, fonts, text sizes etc. and show you the CSS code that does it. That could write to the CSS as their current online-CMS type files do so that it could be edited later. Integrate that with webfonts and you could delivery some really beautiful styling tweaks without people even having to learn CSS and start to teach people to write simple web markup with online tutorials.

<comment><USER15> Even static HTML is no longer static, with people's knowledge of JavaScript increasing and great libraries like jQuery/YUI etc bringing more power to the masses.

I mean, think about how dynamic you can make a site with the use of AJAX and feeding content from various content stores around the web. Very exciting as you say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Idea: If neocities users let you put Google Adsense ads on their pages they'll get upgraded to 30mb for free. At least this way you can have some income.

I love the idea and passion you have for this, your story and purpose, but as soon as I read _" I'm paying for the servers out of pocket, which is tough for me because I currently don't have a large income,"_ and _" My goal is to pay for the site through donations"_ I just sighed. I've seen this so many times before. Founders who have a deep seeded fear or hatred of money or rich people. So much so that they've convinced themselves to go on a neurotic journey to "change the world" or "do something good for humanity" while refusing to be profitable or make money like the "evil greedy rich" that they despise. I hope you steer clear of that. I hope you find a way to make neocities profitable, sustainable, and I hope it brings in so much income that you can grow neocities and keep it free for decades while not having to worry about your mortgage or kid's college fund.

BTW, my favorite is [http://clock.neocities.org](http://clock.neocities.org)

<comment><USER14> Deep seated

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _Instead of having adventures into the great unknowns of the web, we instead now spend most of our time on social networks: boring, suburban gated communities, where everybody 's "profile" looks exactly the same, and presents exactly the same content, in the same arrangement._

It's funny, because I've always felt Facebook was a huge improvement over MySpace for exactly this reason. Now, reading this article, I thought "Wait a second, have I gotten it backwards? Crazy adventures _do_ sound more fun than clinical suburbs." On the other hand, what people did with the old MySpace was actually pretty terrible, and maybe this _is_ just tapping into GeoCities nostalgia. I don't know, the jury's still out.

But, here's one issue: the freedom and low barrier to entry of GeoCities led to a lot of basic and poorly thought out designs. Many were not really "designed" at all, and that certainly led to some wacky surfing safaris. One reason that things have homogenized is that we've developed a much stronger expectation for how websites should look and act. But, these are complex to design and develop - well out of reach of the average individual - so we glom onto template services that provide a nice design and out-of-the-box functionality: comments, social, CMS, etc. And yeah, most sites on the respective platforms look relatively the same. In order to break that, there's going to be a necessary degradation in sophistication. Which is fine with me, I'm down for the punky DIY vibe. But, this quote worries me a little:

 _And we have great CSS frameworks like Bootstrap and a new, even simpler one that Scott O 'Hara is working on called Ground Floor, that makes web sites look pretty good even if the designer doesn't use or understand CSS at all._

What's everyone's #1 criticism of Bootstrap websites? They all look the same. What happens if this turns into BootstrapCities?

<comment><USER18> To all of your points, I say: who cares? Who care if everyone uses Bootstrap? Who cares if no one does, and it all looks terrible? You know why Geocities was both popular _and_ ugly? It wasn't all because it was 1995, it was partly because we were 15 years old and we were having fun experimenting with everything we could get our hands on.

Your comment takes this site way too seriously. I'd like to read your critical analysis of the challenges faced by a civil engineer trying to make a feasible plumbing system in a Chuck E Cheese ball pit.

<comment><USER17> I guess I need to learn how to talk about things in-depth without looking like I really really care about them. Because I don't. I just thought about it a bit.

But, ostensibly, the creator cares, because that was a big part of his post. He decried Facebook and similar platforms for fostering a "uniformity and blandness rival[ing] something out of a Soviet bloc residential apartments corridor," then went on to promote Bootstrap, which is subject to the same pitfalls. I just wanted to explore that trade-off between sophistication and originality in today's websites. I still think it's a great idea, and judging from what I saw on the browse page, people are carrying the experimentation/sandbox torch pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So does the author want this to be a place for quirky fun by people who aren't web experts, or for srs designers? That My Little Pony page they linked to might scale better than a LAMP stack, but I'll guarantee it took more expertise to create. People who don't know CSS but have interesting things to say are much better served by a service like, well, tumblr - which allows plenty of customization, but also allows you to simply write, and have it look reasonable, with the attention on your actual content. There's certainly value in a site that only serves static files and thus has low expenses, but to attract the geocities demographic I'd want some kind of friendly editing frontend - even github pages is a huge step forward from editing HTML by hand.

<comment><USER20> From reading it, it sounds like it's for both. GeoCities wasn't just about quirky fun, there was some actually decent websites.

GeoCities wasn't about things being super friendly, it had a learning curve there. You had to sit down and read up on HTML and write it up and iterate on your failures, and maybe people don't want that anymore but at least someone is offering another way.

<comment><USER19> Back in the day it felt like most GeoCities sites were made with FrontPage or Dreamweaver. Do they even exist any more? Would those kind of static sites be acceptable on today's web?

<comment><USER21> I actually kind of miss static sites. These days everything seems to be about pumping out new content, like a newspaper, whereas static sites were more like books. They had chapters, an order to read, table of contents... you explored them, rather than just read through them backwards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm excited about the potential here. Moore's law etc allows geocities-style websites to be maintained for significantly less cost than it did a decade ago. I hope the next generation has as much fun learning HTML as I did.

Something else has changed besides the technology costs, though. I'm old enough to have used geocities, but not old enough to know or remember if it was truly "anonymous" and "uncensored." Was it? Regardless I wonder if Neocities will have a harder time maintaining those qualities in today's world.

</comment><comment><USER23> One of the most important parts of geocities functionality was allowing users to integrate their static HTML sites with the backend functionality provided by Yahoo.

Stuff like guestbooks,hit counters and even chatrooms. From what I remember you dumped some magic tag in there which was parsed by the server which added a chunk of HTML that was dynamically generated.

Does Neocities have something like this?

You could do all sorts of fun things with this, like javascript games which allow site owners to create lobbies for their website.

So something like:

<Game gametype="bomberman" lobby="mylobbyname">

<comment><USER24> Geocities was great before this happened. I was on Geocities before it was acquired by Yahoo and it was literally just static HTML sites. Guestbooks, hit counters, etc. were all just added into your HTML without special tags.

<comment><USER23> How did you have stuff which relies on a server backend (like guestbooks) without having the server inject HTML somehow?

<comment><USER25> CGI-based images or pages. I don't believe GeoCities let _users_ upload their own CGI scripts, but I believe they had a set of pre-defined CGI tools you could call. You could also set up things like guestbooks using an external service. It wasn't unusual to see "Guestbook provided by $FOO" at the bottom of guestbook pages. Kind of like Disqus, but before JavaScript.

<comment><USER26> Tripod let people write their own (limited) perl scripts for their site... when I found that out the first thing i did was try to get something from Matt's Script Archive to work, but it didn't. Then I wrote my own guestbook and what had to be the lamest forum ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I used to love geocities growing up. Making fake billing error sites and spamming them out was a hobby of teenage me, and most importantly geocities taught me that you can view the source! to any website. I remember when I first learned about viewing the source to a website, I was so pumped to go through some actual working code and then recreate it in geocities. When I was twelve I figured out how to email forms to myself, which would have been much harder to execute without geocities.

<comment><USER28> I remember the first website I "hacked" (read inspected the html code), I was sure I was onto something...

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't get it.

Geocities was right at the time, we have Wordpress (and yes MySpace and Tumblr and Google Sites and Apples site builder and Yahoo pages and Wix _et cetera_ ) and a million different blogging platforms now that fill most of what Geocities was (I had an account there).

For the rest of it there are better implementations of things like photo sharing (and now video sharing) or sharing guitar tabs or artwork or music or ...

>"It's worth it if it inspires even one kid to start building something." //

You can get a free domain name and run your own server with only a few clicks of the mouse now.

So, like I said, I don't get where "neocities" fits in to the web of today.

<comment><USER30> Tumblr (assuming it survives as it exists now) fills the niche that geocities once did, except it slaps a nice UI on making updates and presents some minor restrictions on what you can do (you need to find somewhere to put some of your assets that can't really be hosted by tumblr themselves). Their theme editor even has (if my memory does not trick me, I'm at work and don't particularly want to log into my tumblr dashboard) a reasonable HTML editor. If all the eye melting gif backgrounds, autoplay music and late-90s knock off novelty cursors are anything to go by, a lot of tumblr is probably a more worthy descendant of geocities.

There is certainly a shitton of content created on tumblr, even if you discount the value from aggregation. In addition, Neocities 10mb limitation hugely limits what you can do. Setting aside 1MB for CSS, JS and images and assuming you have a 85/15 content/markup split in your files, you get ~150k words. If you even dare adding images, the possibilities for archiving any content you produce are shot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> As a designer (an imposer of order), this was surprisingly inspiring! In 2004, the trend was towards order and now feel (Ok, hoping?) the pendulum might be swinging a bit more towards chaotic freedom.

<comment><USER3> Not a designer here, but this comment reminded me of the movie "Helvetica", which describes the same pendulum effect happening in font design over the years. Couldn't agree more that a swing the other way would be a great development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I love little tools that let people explore their creativity. Geocities was certainly one of the earlier ones. But perhaps the OP is viewing it with rose- tinted glasses?

Sure it exposed you to becoming a creator on the web but I think that was mostly a historical accident. We can only appreciate it in hindsight. It's not like Geocities was the _best_ way to create and host web pages.

Today I think webmaker.org is a step in the right direction.

But for most people I think initiatives and projects like this will remain rather niche. If you're not technically inclined to learn new skills and technologies to get content on the web you don't have to. There are plenty of great, free tools for putting your content online and hosting it for free.

</comment><comment><USER33> You know what is the mega-feature that is missing? Git integration. Yeah, it's geek, I know, but it would be a phenomenal way to publish a website (edit, commit, push).

<comment><USER34> Even better than git for publishing, I like the "fork" concept as applied to the more general web. Forget copyright issues for a moment... if you could fork sites here it would allow for really fast site creation where you can build off others' creations.

<comment><USER35> Ward Cunningham's Smallest Federated Wiki[1] is basically what you describe. To edit a wiki page you have to fork it into your own wiki, which I think automatically creates links and things. It's interesting but I haven't explored it nearly as much as I'm sure it deserves.

[1]: [http://wardcunningham.github.io](http://wardcunningham.github.io)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Thinking back, it's very possible that Geocities is a key reason I am a developer today.

<comment><USER37> Definitely for me! I plugged away in Microsoft Notepad and did all this fun, interesting stuff locally in the browser but I never had a place to share it. It was getting kind of lame not being able to share it easily. Enter: Geocities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Has anyone heard of Google Sites? [http://sites.google.com/](http://sites.google.com/)

<comment><USER39> Informed people won't build on it for fear google will arbitrarily shut it down some day.

<comment><USER29> That may be true for some definition of informed but I'm inclined to think that there are many informed people using gmail (and other Google services) and this fact leads away from your assumption.

<comment><USER40> But it's perfectly reasonable to think that Google might drop a service like "Sites" if they aren't able to monetize it, or if they think that it competes with another of their services. It isn't currently reasonable to think that of gmail.

<comment><USER29> Nor to think that of [voluntary contribution supported] neocities?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> [http://☁.neocities.org/](http://☁.neocities.org/)

Hah! (where have I seen that demo before?)

</comment><comment><USER42> The author does a great job of calling potential users to action. One of the cool things about the old myspace.com was the ability to customize a profile, it gave users a way to express themselves. I'm sure people made money off of "theme makers" and other web tools that otherwise would not have gained popularity. NeoCities could be the catalyst for a new wave of sites that aim to make it easier for users to personalize their website on NeoCities. Sometimes all it takes to revitalize an idea is to present in a slightly different way.

<comment><USER43> Ironically, the "customization" of Myspace's wacky profiles with animated backgrounds and autoplaying music is what led people to the more streamlined Facebook, and we know what happened after that.

My theory is that design is cyclical. We had GeoCities/MySpace, then Facebook/Twitter, and now we're back to Instagram/Snapchat for expressing creativity.

<comment><USER42> If improvements are made on each cycle then we should end up with something better than we had before. Iterative development on a grand scale. hehe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I must say that today you can do quite complex apps using just JS. So this might take off in unexpected way easily.

</comment><comment><USER45> I strongly recommend reading the Ruby source code for NeoCities on Github [https://github.com/kyledrake/neocities- web](https://github.com/kyledrake/neocities-web)

NeoCities uses Sinatra, Slim templates and Sequel for database queries and migrations. The code is a pure joy to read. Ruby is not the fastest language, but for an initial release of a minimum viable product it's perfect.

If you decide take on investors you can pay someone else to rewrite the thing in java later.

</comment><comment><USER46> What does this really mean: "as long as it's not illegal to host it"? This site is globally accessible, but legal rules are local. If you host something which is illegal say in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (not that hard to do), and make it available over neocities also to Saudi Arabia, then is it illegal or not? Well, in practice for sure KSA will just block whole domain, and probably you don't care. I think whole youtube is still blocked in Turkey because of single bad video. Where are physically your servers?

Also I'm afraid according to many countries you would be legally responsible to the content what you help to publish. So any single page with questionable content may end up badly for you.

Geocities worked because these nasty legal problems did not come up yet, Internet was a marginal non-serious thing, and even if bad content was published then no-one noticed or reacted to it. Now a web is the mainstream media, and you may find out that technical hosting of some bytes is really smallest problem in the global publishing business. In order to follow all laws of all the countries where you operate (i.e. from where your site is accessible) you need to monitor the content, react to notifications etc.

</comment><comment><USER47> Please tell us what you're doing to prevent all the data from being lost if Neocities goes down. I don't want this to turn into another.. well, Geocities.

<comment><USER9> If it were me, nothing. Users should back up. If the admins back up too, well, that is a bonus.

<comment><USER47> Absolutely disagree. The entire tragedy of GeoCities was that it is now inaccessible. On a personal level, of course you should have local backups. But for the sake of the project/culture at large, there needs to be a long- term plan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I like the idea and think it will be both an adventure and worth while, but it'll never be what it used to be.

Here's why:

My friends never really made there own websites or anything even close, but when myspace came along everyone suddenly became interested in the ability to customize their profile page. This alone created would be programmers out of my friends, figuring out how to manipulate each page to add interesting layouts via HTML, picking music to add to the page and figuring out how to embed pictures, videos, music, links, etc. The point is, that myspace was in many ways better than Facebook, and a transition from webpages to social networking. With myspace essentially gone, my friends have on multiple occasions told me they missed the ability to make themselves unique, but when I suggest them making their own webpage they call claim it too hard, costly, no way to network, etc.

Perhaps neocities can make it, but to hit a larger market it'll need more social networking that allows the qualities of facebook chat (why ALL of my friends switched from myspace). If you could add in the social networking aspect, it would trump the need for facebook and open the door for a whole new realm of people.

<comment><USER49> I would claim that Neocities should specifically _not_ add social networking aspects. If someone wants social features on their site then they can copy/paste snippets of HTML/CSS/Javascript into the static site.

I think the difficulty with doing that is that social network integration is almost exclusively focused on consumption. At the lowest end of the spectrum are the widgets containing information from within the network. That's a reasonable way to direct users from a Web site into a network (eg. a user visiting a newspaper's site may go and visit the newspaper's Facebook page) but it's useless at getting people from the network to go to a site. Nobody goes to Bob's Web site to check his Facebook status; they do it from within Facebook.

The situations where this can work well are: 1) Consumer APIs with machine- readable results. The simplest mashup, data visualisation, interactive game, etc. can be made really interesting when it has real-world data to play with. As an example, one of my first programs was a balls-on-springs physics simulation, but I drove it with artist similarity data from last.fm (audioscrobbler at the time). 2) Producer APIs allow data to persist once the static page is closed. This could be as simple as posting a highscore from a game, all the way up to posting the result of a Web-based creative application. What programmer didn't throw together a "paint program" as soon as they found out how to get the mouse position and make a line on a canvas?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Thank you, I really missed websites like this: [http://maxprafferty.neocities.org/](http://maxprafferty.neocities.org/)

:D

<comment><USER51> Needs more <marquee>marquee</marquee>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I don't think anything proves this point more than the "This is a webpage" post that hit 1 on HN a few days ago.

</comment><comment><USER52> This is kind of ridiculous sorry. The Web is so interesting today because it moved forward from a read-only kind of system, which you seem to so happily advertise with this NeoCities website.

And I totally disagree about Facebook. It has given me the ability to communicate very creatively with my friends. Much more than any read-only HTML site will ever dream of. Who cares about its boring interface, the power lies in the content and ability it has given me to easily share this content with my friends.

How will NeoCities adress the challenges we already faced 10 years ago, that is that users will want to _input_ data, and interact with these static sites, rather than just read them?

Sure it's fun and creative to share static content... it's also fun and creative to share static images (flickr). But the _medium_ of the Web has much more potential than simply being a repository of static resources.

<comment><USER53> We can use Java applets for interactivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Complete tangent, but I love how the NeoCities ico image is a brutally rendered globe, probably in 256 colors. When you view it directly, it even rotates. Let the GIF march begin! Again!

[http://neocities.org/favicon.ico](http://neocities.org/favicon.ico)

</comment><comment><USER55> An important part of bringing people back to an interactive web is to do away with the 'browser' concept and bring back symmetrical web clients.

I still actively use the SeaMonkey web browser, and a big part of the reason I do is it still has an integrated WYSIWYG HTML composer component. I have an 'edit' action item for any web page I visit, and cut-and-past capability between browser and composer windows.

Hosting a website permanently is just a matter of getting an account on freeshell.org and setting up your ~/html directory to face the web. If you want a decent amount of space and the ability to use the PHP and MySQL backend, you can make a one time donation of ~30 dollars (can't remember the exact amount) for a lifetime upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER56> There are lots of things to be done, even with static content (from the server PoV). Right next to this entry stands "A dark room", which is entirely static server-side.

Regarding the "airport kid" saddies, someone pointed out how he longed for the C64 days and put one up again. I see this as an opportunity. What can you achieve with 10M and HTML+JS? While the web seems to look like "old stuff" there's lots to be done with WebGL, canvas, websockets... All of this now available to everyone for free. No domain name to own, no DNS to set up, no VPS or RPi+FTTH to own, no hacking around to squat Heroku or GAE with static content.

Think outside the box and show off your skills, folks. Push the envelope. That's the hacking spirit.

</comment><comment><USER57> It's interesting that in the 80s when home computers were new, you essentially started your computer at the command line and could code in something like Basic right away. A lot of non-technical people learned at least some programming, because of this. When GUIs came this faded out.

A similar parallel in the 90s with the internet is that people learned HTML, because in many ways tools were limited and it was relatively easy to create a page that was respectable enough. Now that so many web pages are "covered" in CSS and/or created with higher level tools, it will be interesting to see if many non-technical people will be attracted to creating their own web pages. I hope so.

</comment><comment><USER58> Request URL: [http://neocities.org/create](http://neocities.org/create)

Request Method: POST

Status Code: HTTP/1.1 302 Found

Received Cookie: neocities: [REMOVED SESSION DATA]

My create-account form and session cookie over HTTP? Not a fan. Grab a cert from startssl or similar!

</comment><comment><USER59> Think about adding a social aspect. "Following" cities for example and having a feed with updates (a la Github) of the stuff you follow. This way you will add user-to-user interaction and will help you with surfacing good content.

<comment><USER60> I sincerely wish we had had the foresight to explore this further. Early "homesteaders" of GeoCities would select their URL based on a loose ontology of (neighbor)"hoods" and (sub)"burbs" (a fashion oriented page might be hosted at /FashionAvenue/Catwalk/1493). While this certainly made scaling the backend easy, it also created a sense of community (keeping an eye on your "neighbors", the mad rush to get a site with a hot address (/1000) when a new burb would open).

The need to provide a simple path for all of Yahoo!'s users led to the now familiar "/username", but I'm not entirely certain it was for the better.

( I recall one conversation where we considered providing the ability to tag derelict homesteads with virtual spray paint )

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> There are many such sites on the web where you can easily and for free create a web site with plain HTML, and many of them have been around for 10+ years and give you more than 10MB. What's the big deal here, appart from the name?

</comment><comment><USER62> The idea is great. Really like it.

But what I REALLY like is the browse-function with the little thumbnails of the hundreds of websites which look exactly the same crappy and shitty way as in the good old days. [http://neocities.org/browse](http://neocities.org/browse)

It just shows me that people still don't know nothing about design, they have no idea what it takes, how much time & knowledge and they are like spoiled kids from the idiot-save steps that facebook&co took to maintain a "good" (at least stable) design after putting some text in a textbox and press enter.

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm not sure what this is trying to be. If it's supposed to get people who know nothing about web to create pages, it should really have some handrails and tutorials (or at least links to tutorials). As far as I can tell the new user creating their first page basically just gets a huge wall of xml in their face. If it's really just trying to be hosting for people who know what they're doing and that's it, well, I'm a cheap bastard and I host my static page on Dropbox for thousands of times the free storage. I guess here the ugly url would be slightly shorter?

</comment><comment><USER64> I think it's a shame that GeoCities is gone, and I totally respect this new effort, but isn't NeoCities one missed credit card payment away from the same fate? There's a lot of eggs in that basket.

</comment><comment><USER65> There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. GeoCities infinite customizeability + HTML5 client-side web app capability may be just that. Excellent, good luck!

</comment><comment><USER66> Might want to put in a little thought towards a (N)SFW mode...

</comment><comment><USER67> I think that the problem with GeoCities was not the content of the websites hosted in that platform but all those ads and popups annoying us all the time. If I'd redesign a similar I would take this as a bad example and try to keep it cool and easier to navigate. I think that the platform could not interfere in the hosted page.

Congrats for the idea. That's a great action for sure!

</comment><comment><USER53> Kyle, I love neocities. Not trying to toot my own horn but instead share the similar feeling we have. It's great to read exactly what I've been feeling: [http://www.johnrockefeller.net/you-know-what-i-miss-the- unli...](http://www.johnrockefeller.net/you-know-what-i-miss-the-unlimited- internet/)

Thanks so much!

</comment><comment><USER68> Neocities is just so handy. Like last night, I read the 2012 doomsday forum was going read only, and the search feature was being disabled. So I made a quick google custom search feature: [http://2012forum.neocities.org/](http://2012forum.neocities.org/) and asked the maintainer to link it on the site.

</comment><comment><USER69> Geocities was great, and I'm really glad Kyle is doing this.

The very very first site I built (in junior high) is still live and kicking on freeservers: [http://sina.8m.com/](http://sina.8m.com/)

Certainly it falls in the "vast wasteland of garbage" category, but I'm glad it's still online.

</comment><comment><USER70> Interesting idea. I wonder how you'll deal with the problems with anonymity though. You've no record of who signed up for anything, and creating a page is easy. What will you do when someone puts child porn up? What about any other 'illegal' content? Copyrighted content? Libellous content?

</comment><comment><USER47> > When Yahoo shut down GeoCities, they did much more than delete a bunch of > ... Limp Bizkit MIDI files.

Ugh, guilty as charged.

</comment><comment><USER71> Anyone have a repo of the old gifs that were most common? I'm thinking of things like the under construction stickman or the rotating wordart welcome sign.

I am a little sad that security of web browsers has gotten better. I remember offering people free cup holders by opening up their disk trays :-)

<comment><USER72> This might help a little:

[http://divshot.github.io/geo-bootstrap/](http://divshot.github.io/geo- bootstrap/) (via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508061](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508061) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5474022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5474022))

Also [http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/backgrounds/](http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/backgrounds/) (not exactly what you asked for, but... interesting that it's still up there) (found here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5919862](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5919862))

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> "They deleted the ability for people (both old and new to the web) to easily create web sites, and be in complete control of the content and presentation they provide to their audience."

That makes no sense whatsoever. Does no one remember the extra JS/CSS to hide advertisements?

</comment><comment><USER74> I would appreciate if they could relax a bit a list of filetypes you can upload there. if you want to use some webfonts for your CSS you will be surprised that it's impossible to upload your own TTF file (freeware of course) :(

</comment><comment><USER75> Please add the ability to sort the websites by recency and by (weighted) hits when browsing through [http://neocities.org/browse](http://neocities.org/browse).

</comment><comment><USER76> Why [http://neocities.org/blog](http://neocities.org/blog) and not [http://blog.neocoties.org](http://blog.neocoties.org) ?

<comment><USER77> It looks like neocities uses subdomains to host user sites.[1] They probably don't want to pollute the subdomain "space" with their own content. They probably have some kind of automatic rewrite thing going on as well.

Now I'm wondering how you do the auto-subdomain thing. Maybe have *.neocities.org A record to the same IP and then have the HTTP server parse the URL?

[1] from the blog: [http://mlpfim.neocities.org/](http://mlpfim.neocities.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> This is so cool. Good idea, I am sure people will like it!

<rant>I wished NeoCitites mentions to ignore W3Schools, mention W3Fools and the WebPlatform.org project as the starting point.</rant>

</comment><comment><USER79> My webpage and account were apparently deleted. No explanation or warning was given. Needless to say, I won't be using neocities again, nor can I recommend it to anyone I know.

<comment><USER80> Go get a debian vm for $15/yr at buyvm.net (happy customer, no other relations) and build your fancy site there.

<comment><USER79> Sure sure, but now I'm here, and I'm letting people know a very important thing: don't trust this guy with your website. You might end up spending hours working on it, building it up only to have it deleted because... actually you won't even know why, he won't let you know. Utter lack of respect for the users.

<comment><USER80> I agree. that's lame. Also, I wonder how one goes about having one's own neocities site deleted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Somewhere, I have the code laying around to build a webring ...

</comment><comment><USER82> Would you like to sign my guestbook?

[http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html](http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html)

</comment><comment><USER83> I wish there was an easier way to browse than just "recently updated" sites. Some sort of search and criteria filter would make it a lot better.

<comment><USER53> How about a web ring?

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Love it! It's Angelfire/GeoCities for devs. :D

<comment><USER85> Glad at least one person mentioned Angelfire, I still have an account there, didn't really go anywhere with it in the last 10 years though. LOL

<comment><USER85> Most of the site is dead, but I found this gem. That's me Jumping off a cliff.

[http://www.angelfire.com/nd/tysonb/newmexico/index.html](http://www.angelfire.com/nd/tysonb/newmexico/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> Maybe you should ban this asshole: [http://i.imgur.com/ODfNHVr.png](http://i.imgur.com/ODfNHVr.png)

</comment><comment><USER87> [http://shitrecruitmentagentssay.neocities.org/](http://shitrecruitmentagentssay.neocities.org/)

</comment><comment><USER88> I would be interested to see how far people manage to stretch what can be done in 10megs. I bet it would surprise many.

</comment><comment><USER89> What would make the web sexy again is to find a solution to allow "privacy"! Privacy _IS_ cool.

</comment><comment><USER90> What is going to prevent this platform from becoming a massive spam fest or a link farm to other sites?

<comment><USER68> It will probably get blacklisted by Google like with the .co.cc domains.

<comment><USER91> Easily solved with webrings and pages of links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> I welcome a return to mass market creativity instead of paint-by-number UGC linked to real names.

</comment><comment><USER93> Your vision is great, but which is the difference to open a blog on wordpress.com?

</comment><comment><USER94> If there was an API for uploading files I would use this for a static blog :-)

</comment><comment><USER95> The website is AWFUL. Lato Regular font, green color. Web 2.0 is awful.

</comment><comment><USER96> wow!! This is crazy. Been sleeping on this idea for the past 3 months or so. But for my day job, I would have definitely taken a stab at it. kudos for starting this.

</comment><comment><USER97> this has been a lot of fun to work on. I think it could be really important for letting new (and old) developers have a place to really test out coding and design.

</comment><comment><USER98> That brought me sweet memories. Great idea <3

</comment><comment><USER99> I miss neighborhoods, the sense of belonging...

</comment><comment><USER100> The 3D spinning globe favicon is a nice touch.

</comment><comment><USER101> I can't wait for the visual editor!

</comment><comment><USER102> Yes, for the love of god do this.

</comment><comment><USER103> A poetic manifesto. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER104> The opposite path of Medium

</comment><comment><USER105> _Instead of having adventures into the great unknowns of the web, we instead now spend most of our time on social networks: boring, suburban gated communities, where everybody 's "profile" looks exactly the same, and presents exactly the same content, in the same arrangement. Rarely do we create things on these networks; Instead, we consume, and report on our consumption._

This is a brilliant observation. Facebook started as a scrappy but fun college thing, and now it's a platform for people to brag about travel and the food they eat.

To get anything decent out of humans, you have to create a context for excellence. Otherwise, it's Sturgeon's Law that sets in. That is a natural way of things, even when the technology is well-designed. This is similar to complaints about job sites or dating sites because "the sites are broken". No, the sites are fine. They do their jobs extremely well. It's _people_ that are broken.

The problem is that there's no money in creating a context for excellence, and the economic pressures on an organism like Facebook to mediocritize (remember that this often happens by default; no one explicitly decides to make their platform shitty) are just too powerful.

</comment><comment><USER106> This article made my day.

The standardization/normalization of the web -- specifically, PageRank, Wikipedia, Facebook, and what's now totally recombinant "web design" \-- has ruined the frontier aspect necessary for actual innovation.

</comment><comment><USER107> Great idea. I've never been so bummed out as when I found out Geocities was dying.

</comment><comment><USER108> See also (kind of): YTMND.com

</comment><comment><USER109> yes... limp bizkit MIDIs. I used to have Break Stuff on my neopets store.

</comment><comment><USER110> Want a throwback, services that are pre-1993 still exists: [http://sdf.org/](http://sdf.org/) , but a geocities retro revival is just a fad.

</comment><comment><USER111> Yeah, no, Geocities might have had 0.01% worthwhile content but it was a vast wasteland of garbage.

The reason being that's what a platform like Geocities enables; garbage. It empowers people who are willing to put in basically no effort to make a static page with no scripting. That's not a recipe for amazing content, that's a recipe for bottom barrel content.

Really, any platform that enables everybody to contribute anything they want is going to sink to the lowest common denominator. The platform needs a built in way to highlight the best of it to have any worth whatsoever. Most Twitter feeds are unreadable garbage, the reason the platform is a success though is that it has built in ways to find, discover and follow the very best it has to offer.

It's also got a very narrow use case that happens to coincide very well with the skills of comedians and comedy writers. Geocities' narrow use case only coincides with the skills and talents of artists, and they already have Deviantart and their own gallery websites. There's no compelling reason for them to use Geocities/Neocities as their platform.

Best of luck but I'm skeptical this is going to ultimately be worthwhile.

<comment><USER112> You can use a lot of that same logic to justify any elitism.

If anybody can come to this restaurant, it won't be a great restaurant, so we have to exclude _those people_.

How many future web designers cut their teeth making terrible Geocities websites? Just because something is terrible doesn't mean you didn't learn something.

The forest would be pretty quiet if only the best birds sang.

<comment><USER113> But it was a vast wasteland of garbage.

<comment><USER80> Since Worse is Better, Garbage is Awesome?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Explosion at Japanese nuclear plant, fuel may be melting - Officials - <AUTHOR> http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/12_45.html

<comment><USER3> The official line from the press conference being given by the Secretary General of Japan is "We don't know and we are investigating further, however radiation is still within acceptable levels." This means the only real update from this press conference is that the evacuation perimeter for Fukushima 2 (the second power plant) has been increased to 10km (from 3km).

To the contrary, however, somebody was quoted that the explosion was the containment building for reactor vessel 1. If that is the case it would pretty much be the worst case scenario for both Japan and the future of nuclear power.

<comment><USER4> This was a zero-information press conference.

Authorities still investigating, stay calm, 'it depends on the circumstances', etc.

Several reporters asked if a 10km evacuation radius was sufficient, and the reply was '10km is what we decided'.

This looks like an unmitigated disaster in the making.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> 'Concrete wall of Reactor #1 blown away in explosion' 'Radiation level outside plant now 1015 micro Sieverts.' 'Huge probability of major event.'

\- govt. press conference, next update in 20-30 minutes. Local time in Japan is 5:37pm / 1735.

Most recent reports from power company - several hours out of date right now but still informative:

[http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp- com/release/11031219-e....](http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp- com/release/11031219-e.html)

[http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp- com/release/11031220-e....](http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp- com/release/11031220-e.html)

[http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp- com/release/index-e.htm...](http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp- com/release/index-e.html)

Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency - English, also out of date

<http://www.nisa.meti.go.jp/english/>

<comment><USER5> A micro Sievert is equivalent to .1 millirem, according to wikipedia. So we're looking at about 100 millirem.

According to the book Physics for Future Presidents, you can calculate the odds of getting cancer from radiation by dividing the exposure by 2500 rems. 100 millirem gives you a 1 in 25,000 chance of developing cancer. Or to put it another way, your chance of getting cancer has gone from 20 percent to 20.004 percent.

The average American is exposed to 200 millirems of radiation each year from natural sources.

Of course it's not over yet and could get worse.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was trying to post up material as soon as I heard it, which is why I didn't take time to add context. I was finding the US media coverage largely useless and many hours out of date, while the Japanese media/agencies were also slow at getting English versions up on the net (for obvious reasons).

<comment><USER5> Happy to help :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 48-hour forecast of jet stream over the Pacific: <http://squall.sfsu.edu/gif/jetstream_pac_h48_00.gif>

<comment><AUTHOR> Video: <http://www.stormsurfing.com/cgi/display_alt.cgi?a=npac_250>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Radiation level currently at 1015 μSv/h. [1]

It would take 1000 hours of exposure at this level to cause health effects. [2]

[1] <http://twitter.com/martyn_williams/status/46490355461406720>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_poisoning>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> NISA press conference: 3:36 pm (2.5 hours ago) explosion was reported to them as containment breach, exact situation unknown at present. Further evacuations will be necessary, people should not travel alone. Official says radiation level data 'unavailable at present'. 'We are not sure if the station is devastated or not.'

Not a panic situation yet, according to NISA.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was a pretty solid supporter of nuclear power, but if Japan can't make it safe, I don't believe anyone can.

<comment><USER7> This is actually a proof that nuclear energy is not green, not safe, and should not be used any more. Nuclear plants can't resist direct airliner impact or big earthquakes or anything that the engineer didn't think about.

<comment><USER8> Merde, HN needs a redesign. I didn't mean to upvote this comment, sorry.

Nuclear energy is like commercial airlines. Its a very safe kind of power, but sometimes there are accidents. Its unavoidable.

More to your point, saying that a 747 hitting a cooling tower is a reason to abandon nuclear power is asinine. I the entire 100+ years of human flight, there have been exactly TWO instances of commercial planes hitting large human structures, and they both happened within a few minutes of each other in New York.

To your other point, OF COURSE ENGINEERS THOUGHT ABOUT EARTHQUAKES. They're freaking NUCLEAR PLANTS. They don't build these things on fucking fault lines and then say "oops". They aren't franchise McDonald's that take 3 weeks to build and then ask if you want fries with your uranium.

Any plant takes _years_ , if not a decade in some cases, of zoning and study before they move a bull dozer onto a site. This earthquake SHIFTED THE ENTIRE PLANET. Its quite within the realm of being ok that a 40+ year old nuclear plant isn't handling being shaken by that kind of force very well.

<comment><USER9> the sum of my knowledge on nuclear energy and human flight is nearly nothing, so forgive me if i'm wrong... but comparatively, isn't the potential aftermath of a nuclear meltdown a bit more concerning than a plane crashing?

<comment><USER8> Apologies catshirt. I just re-read my comment and I realize in retrospect my comment was WAY too aggressive and snarky. You might consider adding some contact info to your profile, as I was unable to email you with my apology directly.

<comment><USER9> hey, not an issue, i didn't take it that way at all. i'm pretty tactless so i'm sure all my comments could be taken the same way. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/12_40.html> \- nuclear medical teams dispatched

<http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/12_38.html> venting halted

<http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tbstv> civilians instructed on radiation protection procedures - seal buildings, do not consume food or water, emergency situation now exists

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Japanese Govt. will supply radiation medicine, 'may quarantine area' - spokesperson. Sorry, didn't catch agency affiliation. There is some confusion over whether the reactor containment or the cooling system itself has exploded.

TEPCO updates - but pre-explosion

[http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp- com/release/11031222-e....](http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp- com/release/11031222-e.html)

[http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp- com/release/11031221-e....](http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp- com/release/11031221-e.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 'Japanese people should be prepared for worst case scenario.' - <USER2>

Helpful English translation feed, non-sensational: <http://yokosonews.com/live>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apparently the reactor roof has collapsed. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg4uogOEUrU> if you haven't seen it or can't get to a TV. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMEV-_X5b_8> is a better video.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Evacuation zone widened to 20km, per NHK

</comment><comment><USER8> Its the one site left in the world serving content for Windows Media Player exclusively left.

</comment><comment><USER10> There are actually whole websites and news channels dedicated to this sort of news. We don't need to turn HN into a sort of live streaming play-by-play about what's happening in Japan.

<comment><USER10> not cool to penalize my karma for a reasonable and honest comment trying to preserve site quality.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't downvote your comment, nor did I want to. I'm only posting this here because the English language media has been slow with their coverage and this is an exceptional situation.

<comment><USER11> Add to that the chance of one or more of the commenters here actually knowing something something about nuclear plants seems far greater than on one of the mainstream news channels. Thanks for posting.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tackle Complexity in Typescript apps with TSMC - <AUTHOR> http://theblacksmithhq.com/tsmc TSMC allows you to configure the modules and submodules (as well as their inner dependencies) you want to get out of your library/app and compile them giving you separately packaged modules and submodules.<p>Let's say you have a modals module, inside your ui namespace which is one of many namespaces inside your awesomejs lib. Driven by your config, tsmc will give you a awesomejs-ui-modals.js, an awesomejs-ui.js (which contains everything inside ui, including modals) and a awesomejs.js (which includes ui and everything else). For each package it will also give you a declaration (.d.ts) file and a sourcemap (.js.map) file. AFAIK, this is the best way available to have your source code compiled into a big combine package as well as fine grained modules. <comment><AUTHOR> Cool @paf31, please let me know how it goes!

</comment><comment><USER2> Neat! I'll try this out today.</comment>


Ask HN: Database of webapps with focus on UI critique - <AUTHOR>

I've seen some mentions here on HN in the past of a site that lists new and upcoming webapps to get feedback from other developers. Its users give their opinions mainly about the user experience of the app.<p>Do you know what site I'm talking about? I can't remember its name. <comment><USER2> The iste I was looking for was producthunt.com

</comment><comment><USER3> I know - startupstash.com and Getapp.com</comment>


Ask HN: Would you buy your insurance from a company using AI? - <AUTHOR> I am just curious. <comment><USER2> Using AI how? There are many ways of using an AI. When I will use such insurance AI used to automate their backend tasks reducing my price AI used to automate billing issues, address changes anything I don't like manually doing AI used to score customer support requests then handed to a human AI used to price my contract dynamically while giving me ability to grant granular access to my data. When I won't use if AI powered? AI used to do large scale compartmentalization of clients and putting me in a bucket Customer support fully done by AI causing no end to my headaches AI used to predict my behaviour then alter my pricing AI used as a buzzword to make me pay more for some reason AI used to search for susceptible clients and upsell them other products

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes. Though I like my agent. He's been good to me and the mutual insurance company we are with has really low rates. So if the case could be made that the chosen insurer would actually be there when I had an accident or needed to make a claim, maybe the chosen company could reach out to me and say "congrats we were connected I'll be your agent..." etc</comment>


Let's make a list of niche community sites to find customers/startup ideas. - <AUTHOR> One way to find a good startup idea is to interact with potential customers of different industries/niche, understand the problems they face in their day-to-day tasks, and look how technology can provide a solution in a feasible and profitable way.
While, one can try and meet people in real, it is often not possible for everyone. In such cases, it would be really nice if we had a list of online forums, communities, QA sites for niche/industries where we can interact with potential customers. There many such sites for technology and business (Like HN) but not many for other niches(or I don't know about them if they exist).
Why not make a list/directory of such websites? Submit such websites you know about. I will start with these :
- http://www.t-shirtforums.com/
- http://beta.threadless.com/play/forum/
- http://recordingquestions.com/
- http://www.bodybuilding.com/
- http://lawyrs.net/
- http://www.lawlink.com/
- http://news.knotist.com/
- http://www.meetpips.com/
- http://www.freshpips.com/
- http://ozmosis.com/
- http://www.parentsconnect.com/
- http://www.minti.com/
- http://www.myshutterspace.com/
- http://activerain.com/
- http://www.fohboh.com/
- http://doc2doc.bmj.com/
- http://www.doctorshangout.com/forum
- http://www.accountantforums.com/
- http://forums.foodservice.com/
- http://www.roadfood.com/Forums/
- http://www.restaurant-community.com/
Some general purpose websites where one can find potential customers :
- Quora
- Reddit/Sub-Reddits
- Facebook Groups <comment><USER2> While I applaud the work OP put into this, it makes no sense to me. Why?

The first thing is that why do this instead of using Google to find out the most popular niche sites? If I type in "restaurant forum" in Google, surely the first 4-5 pages will contain useful information, no?

Secondly, people have to remember that this list exists when they are thinking of ideas. First thought in anyone's mind is to Google "restaurant forum". You aren't going to overcome that line of thinking in this community - you just aren't. The only hope you have is to augment it by providing information that Google doesn't offer. What's the chance of that?

Third - let's assume that you get a lot of interest on this thread and people submit 500+ links. Awesome :) Who will take it upon themselves to categorize these and present them in a helpful way? Surely you wouldn't expect anyone to visit a page with 500+ links on it and search one by one through the links to see if one meets his/her needs, would you? If you did a page search for "restaurant" on this page, a site like <http://www.fohboh.com/> would not show up b/c it doesn't have a descriptive URL or tagline next to it. So someone has to take this list and make it usable. Who will do that?

Fourth - who will curate this list to ensure that only the "right" sites are added (rather than someone submitting their own site for SEO purposes)? It would have to be a mod b/c OP cannot edit others' submissions. Can you get a mod to agree?

Lastly, who will curate this list over time by adding, removing, and editing it? New sites are always on the horizon and thus will need to be added over time. Current sites will die or fade in popularity. Someone will have to be on top of it. HN doesn't have "sticky threads". Even if it gets voted to the front page, it will eventually/soon fade to the 2nd, 3rd, etc. Only a certain number of stories are maintained in perpetuity (at least in the "More" button). How will you ensure that it stays alive?

Sorry - the "actual benefits received" vs. "how much work will be required" just makes it untenable to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> You raised some very valid questions. Let me address them one by one.

 _Why do this instead of using Google to find out the most popular niche sites?_

\- because not all good sites can be discovered using Google. For example, there may be a Facebook group for a niche that is far more active than a dedicated forum site. There may be some good niche sites that are not ranked high enough. The idea is to let people submit good sites they know about.

\- to make all such sites available at one place for quick access, not only for me but anyone else who is interested.

 _people have to remember that this list exists when they are thinking of ideas_

\- It is not just about discovering startup ideas. It is about interacting with people outside hacker community through these sites. You may know about problems they face and it can result in some good ideas but it will also be helpful in marketing some existing products for that niche.

\- One thing I would like to make clear is that if enough links are provided I will make a website/google doc for this where anyone can submit new websites. May be I will do it anyway but there is no harm in asking for more such sites from community.

 _Who will take it upon themselves to categorize these and present them in a helpful way? Who will curate this list to ensure that only the "right" sites are added?_

I will do that on a dedicated site/google doc. I don't think it is a very time intensive task. HackerNews isn't a good place to keep and maintain such information but people here can definitely help by submitting the sites they know about.

 _who will curate this list over time by adding, removing, and editing it?_

If I make a small web app for this(it will take just few hours) anyone can submit sites and people who are interested in maintaining it can be made moderator. In any case some effort is definitely required and if people find it valuable it is worth the effort.

I guess you raised all these questions because you thought I am proposing that this list should be created and maintained on HN itself. That is simply not most effective way to do that. May be I didn't made it clear but the objective of this post was to just collect such links not make a wiki on HN.

<comment><USER2> Some good counters but I'd counter back with:

 _...there may be a Facebook group for a niche that is far more active than a dedicated forum site._

Two counters for this one:

1) Activity is not always what's most valueable. Forums offer value not just in their activity level but in their archives. It's easy to find any post mentioning the word "aerator" for example. You cannot do that easily on Facebook. Besides, Facebook is also used in a more social way than many forums. People post "funny pictures of their cat on their restaurant manual" on Facebook, for example, but they'll ask "Where should I get my restaurant manuals printed?" on a forum.

2) The obvious next question is, "So they'll also search on Facebook for niche groups. How will your list trump FB's up to date results?"

 _It is not just about discovering startup ideas._

I think you missed my point completely with this, or so it reads. I'm saying that, for your list to be useful, people have to remember that it exists. No one has to remember that Google or Facebook exists. If they have a problem, bam - off to Google to see if other people have written about it. But where, in the order of when someone thinks "How I will go about finding niche sites" will _your_ list appear?

 _if people find it valuable it is worth the effort_

But if they _don't_ find it valuable, was it worth the effort? My bookmarks are full of cool lists that I've bookmarked and have big plans to eventually come back and use...

 _May be I didn't made it clear but the objective of this post was to just collect such links not make a wiki on HN._

That's a good start, of course. I don't know that I would contribute though. To a certain degree, being able to find this information on your own is sort of a barrier to entry in that market. If you aren't capable of finding quality restaurant forums, for example, then maybe you shouldn't be trying to start a business in that industry.

This is a cool idea for a project in which you are learning how to code, or learning a new language, or learning a new stack. It's just not a viable, long-term "thing" IMO for the reasons listed. Prioritization is a big part of entrepreneurship - you have to recognize what's worth doing. You say it takes "a few hours" - no way. Nothing - NOTHING - ever takes however much time you estimate in the software world haha. It will take longer. You will over- optimize in the beginning, start your project, then have to scale back and re- think. It happens to everyone :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think this is a good idea (I mentioned it in a comment a while back :-) ). I don't have many forums to submit, but here's one:

<http://www.pprune.org/> \- Professional Pilots' Rumour Network (basically a hang out for pilots and wannabe pilots)</comment>