This is a web page

Thanks for sharing this. I've been obsessing over so many new fancy effects using javascript and fancy CSS3 styling and getting held up about the technology, but you reminded me why I ever got into programming / web development in the first place. To share things with people all over the world. As a kid growing up on a tiny island that was a huge deal for me when I first started. I think some of the magic got lost over the years as I I focused more and more on the technical aspects but you've reminded me that sharing is important and the tech is just "syntactic sugar"

First time [1] my in-laws saw "the web" they were trying to find information about vacation spots in Brazil but their travel guide was obsolete, I found a web page a student had written up about where the best places to stay and see were in Brazil.

I could almost see the dots connect when they realized that someone they didn't know, in Brazil, had written up a piece of information at some point that they were now seeing and using, and anyone could do that. It was like watching a Pachinko machine pay out a jackpot :-)

[1] It was circa Christmas 1994 since I was trying to explain to them what Java was and why I thought it might have an impact on the world.

It made me look - the front page of HN is currently 7.8KB, and this is:

    - 1.6% of yahoo.com size (477KB)
    - 18.9% of reddit.com size (41.2 KB)
    - 23.6% of stackoverflow.com size (33KB)

and

    - 108.3% of gmail.com size (7.2KB)
    - 520% of google.com size (1.5KB)
    - 866.6% of your blog post size (908B)

so this gives some perspective.

edit: the most surprising is gmail.com for me, id have thought they load tons of js in the background. but maybe so does hn?

It's funny because in that Instagram thread, I just wrote a comment about how "beautiful" is the new "it just works"[1]. This post and the many like it are a direct backlash from that mindset, just as the Linux users mantra during "it just works" was "I can make it work better". It's a grab for control in a world where oftentimes your choices are limited. Everything is beautiful, and everything looks the same. What will be the new "beautiful"? I don't know. But I'll bet there will be a counter-culture there to espouse an alternative as well. Perhaps the new "beautiful" will be "content is simple". Time will tell.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5913461

Looks like the focus is everything else, but words here http://buildandlaunch.net/