Hacker News Reader

Sigh, being an old geezer here I can't shake the feeling every other show HN post is stuff we did 20 years ago just reinvented (sometimes wastefully). Yes, we had 3D on the web then. It was called VRML. We didn't have Svelte but somehow UI work didn't take years and an army of coders to put together. Something went funny in the last couple of decades. Back then I thought we'd be coding much cooler stuff in 20 years.

View on HN

Maybe the web has an upper level of "cool" that we've already reached. And the really cool stuff quickly gets nerfed and watered down to appeal to the masses for commercial purposes.

There is some cool shit being done, maybe just not on the web.

> Maybe the web has an upper level of "cool" that we've already reached.

The web's "upper level of cool" is being able to display a list of text and images without stutter. And it fails even at that.

All the other things that are being desperately bolted on (WASM, WebGL etc.) are just rehashes of everything we already had 20 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com