Those two things can easily both be true, and it doesn't change the fact that shallow comments are bad for HN and therefore against the rules here.
It's perfectly possible to write a non-shallow comment about work that you consider shallow. More likely, though, there isn't much that's interesting to say about it, in which case you shouldn't post anything.
But that doesn't detract the artistic merit of the submission.
Agreed, looked at in that light I'd suggest that it actually adds to the artistic expression. I was one of a few, apparently, that the site loaded for (sans images) and it was a tiny thrill to see it load. So, it felt like watching a performance of sorts, for me at least.
Lead with the positive curiosity of wanting to know how the author did this rather than your negativity of “what’s the point?” The author could very well post a follow-up article detailing how
What is there to talk about really? Hook up a USB floppy drive to an IIS machine, select the floppy as the source for the site and voila. Takes 1 minute to set up if you have a USB floppy drive hanging around.
It’s great that you already have an idea of how this was done; others may not. There’s a lot to talk about there for people unfamiliar, don’t you think? Saying otherwise would be very close-minded.
It seems to me from your other comments in this thread that you’re intent on being negative / reductionist to others work without offering much to the conversation, so I will happily disengage with you now.
If you really checked my comment history, you’d see that I actually gave a warm compliment just a few days ago. I apprecite the work of others, but not necessarily when the work is trivial and keeps popping up on HN quite often.
The site loaded for me. So I can tell you; it does not use IIS. And it's running on a 386 so I doubt there's any USB involved. What he pulled off is a lot more interesting than what you're describing.
It was a fun thing he did to see if he could and when, to his apparent delight, it worked he decided to share his results. As someone who grew up in the era of floppy disks and constant worry about disk space and performance I found the whole thing very entertaining.
Sometimes we need to take a break from all the serious and just have a little fun. Items like this guy's post are why I come to HN.
Thank you for the clarification. I too find this interesting, especially because it runs on win 3.x. The floppy part is a bit unorthodox, but cool nonetheless!
One point could well be to see how your setup handles extreme overload?
I guess different OSes and server software would handle it very differently, so using HN to trigger a huge overload would be a smart way to get some science done along those lines.
Reminds me of Hotline Connect file servers, sometimes people would host directories linking to different drives in their system, including the A: drive
