Yep. Everyone here is talking about "just use the website" but ANZ Plus, a "neo-bank" which is increasingly popular here in Australia, literally has no web portal.
Its app is really nice and native, though. That, along with a decent interest rate, is why I use it.
> If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens.
Is NodeJS still considered on the same level of "unknown" / "not-boring" technology as the others listed? By my reckoning it is plenty mature enough to be considered a "boring" choice, and going for bun would be spending and innovation token.
I think that in 2026 Node is a boring technology, but with the fast-moving ecosystem around it if you opt into npm (the registry, not the package manager) it makes it not boring.
The things you layer on top of Node via npm could count as "not-boring" in this instance, especially with the number of supply-chain attacks each month.
Yeah, compared to most other languages there's a lot of moving parts and activity in the space still - npm vs pnpm vs yarn, node vs bun vs deno, eslint / prettier vs biome vs oxlint, and that's before even writing a single line of code.
Boring in comparison would be Go where a lot of things are standardized. You still get some non-boring in choosing what libraries to use (if applicable) but generally it's a very dull language/ecosystem.
I think the main problem is just that we don't have a standard library across the browser and server. We have to reinvent everything across both domains because we don't have good building blocks unlike Go which, despite my issues with some the standard library, at least has one.
I'm disappointed that we've fragmented across Node/Deno/Bun, although I was briefly hopeful for Deno since they tried to standardise around ESM and provide a strong standard library. Of course this still had to be bundled for the browser, which has its own issues.
Is NodeJS the simple, solid and rugged way this has been done for a decade now? If not, then it is an innovation.
Second it depends on what your or your teams experience level is.
Have you ever built a serious thing with it and do you have multiple years of experience running and maintaining it? Yes? Then it is probably the boring choice.
Would you be okay with leaving the final product unmaintained for a few years and it would not be a major problem? That may be a factor as well. E.g. a static HTML website needs next to zero maintenance, while a wordpress blog may fall apart every once in a while.
How maintainable would it be if the person who built it leaves? Could someone else pick up the slack right away? Would they need some time to get up to speed? Would it be literally impossible to get up to speed?
How hard is it to get the build system setup if the devs laptop is crushed under a truck? Is it as simple as cloning the project or does it need ritual sacrifice and dark chants and incantations to even get near running?
The boring thing is one that scores all the easy points on these questions.
> Second it depends on what your or your teams experience level is.
+1.
I work in a Skunkworks department inside a larger/older company and we recently decided to stop using Python in the future, the company's language.
Node.js, Go, Rust, C#, etc, all of those are extremely boring for us. They're stable and we get things done in minutes. In Python it's like pulling teeth, with constant API changes and refactors from other teams we're struggling to keep up with. Which one is boring? For us, not Python.
The Python developers naturally disagree and say "there must be something wrong with your team if you can't use Python at the same speed and efficacy as us".
Python is fast for tiny programs. However if you have more than one team it isn't tiny. One developer can make something not tiny in a few weeks. For large programs a compiler that checks syntax, and ideally types before you run a comprehensive test suite ( which probably isn't comprehensive enough) is nearly mandatory to be maintainable. Otherwise you can never be sure you adjusted everything when you need to change an API.
I think a good metric for "boring" technology, at least for languages/frameworks, is how painful the process of updating an abandoned/unmaintained project after 9-12 months is. NodeJS itself qualifies as boring, but the entire ecosystem around it is still a mess.
Yes, Node is boring. Its capabilities and failure modes are well understood. And no, installing today's flavour of leftpad is entirely self inflicted. Bun or Deno are definitely a token or two I'd rather spend elsewhere or not at all.
NodeJS is just an example that must have seemed reasonable to the author at the time this blog post was written (11 years ago). Obviously it may no longer apply.
Also the definitions of "unknown" and "boring" are always up to you. If you have a bunch of experienced `bun` developers in your company you may consider it as the boring tech.
10 years since the original and it feels like one of the go-to de-facto standard technology choices in many organizations. So I suppose it doesn't cost an innovation token anymore, but that doesn't mean you should just use it - there are many factors to consider when picking a technology.
It is more about being a dynamic language where V8 can only help as much, thus C++ addons, rewrites into .NET, Java, Go, Rust, and the whole npm system made of packages with single functions written by folks that just did their first package out of a bootcamp.
If it was for me, JavaScript would stay in the browser.
We're participating in it right now. HN is a living example of a simple website facilitating discussion between humans with a shared interest. That's why I come here more than any other news/social site now.
I didn't live long enough to see the entire lifetime of HN, but it's definitely part of the old web in my book. Its functionality is the same it's always been, it's rock solid, lightweight and simple. No personalization or engagement maximizing, no modern-style ads. Being spun off from something as big as Y Combinator meant they can run this site almost indefinitely.
HN is a good example of how little a website actually needs once you remove the requirement to constantly squeeze more engagement out of it. Though to be fair, its audience is unusually self-selecting :)
I don't know much about how HN is run but I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the need for human moderation here, and I assume that is a lot of work.
A message forum is simple, old technology. Keeping it usable and useful for humans is not.
I have fond memories of Slashdot in 1998. It was the spiritual forerunner to HN, and had upvoting, and in a more complex form as there were categories of votes. I got lots of +5 Funny comments. Hard to imagine, isn't it.
I've only seen the ./ category moderation style in one other place and it's really a shame as I think it has great value if it can be linked up with filters besides raw thresholds, of course balanced against how it would be used in reality by a large group of people. Voting incentivizes populism, and that means a lot of topics degrade into "everyone's a comedian" or virtue signalling whatever is acceptable in that particular forum, mostly retreading old ground instead of moving the discussion forwards.
Ya, sorry, I never read Slashdot back in the day (even though I'm well old enough to have had), so I'm very wrong here. I'm just generally annoyed how every forum now a days has it. But of course one of the reasons I dislike it is because I fall victim to its dopamine effects.
Naw, it's my bad, I'm 45 but never spent any time on Slashdot as I didn't really care about tech at large back then. None of the forums I spent my time on back then had voting systems and now all the ones I use do and I'm not the biggest fan.
I've really soured on votes in recent years. They promised a sort of crowdsourced moderation and I appreciated the cleverness of the idea back around the time reddit first came out.
But now I think that downvotes have just kinda become a sort of digital tomato for people to throw, a means of burying a post without putting any thought into an argument as to why the post is illegitimate.
And that's the best case. In the worst case it's a really easy system for bots to game. You don't even need AI. All it takes is a bunch of accounts "legitimate" enough to not get flagged by whatever botting heuristics the site implemented and you can produce a false consensus.
havent lived. “I didnt live long enough” means your life ended! past tense. hasn’t means its still going “have not (yet)”. I don’t know the formal rules behind it all though.
its interesting because it sounds more correct to use have not yet because your life is still going on but its going on in the forward direction, not backwards in time to overlap an earlier HN state. So you could say its not right, but the sentence sounds/feels more right to preserve that your life is still going on.
> your life is still going on but its going on in the forward direction, not backwards in time to overlap an earlier HN state
Wouldn't the proper tense be "I won't have lived long enough to see the entire lifetime of HN" then?
> We like that you are still here with us.
Same here, and it feels like a very "old web" kind of feeling, as we're expressing this empathy towards an anonymous stranger with a very deemphasized username.
I find it surprising how much empathy has seemingly been on a decline as the Web went from anonymity to pseudonymity to everyone's full name and face being attached to their online presence.
"I won't have lived long enough" implies you will be missing out on the tail end of HN, "I haven't lived long enough" implies you have missed the start (head end?) of HN (as I understand it).
Isn't there a vested interest here for bots though to communicate here though?
HN is a certainly a smaller but more targeted market but there's no reason to assume we're communicating with other humans here necessarily especially given HN demographics.
Does it matter? A 3rd world getting paid to post content, the bot that replaces the shill, and a first world office worker that's been indoctrinated by and is parroting either of the former are functionally equivalent as far as the next user cares because the text they put bore that next user's eyes is the same.
This is the way! The old web never went away. It is still there for the people who care to look. If you are curious, good places to start is here, gopher/gemini, mailinglists, usenet, irc, webrings/blogs, mastodon/pleroma instance etc.
Basically every area that is either forgotten by the mainstream, or completely unknown, and make sure the author is a person and not a company and you'll be on your way to way more interesting discussions, texts, content and interaction, that the B.S. of facebook, twitter and commercial web sites.
what would be amazing would be a resurgence of the old style forums, but where users could choose to see a flat or tree view of a discussion (and even customize those views, e.g. the tree could be reddit style without subject lines, or slashdot style with them)
SwedeSpeed has this. It is a forum, posts have threads. It isn’t always nice because the threading/three view also breaks the sense of time and makes it harder to see new posts.
I actually prefer a linear view with posts that quote what they want to reply to. This also allows a single post to reply and combine multiple remarks. So it allows more for convergence instead of divergence as with a tree.
right, i agree with you - there's no one size fits all. that's why the best thing would be to let the reader toggle views on any given post/thread. one could even experiment with fancier views like a flat layout but with a git tree like sidebar that shows the perhaps multiple parents for any post and support for clicking on a post and popping up a mini thread with just the posts it's replying to.
Ask someone for feedback on your website. To you it might look ok, but to me and I think many others, it is unintelligible. I have no idea what I'm looking at and it is impossible to parse.
That is the primary issue, and secondarily it is a cookie-cutter AI slopfest that will make any technical person not submerged in Kool-Aid click away.
Please just get your AI to follow some basic UI best practices or pick up a UI library.
Thanks for the feedback, appreciated! Yes its due an overhaul, but a large part of the purpose of this website is going through experiments as a digital garden and having a creative outlet, I am fully aware how it looks, but there is a part of me that needs it to go through the process of looking as sloppy as possible. It's likely going to end up going through its nth iteration very soon, and then another one after that. I do run and maintain (for clients/myself) many websites that look nothing like this.
> ...typing notes into a dumb markdown file with the textbooks name is good enough
What sorts of things are you writing into your markdown file? After 3.5 years of uni I still don't know how or why to take proper notes to enhance my learning.
> I still don't know how or why to take proper notes
I find that there is some element of ritual to "proper" notes. Its personal, and everyone differs. Any given system may sound logcal and sensible, but its most important that you write something, anything. Everything else doesnt really matter. I like to use real paper and pen, and start with a wide ruler drawn margin on the left (of course, you can buy paper with this. I prefer to do it by hand. It feels right.) and the date and subject at the top.
Then I put keys on the left (page numbers, question numbers, subtopics, speakers in a meeting) and values on the right (insights, things that seemed cool, the steps of a particularly tricky bit, definitions of words)
I put a dash before tasks I have to do, and a question mark on words or concepts I heard but didn't understand and I need to go look up later.
Literally none of this is necessary. It supports my learning only in the sense that it makes me feel like im doing things right. I rarely ever come back and read them (usually only ad-hoc looking for something I knew I wrote but cant remember, not a structured review of them). Your system is for you to figure out yourself. A lot of it came from imitating my math teachers. But maybe the description helped?
Some days I write the date and a margin, and nothing else. No pressure, not every day is a notes day. Some days you learn a ton, and others don't challenge you at all. Thats normal too.
> It supports my learning only in the sense that it makes me feel like im doing things right
I think my downfall might have been questioning the efficacy of my method beyond it just "feeling right" and trying to find ways to show myself that I am learning.. maybe the correct approach is to just do whatever and hope for the best
BTW, this is darn near to being bullet journaling. It’s also almost exactly how I ended up taking notes after experimenting with bullet journaling and throwing out the parts I don’t really use.
40 years ago we just wrote as much as we could down. The teacher usually hand wrote on the chalkboard. Some courses had slides, a precursor to PowerPoint. There is some reasearch that writing down on paper or with a stylus puts the stuff in extra places in our head.
Taking notes is like lifting weights. You don't need the weights to be higher, and you don't need the notes to exist. The process of writing organizes thoughts.
For students, that is. If you're writing papers or a book you should probably structure and manage your notes somehow. But for uni classes, well, it isn't even recommended that you read your notes. Or teachers' slide decks.
Lectures, slides and notes are merely a hike through the territory. You're supposed to range it by yourself later, seek out papers and books. Digest as much material as you can as early in the course as you can. Taper it off towards exams and do not study for a few days beforehand.
Basically the opposite of every student's instincts. It works though. Learning takes inquiry, breadth and depth and lots of sleep to sink in. Cramming for exams is self defeating.
I don't know I think it is charming in a way that is lacking in nearly everything else an LLM tries to do creatively.
I have always preferred the result of getting an LLM to draw an svg or make a procedural animation like this to the uncanny hyper-realistic result of diffusion image/video generation.
To help explain AI to my elderly mother, I said it is like an alien intelligence on a planet too far away to directly observe Earth, and everything it knows about humanity and our world it learned from reading just about every book and website. You can ask it a question or to do some work and it can often give a useful response but it can never directly judge its accuracy if it relates to the physical world, it has only your judgment to work with.
Given that limitation, it is incredible what it can still accomplish. And when it falls short, it is often in a charming way, if you are open to seeing it that way. It reflects something like a child's understanding of the world, not entirely wrong, just incomplete.
The fluttering cubes that might have been bees or butterflies were my favorite part.
That's a nice metaphor for your mother, i like it. I would just touch on one small part, which is that it has more than our judgement though. It has access to laws of physics, to formulas, to all our current scientific knowledge which we have shown to be correct by interacting with the physical world. It can create an (incomplete) model of the world based on verified theories already. Through deduction and reasoning alone it can get pretty far. After all, there's many scientific theories we created long in advance before we actually proved them to be correct through interaction with the physical world. So even before they were proved to be correct, they were already correct. Same can be applied to what LLM can infer through reasoning alone.
Anyway, just a small point which probably still wouldn't change the nice metaphor your made.
That's true, on some level it is capable of reasoning about the physical world even beyond our ability, through sheer breadth of knowledge and stamina. I suppose the area where it relies most on our judgment is about subjective experience, and this better explains its limitations.
Even so, they likely aren't recording everything your eyes see and for how long they linger. They likely aren't recording your entire traversal through the venue, what you do, what you say, what times you go there, from where you connect, etc. Simply being at a public place is one data point. A full history of your entire interaction is a magnitude different.
Its app is really nice and native, though. That, along with a decent interest rate, is why I use it.
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