Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

justinjackson.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 229 posts

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#81

Post by piva00 »

eimrine wrote: post #76
tomhoward wrote: post #20

My 1996 self feels very seen. I think a lot about the way the web was back in the mid 90s, compared to the bleeding-edge technologies of today, particularly blockchain and cryptocurrency. And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfo…

> Why is Hacker News so anti-crypto? I have missed the discussion you have mentioned. But I remember 10 years ago HN was opposite to anti-crypto. And the anticryptoness of nowadays for me seems like stupid ppl who don't understand some basic principles and downvote me if attempting to criticize their misunderstanding.

> And the anticryptoness of nowadays for me seems like stupid ppl who don't understand some basic principles and downvote me if attempting to criticize their misunderstanding.

Name-calling and assuming that everyone that "doesn't get it" is stupid is non-conducive to discussions. Worse, it makes your point much weaker because now there are only the "true believers that have seen the truth" and the "stupid sheeple" as opposite groups, which is a very stupid take in itself.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#83

Post by anta40 »

I was in the last year of junior high school in 2000-2001. We had computer lab running Windows 3.1 (each student had their own floppy disks to save their works before logging out).

We learnt HTML basics: displaying paragraphs, images, blinking/colored text, marquee, etc. It was definitely an eye-opening moment for me: computer was not a device only for playing games or typing documents, but something that could run what your instructions are.

Then during high school days, I learnt more serious programming languages: Basic, C, and Pascal.

These days, web frontend is definitely more complicated: HTML5, JS, CSS, etc. Nope, not interested to touch them anymore :)

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#84

Post by fartcannon »

SkipperCat wrote: post #71

Back in the early 2000's, I taught "computers" to a bunch of kids in DC. I first started off with how a computer work; IO, CPU, storage and their eyes glazed over. I quickly ditched that topic and went right to building a web page. Taught them a few HTML tags and they instantly became "webmasters". They were so thrilled. They could create blinking text, could make all the fonts pink. All just by moving around some si…

You can still just use HTML.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#85

Post by Angostura »

soco wrote: post #38
tomhoward wrote: post #20

My 1996 self feels very seen. I think a lot about the way the web was back in the mid 90s, compared to the bleeding-edge technologies of today, particularly blockchain and cryptocurrency. And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfo…

Erm, no, many understand very well what blockchain is and it's definitely not opaqueness what they accuse it of. But everybody can choose their own strawman to fight, can't they.

How do I add a headline to a webpage? add Some big text goes here

How to I add some data to a blockchain? What is a blockchain?

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#86

Post by jraph »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #70
jraph wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testing whether a number is odd is done in 3 characters: n % 2 if you don't like the % you can also do it using a bitwise AND, this also handles negative numbers: n & 1 this is equal to 1 if the number is odd, 0 if it is even, and will be converted to true or false in a if statement. You don't need a library for this. And you should not need a library to handle string conversions, you should be aware of the types you…

Before reading your comment, I probably would have agreed with you that isOdd was overkill. After reading your comment, I'm starting to think that isOdd is not only more readable but safer. I don't think I ever thought about n % 2 not handling negative numbers, and I'm not sure I would immediately recognize n & 1 as equivalent to isOdd. In languages without truthiness, n % 2 == 0 is longer than isOdd(n). Likewise, ev…

But would you be sure that the implementation isOdd you are using is safe? To be sure you end up needing to try a few values, or to read the implementation, at which point you might as well write isOdd = n => n % 1.

That does not hold true for more complex stuff, but to test whether a number is odd, come on.

You'll test your code if it works anyway and if your odd test is wrong it will show.

But yes, you need to make sure on how '%' works in your programming language especially on negative numbers (and on non integers) because that can differ.

If you are testing whether a number is odd and that number can be negative, you'll probably think about it anyway.

That's a trap you should encounter once and then you are good.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#88

Post by egeozcan »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #59
ransom1538 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web3 is cryptocurrencies? Are we sure about this? Just because it was on someones blog?

What do you believe web3 is?

I believe it's what the spider drawn by David Thorne produces: https://27bslash6.com/overdue.html

Ironic that payment via random drawings became a "reality" in this crazy world after all.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#89

Post by Semiapies »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #55
dmje wrote: post #33

"WordPress is too complicated! Let's do everything in React" is my current favourite developer anti-pattern :-)

Enlightened centrism take: both are equally shit. Go back to ~~monke~~ regular html.

Really, that's what fatigues me about a lot of these "I miss websites." posts.

I think if more people would at least try to build and maintain their own website, starting with the barest of basic HTML, we'd have less of this tech wistfulness around the old web. They'd do one or more of a few things:

1) Find a personal outlet in the hand-rolled site.

2) Find that outlet, but get tired of wading through angle brackets and set up/write a static site generator.

3) Find more they want the site to do and start coding.

4) Realize they've exhausted everything they want to say to the world and abandon it.

But what else would happen in any case would be a demystification of it. Old hands would lose their nostalgia goggles, and young folks would recognize how much of the irritations of social media derived from people's dissatisfaction with the time and effort it took to shout into the void on the old web.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#90

Post by sixQuarks »

skilled wrote: post #58

I never changed from being a webmaster to being something else. For the last 15 years I still manage my own servers, I still design my own websites, I still do most things myself when it comes to building/managing a website. And the fact that everything is SaaS now, well, that just gives me motivation to keep it that way. Easy for me to say, of course, since I grew up back then and was fortunate to have the experienc…

I’ve been and still am a webmaster for 24 years. It’s always difficult when people ask me what I do these days, I literally tell them I’m a webmaster.
Post reply on HN