I Miss the Old Internet - <AUTHOR> http://misc-stuff.terraaeon.com/articles/miss-old-internet.html <comment><USER3> I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.)

I think the old internet went away because it was more profitable to create a walled garden distribution channel than it was to develop a syndication protocol like email or rss. I honestly don't see any way around this.

<comment><USER4> Do you not find Reddit to be a bit of a cesspool? I tend to avoid it for that reason, but how true it is probably depends on which subreddit(s) we're talking about.

<comment><USER5> Spend enough time on 4chan and you'll realize reddit is a safezone kid gloves hug box.

And 4chan isn't even that bad in terms of bad or illegal content so that goes to show how relative it all is.

<comment><USER6> 4chan is outright fantastic in some aspects.

/g/ is actually quite useful and friendly, especially the DPT (Daily Programming Thread), more-so if you're a beginner.

/trv/ (travel) is just good and perfectly slow where you won't feel pressure to keep up with a thread because it will still be there tomorrow.

/fit/ has good information and really encapsulates what happens when the internet meets bro-gym culture.

Compared to parts of Reddit, I would honestly take 4chan over it. I mean even some of the formerly "default" sub-Reddits are cesspools of hatred with the occasional call for targeted violence and Moderators who will ban you by association. Some of the big sub-Reddits openly discriminate based on race.

I know journalists have zero motivation to investigate sub-Reddits or the incestous circle of Reddit moderators that control the groupthink in most of the major sub-Reddits, but one day that will come out and it will be an internet scandal. If they time it right it could sink any hope of an IPO or serious monetization.

<comment><USER5> Yeah 4chan is great but it differs from reddit in a fundamental way.

You can have a normal thread where someone will casually drop the N word or other slur and it will just sit there, maybe not even acknowledged but also not downvoted or deleted.

That alone is enough to turn people off immediately. They need that sense of retributive justice for a wrong they see in the universe. You're right that reddit can be just as bigoted than 4chan if not more so but I think you realize it's way more subtle and dogwhistley. The only reason a 4chan post will ever dance around being blunt bigotry is usually for the sake of humor not to ban evade.

Also I can't imagine browsing 4chan without something like 4chanX and your average person probably isn't going to bother installing that.

<comment><USER7> >but also not downvoted

Well, there is no way to downvote. Point-based systems usually turn out bad if the community is too big. Just check big subreddit like the defaults, posts get too catering to group-think. Not having downvotes or even upvotes, means that you have to deal with crap posts.

For some people 4chan has "upvotes", what they call "(you)"s, basically a reply, people post too much bad content just trying to provoke a reaction.

<comment><USER8> The introduction of the "(You)" feature arguably changed the spirit of 4chan, since now people know that when they get a reply their comment will get more attention because the list of replies is listed on the comment itself. I don't think there was enough pushback against its introduction a few years ago.

If I still had an imageboard, it would never implement a feature like that.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. It's bigger than an upvote!

Of course, people could still get it from extensions, but not everybody uses them.

Still, the provoking nature on 4chan would still remain even without (you)s as it's the quickest way to get answers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The old internet is still there, it's still growing. It's just covered in a thick layer of corporate shit sites. All you have to do is be the change you want to see. Start hosting your website from home. Code it by hand. Don't use any javascript frontends. It's a good time.

As for finding others, well, HN isn't a bad place to start. Just install an RSS reader client and every time you find yourself enjoying an article check the site to see if it has an RSS feed. In fact, do this with every web interaction. Pretty soon you can completely decouple yourself from content aggregators and start perceiving the web as a community again.

<comment><USER10> > Start hosting your website from home.

This isn't feasible for a large chunk of the population, mainly because ISPs like Comcast love to give you 500 mbps down while limiting your upload to a pitiful 10 mbps.

Host a single 100K image that hits the front page of reddit and your home internet gets hugged to death.

<comment><USER9> How many 100k image hits do you get on your personal website you made for fun? In the entire 20 years I've hosted my website on my comcast connection I have never had this issue. If you're going to post an image to reddit (which is kind of going backwards from the point of all this) then just mirror it onto some popular image host (or your VPS). This doesn't prevent you from also serving up a copy from your local disk to visitors.

1 megabit of upstream is _plenty_ for a personal website. I can say this from long experience.

<comment><USER11> when comes time for your personal websites 15 minutes of fame it becomes inaccessible due to severe upstream bottlenecking

<comment><USER12> If that 15 minutes of fame is so important, put up a load balancer with autoscaling or make sure the Wayback machine archives every post upon publication.

Not every site needs to have 3+ nines of uptime.

<comment><USER10> While yes, that would work, we were talking about hosting things yourself at home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't miss the days when you had to physically send a paper form with a cheque or postal order, go to a bank, wait 28 days for things to be delivered, stand in line at a post office, or phone someone up to get mundane stuff done. Can you imagine sorting out car insurance quotes or booking flights/hotels or doing your tax return without the internet? What a ballache!

The modern internet has been utterly transformative and has made modern life so much easier and simpler. Don't forget about all the useful things you take for granted now that weren't possible then because the internet wasn't commercialised at the time.

The old internet is still there, some if it actually physically _still there_ \- i.e. still on the server/URL it was on back in the day (I find this kinda cool in a way - these sort of mary-celeste servers ticking away somewhere, untouched for 20 years but someone still cares enough to pay to keep it running).

Perhaps less people make their own websites these days, but there is still a thriving and still-as-useless ("not much yet - check back soon!") collection of random personal websites on dat, gopher and ipfs. Stumbling onto these things or hearing about them via word of mouth/keyboard was always part of the joy of 90s internet.

<comment><USER14> >postal order

>a bank

>stand in line at a post office

>car insurance quotes

>booking flights/hotels

>tax return

These conveniences you cite of the _modern internet_ all feel like they help the other side of the relationship even more than they help you. Imagine how much the airlines, banks, tax collectors, and insurance companies love the modern internet, making it all the more convenient for you to interact with their products and services! And at such scale!

My point here is that, on the intellectual front, the _old_ internet was a lot more transformative for humankind than the state of today's "cable television as a service" internet we endure today.

<comment><USER15> How does that change anything? The amount of ease of use you get from the internet is not zero-sum; everyone benefits from it.

Calling the internet "cable television as a service" is ignoring the incredible reach and user-friendliness of the modern internet, and all the advantages that come from that. Nostalgia is okay, but that doesn't change the fact that the current internet brings a lot more information to a lot more people, albeit with differing quality. It has absolutely changed humanity for the better, and is orders of magnitude more transformative than what you seem to be calling old internet.

<comment><USER14> You could make the same argument about the television remote control as it relates to broadcast TV. There is a popular phrase these days, "progress trap," [0] which I think adequately explains the issues with both today's internet and the remote control.

We have indeed made some advancements in some interesting fields due to the modern UI of the web, but what underlies this is a really heavy-handed plasticity on the infrastructure/architecture fronts. That is what the earlier web lacked, and what made it such a fantastic, democratized resource for information and communication.

The remote control achieved the same thing for broadcast TV - a way to make the format easier to use mindlessly. And what it enabled was channel surfing: building it into the hunter-gatherer human mind that the TV was a universe to be explored, filled with wondrous gifts for the would-be explorer to uncover. But that's a lie merely proposed by the interface - the most common thing to land on during a channel surf is a network advertisement. You will of course land on some shows, too, but the channel surfer is destined to see more than a couple of ads before they are finished with their remote.

Getting the internet away from its keyboard-driven beginnings has led to a similar outcome on the web, and it's plain to see. The advent of touch screens has made this interface/architecture authoritarianism even harder to avoid now that the entire package has been shrunk to the size of one's palm and available at a moment's notice or a passing whim.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_trap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_trap)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> old-gregg To me, the best "old internet" site is Wikipedia. Although they also partially succumbed to madness of breaking the web (opening images in JavaScript popups?? breaking the "Back" browser button??) it's mostly a well-done clean HMLL/CSS site which has everything you want. I even treat it as "slow news" source [1], instead of MSM.

In a way, they have outperformed Google at Google's vision of organizing the world's information. That's why I try to donate as much as I can every year.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kincade_Fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kincade_Fire)

<comment><USER16> > ...organizing the world's information...

Wikipedia is even pushing further forward on that vision with Wikidata, a general-purpose knowledge base that's perhaps _the_ most successful example of such a thing, succeeding where many other efforts have failed dismally. (Already, Wikidata gets _more_ edits per minute than Wikipedia, albeit much of the activity is performed by bots.) It's also a successful use of Linked-Open- Data and Semantic-Web technologies (the Wikidata site hosts a SPARQL endpoint, for general queries of all sorts), so while it might not be "Old Web" per se, it feels quite retro-futuristic in many ways.

And of course, all the well-known personal assistant AI's rely on it quite a bit, although they're not eager to advertise that fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's all still there, the major search engines are just broken because they've been co-opted by SEO.

Tons of people still own and operate their own websites; BBSes exist; IRC is still here; mailing lists are still here; and so on and so forth.

You just won't find it on the top hit at Google because their business model is based on ad sales wankery.

Whilst we're on the topic, I'm gonna take the chance to write - if you work on this corporate shit and you're doing stuff you despise day in day out - <USER2> re-assess whether you could change things in your life to prevent that. Be the change you want to see. Cheers.

<comment><USER18> >if you work on this corporate shit and you're doing stuff you despise day in day out - please re-assess whether you could change things in your life to prevent that

I once worked for an SEO agency and ended up quitting after 4 months. Everything about it went against my morals. I was disgusted with myself for pushing rubbish sites, snooping on peoples browsing behaviour, and working to squeeze every cent from it all through what I believed to be manipulative practices (despite it all being 'white hat')

Quitting that job was a major relief, though I'm haunted by the fact that there are thousands of other agencies and even more people willing to fill my previous role.

<comment><USER19> Can you elaborate more on what that industry is doing? How would you snoop on people's browsing behavior?

I'd be curious if you know of any industry blogs or forums that you'd read to stay current on techniques.

I haven't followed SEO since the early days of link trading and keyword stuffing.

<comment><USER18> Sure.

For one we had a service that records video of your site visit so we knew exactly how you interacted with it. It would be no different from be standing behind you and watching your screen as you navigated a website. While the data is anonymised, I'm still morally against essentially video recording someones interactions with a site. There was never any notice that they were being recorded.

The email marketing workflows were relentless, especially on e-commerce stores that required several points of contact in order to make a purchase. We were able to build profiles on most customers by combining purchase history, personal details, and details pulled from social media to get a fairly accurate portrait of someones behaviour. For example, if someone bought engine oil, we knew that a typical bottle of engine oil would last someone, say, 6 months. The email marketing workflow would automatically send out a promotional coupon 6 months later for a discount on more engine oil. But because we were able to build profiles on people, we were able to tell that "Joe Blogs" is a motoring enthusiast and therefore the likelihood of him using up that engine oil in three months rather than six months increases by 50%, so send out the marketing materials to him quicker than the regular customers. There were very smart people working on these campaigns. Statisticians, psychologists, linguists and the like.

Because we had several points of contact with customers, having them unsubscribe from an email list wasn't bad. If you unsubscribed from the email, you would just be sent SMS notifications. If you replied STOP to that, you were sent physical mail, and after all that it was still quite easy to target you with remarking ad campaigns.

The amount of complete and utter garbage we were pouring out onto the web on a daily basis was staggering. Hundreds of pages a day that were of absolutely no use to anyone but to Google would mean that we were able to rank clients for some very serious keywords where real people needed real help but were instead being presented with crap that we'd put out that wasn't meant to actually help anyone but to get the #1 position and the sell things. And when I mean people who need help, I mean people who seriously need help. We'd push crap to rank for things like depression, bankruptcy, divorce, a whole array of legal issues.

I hated working there.

<comment><USER19> Thanks. Almost all of that makes good sense, and it's pretty clear that optimization kept working so they just kept doing it. I wonder how much farther it will go.

You lost me here though:

> Hundreds of pages a day that were of absolutely no use to anyone but to > Google

Do you mean like spam/clickbait blog posts on their own domain? I'm having trouble connecting "producing garbage content" to "increased ranking from google".

<comment><USER18> Think along the lines of those recipe pages that have 2000 words of backstory that no one cares about but is considered good SEO practice in Googles eyes.

<comment><USER19> Fascinating. I didn't know that was so significant to Google. That does explain a lot of what we see in the search results though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > _You have to enter the exact name of the website to find it on Google. > MayVaneDay is also mirrored on I2P, TOR, and Dat...You have to look really > hard for them now, and the best way to find them is through links from > similar small websites_

Without getting into the argument of whether Google deliberately makes these sites hard to find, it doesn't really support the author's thesis that the old Internet was any better, at least in the case of MayVaneDay. In the early 90s, how else would you have found it except "through links from similar small websites"?

> _I miss the internet of the early 1990 's, back before the World Wide Web > had been visited by more than just a few computer geeks, back when websites > like Vane's were the internet. Don't get me wrong, many cool things can be > found on the internet today. But, the voice of individuals has mostly been > drowned out..._

This feels incredibly myopic. The Internet of those days were limited to the extreme minority of people who were aware of the Internet and had access to a connected computer, nevermind took the time to figure out how to create for it. The author derides Facebook and Reddit as being too "easily monitored and controlled" to allow for individual voices but that's utter bullshit. The modern Internet is far from perfect, but the diversity and quantity (and arguably, quality) of voices is far better than when the Internet catered mostly to college-age kids and academics, i.e. people with access to free, high-speed Internet portals.

<comment><USER16> > how else would you have found it except "through links from similar small > websites"?

By browsing Web-Directories such as DMOZ/ODP, mainly. Albeit that's really a late-90s and 2000s thing. We should go back to that kind of curation effort. It would be more of a challenge for politically-sensitive stuff (the Internet overall is a _lot_ more politicized and less free-speech-friendly than it used to be) but for most uncontroversial stuff it would work well enough.

(And no, Wikipedia is not a true replacement even though it might be the closest thing to one we happen to have. They purposefully keep external links to a minimum, for sensible reasons - they're building an encyclopedia, not a Web directory.)

<comment><USER21> I'm sure there are lists like these and we just don't know about them.

<comment><USER19> They're called awesome lists and this is the problem they attempt to solve. Here's a starting point [https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome](https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "I Miss the Old Internet" \- an article about another website WITHOUT LINKING THERE. Congratulations, you've played yourself.

What's murdering the old internet is the lack of links. Everyone is posting screenshots, twitter/facebook/etc all hijack links, and we're surprised we can't find the sites.

Link to eachother. That's why it used to work.

<comment><USER23> This. Also, make sure you have an RSS feed on your site. RSS helps people get back to your site for new content later on.

<comment><USER22> Even Firefox dropped it's built-in RSS support by now, so for the current September generation, this is meaningless, unfortunately. Still, as infrastructure, it's very important, because it's simple to transform RSS into other formats: JSON feed, h-feed[^1], etc.

As for how to "follow" (I'd prefer to use subscribe instead) a personal site these days, it's a hard problem, reasonably well documented here: [https://indieweb.org/follow](https://indieweb.org/follow)

There is a current effort, called microsub[^2] to tackle the problem, but it's new, and is not user friendly enough at all.

Alternatively you can make your site compatible with services like [https://fed.brid.gy/](https://fed.brid.gy/) and people on fediverse[^3] instances will be able to follow it.

Trouble with these: all of them require some (ranging from install wordpress plugins to write your own service) technical knowledge, and therefore contributions to solving them and making them more accessible, are more, than welcome.

[^1]: [http://www.unmung.com/](http://www.unmung.com/)

[^2]: [https://indieweb.org/Microsub](https://indieweb.org/Microsub)

[^3]: [https://fediverse.network/](https://fediverse.network/)

<comment><USER23> If we'd be talking about any category other than "the old Internet", I'd say you were absolutely right. In this case, though, we are specifically talking old-school web sites and I therefore maintain that RSS should be included. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This sort of post is a recurring theme here on HN, and in some ways I do sympathize with the sentiment. But I seriously believe that today that "independent" web is actually much bigger than it was in the olden days. It only seems small because of the illusion created by the hugeness of the non- independent web. And of course it is not clean binary option of independent or not, instead it really is more of a spectrum of independence, which further confuses the matters.

<comment><USER13> It is also relatively easy now for independent individuals to create "professional" websites that look and behave like commercial ones - professional templates on some hosted CRM system with dynamic features (ads, shopping baskets, comment systems etc) just a few clicks away. Wix, wordpress, shopify to a certain extent, disqus etc all make things pretty easy and decent looking.

They may not be as "kooky" it as "characterful" as they used to be any more which I guess is part of what people are missing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > the best way to find them is through links from similar small websites

That's also a property of the "Old Internet" though. Discoverability has always been a problem for smaller entities. It's why every fan/personal site in the 90's/00's belonged to a half-dozen web-rings or link-list sites.

> it's getting increasingly harder to find them

It's getting harder to find them because most content creators have moved to platforms. They don't want to deal with all the complexities and annoyance of running their own site and dealing with the discoverability problem -- they want to focus on creating their content. I'm also a fan of the personality small self-created/run sites can have, but it's not what most creators want to do.

<comment><USER26> I'd wager it's getting harder to find because content strategists have figured out that they can pick up search traffic by creating throwaway blog posts about unrelated topics on a site that already has a high domain ranking.

Take for example Game of Thrones. What does GoT have to do with personal finance? Nothing, but that doesn't stop sites like Yahoo Finance from posting bilge like "10 Epic Personal Finance Lessons From 'Game of Thrones'".

Who's going to rank higher on a search for GoT related content? It depends on the search query for sure, but chances are Yahoo Finance, or HuffPost, or any of the other content mills will beat out your hand-coded personal website that probably doesn't even have Google Analytics set up on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The main thing I miss about "old" internet is personality. With Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram you'll always have the same boring page design around your posts no matter who you are. Sure the content you post will get your personality across fairly well, but just like with art it's not only the painting that matters, but also the frame.

It's one of the two main reasons[1] why I vastly prefer Tumblr over the three aforementioned sites. It lets you create a page that's your own to customize how you like. And that makes it much more personal and interesting than Twitter and Instagram imo. I really wish those sites would start letting users customize their pages more than just by changing their profile pictures and header images.

[1]: The other being the ability to view all posts from people you follow in a sequential order instead of having some algorithm decide which posts you should see.

<comment><USER28> I agree in part. However, there is an advantage to the same boring designs being popular: they're actually readable. Some Tumblr themes in my experience are more of an artsy flex rather than a conscious, well thought out design. E.g. small text, low contrast, links that move, the menu being in any number of places. This isn't exclusive to Tumblr - I remember many horrible MySpace sites that were nigh impossible to read.

At least Tumblr has an archive view that doesn't throw you visual curve balls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> We don't have to "miss it". Let's just share it. There are many corners of the internet away from the spotlights. Let's just share some links, what are they ?

<comment><USER30> I find people don't want to share these. I can understand to a degree as I've seen good communities go to hell once the "normies" show up.

<comment><USER31> It's so hard to strike a balance between inclusion and 'eternal september'. Managing a community is incredibly hard work. I don't really know if I can think of a way to be both inclusive and preserve the value of a community indefinitely. It seems that at some point you really need barriers to entry to keep things sane.

<comment><USER32> I've found that an effective way to strike a balance is to simply refuse to scale. Once people can't access your site only the dedicated will remain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> >But, the voice of individuals has mostly been drowned out, except on.. Reddit

A pretty big exception there. This reminds me of "But what did the Romans ever do for us?"[1] sketch.

"apart from free hosting and cataloging and tagging and community and moderation and upvote/downvote ordering and making all that easy to read with restrictions on formatting and still allowing individual expression by this newfangled concept of 'linking'[2]... what has the new Internet done for helping voices being heard?"

I'll tell you, I had a website that I hosted on my own PC. And before I got DSL, you could only reliably connect to it by dialing into the computer with a modem.

DSL didn't change much. My voice was heard by exactly one user: me.

And now I can make an comment on reddit about, say, why we use radians instead of degrees in Calculus, and it will have hundreds of upvotes, a dozen of responses, and an audience of at least thousands who actually read it.

Yes, there's no opportunity to practice Geocities-style web design there. That's _why_ the things you write there actually get read by other people. Surprise, that's how it works in the old world too: print newspapers look and function about the same, and math papers are all generally typeset with the same _font_ and style, as to not distract the reader from the content.

In today's internet, the voice of the individuals has been amplified. I had a lot of fun with HTML back in the day, but my voice was only heard when portals like reddit/fb/ng/etc came to be.

[1][http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html](http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html)

[2]Somebody please tell the author of the article that they can simply _link_ to [https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/](https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/) instead of ranting about how hard it is to find on Google

Also, it's not hard to find on Google. It's a personal homepage of "Vane Vander", and looking for Vane Vander gives you that page.

</comment><comment><USER34> When I think of the old internet, I think of Usenet before the Green Card Lawyers spammers.

<comment><USER35> That, and a working DejaNews, before Google bought and sank it. I made a two- frame (as in <frame>) browser for it and revelled in the sheer abundance of information it provided. Enter Google, exit stage left DejaNews. Progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I miss the old internet, but if I had the magic to go back to 1997 to browse for a bit I'd be over it in about 30 minutes. Just like I'd be over Mac OS System 7.5 in about 10 minutes, or my SNES, or Darkwing Duck, and on and on.

...member chewbacca

<comment><USER37> The early Internet was less crowded and less commercialized. There were often local communities, organized around local BBSes and ISPs. That is what I miss.

I certainly don't miss Netscape crashing every 10 minutes, and waiting for downloads over my 33.6k modem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I don't miss the old Internet because it never went away, at least the part that interests me the most and that's communities. Forums are still online and they seem to be doing just fine. Even IRC is still active.

What I miss is contextual advertising. You went to a video games site and all ads where relevant. Ads used to be informative and interesting. These days they're irrelevant, annoying and indifferent.

And I certainly don't miss the dial-up days when depending on the time of the day you might had to redial a dozen times to get a connection, and your bandwidth was a mere 28.8 Kbps which seems ridiculous by today standards.

<comment><USER39> > Forums are still online and they seem to be doing just fine.

I wonder what the stats would be on the number of forums and overall forum activity today vs. 5, 10, or 15 years ago.

<comment><USER40> That would depend on your definitions. Reddit is #18 on Alexa's top sites list, and it's arguably nothing _but_ forums.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's essentially self-contradictory nostalgia.

> I miss the internet of the early 1990's, back before the World Wide Web had > been visited by more than just a few computer geeks.

vs.

> Yes, alternative social networks [...]. But, they are not well-known or > frequented by many.

</comment><comment><USER42> The Old Internet was much smaller. Much, much smaller.

I don't think it can scale.

<comment><USER43> When the Old Internet was a small part of my life, it felt huge. The New Internet is a huge part of my life, and feels small.

<comment><USER26> True. It's everywhere but it feels small because we've trained ourselves to ignore 95% of it. There is so much coming out, all the time, and all vying for our attention. I can't stand it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Like the author, I too had made an account on Raddle. After lurking for a while, I came upon a post about the Proud Boy March in Portland, and I made one single comment with a slightly cynical tone. Within a period of five minutes I was banned from the site.

</comment><comment><USER45> Back in the day, your ISP would give you an email address, a login on their Usenet server, and a few megs of free web space under "~username". That was part of the standard package.

Nowadays it easily could be, but since approximately everybody only uses the internet for Facebook and Gmail, it became too much of a hassle (and a legal liability) to provide.

The old "free" hosting services injected all kinds of obnoxious ads - banners, watermarks, pop-ups, pop-unders, Flash. Still worth it for kids who couldn't afford to set up a "real" website. Now there aren't a lot of options like that anymore. You want a website? Pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER46> The Old Internet is when the web browser was a "smart document reader" and information was open and accessible.

Now the web browser is more of a VM for "web applications" and the web is turning into walled gardens.

The tendency for the tech world to centralize around a single browser like Chrome is a big culprit. But once we started having auto-updaters for browsers, that was the nail in the coffin. The centralizing effect of that is huge.

Things became easier for web developers, but not necessarily better for the end user.

The new internet is in the favor of commercial interests. The open internet & the open browser is being strangled.

</comment><comment><USER47> I keep a modern directory to the 'old' Internet at [http://href.cool](http://href.cool).

I also track what's happening on blogs and wikis at [http://www.kickscondor.com](http://www.kickscondor.com).

There is a whole lot of great stuff going on, regardless of how popular it is. (I kind of think it's great that it's not.)

<comment><USER48> Hey man, I just have to say, I've randomly stumbled onto three(!) of your projects this week and love them all! Keep it up!

<comment><USER47> Very kind. Thank you for saying hi. Your github has some sweet projects. Love the D&D5 tldr. I need to look over your SoundCloud scraper today - I'm doing the same thing in some code and it'll be good to compare. So thank YOU in advance, Miserlou.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> More and more I blame not just social networks, but the Web Search (and I mean Google) for strangling old-web community-centered resources. Many blogs and forums were shadowed by infinity of click-farms and other CEO'ed to crap sites, later adding tons of easily identifiable marketing black holes. Discoverability plummeted.

That's understandable, as Google have zero intention to lead to "real people" discussing things.

</comment><comment><USER50> There are some search engines that help to solve this problem (no affiliation):

\- [https://wiby.me/](https://wiby.me/)

\- [https://millionshort.com/](https://millionshort.com/)

Reddit is not bad for discovering content if you understand the inherent biases, and I personally have good results with blogrolls on blogs I already enjoy such as [https://slatestarcodex.com/](https://slatestarcodex.com/).

</comment><comment><USER51> I always find it a bit weird when people wax nostalgic about the "old internet" when they're still talking about the web. The _real_ old internet had existed for a while before the web, BBSes and Usenet before that. Eternal September[1], of which the early web was effectively a continuation, practically obliterated those communities.

There's a lot to like about being able to do my banking, shopping, etc. online. I value the contacts I've been able to make and maintain via Modern Social Media. Still, the loss of something that existed before looms larger for me than any differences between different generations of websites. The author is missing the _middle period_ interent, and that's OK, but some of us also miss the truly _old_ internet.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)

</comment><comment><USER52> The continued integration of the "real world" and "online world" is cancerous in my opinion. It never mattered if xXDeath_BonerXx said he was going to show up at your house and kill you, but it matters when John Smith from Company Inc who lives at 101 Boulevard Street tells his 400 followers he's going to murder Cindi Jane from accounting. If you made a fool of yourself, you either made a new screen name or left that website and found a new one. Nobody knew a thing about you you didn't tell them, and that was wonderful.

</comment><comment><USER53> Rose colored glasses. "The old" internet still exists, it's only that there are many orders of magnitude more content available online today than in the old era. The idea that corporate dominance and filtering is hiding content is false, in fact, the opposite is true, today's search engines are better than ever before at finding whatever you're looking for, what has changed is that search habits have become much more directed towards specific tasks rather than used for leisurely "browsing" the web.

<comment><USER54> _today 's search engines are better than ever before at finding whatever you're looking for_

IMO this is empathically not true.

Not necessarily because Google has gotten worse -- although I will argue that in some ways it has, especially by deleting or ignoring search terms that I explicitely include in my query while freely adding others that are only vaguely connected -- but because people have gotten better at gaming the system on an immense scale. Search for basic information on a topic and more often than not everything is an ad-ridden Wordpress site with lots of big pictures and ten paragraphs of SEO-optimizing fluff (because Google likes lots of text to harvest keywords from) before the actual information. Google has utterly failed at de-prioritizing all this useless nonsense, probably because they make money from ranking it high.

I have to work much harder now than ten years ago at getting Google to return useful information.

<comment><USER53> The handful of anti-features that google has implemented do not nullify the immense progress in the other direction. There is literally _nothing_ I cannot find on google.com with ease if I know what I am looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I think most of the charm of the Old Internet lay in the state of social networking at that time. In 1993-1995, WiReD magazine was ablaze with new fresh ideas and grand possibilities made possible by connecting inquiring minds in creative new ways. Add 20 years and unsurprisingly all those fires have extinguished. Once you've been online for a decade, few unexplored paths remain.

It's like ham radio. There's only so much novelty in talking to random people who just happen to be on-air when you are.

</comment><comment><USER56> I wholeheartedly agree and think this pretty much every day. Additionally, I still have my best links ever thread back from the early naughts on my personal website (be sure to put protections up to full-on, I haven't tested those links since back then (the site is still almost alive)). [https://sensibilium.com/writings/the-profane-dog/#best- links...](https://sensibilium.com/writings/the-profane-dog/#best-links-ever)

</comment><comment><USER57> Maybe I'm just getting old, but the internet does not entertain me like it used to. There used to be so many fun communities, now everything is Facebook, Reddit, etc. We used to make fun of people who took the internet too seriously, but nowadays the internet really is serious business.

I think the dawn of smartphones, high-speed wireless data, and the internet being in everybody's pocket is one of the primary drivers behind this.

</comment><comment><USER58> One paradox of Google's era is that we needed it when the web was full of websites like this that would pick our curiosity and feel good but hard to find. That's why we all flocked to it .. it made it easy. But it shaped the system to make people please search engines now that the web is a socio- economic platform and everything is formatted and structured for ROI... making Google's original job meaningless.

</comment><comment><USER59> My homepage from 1995/6.

[https://blakespot.com/homepage_1996/](https://blakespot.com/homepage_1996/)

</comment><comment><USER60> I was just listening to 'Internet Sucks' by MC Frontalot and it basically has the same message. The old internet was amazing and I also miss it.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Although many websites like Vane's exist on the clearnet, it's getting > increasinly harder to find them through the commercial smog thrown up by > Google.

This is true, and is one of the big reasons why I don't use Google search -- it tends not to surface the sites that I am most interested in finding.

Other search engines don't have the problem so much.

</comment><comment><USER61> "I2P, TOR, and DAT" is an interesting callout in the article. Purposefully removing the search engine as a way of opting out of internet "homogenization" is an interesting counter-culture move. I would be very interested to see if it's possible to reclaim the individuality on the Old Internet using these protocols.

</comment><comment><USER62> Any good tips&tricks to find this personal sites without exactly knowing what you are searching for?

The crazy part is I have google but I tend to visit my 5 (mostly more commercial) news&tech websites nowadays.

Gone are also the days with my well structured bookmark lists.

Only thing I do nowadays is to keep a personal list of Markdown notes for all important topics to look up.

<comment><USER22> Try searching with [https://millionshort.com/](https://millionshort.com/) as a first step, but it's not simple at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> So, not sure what is meant by "old internet " ... is meaning 1980's BBS 's ? Because the equivalent of those probably still exist for those who seek. Is meaning 1990's and early noughties? Or is meaning the noughties in their entirety?

</comment><comment><USER64> Any good guide or recipes for hosting your own website over a major ISP (Spectrum, Comcast, etc.)? I currently host my site on GoDaddy, but I find simple things like providing https and certificate are a monthly recurring charge.

</comment><comment><USER65> Similarly named discussion from a while back [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552)

</comment><comment><USER66> There's still great creative stuff on the clearnet, you just need to know where to look for it: [https://neocities.org](https://neocities.org)

</comment><comment><USER67> remember Hipster Runoff?

apparently, he was "The Last Relevant Blogger"

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ypwezb/hipster-runoff- the...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ypwezb/hipster-runoff-the-last- relevant-blogger)

including posts such as:

\- Animal Collective is a Band Created By/For/On the Internet

\- U, Me, And Every Concert We Attend: How We Grow Older With Concerts

\- My job/career does not align with my true personal brand. [Generation Y and the mainstream workplace]

</comment><comment><USER68> and here i thought this was going to be about compuserv or prodigy. those experiences, along with aol, were the means by which many people experienced "the internet" in the "olden days". the only place i used the "internet" was at the computer lab in my school...all my friend's parents had signed up for one of the walled gardens and had no idea what else was "out there".

</comment><comment><USER69> I enjoyed reading this.

However, a better title would be "I miss the old Information Superhighway" (the stark 90s name for the Internet)

</comment><comment><USER70> The internet is a better place when it's treated like a network of people instead of a network of Brands™.

</comment><comment><USER71> Maybe someone could take inspiration from Blizzard and create a "Classic Internet" ;)

<comment><USER22> Chrome has been sort of working on disabling or not showing http sites - it's already marked as insecure, so you might think you're joking, but I kind of believe that we'll see 2 internets very soon: one of http/non http-2 https, the other on some google abomination JSON-LD schema over HTTP3/brotli, only working with "modern" frontend/social media.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> gopher still works!

<comment><USER22> I made my site available over gopher a while ago[^1]; After reading [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178885) and it's comments I curiously started up lynx and entered gopher the first time* and it was a massively unexpected ride into the forgotten oldskool internet.

* I'm from Hungary and gopher never really existed there. Besides, it kind of predates my internet-age, which really started around 1996.

[^1]: [https://petermolnar.net/gopher/](https://petermolnar.net/gopher/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I miss Diablo II.

</comment><comment><USER74> INTJ = "incredibly tiring jerk"?

</comment><comment><USER75> Old internet? I miss pre-internet.

<comment><USER22> The old internet was an escape from the ordinary, from the unforgiving world out there. This seem to have swapped in the past ~20 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> I generally agree with the author's sentiment regarding "the Old Internet". However, using "voat" and "thank goodness" in the same breath raised a red flag for me about the author and their motives. They mentioned being kicked off raddle.me for posting links to their site (the one that's currently linked to on the top of the HN homepage); maybe that was with good reason and not a result of gatekeeping?

For example, from _Men and Women and Marriage_:

> In contrast, from what I've observed of women's behavior, most women marry > for money. Some of them marry several times for money. You see, women > understand why marriage exists. It exists to ensure that women will be > provided for while they raise their children. This is why so many marriages > are dissolved after the children leave home. From the woman's perspective: > no more children, no more reason to be married.

Perhaps, in addition to the conveniences, opportunities (learning, employment and otherwise), etc. the "New Internet" has afforded us, making this sort of trash harder to find is a bit of silver lining.

<comment><USER77> Can you please link to the list of Empirically Correct Viewpoints™ so that I can identify and purge myself of thoughtcrimes?

<comment><USER78> They aren't thought crimes, but they are views that will get you ostracized... and they should.

The rule is fairly simple, and does not require a list; if you believe that someone should have a different set of rules and expectations just because of a characteristic outside or their control, that is not acceptable.

<comment><USER77> Dividing the discourse into Correct people and The Others Who Shall Be Shunned is exactly the kind of binary thinking that is killing rational discourse.

You are never going to change someone's mind by shouting at them.

<comment><USER79> It kills far more than rational discourse. People have had their careers and lives ruined over what somebody else deems to be wrongthink.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is a credit system for the Bottom Up economy feasible and beneficial? - <AUTHOR> I'll be travelling to my home country of Kenya to build out my company www.5group.co . While there, I want to research trends in credit and lending especially with regards to those earning less than $3000/year (apx. bottom of the pyramid). Would a FICO like agency for Sub-Sharan Africa open up new lending frontiers and thus lead to upward mobility for the masses? What considerations might need to be made? <comment><USER2> {random internet advice}

FICO matters in a competitive market for good customers, where good customers borrow significant amounts of money and are relatively low risk due to having access to cash income streams. Where customers may not have ready access to cash [e.g. operating in informal economies or living more closely to direct agricultural subsistence], then the risks more systemic and less tied to the individual. When the amount borrowed is small, the overhead of a credit check may be a non-trivial cost for the lender. This suggests that there may be a tipping point between flat rates that reflect a more or less uniform risk and individual rates that reflect variance in individual's economic behavior.

Good luck.</comment>


In less than two years, a smartphone could be your only computer - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/02/smartphone-only-computer/

<comment><USER2> I think it is possible.

Easily hooking up to large monitors and/or 4K TVs will be important. Also new designs in furniture, where some table and counter surfaces becoming virtual keyboards with nearby displays will help also. My Note 4 is powerful enough for a lot of work with better peripheral support.

<comment><USER3> and cost the same as an low end notebook and smartphones segment are too fragmented to find the right support. In fact, Remix Mini is way cheaper that everyone can own it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They kept saying this for many years now. Depends on who the "your" is. This is not true for anyone whose uses a computer for more than just e-mail and browsing. and smart phone still sucks for the latter.</comment>


Job Listings at Hacker Monthly - <AUTHOR> http://hackermonthly.posterous.com/job-listings-at-hacker-monthly

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure how likely this is but it would be very interesting to read about the profitability of Hacker Monthly and how much time/effort has been spent on it so far. Is this something that may eventually turn into a full time gig for you?

</comment><comment><USER3> Considering how well it came out and how good the reception was here, it strikes me as a shame that fewer than 400 print copies have been sold (it comes out really good!)</comment>


Raspberry Pi microSD follow-up, SD Association fools me twice? - <AUTHOR> https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-microsd-follow-sd-association-fools-me-twice <comment><USER2> I really can't understand why SD cards are considered applicable as a main storage device for a general-purpose computer. Reliability is the primary bottleneck in everything, and IO speed second. SD cards are the single worst experience I have had in both speed and reliability in any commodity computer stuff for many years.

<comment><USER3> The reason why rPi uses micro SD is that it's the cheapest possible storage solution. You are not buying an industrial-grade workstation for $35. (For those using the rPi in industrial settings, there is the Compute Module which has eMMC. It adds to the cost, though.)

I am not really a fan of "embedded" devices that have to be shut down properly. You can never assume that you won't lose power, and I think there are a lot of flaky/bricked rPis as a result of SD not handing power loss well. But it's cheap, and you just reimage the thing and go when your SD card gets corrupted.

When I last worked on embedded Linux, our OS image was read-only and the writable storage was literally initialized at boot with "mount /dev/mmc1 /storage || mkfs.ext4 /dev/mmc1". That is how you get a consistent state after power loss. But throwing everything away at boot doesn't fit the Raspberry Pi model of being half-embedded half-workstation. The result is flakiness.

<comment><USER4> > I am not really a fan of "embedded" devices that have to be shut down > properly.

the problem is the Pi is not an embedded device, per se.

It's running a desktop operating system that has to be shut down properly. This is the main reason SD cards get corrupted - there is an unchecked flow of writes to the SD card. This increases the chance of outstanding unsynchronized writes and SD card burnout.

I've said many times that raspi-config should allow an option for mounting the filesystems read-only, with an overlay ram based filesystem.

You can run openwrt on the pi, and the filesystem is set up this way. I run a pi like this and have never seen a corruption problem.

<comment><USER5> >>I've said many times that raspi-config should allow an option for mounting the filesystems read-only, with an overlay ram based filesystem.

I've had success with this:

[http://wiki.psuter.ch/doku.php?id=solve_raspbian_sd_card_cor...](http://wiki.psuter.ch/doku.php?id=solve_raspbian_sd_card_corruption_issues_with_read- only_mounted_root_partition)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Command queuing is such a dangerous thing.

This is the disk equivalent of 'buffer bloat'[1] but with disk data. The question you have to ask is what happens when you lose power and there are 'n' writes queued to the storage device. How has the kernel marked that data? Historically once the disk accepted the write and returned kernels would say "ok, data on disk" buffer clean now.

Of course if you lost power and that write never actually completed, well you now had file system corruption (possibly silent if it was just a data block).

Another problem that cropped up is "ok we can re-use this data buffer" so it gets fill with different data, and then the storage device says "oh hey, send me that data you told me write ..." whoops.

The third problem that crops up is that the computer on the _storage device_ crashes (or watchdog resets) and it goes back and doesn't remember what commands it had in the queue. So some time later your kernel better ask "hey why haven't you acknowledged this write we sent 50mS ago?" and have the disk say "What write?" and replay it.

One school of thought was "Command queuing in the storage device is always bad, the kernel knows more, has more memory, and is ultimately responsible for what is and what is not on disk." So the kernel would 'hold' writes to the disk until the write was sufficiently aged or until enough writes had accumulated to do a "streaming" write (multiple sectors on the same track). But for non-spinning media there is no seek time so there is no advantage. Except for flash, you have to erase a page which can be a _lot_ of data which then has to be rewritten with the new stuff.

I enjoyed the writeup but it really needs to start with a highly fragmented SD card (one with lots of random I/Os to it) so that it can measure the latency hit for page rewrites.

[1] [https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Introduction...](https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Introduction/)

<comment><USER7> additionally SSDs use garbage collection algorithms so are fraught with the possibility of a write taking an unbounded amount of time, even if nothing is malfunctioning, which is pretty scary.

To head off replies about fixed time garbage collection, sure it exists, but you cant guarantee it will reclaim enough space in a fixed timeslot (think of a massively pathological case where 99% of every flash chip is full, but super fragmented and data needs to be shuffled around perhaps hundreds or even thousands of times before enough space can be reclaimed)

<comment><USER8> > To head off replies about fixed time garbage collection, sure it exists, but > you cant guarantee it will reclaim enough space in a fixed timeslot (think > of a massively pathological case where 99% of every flash chip is full, but > super fragmented and data needs to be shuffled around perhaps hundreds or > even thousands of times before enough space can be reclaimed)

That's why you have spare space. It's not overly hard to clamp write amplification to a number like 10x or 20x, even in the absolute worst case.

Note that the SD standard here requires a minimum number of writes per second _inside a 256MB area_ , and even 1% spare space on a 32GB card would give you a >256MB buffer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > (and this has become a bigger problem every generation of Pi—you need a good > power supply or you'll have a lot of annoying problems)

I wish the pi just had a 12v barrel jack.

edit: it first dawned on me that the pi power situation could be improved when I read this article years ago:

[http://www.bitwizard.nl/wiki/Reducing_power_consumption_of_a...](http://www.bitwizard.nl/wiki/Reducing_power_consumption_of_a_raspberry_Pi)

<comment><USER9> That's one of the things that disappoints me most about the Pi, to be honest. Not the power situation, but the "no way to remix it" situation.

While it's not quite as beefy as the Pi (especially the Pi 4), nor as cheap, the Beaglebone family of boards are awesome. They come with schematics, and you can order the processor in qty 1 from Digikey. I haven't yet remixed one yet (a 400-BGA is going to be stretching my abilities...), but I have leaned on the schematic quite a bit to figure out some clever things I can do with it.

<comment><USER4> When the Pi first came out I talked with a hardware engineer about it and he said they made some weird choices.

One thing he pointed out to me was the pin design. Everybody else would design it with female pins so that you won't accidentally bend the pins or short them out.

He loved the beaglebone though and recommended it.

That said, I think the pi has a bigger community and more software. (I might be wrong)

<comment><USER9> > That said, I think the pi has a bigger community and more software. (I might > be wrong)

Most definitely. From an "ease of getting started" perspective, the Pi is absolutely amazing. NOOBS, or whatever the distribution is called, is pretty painless to get going. You flash it to the SD card, plug in a monitor and keyboard+mouse, and you boot straight into a familiar GUI with tons of tools pre-installed. Plus, the $35 price point (well, more once you include SD card, power supply, etc) is pretty hard to argue with.

Debian IoT (the "standard" distro for the BeagleBone) is cool in its own right, but definitely not as approachable for someone who's new to embedded Linux. Things like GPIO mappings need to get tweaked sometimes, you're dinking around with device trees here and there, etc. For the stuff I've been working on lately (robotics), the BeagleBone Blue has been an absolute godsend. Tons of ports that speak different protocols (UART, I2C, PPM for driving servos, GPIOs, etc), and librobotcontrol is really straightforward to start building with.

I guess a great way to distinguish between them: I pretty much always use a keyboard and mouse to get a Pi set up. I don't even know if the BBBlue has video output onboard, because I've never looked or tried. On boot it exposes itself as a network device over USB; you can SSH into it and start doing what you're trying to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Even despite the issues around A1 and A2, the read speeds on SD cards are just too slow, and will probably always be too slow.

What the RPI needs is a simple m.2 slot for a "real" hard drive, which are getting cheaper and cheaper.

<comment><USER11> I think the goal is ease of access with the memory. How many people have a m2 dock or adapter ready to write the raspbian image on it? A memory card reader is much more common.

<comment><USER12> It seems like it would be fairly simple to give people a minimal USB image that then installs to the M.2.

<comment><USER9> The Beaglebone Blue has an onboard eMMC that comes blank from the factory. You can:

a) write an OS image onto an SD card and just run off that if you want

b) set a flag in /boot. Upon reboot, the LEDs go into Cylon/Knight Rider mode while it copies the OS image from the SD card onto the eMMC. When they're done, pop out the SD card and reboot. Done!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You should mention very clearly which Raspberry Pi board you're using. I'm not sure if CPU throttling can affect I/O but if yes then it might also matter if you use a good case or use active cooling or heatsink.

Also, which OS version did you use? What Linux kernel version?

I'm more interested in longevity tests and industrial grade microSD card performance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Raspberry Pi 4, latest Raspbian Lite image (2019-07-10 with kernel 4.19), and did apt-get update and upgrade prior to test and rebooted, official case with Fan modded in [1] to ensure it does not get anywhere near throttling.

[1] [https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry- pi-4-needs-...](https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-4-needs- fan-heres-why-and-how-you-can-add-one)

And everyone asks for longevity tests and industrial grade performance, but I always answer the same: I have had four Pis running almost continuously (99.9% uptime, occasional reboot for updates) for 3+ years, and have used the same set of 6 Evo+ cards for 3+ years now, and have never had any problems with corruption in any of those cards.

I also run a Kubernetes cluster with 4 Pis (see www.pidramble.com) from time to time (right now it's running), and I have never had a corruption issue either.

The main thing I attribute this to is the fact that I'm using reliable, quality power supplies (either Pi Foundation official supply or some other name brand or good PoE power supplies that support at least 2A).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reading about SD cards reminds me of this idea I had. Is it possible at the moment to have a wifi or 4/5g transmitter small enough to fit into a chip within (or instead to bind to equivalent connectors of) sd cards to automatically upload sd card contents to a hub or router that can sync with the cloud? So that you can effectively have an unlimited capacity sd card? Anyone working on this?

<comment><USER15> Not only does it exist, but it runs linux too:

[https://www.amazon.com/Transcend-Wi-Fi-Class-Memory- TS32GWSD...](https://www.amazon.com/Transcend-Wi-Fi-Class-Memory- TS32GWSDHC10/dp/B00A659ILQ)

You can run custom code on it: [http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=15.%20Transcend%20WiFiS...](http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=15.%20Transcend%20WiFiSD)

<comment><USER16> Love this: New (2) from $5,000.00 & FREE shipping.

Personally, I used an Eye-Fi card when I needed wifi.

<comment><USER17> What do you expect? It's a discontinued, niche product that probably didn't sell a lot to begin with, so aftermarket prices are going to be insanely high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> People expecting a $35 childhood educational computer to perform like a mission critical embedded device get what they should expect from that.

Having said that, what is so hard about running regular backup images, and simply burning a new one every time the current SD card _inevitably_ fails? That's been working for me for years. Can't reboot... burn a new SD card from the backup. Reboot. All the super-timely stuff is on github, so at most, I might lose an hour or so every 6 months to a year. And anything that isn't altered often just has a rolling updated image for me to dd if needed. It's rare enough I just don't care about it.

I use rpis a __lot __, and since I work with MPI, usually there are quite a few running at all times. I just back up regularly and don 't get alarmed that they don't last like a desktop at _100_ times the price would. Of all the SD cards and actual rpis that died, I heaven't come close to that price, and have lost nearly nothing for all that I've gained in the experience.

</comment><comment><USER19> I read here on HN about someone who had a SD card show old data. He reinstalled the OS only to reboot into his old OS. Same thing happened to me the next week with a camera, the SD card showed _old_ pictures from before a reformat. Using these things now is super scary. I wondered why some cameras had dual sd slots, now I know why.

<comment><USER20> Happened to me too. It's a good failure mode, IMO. :) If the card runs out of total write capacity, it turns read only. It might be better for it to reject writes, but whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The rpi is nice but I'd prefer a CPU 10x times slower if it had memory to store the OS. The rpi's CPU is way too powerful.

The only one I would buy would be the RPI zero.

Having something reliable can matter.

</comment><comment><USER22> The description of A2 standard features sounds very similar to the new Linux multi-queue block device framework.

From quick look at latest Linux source code, there are couple mentions of "blk_mq" in drivers/mmc, but there seems to be no actual support for multiple queues (unlike e.g. in drivers/nvme).

Does anyone know, if those are supposed to be same things? Does SD driver actually need new firmware to support multiple queues or is it something, that can be implemented on kernel side in software only? At the very least, it might be possible to use a third-party reader as long as it's kernel drivers are updated to take advantage of multiple command queues.

<comment><USER23> > The description of A2 standard features sounds very similar to the new Linux > multi-queue block device framework.

Unless I missed something, it's not that fancy. It's just one queue, not multiple queues -- the only new thing is that the length of the queue is more than 1. A multi-queue device is a device with more than one independent queue. This is useful for very high performance devices (NVMe, for example) that can allow multiple CPUs to submit requests at once without interfering with each other. If there's only a single queue, then all CPUs trying to submit need to contend for access to the queue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> this is like people putting premium gas on cars that ask for regular.

read your specs, use what is recommended. not the mopst expensive. it's just engineering 101.

<comment><USER25> At this moment in time 0 cars can utilize this "premium gas".

This isn't communicated well, the author points out that it's marketed as better, but you have to dig into the technical details to find out the host must support it as well.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr: I tested an A2 'Application Performance' class card and found that it was half as fast as it should be, based on the SD Association specs (minimum 4000 IOPS 4K random read, 2000 IOPS write).

Then some people dug deeper and found in the specs that 'Command Queue and Cache functions' needed to be supported in device firmware and/or on the kernel level for A2 specs to be reached—though I haven't yet found a way for any consumer to get their hands on devices or software with this support... so no way to achieve claimed A2 performance.

So then I bought an A1 card from the same manufacturer (SanDisk), and it is actually much _faster_ than the A2 card (though for price/performance you're still better off buying the not-Application-Performance-class-rated Samsung Evo+ card).

And in the end, being able to use an SSD or mSATA drive would be even better (the former of which is semi-possible today with the Pi 4 and USB 3.0—though you can't fully boot without a microSD card yet).

<comment><USER26> > you can't fully boot without a microSD card yet

Not true! The Pi supports several different USB and network boot modes.

[https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/)

This documentation doesn't cover the Pi 4, but USB/network boot is available there too, cf.

[https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/booteeprom.md)

<comment><USER27> As your parent says, the Pi 4 doesn't support USB or network booting _yet_. From your link:

> Support for these additional bootmodes will be added in the future via > optional bootloader updates

I believe they need to write (bootloader) drivers for the PCIe host and for the new USB3 chip before USB boot can be supported by the bootloader, while netboot requires a driver for the new gigabit ethernet core.

<comment><USER28> You can use micro sd card for the bootloader and boot from USB 3 ssd on rpi4.

[https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-4-usb-boot-config- gu...](https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-4-usb-boot-config-guide-for- ssd-flash-drives/)

<comment><USER29> That's not _quite_ booting _without_ an SD card though ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why does everyone here seem to dislike C++? - <AUTHOR> So I'm a 3rd year electrical engineering student at university and so far we've been taught how to code in ones and zeros, assembly, C and C++. Out of all of these I like C++ the best. I wouldn't say I'm great with it, but I can use it to get what I need done. But every time I come onto this subreddit everybody always makes fun of C++. Apart from school I'm kinda interested about getting into game programming as well as windows applications. Can anyone explain what's wrong with C++ and suggest a language to learn next? <comment><USER2> Apart from school, let me give you an advice.

If you have a brain that can handle multiple levels of OO in c++ across multiple threads; keeping multupltformness in mind and crunching out optimized code with all that you learned in your data structure classes, stick with C++.

The pay is way better (like three times more here in Toronto) than anything web or app related, the working hours are more sane, and stuff are usually _way_ more planned in advance.

You'll have way better life sticking to the shops that need your engineering coding skills.

Think carefully and be ready to wait out few months for your first job when you graduate. Charging jobs after is hard. App/web/testing shops will take a decent low level engineer any day of the week. A financial/embedded/engineering company will think long and hard before they hire a web dev for a backend/driver team dev.

In this proffesion you are beign paid to think. Why not approach your career choices similarly?

'everybody making fun of c++' is a non issue. You may as well worry about what wasn't cool in kindergarten. C++ was and is an industry standard.

On a unrelated note: this post will reflect the HN community by their impulsive up/down voting it ;)

<comment><USER3> > The pay is way better (like three times more here in Toronto) than anything > web or app related Web developer with 5+ years experience can expect 75K+ in > Toronto (according glassdoor / reddit / google search). And both python jobs > and such salaries are available. I doubt C++ developer can make 225K in > Toronto. Even if some one does like you, it's an exception.

<comment><USER2> I wish I was pulling that kind of money here. From my anecdotal experience, I had friends that started at 35k/y as frontend devs, and 65k / year at IBM for c++ , both fresh out of univ. I agree that 75k with few years under the belt seems reasonable.

But, we should move to where the 225k jobs are it seems :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To answer the titular question: I hate C++ because I worked in it for 10 years, and I came to realize things could be otherwise.

I almost came back to the language with C++11, but its core problem remains the same: the only maintainable codebases seem to be those strictly ruled over by language experts with an iron fist -- and too many people think they're experts (hint: if you haven't read the language standards (or written them!) and hacked on a compiler or two, you probably aren't an expert).

You inevitably have to choose an opinionated subset of C++, which often results in a language which is more on par with many modern languages, but with more pitfalls and traps, and which you have to teach to every person you bring on board.

And let's not even start on compile times and other problems C++'s legacy brings with it.

FWIW, I still do a lot of C and assembly. Modern C is pretty nice, although it will be nice to see a newer systems language finally take over.

You will probably end up doing C++ professionally, and that's fine, but for your own sake and the sake of your coworkers, learn some other languages that will broaden your mind.

You can find many suggestions in this thread, and I could go on about the more mind-broadening ones (logic programming, dependent types, metaprogramming, etc), but the most valuable might be another systems language, even if it's not popular, just so you can see how things could be otherwise. I think reasonable candidates might include Ada, Modula-3, Rust, D (which is a little too close to C++), BLISS if you can track down a compiler, Forth; maybe even Common Lisp.

<comment><USER5> I thought BLISS was just a macro language. Why do you count it as a systems language?

<comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLISS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLISS)

It included a macro facility, but it was also a full-blown systems programming language.

<comment><USER5> I'll be darned. Whole time I've seen it in VMS-related material I thought it was just a pre-processor for ASM or something. Turns out it was a sort if C competitor. Thanks for the tip. :)

<comment><USER6> No problem. I'm trying to remember when I first learned about it. I want to say it was a compilers (?) course in grad school. The professor was lamenting that C had survived and BLISS had disappeared, led me to research it originally. I particularly like that everything (or nearly everything) is an expression, probably due to my affinity for functional programming languages. Beyond that, I'm not sure that I like it's typeless nature for doing systems programming work. I guess it depends on how low-level you're talking about, though.

EDIT: I recall reading more about BLISS back then, but that was a decade ago. This [0], linked in the Wikipedia article, is pretty interesting. I'm about 5 pages in and have to head out so I'll finish it later, but it seems like something you'd be interested in given your general interest in language history (from reading your posts in the past).

[0] [http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/ronald- brender/bli...](http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/ronald- brender/bliss.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> People get very hung up on the complexity of the language and all the bad code one could potentially write. I use a C++ compiler to compile my preferred subset of the language, and for me that's within epsilon of the best of all possible worlds. If I was on a team that forced me to use every language and library feature, I'd probably be unhappy.

<comment><USER8> Interesting workflow. Whats your preferred subset ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Compared to plain C, C++ tends to become unmaintainable. Everybody knows a tiny subset of the huge language, yet must somehow work together on a team. People do not stick to a common subset of the language that everybody is comfortable with, especially considering team members that will be hired in the future.

In theory, C++ can be as fast as C. (officially lacking the "restrict" keyword, but otherwise fine) In practice, C++ is much much slower. The theory is no help. C++ code runs slow. People layer on the abstractions.

Suggested next language:

Well, although Rust and Ada look nice, I'll tell you what I use at work. I use C99 and lots of assembly. I do assembly for x86 (16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit), PowerPC, ARM (original, thumb, thumb2, aarch64), ColdFire, MIPS, and many stranger things. Oh, don't forget the build system tools: bash, sed, GNU make, awk

<comment><USER10> > Compared to plain C, C++ tends to become unmaintainable...

Yeah, true. Used to think otherwise, but experience shows over and over again this happens in most large teams. C++ somewhat encourages too many abstractions and complicated control flow (exceptions, [multiple] inheritance, templates, ninja operator overloads). Building and linkage (especially against third party blobs) is also a big issue even in 2016. Builds are slow and binary incompatible between compiler versions and vendors.

> In theory, C++ can be as fast as C.

Actually, it can go both ways, C++ can be faster as well. For example when C++ enables inlining - std::sort beats idiomatic C qsort quite handily. Depends how you use it more than anything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Because what I can clearly express in one line of swift/haskell/etc is often like 15 lines of nasty in C/C++. And when I make a mistake, the former has around a 90% chance of telling me about it immediately whereas the later is maybe 30%. When you're dealing with a couple person decades of code, that really really matters.

It's kind of like building a house using a rock instead of a hammer. It works. But after a few years building houses with a rock....when you try out a nailgun for the first time......yea not going back to that insanity. Of course sometimes a rock is your only choice...embedded, and a few other domains, but I'm never writing another line of C++ unless it's genuinely the only language that can solve the problem. To be fair, if you stick with EE, then yea it may be your only choice most of the time.

Also, as a counterpoint to the C++ makes more $$ comments. I doubled my salary(and got way more job offers) going from embedded C to iOS dev. Most of that's attributable to moving out of an economic backwater, but C/C++ is not necessarily a magic ticket to more cash. Being the company expert in C++ might be, but then so is being the company expert in <whatever>. I'd be lucky to see any increase at all moving back to C.

</comment><comment><USER12> There is only one thing "wrong" with C++ and that is undefined behavior. An accident of history, but one that will make you cry at times. For the rest the tooling around it is quite depressing as well. But none of this prevents you from getting great work done, they are annoyances. i.e. you can have a solid career with C++ so the languages to learn are suggestions for horizon expansion not career advice.

Now it looks like you want to stay close to the hardware so there are a few options that can be interesting to look at. Game programming is not nearly as much fun as game playing so be careful what you want.

Rust: the new kid on the block, learning this will help you look different at C/C++ and even if you don't continue using it professionally you will pick up nice things.

A scripting language with a REPL. Lua, JS, a lisp, python, perl, ruby, it doesn't matter. Just have a look at one and see what tools to make tools you can build with them.

The following I would suggest having a look at but not more than 1 weekend each ;) They are very far from windows apps and game stuff.

Ada/spark: the old kid on the block, a could have been interesting. Again not something that is widely used so learn for curiosity not for career.

JavaCard: the slow kid on the block. Not talking about plain java here, but specifically the JavaCard environment which is a whole different playing field. You will pick up standard Java as well, by doing this. Massive different perspective, but no games ;(

Outside of languages I would spent time picking up Vulkan the new graphics API and OpenCL or Cuda. These will help with getting into the game market but also help you look at visualization and data presentation. Valuable skills no matter where you go afterwards.

Remember in the end people don't pay for code. They pay for solutions to their problems. If you can solve problems you will always have a job.

<comment><USER13> Ada was held back by super-expensive compilers. This was the natural result of Ada being required by military contracts. You paid, or you didn't get the job done.

Free compilers are available now, along with free RTOSes that support an Ada runtime. The language seems to be growing in popularity again, partly because of the free compilers and partly because of a renewed interest in security.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not everyone here dislikes C++. C++ is a good language for some things, and a bad language for others. In particular, C++ is not a good fit for web development and an especially bad fit for the type of web applications that the majority of people on HN work on. If you had asked people who make AAA games or create more performance sensitive applications you would likely see a different opinion of C++.

</comment><comment><USER15> For an EE, C++ is a pretty good language, in that it lets you get very close to the hardware. Most of the people who criticize it don't work in that world.

<comment><USER16> As a computer engineering student (the programming counterpart to electrical engineering), I still prefer C over C++.

I dislike C++ because it's just so unbelievably complicated and hard to learn. There's a special place in hell for the abominations C++ calls error messages. Clang helps, but not enough unfortunately.

<comment><USER17> Im suprised that nobody has mentioned golang, which is generaly described as the successor to "c".

<comment><USER18> Golang is great, and I'd love to move my code over to it from C and C++. But one of my projects involves creating a Windows DLL, and I don't think Golang provides a way to for me to compile to that just yet. I don't think Go has a strong GUI story yet either (and even if it did, it will take a while for the tooling to match XCode or Delphi or Xojo).

Languages have different strengths, part of programming is deciding which languages & toolset are most productive for the project you're working on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When you learn/taught any new programming language you learn about the primitives of the language and how to combine them to create programs. You will create simple programs to test the understanding of the language and get used to the features of the language in terms of how to solve a problem. On the other hand, the world of professional software development is very very messy, instead of creating program you end up creating these enormous complex software systems. Most importantly its not like that you get requirements, you implement them and you are done, instead you will keep getting new requirements over time which in most cases are conflicting with the existing requirements and the system needs to keep evolving to handle this mess forever. Handling this evolution over time is the most important feature of any language/tools/platform and it seems those people who don't like C++ have been through the frustration of handling that evolution of software in C++.

</comment><comment><USER20> Because it adds complexity, but doesn't deliver the gains in productivity or encapsulations that you hope for.

C++ is a big language, and most people agree that "some parts" of it are useful, but they just can't agree on which parts are the good ones. You have to decide that for yourself.

This is worth reading for a good suggestion of how to use C++ features sparingly:

"Orthodox C++" [https://gist.github.com/bkaradzic/2e39896bc7d8c34e042b](https://gist.github.com/bkaradzic/2e39896bc7d8c34e042b)

Everyone has their own opinions, from dogmatically never use anything c++ to only stopping short of using boost. I will vary by project, using STL sometimes and not others, sometimes using classes lightly, other times sticking to POD, etc. I think you have the right idea when you say "Use it to get what you need done".

</comment><comment><USER21> C++ has lots of issues, most of them due to backward compatibility and versatility. Also, the language is very complex and enormously hard to master. I've used C++ for quite a while and everybody I know who used the language for at least a few years have developed a love&hate relationship for this language, or abandoned it.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think its just personal taste and preference. It also depends alot on the kind of projects interests you to work on.

Go with what you like.

</comment><comment><USER23> From a gaming industry perspective, Jonathan Blow gave a great presentation about his problems with C++:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9VCN6UkyQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9VCN6UkyQ)

</comment><comment><USER24> Expressing yourself in languages like Python is much easier than C++. You'll be able to concentrate more on solving the problem at hand than dealing with the language.

I highly recommend these two short books:

[https://www.amazon.com/Treading-Python-Beginning- Programming...](https://www.amazon.com/Treading-Python-Beginning-Programming- Learn-ebook/dp/B00639H0AK)

[http://www.amazon.com/Treading- Python-2-Intermediate/dp/1490...](http://www.amazon.com/Treading- Python-2-Intermediate/dp/149055095X)

<comment><USER9> You'll spend more time debugging errors that could have been caught at compile time by strict static types.

The minimum here should be C with the warnings enabled. Things like Ada and Rust may improve upon this.

Also, I think performance issues can count as "dealing with the language". Python is roughly 100x slower, making it like all your computers are a dozen years older. It's like having a 2004 computer in 2016.

<comment><USER11> I'd wager that python's ease of expression is enough to beat C/C++'s strict static types as far as reducing bugs. I'm all about strict static types, but C++'s incarnation of them is surprisingly un-helpful. Several other languages(swift, haskell, etc) actually deliver on at least most of the promise of static typing, with nearly the ease of use of python, and nearly the runtime performance of C. Maybe the newest flavors of C++ are better, but the C++ I coded in 7ish years ago was a morass of boilerplate and foot shooting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> For me a lot comes down to the tooling.

* How do I start a new project

* How do I build/test/cross compile the project

* How do I add dependencies and optionally vendor them

If someone could 'reboot' c++ so it ships a decent standard library and update the tooling to work something like go or rust I'd be interested.

One of the projects I've been working on in go parses some csv files, stores the data in a sql database and presents a simple http json rest api. Could I write this in c++? yes. Do I know how to do all the bullshit needed to get a c++ project going that includes csv+sql+json+http libraries? no.

</comment><comment><USER26> I for one don't. C and C++ runs the software that runs the world. From operating systems to embedded systems to browsers to whatever you can think of. Even the interpreters/VM's of all other languages (Python/Java/Ruby/...) are written in C/C++. All other languages have about 0.1% of the impact that C and C++ has. People who love other languages hate that. And haters will be haters. I for one am super happy that people choose other languages. Please do that! Less competition for me.

</comment><comment><USER27> While C++ has plenty of interesting and nice features to play with it lacks something important Java has, reflection. C++ would be pretty close to "perfect" language if it would add reflective capabilities on top of all the other nice features.

Yes. I know some libraries add "reflection" but its not good enough. It needs to be baked in language and not require additional syntax on classes to be used as data for your own reflective code.

<comment><USER10> Generic reflection for C++ would require disabling optimizations that affect object memory layout somehow. It would also mean you need to have all the symbols present.

It would also require additional overhead for RTTI information per object, if you want it to work using arbitrary void *.

It'd br great to have reflection of course. At least so some subset, non- generic but with zero (or low) overhead.

Just being able to iterate known type struct or class fields could be something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Name me one programming language that people don't make fun of. There aren't any. And why do you care anyway? Pick what works for you.

</comment><comment><USER28> C++ is very hard. IMO, that's why people dislike it.

I was writing a test output parser in Python: ~50 lines of functional code in less than an hour. Testing the script for about 10-20 mins and tweaking it to my liking.

The same in C++ would've required me to look up/read up a bunch of library functions that I've forgotten (Should I use file I/O, string manipulation C functions or C++ functions?), link to a few libs (non-C++11) or read some obscure documentation on C++11's regex implementation. Compile, test, change, repeat. This is way more time spent as compared to the Python option.

This is not a fair judgment of the language, but my point is that for something simple there are other languages. For something complicated, C++ has been used in many applications (successfully and unsuccessfully). But there is no doubt that once a C++ code base becomes large it is extremely hard to maintain.

</comment><comment><USER29> Try learning Python, Java, Erlang/Lisp/OCaml/Haskell, Prolog, and then look back at C++. You'll see what's the reason.

<comment><USER14> This type of comment is really unproductive. Not only does it not answer the question, it dismisses it with an air of superiority. I happen to know Python, Java, Lisp, OCaml, Haskell, and Prolog, and wouldn't use anything other than C++ for my day job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It varies per person. The history of imperative programming branches off from ALGOL into several directions. One was to C and then C++. Here's my point-by- point trace of how those were "designed." You'll see that C is more an accident of history designed to work on ancient hardware then lots of uptake since UNIX was written in it. C++ was actually designed carefully on top of C with features from many languages but inherits C issues and kludginess of that approach.

[http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG](http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG)

Now, there were a few other paths from ALGOL. One was Wirth's tradition of languages that were simple, type-safe, memory-safe as possible, compiled lightening fast, consistent, and still performed well. Started with Pascal with Turbo Pascal and Delphi being big commercial successes. Drawback with him was he leaned too far to simplicity as some features might justify extra complexity. Yet, the Oberon's, Modula-3, and Component Pascal derived from this style could do much of what C++ developers could with more safety, consistency, and development speed. Examples below:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3_%28programming_langua...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3_%28programming_language%29)

[http://blackboxframework.org/index.php?cID=why-program-in- co...](http://blackboxframework.org/index.php?cID=why-program-in-component- pascal,en-us)

[http://www.freepascal.org/](http://www.freepascal.org/)

Another branch was Ada family. It was designed to prevent as many faults as possible in embedded programming mainly. They systematically eliminate them with syntax, semantics, and defaults. SPARK variant extends that to automatically prove absence of common errors in code via formal verification that runs behind the scenes. The systems were never popular for various reasons but empirical studies by military showed vastly lower defects than C or C++ with productivity and maintenance advantages.

[http://www.adacore.com/uploads/technical- papers/SafeSecureAd...](http://www.adacore.com/uploads/technical- papers/SafeSecureAdav2015-covered.pdf)

[http://libre.adacore.com/](http://libre.adacore.com/)

So, ignoring functional programming and such, it's hard for me to like C++ coming from a Pascal background where the syntax was readable even to lay people a bit (a la BASIC), operations were safe by default, compiles up to 100kloc/sec on Pentium3, no segfaults, less hacks, GC by default, unsafe for speed if I need it, and small set of features all developers understand and use. C++ was nothing like that although they've improved it a lot over time.

So, given I know better stuff is possible and even out there right now, I have to still think C++ is crap because it combines pieces inconsistently to approximate stuff like I use plus builds on an unsafe foundation with undefined behavior.</comment>


Time to 'Guitar Hero' the Guitar? - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/jan/06/popandrock <comment><USER2> Yeah who knows how much damage has been done to pop music by people who can actually operate the various machines and instruments needed to create it. Because if there's one thing that pop music is lacking these days it's a general feeling of vapid, amateurish, imposterism. Because every time I hear an autotune on a vocal or see American Idol playing on the tv I thank god that I'm not having to experience the music of nerdy dullards like Led Zeppelin or Aretha Franklin. Oh wait, that's the exact opposite of my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER3> Summary of the article: English tongue-in-cheek humor.

One could say that the Akai MPC is the "button guitar" that the article claims for. It's not as nice-looking as a Stratocaster, though.</comment>


Ask HN: What are you using to keep your technical notes? - <AUTHOR> I have several different pieces of software I use for note taking, but each one has its upsides and downsides, none seem to be perfect.
The kind of notes I'm mainly after storing are learning notes. For example when I did my Red Hat course, I used Evernote. Evernote is really good, styling is easy, it looks great, I can share it, putting pictures in (big points) is easy - but one of the major drawbacks is it's a pain to insert code blocks. I use Markdown for more code-oriented notes, but putting images in to Markdown is a pain and it's just a format, not a service (whereas Evernote syncs to all my devices etc).
Just thought I would see what the HN community uses. I'm currently learning Puppet and taking lots of notes, I started with Evernote but then realised I wanted to insert lots of code blocks, so I swapped to Markdown and now realise I want easy inline images and the ability to share to all of my devices without having to do something bespoke or use Dropbox/G drive etc. <comment><USER2> I use Fossil [http://fossil- scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki](http://fossil- scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki) I use the source control portion of it to check in documents and random code samples. I use the wiki portion for notes on things such as server configuration and general info that is not code.

</comment><comment><USER3> A paper log book. I like writing by hand.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree for personal notes, but massive code blocks? Doesn't work.</comment></comment>


CharybdeFS: a new fault-injecting filesystem for software testing - <AUTHOR> http://www.scylladb.com/2016/02/16/fault-injection-filesystem-software-testing/ <comment><USER2> This appears similar to the "virtual filesystem" SQLite uses for testing[1], except of course this one is open source and easily reusable, since it exposes a regular filesystem interface via FUSE. This is fantastic news for every database (or, ahem, application that saves files), and a very good sign for ScyllaDB, since they are literally breaking new ground in reliability testing. You can bet this will turn up problems in at least a few other databases.

FWIW, I asked for something like this a while back on HN.[2] Maybe someone saw it :) Thanks!

[1] [https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html](https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9729225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9729225)

</comment><comment><USER3> So Gluster, just better documented? /s

<comment><USER4> CharybdeFS isn't a fully functional FS (unlike Gluster). It's whole purpose in life is to inject faults and delays in order to make sure the app on top doesn't crash

<comment><USER5> I think you may have missed that the parent post was sarcastic in nature. I'm fairly certain everyone here knows just from the title alone that CharybdeFS is made to insert faults. And I would assume most would know that Gluster is a fully functional filesystem. Sometimes it's just too hard to resist making a joke about the reliability of Gluster.

<comment><USER3> > Sometimes it's just too hard to resist making a joke about the reliability > of Gluster.

I'm glad it's not just me. I've been eyeing it for years before finally deploying it in production, and so far it's been a frustratingly wild ride.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is really neat. Glad it was built. Im a big fan of using realistic mockups for analysis and fault detections. Especially needed for filesystems, networking stacks, distributed system assumptions, bitflips, and unauthorized code execution.</comment>