Who else considers plain vanilla web to be writing websites in pure html like it's 1995?
Plain Vanilla Web
621–630 of 715 posts
Re: Plain Vanilla Web
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have an idea how this could be decentralized?
It would have to be some kind of web of trust thing. But no, I don't have any specific suggestions to that effect (which is why I believe that HTTP should remain an option).
What about self-signed certificates? That's still better than plain HTTP.
Re: Plain Vanilla Web
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weirdly this is something similar to what Satya Nadella said. > Yeah, I mean, it’s a it’s a very, very, very important question, the SaaS applications, or biz apps. So let me just speak of our own dynamics. The approach at least we’re taking is, I think, the notion that business applications exist, that’s probably where they’ll all collapse, right in the agent era, because if you think about it, right, they are essen…
Except this is pure fantasy and AI is uniquely unreliable and error prone.
> Except this is pure fantasy and AI is uniquely unreliable and error prone.
Is this perhaps why Microsoft is in a uniquely good spot to take advantage of AI for customer facing software? If customer expectation of your software is already that it's horribly unreliable and error prone, AI bringing more of the same may not really hurt...
Re: Plain Vanilla Web
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've purchased specialized woodworking tools online that simply involved filling out a form. I later received the parts with an invoice to send payment. You can simply not pay if you choose not to. People romanticize businesses like this but there’s a reason you’re not posting the link. It only works when it’s for a small group of people who are in the know and refer trusted buyers. It’s also trivial to set up any…
> People romanticize businesses like this but there’s a reason you’re not posting the link. What you're insinuating is true, but more likely the reason they didn't post the link is that it's not relevant.
It's customary to link the example given if relevant to the point even if not to the topic in general, otherwise you have to trust the person that the example they're talking about is real and true
Re: Plain Vanilla Web
#625Earlier quoted context omitted.
I sell urns online and my website just has an email link. No shopping cart. A brick-and-mortor urn shop would never have a shopping cart, so why would a virtual one? I've purchased specialized woodworking tools online that simply involved filling out a form. I later received the parts with an invoice to send payment. You can simply not pay if you choose not to. There are so many way to do commerce both on and offline…
> I've purchased specialized woodworking tools online that simply involved filling out a form. I later received the parts with an invoice to send payment. You can simply not pay if you choose not to. People romanticize businesses like this but there’s a reason you’re not posting the link. It only works when it’s for a small group of people who are in the know and refer trusted buyers. It’s also trivial to set up any…
This type of business works in the small - when you know your suppliers and your customers. It doesn't work if you have 10,000 customers, or if anyone can email you. For this business it's only a spam problem, though - they have to reject emails from strangers if they get a high volume, exactly the same way they have to reject emails selling Viagra.
That's probably alien to HN and a lot of them may try to contact him, as if they have a possibility of becoming his customer, which they don't.
Re: Plain Vanilla Web
#626Earlier quoted context omitted.
For this to work, you need society as a whole to participate in enforcement. But we have created an environment where this kind of thing is unthinkable, not even because people won't do it, but because they will only create legal trouble for themselves if they try. So the modus operandi for your average citizen in Western societies in general and US in particular is to not get involved and leave it all to law enforce…
Not to mention the people who actively vilify anyone who "snitches" on the person by turning them in to suffer the consequences of their own actions. Luigi anyone?
Can you elaborate?
Re: Plain Vanilla Web
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've purchased specialized woodworking tools online that simply involved filling out a form. I later received the parts with an invoice to send payment. You can simply not pay if you choose not to. Payment after receipt is very common in Switzerland, but fraud is presumably rare. Your name would probably go on the debtors register and that's the sort of bad credit history you don't want to have. At some point the p…
also kinda common in germany. Used to be much more common, but you still see it, especially in b2b, even for high value items
You see delayed payment everywhere in b2b - "net-30" for example.
There was a story posted on HN once about a business saving money by prepaying. Some guy was working for a restaurant and saved 70% (yes, over two thirds) on their meat by, instead of ordering each day and settling on net-30 as they had been doing and as is typical, calling up their meat vendor and committing to a certain minimum order every day and paying for it right then. Because cash flow is that important to some businesses. The vendor said they'd never had a customer so good before, and yet it wasn't such a big deal for the restaurant. (Yes, they tend to run on thin margins, well, now their margins are a little bit fatter and they can afford to have mispredicted their meat usage a little, and still come out ahead).
It's the same as Hetzner vs AWS. You buy AWS, you can ramp up and down your bill any time, but you're overpaying by a huge multiple (can even be 10x-100x). If you get your servers from any traditional provider that's updated their price in the last five years, they'll bill you monthly for your server, and there's a setup cost of approximately one month, and you can't scale up without a week latency or down without two months, but you get the same amount of server for an incredibly low price (if you're accustomed to AWS) which - if you're not running a workload as bursty as Amazon on Christmas Day - lets you overprovision enough to more than make up for the inflexibility.
Re: Plain Vanilla Web
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Much of US banking operates almost entirely on this premise and has done so forever. I've had the same epiphany when I worked for a fintech startup that interacts with financial institutions. Having a website just isn't necessary for some of the day-to-day operations vs just sending CSV/Excel files back and forth for reconciliation, settlement, accounting purposes.
> Having a website just isn't necessary for some of the day-to-day operations vs just sending CSV/Excel files back and forth for reconciliation, settlement, accounting purposes. This doesn't end well when there are hundreds of thousands of "reconciliation, settlement, accounting purposes" to support.
It kind of does. You still have all the same backend logic, but now it doesn't have to run concurrently with a user interface. You can take a queue of operations, process operations off the queue and send their results back. Isn't that a pretty reasonable way for a system to behave? More than a few systems do this internally, with some kind of central message queue.
Re: Plain Vanilla Web
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure about the US, but in my country that's how mail order used to work for decades, and it's still pretty common to offer that payment option, though usually with some restrictions (e.g. not for your first order). Most people are not scammers and will pay simply because it's the right thing to do.If your margins are decent, you can just eat the loss to some scammers as the cost of doing business. Especially if t…
Cash on delivery (COD) used to be popular in the US for a lot of the mail order junk on television in the 70s to early 80s. The rise of the credit card for normal people was a cause of its decline because people now had a reliable way to pay over the phone when ordering said junk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_on_delivery
COD still protects against fraud by having the delivery company collect the money before handing over the order.
With the "pay the bill later" it's entirely up to the recipient whether they decide to pay. Some will even just forget it with no ill intent.
Re: Plain Vanilla Web
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that this comment is a great example of the total disconnect these conversations always have. On the one hand we have lots of people on here who are building full-featured web apps, not websites, on teams of 30+. These people look at frameworkless options and immediately have a dozen different questions about how your frameworkless design handles a dozen different features that their use case absolutely requi…
Many years ago—2002!—Joel Spolsky wrote this: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/05/06/five-worlds/ His thesis was that before arguing about software development tools, practices, anything really, it's vital to establish what kind of development you're doing, because each "world" has its own requirements that in turn motivate different practices and tools. The worlds he quoted were Shrink-wrap; Internal; Embedded; G…
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