Actually it seems every app is just a browser window, so you can create an app that points to puter.com, and you'll have puter inside of puter.
It's pretty cool, but I can't think of what this would be useful for. Presumably, you need a sophisticated desktop OS that can run a modern web browser in order to use this. And that OS is likely more useful than this.
Seems to have an issue with Firefox. At least in the terminal app -- the characters are multicolored blocks rather than letters. The editor app seems to work, as do the various games like Panda Love.
Mozilla has no time to fix Firefox Android or address their ever dwindling market share but we can count on them to waste time on overzealous security theater
can we stop doing posts like these on hn? thank you. by the time we have all figured out it's nothing malicious or not, the harm has already been done. or not. in this case, no harm.
wait, this is an easter egg? I saw the same when I randomly opened draw, and all the drawing tools were hidden behind some advent-calendar style doors...
I was like "hm, okay, looks like another windows93.net" and closed the page
"Puter is a cloud operating system that allows you to upload, store, process, and share data, files, personal information, messages, pictures, and other materials (collectively, your “User Data”). You can also search, preview, sort and personalize your User Data."
I didn't give them anything; I also don't recall their asking for anything.
> I didn't give them anything; I also don't recall their asking for anything.
When I click the link, I see only a login modal over some abstract background art. I don't even see the link to the terms of service you have there. (That's after I enabled Javascript on the page to even get that far.) I can only assume that's what OP is complaining about. Maybe they've got too many users because of this post and they're limiting it to signup-only for now? Or maybe my browser isn't passing some IP trustworthiness thing. shrug
Oh? That's very strange, it instantly works in private browsing mode, taking me to what looks like a desktop. I tried it again in non-private browsing mode and I still get the login window.
Edit: deleting cache and offline website data in Firefox fixed it. In my experience when this fixes something it's usually because there's a broken web worker and that forces it to redownload.
Puter sets "has_visited_before" in the LocalStorage, then does some XHR/fetch requests with no error handling, then sets other stuff in the LocalStorage.
If for whatever reason, one of the XHR/fetch requests fails, you end up with only the "has_visited_before" key in the LocalStorage, which causes you to be stuck on the login screen until you clear the LocalStorage.
This is cool... but what is the business?
It's a good domain name & they have a careers@puter.com email address (if you click on the i in the bottom right)
which has almost no API calls except accessing files stored in their cloud drive. Other than that, your apps are just plain JavaScript running in a window inside their window. So it appears more like a very goofy way of selling overpriced cloud storage and trying to entice developers to build an ecosystem around that.
If Puter/FriendOS can support legacy Windows enterprise apps not updated in over a decade and adds collaboration, SSO, 2FA, access controls, VPN/intranet, etc. - basically what FrontEgg (https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/28/with-40m-in-new-funding-fr...) offers - on top on them, it could be a pretty great business.
This is a great illustration of this type of business: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20120326. A lot of customers totally need, not just want, this type of thing.
Puter/FriendOS type systems can graft upon some modern features on top of all legacy apps, which is far far better than having to build it out for every single one. Especially as the market lies more in the long tail of the custom software tailed to specific companies, that has been chugging along for 15 years in maintenance mode.
I am trying to think of where to take it next. Possibly integrate something like VLC for media playback or allowing users to install applications. I don’t really know what users would want from something like this.
I was thinking this is super nice, but just a toy project. But I saw there is even funding and the author is hiring. So, it is serious.
I think this will be an enormous commercial success, because I tend to misjudge these kind of things. :')
I am impressed by the slickness and speed of this thing. It is more responsive than your average MS Windows system.
@ent101: well done and good luck with this project! Super slick!
If Puter/FriendOS can support legacy Windows enterprise apps not updated in over a decade and adds collaboration, SSO, 2FA, access controls, VPN/intranet, etc. - basically what FrontEgg (https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/28/with-40m-in-new-funding-fr...) offers - on top on them, it could be a pretty great business.
This is a great illustration of this type of business: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20120326. A lot of customers totally need, not just want, this type of thing.
Puter/FriendOS type systems can graft upon some modern features on top of all legacy apps, which is far far better than having to build it out for every single one. Especially as the market lies more in the long tail of the custom software tailed to specific companies, that has been chugging along for 15 years in maintenance mode.
Puter.com belonged to my good friend (and now also an investor in Puter) Humberto (who is the founder and CEO of Rows.com). He told me about the domain and I immediately thought it would be the perfect fit for this project. He was very gracious and agreed to sell it to me (well, to Puter Technologies Inc. lol). The price was $25,000.
Another comment on here explains it very well: "It’s “pyu-ter”, like comPUTER! Puter dot com! Well done" This is why I loved it so much!
At your suggestion, I did the Google search. I did not find an 'overwhelming consensus'. There are some sellers who are motivated to allow it for complex reasons (public perception, value of sell-out crowds which allow TV broadcast of sporting events and ancillary sales. e.g). The fancy term 'allocative efficiency' which is econ-speak for 'we should always sell to the highest bidder' is described as a positive outcome of scalping. Personally I find that nauseating, and of no real value to (original) providers (sellers) such as entertainers. There are first-person interviews of entertainers distressed by the way scalping impacts their fans.
I’ve shown up to venues before and paid less for a ticket from the scalpers than if I would have walked over to the box office because they were just trying to unload them.
I’ve also sold an extra ticket for a friend by just walking up to a random person standing in the ticket line and offering it to them for face value (which saved them money on the ticket counter markup).
Both cases involved turning what would have been a complete loss into less than a complete loss. Never felt bad about the scalpers loosing money because they knew the risks and my friend was just going to eat the loss because whoever the ticket was for couldn’t make the show for whatever reason and I was like “I’ll get rid of it for you”.
Yes, these are good examples of ... well, 'useful' scalping. The scenario I had in mind was when big scalping outfits have a modus operandi of buying huge quantities of tickets for re-sale. Aided and abetted by the technology of the web. I don't think it happened too often before that.
Ah yes, buyers benefit from paying a higher price they otherwise would have done. This is very smart and sensible and obvious.
(If you're claiming that buyers benefit from being able to buy a ticket that was purchased but then was not wanted, then that's true - but that's not scalping. Scalping is specifically buying a ticket with the intention to resell it for a higher price, _not_ reselling a ticket that was genuinely wanted at the time but was then unusable due to other conditions)
There are human lifetimes worth of political philosophy that argues just that, yes. Many times that written about how land ought to be heavily taxed in accordance to its value.
For some examples, see the Lockean Proviso, Mutualism, and Georgism.
It seems like for the first domain on your list (angeiras.com), you’re quite explicitly marketing it to the proprietor of the popular seafood place you mention. But if you say you’re not squatting, I’m sure there’s something I’m missing.
but then got super busy with my spreadsheet company at rows.com.
all the domains i buy are for real projects, which i release like decodeportugal.com, portotype.com, berto.com and more but some take years to see the light of day.
i am open to selling if the idea is superior to mine, which is the case of the creator of puter.com.
fyi i'd paid a 5 digits good deal of money for puter.com too. when you fall in love for these projects..you risk it.
Never heard that before. It's a nice folksy bit of wisdom... except very few people in old Ireland or England could afford a fair bit of land, and even fewer could afford to build a folly upon it.
It unifies the Operating System with the cloud. Your local storage becomes irrelevant while at the same time you have full durability and portability of your environment on any device in the world.
I think more to the point, why would someone use this as opposed to a remote-desktop service from an established company like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, ...
This isn’t a Remote Desktop.
This is a cloud file system which loads your files and js apps on the front end in a way that it looks like a remote desktop
Do you see positioning this say against a Citrix (IE: corporate desktop virtualization) or as a Google Apps alternative, (IE: students, consumers looking for a cross-device solution)? Or something else altogether?
I don’t know anything about you two, and I don’t want to sound condescending, but… what kind of friend sells a freaking domain for 25,000 dollars to another friend? Or was that just some asset shifting between your companies, without any real money involved..?
It's excellent for typing in 'wsl'. More seriously though the new Windows Terminal isn't what provides autocomplete, that's the shell. Powershell probably has okay autocomplete. In Windows the distinction has always blurred a bit.
I've recently given up on unix-type shells on Windows. Whether it's WSL1, WSL2, WSLg, MSYS2 or Cygwin, there's always compatibility quirks or performance issues that just reminds me that "it's not Linux". So I decided to just bite the bullet and go all in on PowerShell. It's still not a great default CLI experience but it can be made acceptable with plugins. But the real strength is in scripting, it's a good mix of high-level language and shell terseness.
"logout", though, takes you back to the uh, root directory (which contains nothing except your user dir).
It doesn't log you out though, since there's no users or privileges anyway. Which seems like a rather major oversight.
Typing `exit` in terminal killed my Chrome with all 20+ tabs. Restoring previous session after restarting Chrome -> killed Chrome with all tabs again, and again, and again... Only thing that helped was killing Puter tab really fast before it loaded.
I think you could solve it by giving apps an option to not open automatically when you start Puter. That way you could start the Puter app, and it'd open a nested instance of Puter, but that instance wouldn't start infinite recursion by automatically opening the Puter app inside.
I don't own anything Puter-related, no, except for those two apps (since anyone can publish an app on Puter - app names are first-come first-served).
I thought it would be funny, since I got in pretty early, to make an app called Puter that would just load Puter inside. (I initially called it "PuterPuter", but then tested to see if just "Puter" was available. It was. Now both apps exist and do the same thing.)
The "DDoS" is because when you open up either app, it loads up another instance of Puter... which promptly restores your session that has the app open, causing infinite recursion. If the HN hug of death found my comment and each person started infinitely recursing, that's a DDoS.
I believe ent101 (Puter developer) thought I changed the name from one to the other to stop the recursion. I didn't. Both apps just exist. I trust that anyone stupid enough to open that app is also smart enough to close it when they are done. :)
Puter apps are just iframes that point to a web address. I claimed the name "Puter" to point to Puter's own web address. If you open the app, it will load Puter again inside, which will restore your session that contains the app, loading another Puter inside, which will again restore your session that contains the app...
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadIt's pretty cool, but I can't think of what this would be useful for. Presumably, you need a sophisticated desktop OS that can run a modern web browser in order to use this. And that OS is likely more useful than this.
Yep, you can, I now have several nested Puters.
I did this months ago! Here it is: https://puter.com/app/puter
Wow, ASCII art Star Wars! (⊙ˍ⊙)
I can’t reproduce now. I bet there are other Easter eggs here.
I was like "hm, okay, looks like another windows93.net" and closed the page
Splatting a login/signup form in your face right away with no indication whatsoever of what the website is about, is a dark and scummy pattern.
"Puter is a cloud operating system that allows you to upload, store, process, and share data, files, personal information, messages, pictures, and other materials (collectively, your “User Data”). You can also search, preview, sort and personalize your User Data."
I didn't give them anything; I also don't recall their asking for anything.
When I click the link, I see only a login modal over some abstract background art. I don't even see the link to the terms of service you have there. (That's after I enabled Javascript on the page to even get that far.) I can only assume that's what OP is complaining about. Maybe they've got too many users because of this post and they're limiting it to signup-only for now? Or maybe my browser isn't passing some IP trustworthiness thing. shrug
Edit: deleting cache and offline website data in Firefox fixed it. In my experience when this fixes something it's usually because there's a broken web worker and that forces it to redownload.
If for whatever reason, one of the XHR/fetch requests fails, you end up with only the "has_visited_before" key in the LocalStorage, which causes you to be stuck on the login screen until you clear the LocalStorage.
Uncaught SyntaxError: private fields are not currently supported
If Puter/FriendOS can support legacy Windows enterprise apps not updated in over a decade and adds collaboration, SSO, 2FA, access controls, VPN/intranet, etc. - basically what FrontEgg (https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/28/with-40m-in-new-funding-fr...) offers - on top on them, it could be a pretty great business.
This is a great illustration of this type of business: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20120326. A lot of customers totally need, not just want, this type of thing.
Puter/FriendOS type systems can graft upon some modern features on top of all legacy apps, which is far far better than having to build it out for every single one. Especially as the market lies more in the long tail of the custom software tailed to specific companies, that has been chugging along for 15 years in maintenance mode.
https://github.com/prettydiff/share-file-systems
I am trying to think of where to take it next. Possibly integrate something like VLC for media playback or allowing users to install applications. I don’t really know what users would want from something like this.
I am impressed by the slickness and speed of this thing. It is more responsive than your average MS Windows system.
@ent101: well done and good luck with this project! Super slick!
FriendOS is arguably also the most advanced and complete of these systems: https://friendos.com/
This is a great illustration of this type of business: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20120326. A lot of customers totally need, not just want, this type of thing.
Puter/FriendOS type systems can graft upon some modern features on top of all legacy apps, which is far far better than having to build it out for every single one. Especially as the market lies more in the long tail of the custom software tailed to specific companies, that has been chugging along for 15 years in maintenance mode.
[1]: https://www.winehq.org/
Another comment on here explains it very well: "It’s “pyu-ter”, like comPUTER! Puter dot com! Well done" This is why I loved it so much!
He has more domains available here: https://portotype.com/documents/domains/
Otherwise all websites would be an abandoned MySpace page.
You can do a Google search for economics of ticket scalping and the overwhelming consensus is that it benefits both buyers and sellers.
Or is this just a hidden sarcasm?
I’ve also sold an extra ticket for a friend by just walking up to a random person standing in the ticket line and offering it to them for face value (which saved them money on the ticket counter markup).
Both cases involved turning what would have been a complete loss into less than a complete loss. Never felt bad about the scalpers loosing money because they knew the risks and my friend was just going to eat the loss because whoever the ticket was for couldn’t make the show for whatever reason and I was like “I’ll get rid of it for you”.
(If you're claiming that buyers benefit from being able to buy a ticket that was purchased but then was not wanted, then that's true - but that's not scalping. Scalping is specifically buying a ticket with the intention to resell it for a higher price, _not_ reselling a ticket that was genuinely wanted at the time but was then unusable due to other conditions)
For some examples, see the Lockean Proviso, Mutualism, and Georgism.
I guess they should have to pay taxes on the potential agricultural value because wild ducks don’t have any intrinsic market value?
I kind of suspect the basic argument is based on some fallacious theory of value…pretty much guarantee it methinks.
all of them i bought for my projects.
puter.com was purchased so that i'd build this https://berto.com/docs/2022-03-01-full-stack-markdown.html but this guy had a much better idea.
happy to explain what all of them are for. (mostly local content projects like decodeportugal.com)
i bought it specifically for a project called full stack mark down
https://berto.com/docs/2022-03-01-full-stack-markdown.html
but then got super busy with my spreadsheet company at rows.com.
all the domains i buy are for real projects, which i release like decodeportugal.com, portotype.com, berto.com and more but some take years to see the light of day.
i am open to selling if the idea is superior to mine, which is the case of the creator of puter.com.
fyi i'd paid a 5 digits good deal of money for puter.com too. when you fall in love for these projects..you risk it.
Woah is this a serious project then? Seems like a huge investment for a fun side project
So you could use it on a chromebook as well.
I like the idea, and as PG often says the best ideas often sound crazy at first.
Glad someone other than me is trying I guess :-)
But maybe times are more mature now?
_Literally_ unusable.
(But for serious, this is a _very_ clean interface, I like it a lot.)
https://puter.com/app/puter
(Those were both the same app and have been for months. I just claimed Puter after PuterPuter way back when.)
I think you could solve it by giving apps an option to not open automatically when you start Puter. That way you could start the Puter app, and it'd open a nested instance of Puter, but that instance wouldn't start infinite recursion by automatically opening the Puter app inside.
I thought it would be funny, since I got in pretty early, to make an app called Puter that would just load Puter inside. (I initially called it "PuterPuter", but then tested to see if just "Puter" was available. It was. Now both apps exist and do the same thing.)
The "DDoS" is because when you open up either app, it loads up another instance of Puter... which promptly restores your session that has the app open, causing infinite recursion. If the HN hug of death found my comment and each person started infinitely recursing, that's a DDoS.
I believe ent101 (Puter developer) thought I changed the name from one to the other to stop the recursion. I didn't. Both apps just exist. I trust that anyone stupid enough to open that app is also smart enough to close it when they are done. :)