[HN Gopher] Setting User-Agent Field? (1996)
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Setting User-Agent Field? (1996)
Author : laszlolm
Score : 115 points
Date : 2021-01-07 12:16 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (groups.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (groups.google.com)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Something about looking at that... strange feeling ... realizing
| that I too was programming for the Internet in 1996, and I could
| have asked the same type of question, in the same year, etc.
|
| But in the intervening years Larry Page became a billionaire and
| is actually my employer, while I'm an aging pudgy programmer
| posting on hackernews.
|
| Y'know what I'm saying? The passage of time is weird.
|
| Ok, finishing my coffee now.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I think what I'm hearing is that I just found Lawrence Page's
| HN account
| msoad wrote:
| I get the feeling. I too, feel I "could've" done things
| differently. Here is my question to you: Did you also go to
| Stanford and have an influential circle of friends? Just asking
| to see if you two were actually in similar boats.
|
| I'm not discounting what Larry Page has done. I'm saying he had
| the tools to build Google. So many others had and didn't but
| not every programmer in 1996 had.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yeah I'm not suffering under the illusion I could have been
| him. In 1996 I was a drop-out philosophy student who got web-
| programming jobs through a friend who saw my potential and I
| moved out to Toronto to try to make a go of it, got caught up
| in rave culture, etc instead of focusing well on my career.
| My programming interest was in the MUDs/MOOs and the
| potential for that kind of synchronoius multiuser
| environment; not the web (which I was only into because
| that's where the $$ was and it kind of sucked then.) Then as
| now I didn't/don't have the personality type to be an
| entrepreneur or manager of that kind of stuff.
|
| It's just interesting to look back at those early days and
| think of how green field it all was, and how there was at
| least the semblance of opportunity.
|
| But as you point out, it wasn't really a level playing field
| either.
| davidg109 wrote:
| We still love you.
| tootie wrote:
| If Larry had posted that to the Hacker News of 1996 (probably a
| BBS or AOL forum) I would have told him he has no chance of
| displacing Lycos or Alta Vista then spilled soda on my copy of
| Webmaster in a Nutshell or Learning Perl.
| jasode wrote:
| _> realizing that I too was programming for the Internet in
| 1996, and I could have asked the same type of question, in the
| same year, etc._
|
| Let me offer another way of framing it so it doesn't seem like
| comparing your programming-trajectory to Larry Page's
| programming-trajectory.
|
| The way to look at people like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry
| Page, Elon Musk is to see them as _businessmen_ who happen to
| know how to do some programming.
|
| I'm not trivializing Larry as a "script kiddie" because he did
| know advanced programming concepts since he pursued comp sci
| PhD at Stanford but the _programming itself wasn 't his main
| interest_. Yes, Larry asked a _Java_ question but the real
| interest was solving an intellectual puzzle: since the impact
| (e.g. h-index[1]) of academic papers can be approximated by
| citations, can that _same idea_ be applied to webpages by
| _analyzing the pages ' href links_??? This is the idea that's
| _bigger than Java_ which preoccupied his mind.
|
| After he codes his proof-of-concept crawler in Java, one of his
| later employees at Google Inc rewrites it in C++ for
| performance. Larry Page doesn't waste time arguing on internet
| forums that _" C++ gives you so many ways to shoot yourself in
| the foot"_. Instead, he concentrates on the _expanding his idea
| to organize all the world 's information_.
|
| That's what a lot of us on HN are trying to do... find a big
| idea that just lets us use our programming skills to implement
| it. The programming is only a transition state to something
| else. Personally, I do like programming but that's not my end
| goal of self-actualization.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index
| rwmj wrote:
| Also better to look at them as people who were enormously
| lucky, by being in the right place at the right time with the
| right idea.
|
| For example I worked at a company which built a social
| network, starting out in schools, generously funded by VC
| money. Unfortunately that was back in 1999 before a bunch of
| stuff had come together to turn that into a multi-billion
| dollar idea (such as widely available always-on flat-fee
| internet, and cheap digital cameras).
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| Which company was that? Genuinely curious to learn from the
| graveyard
| rwmj wrote:
| The URL itself is some kind of spam link site, but here's
| the site from back in the day:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20000303100223/schoolmaster.n
| et/
|
| It's a bit hard to get an idea what the site was about
| now because everything was behind a login (hey, like
| Facebook!) so the Internet Archive didn't scrape very
| much.
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| > Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Elon Musk
|
| Arguably Steve Jobs is more deserving to be in this list than
| Musk who's never run a profitable company.
| OJFord wrote:
| My yawning aside, Tesla turned a profit last year; hence
| its inclusion in the S&P500. It wasn't waiting to be big,
| it was waiting to profit, at which point it joined at #6.
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| Enron was also highly ranked. Apple is a bigger success
| story, profitable from day one.
|
| Musk promises self driving year after year, and now even
| Waymo is moving away from that term in order to
| distinguish themselves from misnamed driver-assist
| technology like Tesla's [1].
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/6/22216848/waymo-
| change-self...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > Apple is a bigger success story, profitable from day
| one.
|
| Except they'd be gone without the Microsoft investment.
| Profitable companies don't end up on the verge of
| failure.
| OJFord wrote:
| Sure. But it's just some commenter's list of successful
| people, not Forbes' Top 5 Businessmen Ever or something.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Musk who's never run a profitable company."
|
| Isn't the profit of a private corp. like SpaceX an unknown
| variable? They do not have to publish any financials and
| they don't.
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| Right, so we cannot assume it's profitable. It may or may
| not be.
|
| It may be that Musk uses a string of companies to shuttle
| money between, who knows. He did manage to convince
| shareholders to buy his cousins'/brother's company which
| ended up being a huge liability. It seems to have saved
| him from the public seeing one of his family's companies
| fail.
| recursive wrote:
| > Right, so we cannot assume it's profitable. It may or
| may not be.
|
| That makes sense, but can you assume it's not profitable?
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| Also, he understood linear algebra's eigenvalues and
| eigenvectors well enough to apply them to that problem for
| pagerank. So it's then second year math/engineering students
| who should be comparing themselves...
|
| [ Counterpoint: some argue that pagerank wasn't as important
| as google's ad-free front-page (not a "portal"), and
| superfast results (thanks to Sergey) - but even if so, "The
| Algorithm" impressed Stanford, Sun co-founder investor,
| talented employees and early nerd users. ]
|
| BTW as for programming, it seems Scott Hassan "wrote much of
| the code for the original Google Search engine."
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I used Google in 1997 and set it as my home page, etc. and
| it was almost certainly the fast response and ad-free page
| that got me, more than the results. The results were good,
| but not uncanny or mind blowing. Also had a great vibe of
| "geekiness," kind of still old-school Internet in a time
| when the web was going in another direction very quickly.
| _jal wrote:
| > kind of still old-school Internet in a time when the
| web was going in another direction very quickly
|
| Oh, they had great marketing. Some of it was even true.
|
| Too bad they became that other direction.
| chasd00 wrote:
| what a great comment, thank you. I'll add that the devil is
| in the details. a great idea and a great POC can be squashed
| by bad hiring. and good hiring can be squashed by bad
| culture. there are many slices in the pie chart of building a
| company and you have to hit every one out of the park for
| success.
| laszlolm wrote:
| EDIT: The email checks out too, page@cs.stanford.edu so it's
| likely him
|
| To anyone coming here, it's not verified if he's the same Larry
| Page, but the date and name + topic checks out
| [deleted]
| elvis70 wrote:
| It's him.
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| Now I'm convinced! Thanks.
| elvis70 wrote:
| I just wanted to reassure the OP. This was posted a zillion
| times all over the Internet.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| So what's the answer?
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| I think Joe Millar deserves a few Google shares
| zaczekadam wrote:
| That's so neat! I'd sometimes wonder if founders of Google etc.
| knew how their software worked during early years. Thanks for
| posting, seriously!
| raverbashing wrote:
| The weirdest thing for me is Java 1.0 beta. I suppose this might
| have been something not for general consumption (but it was
| already been used in academic settings?)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| myth_drannon wrote:
| In 1997 I was taking a first year intro to comp-sci in an
| Israeli university and Java was the language we did the
| assignments. It was pretty solid and wide spread back then,
| version 1 I guess. My high school was still teaching Pascal and
| Cobol...
| philjackson wrote:
| Pet project. It'll amount to nothing.
| opportune wrote:
| Why would I use google when I can just wget | grep from the
| command line?
| cpach wrote:
| Before Google we used Altavista :)
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| It will never be big and professional like GNU.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Previous discussion :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8587697
| mannykannot wrote:
| While the re-titling of this repost (leaving out Larry Page's
| name) is in accordance with HN's norms, I suspect it will lead
| to it being skipped by many who would otherwise find it
| interesting.
| laszlolm wrote:
| Looking at the replies it looks like it brought value to the
| people with Larry's name in the title, this way even if you
| knew what you were looking for it'd be difficult to find why
| this post exists here from 1996
| elvis70 wrote:
| Related: Amazon's first job posting by Jeff Bezos
| http://www.ngrblog.com/amazon-usenet-post/
| marvinblum wrote:
| "and you should be able to do so in one-third the time that
| most competent people think possible"
|
| Wow...
| tsar_nikolai wrote:
| > Your compensation will include meaningful equity ownership
|
| quite an understatement there
| fnord77 wrote:
| that signature quote... wow
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Wonder how that would fare on stack overflow today.
| jasode wrote:
| Not exactly the same question but similar questions on the same
| topic:
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2533236/setting-user-age...
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2529682/setting-user-age...
|
| In my experience, if you ask a straightforward question that
| doesn't require answers in the form of opinion/debate, you'll
| get answers.
| toper-centage wrote:
| In my experience, you would get tagged as duplicate with a
| tangentially related question in 2 seconds.
| frouge wrote:
| Is Google a good net citizen now?
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I guess he never read the reply to the question he posted
| rbinv wrote:
| Today, Google even crawls, renders and indexes URLs sent from
| Chrome browsers via dial-up IPs using regular browser User-
| agents, so... no. Other than that, Googlebot seems to obey most
| of the time.
|
| I don't blame them. Cloaking couldn't be detected otherwise.
| toper-centage wrote:
| I think i read somewhere that Google crawlers sometimes
| pretend to be real browsers to prevent you from displaying a
| different page the crawler. So, no.
| z240 wrote:
| Google no longer just "crawls" in the sort of general way that
| crawlers work to populate its search index, but also "scrapes",
| - that is to say they seek out specific information from some
| websites in order to display their data in the Google answer
| box, instead of directing you to their website to get that
| information.
|
| While not illegal, I think it is unethical and breaks the
| symbiosis that their search engine had with the web.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| I don't think it could be solved globally; local
| jurisdictions like the EU will need to deal with this issue
| sooner or later. I think American companies can try to lobby
| against it too, because Google abuses its enormous power to
| eliminate competition in various markets (product price
| comparison etc.). There are many American companies operating
| in this space. Google's strategy is to steal it slowly piece
| by piece and it looks like they're getting more and more
| bold.
| pulse7 wrote:
| Is Larry Page still writing programs in Java?
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(page generated 2021-01-07 23:01 UTC)