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Comment by pleb_nz | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see the reverse of this 'things that used to be easy and are now hard'

That would be an interesting read

* Running any website with user-contributed content. Spam is just everywhere nowadays, and you cannot publish a simple hiscore list for your game anymore without some kind of anti-spam measures, otherwise the spammers find it astonishingly fast and flood it with spam, even if it doesn't allow any clickable links

* Thinking about it some more, everything related to security. Back in the days, the whole Internet wasn't port-scanned for known vulnerable services multiple times a day, and you could get much further with less refined security practices.

* Drawing things on screen. Back in the days of DOS and QBasic, it was just a single line of code to put the screen into a different mode and start to paint lines and rectangles on it, placing text at certain coordinates. Now you have to have a GUI (though canvas elements in web pages make it a bit simpler again; still not quite as simple as in the 80s/90s)

* Getting access to a particular memory location, without layers and layers of virtualization in between

> Thinking about it some more, everything related to security.

wasn't it more like "nobody gave a f back in the days"? :P

>Back in the days, the whole Internet wasn't port-scanned for known vulnerable services multiple times a day, and you could get much further with less refined security practices.

what years are you talking about? seems like a lot of decades ago

Maybe OpenGL?

Nowadays to draw a triangle you have to write, compile and attach two shaders written in it's own separate language that interface with the main code

I'm not sure about drawing things on screen, actually. There are still tools similar to QBasic: Processing and Python's turtle module, in particular.

I think browser security has made a lot of stuff harder. E.g. CORS has made loading JSON off a remote server harder, chrome now won't load mic/webcam feeds off non-HTTPS.

(Not saying these are bad things! Just annoyances I've run into during development.)

Running your own email server. Receiving email is easier since mail routing and spam filtering has matured. But sending email is now hard with authenticating yourself everywhere and making sure you are not blocked by the big providers.

I'd also say that even with letsencrypt it is harder to setup a web server than 10 years ago when you didn't need https at all.

Writing programs that most users could run. It used to be a matter of firing up Delphi, moving some widgets around in a form, writing event handler code, and compiling. The install builder had it all done in less than an hour. It would run on almost any Windows PC in the world.

Now everything has to do Unicode, be piped through the internet, work on MacOs, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android and the web.

Lazarus works on Linux, Windows, Mac and even Win 9x.

I think you can argue this one either way. For example, I would say that writing a little html+js calculator web app these days is very easy and works on billions of devices around the world (approx anything with a web browser and an internet connection). I'd say this is reaching more users more easily than your delphi example.

- registering internet resources (e.g. IPv4 block or desirable domain), due to scarcity

- various features that are harder to implement due to changing user/regulator expectations (from simple websites to stuff like GDPR)

- multimedia in the browser post-Flash, pre-WASM

- sending emails (spam filters)

- publishing apps (app store / google play rules)

Search.

In the past, Google just works. Nowadays, Google must be used with uBlacklist or something like that to yield decent results.

Back then you had a few programming languages. Now you have hundreds to make a decision.

Back then you had a few tech stacks. Now you have thousands to choose from.

Logging in.

Creating and publishing animated/interactive stuff (aka Flash.)

Submit and post a link to submission here. I'll vote it up.

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