[HN Gopher] HN 15 Years ago
___________________________________________________________________
HN 15 Years ago
Author : agustif
Score : 523 points
Date : 2021-10-09 23:41 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.ycombinator.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.ycombinator.com)
| [deleted]
| domador wrote:
| How long has this Hacker News archive browsing feature been
| available? Is it brand new?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| melling wrote:
| I always thought it would be interesting if we looked back to
| help us figure out how to plan for the future.
|
| Let's pick climate change, for example, and see how our
| expectations were met:
|
| 2006-2008
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1223424000&dateRange=custom&...
| agustif wrote:
| I was reading on another thread and found the link, no entries
| for the 8, but some for the 9, 15 years ago...
|
| when did HN actually launch?
| gus_massa wrote:
| October 9, 2006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1
| ardit33 wrote:
| So much more tech / startups focused. Felt much more intimate,
| and that was a large part of the appeal. Now it is half politics
| and other reddit material. :( Interesting hacker type of stories
| usually don't make the frontpage anymore. (eg. new frameworks,
| new products or even startups).
| trophycase wrote:
| It really doesn't look all that much different to my eyes.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I note how _few_ comments the top stories have.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| A story on the front page back then, "NYC Developer Dilemma" is
| really quite interesting in the context of today, in terms of how
| cost of living and balance of power have changed in the economy.
|
| https://avc.com/2006/10/the_nyc_develop/
| headmelted wrote:
| There's something a little sad about clicking through this in
| that most people I can find in the initial submissions and
| comments have been gone from HN for 10-15 years.
|
| Maybe it's just the way I'm wired but I'd love to know from them
| directly what their reasons were for moving on and what they did
| after HN - or maybe I just spend too much time on here myself :-/
| msb wrote:
| Good memories. Anyone remember the user nickb?
| plusbryan wrote:
| Wow! What an incredible and surprising portal into a personally
| transformative time. Article #4 was my startup, LikeBetter. While
| the course of history flowed elsewhere for me, I have gratitude
| for the reminder in this moment. Thank you for sharing.
| a1371 wrote:
| One of the truly amazing things about HN is stuff like this
| comment. Someone who's actually "been there".
|
| Could you say a little about the motivation behind your
| LikeBetter?
| pinguin7 wrote:
| This is also what keeps me coming back: the frequent
| appearances of an insider to the events that are mentioned in
| an article or post.
|
| I wouldn't be too surprised if in a comment thread about an
| article about the first moon landings Werner Braun would
| chime in with a few anecdotes and correct some errors in the
| article.
|
| And Buzz Aldrin would debate him on that.
| plusbryan wrote:
| I welcome this opening, thank you for the opportunity to
| teleport. Since this delightful memory popped up earlier
| today, I've actually been contemplating this very question.
| Tomorrow I embark on a brand new venture (outside of tech),
| one that has me again drawing outside the lines. And so of
| course, in this moment, I am given the opportunity to reflect
| on another time in my life where I did something outside the
| norm.
|
| I don't think it's easy to appreciate just how "weird" it was
| to be in tech in 2004-2006 from our current perspective. I
| recall sitting in for a talk at UC Berkeley by PG in around
| 2004, promoting his "crazy" new idea. There were maybe a
| dozen people there at most. And I remember thinking "I don't
| really know what this startup thing is, but I know I want to
| be a part of this movement".
|
| And doing something like starting a startup then was actually
| really hard. My family definitely judged me for making this
| choice, many of my friends didn't understand why I would go
| this route. But it was an excellent filter - the people who
| came to this space at that time were passionate about
| building something amazing. Very few of us had dollar signs
| in our eyes at the time, and yet many of the big names of
| today were forged in that fire.
|
| None of us knew what we were doing, and that was the best
| part! Everything was new, exciting. But you also had to build
| most everything from scratch because the SaaS ecosystem
| wasn't there. In this early time, despite the challenge,
| there was room to explore and forge new paths. To make
| mistakes and be creative.
|
| LikeBetter started as a dating app. The concept was simple -
| I thought that current dating apps at the time were stupid in
| that they asked users to fill out profiles (eHarmony, Yahoo
| Dating). You essentially had to trust that everyone was being
| honest, which was never the case. What if there was a dating
| site that "knew you" better than you even knew yourself, and
| matched you with people that were actually like you?
|
| So we build a bifurcating personality classifier with the
| simple and addictive prompt "What do you like better?" and
| the choice between two distinct images. We had a responsive
| interface which felt unbelievably fast for the time, and
| people were just so drawn into this concept. We were featured
| on the front page of Digg (lol) and got a lot of press too.
|
| We also launched with no data model whatsoever - we just
| presented "guesses" and allowed the users to correct us if we
| were wrong. But over time we were able to accurately guess
| all sorts of interesting things about a person's personality,
| just from their choosing between 20 or so pairs of images.
|
| But as with many things, the course of my own life forged a
| different path. We were part of YC Summer 2006, back when it
| was in Boston. We relocated back to SF, my cofounder and I
| had a falling out, and we decided to shut down the company
| rather than raise capital. We had hit upon an exciting spark,
| but were not the right torch bearers to see it through.
|
| The path in startup land that began with LikeBetter
| eventually led me to successful outcomes, and for that I am
| forever grateful. And it all started by being brave and
| joining a movement that I felt passionate about.
|
| In your own life, it's so easy to follow the "head": what
| makes sense and will make me the most money? But I encourage
| you to look for those moments of passion and inspiration,
| even if they seem strange - for they will lead you to great
| things.
| adam_ellsworth wrote:
| Thank you for sharing; your insight is human and
| approachable.
|
| I'd like to ask, though: looking back, what were (or have
| become) the best resources to you - read: books, articles,
| conference videos, etc. - which have unequivocally helped
| you in the years since?
|
| Thank you
| plusbryan wrote:
| My answer may go in a different direction than you might
| expect. But The most important gift I've ever given
| myself is being brave and facing my fears/demons. Taking
| a break from the flow of life, stepping outside of
| expectation, and turning inward. Of going to therapy for
| the first time, learning to meditate, and working through
| the childhood conditioning that was causing me to choose
| a life of "imprint" rather than "blueprint". The imprint
| allowed me material abundance for which I am grateful.
| But the blueprint has given me my life's purpose, my true
| calling, which is no less scary than the choice I made in
| 2006, but more valuable than anything on paper.
|
| I'm always happy to connect more deeply and provide
| guidance if this resonates with you - PM me.
| elorant wrote:
| I'd love to read more about your algorithm for discerning
| personality traits from picture classification. Are there
| any resources you'd recommend?
| tomxor wrote:
| > it was an excellent filter - the people who came to this
| space at that time were passionate about building something
| amazing. Very few of us had dollar signs in our eyes at the
| time [...]
|
| This is interesting to me. Similarly, although I know
| "hiring" isn't quite the same thing, through that process,
| I've come to realise how difficult it is to find passionate
| and skilful people. I wonder if startups are as good a
| filter in 2021 as they were in 2006.
| plusbryan wrote:
| No I believe you are right. It's all related.
|
| Passion is love. Love is the force of creation. When we
| love something unconditionally, we pour the energy of
| creation into it.
|
| When we love with conditions/incentives (ie I love this
| be because I'm making money), that pure energy is
| distorted/blocked. The most powerful way to create
| something is by unconditionally loving it.
|
| But how do we filter on passion, when incentives seem to
| be required to attract anyone these days?
| Southland wrote:
| Just wanted to say thank you for sharing, really insightful
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| This is interesting. But I wonder, was this really a unique
| time or was it unique to you because you were young and you
| were discovering a new and unexplored part of your world at
| that time? What I mean is that what you described sounds
| very similar to stories from entrepreneurs in the 90s pre
| dot-com bubble, or founders of hardware startups such as
| Apple or Cisco in the 70s/80s.
|
| Maybe in 2035 we'll look back at the 10s with the same
| nostalgia and sharing stories about how it was different
| and special "back then". It reminds me of an essay often
| posted on HN which I can't find now but that went something
| like "we always think this is the end of the story, there
| won't be new revolutionary startups/techs, and yet there's
| always new players who emerge that no one saw coming".
|
| Anyway I like stories like yours about times long gone.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| (Lots of us rolled the dice. I bet if you ask about
| experiences in general, you'll get a flood of replies.)
| furyofantares wrote:
| If you have showdead on, every single thread has the same user
| commenting "This is why we can't have nice things."
| dang wrote:
| Those were added much later, and were why p 'i never write a
| line of code i don't have to' g made threads be closed to new
| comments after a while.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Old, unwatched threads are a magnet for referral link spam
| anyway. Most sites have ended up blocking this.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| TechCrunch strikes again!
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Haha. Don't worry Apocryphon, I got the joke. :)
|
| (It was a troll user. Someone made a parody account named
| Aarington, who was running TechCrunch at the time. I suppose
| TechCrunch's influence has dwindled dramatically, since I
| can't remember the last time I got a scoop from them. But
| back in 2008, TechCrunch seemed to matter a lot.)
| sharmin123 wrote:
| Let's Secure WiFi Network and Prevent WiFi Hacking:
| https://www.hackerslist.co/lets-secure-wifi-network-and-prev...
| sli wrote:
| I wonder what that Arrington guy from the YouTube thread is up to
| these days. They were very concerned about everything.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Unless you were there, you can't understand what a magical time
| this was. The prevailing wisdom was to get a job after attending
| the university gauntlet.
|
| This was long before pg was known in general, let alone famous.
| For context, I ended up visiting SV about a year after this for
| Startup School. We were staying with a relative, who was also
| tied in to the VC scene somehow. I remember her asking some
| question that prompted a "Paul Graham" response. I think she was
| asking something like "so who might your investors be if things
| go well?" And being 19 and confident, I foolishly felt I might
| have what it took to run a YC co. Her reply was illuminating,
| though: "Who?"
|
| The run-up to YC's worldwide takeover was truly a cool thing to
| watch. And I think HN was the central reason it was able to grow
| at all. Most people seem to disagree, but this snapshot provides
| a glimpse into a time when YC was a sapling, just like every
| startup in the YC batches now.
| kongin wrote:
| In 2006 SF was well on the way to world domination, google was
| the hottest place to work and a whole bunch of other things
| were cropping up. The long cold internet winter after 2000 was
| thawing and dotcom bubble 2.0 was just starting to throf.
|
| I rather enjoyed the internet 2000-2005. It was like squatting
| and having a rave in an recently abandoned factory.
| p1esk wrote:
| Google is still the hottest place to work, closely followed
| by Facebook (whether HN crowd likes it or not). Just look
| where the best and brightest CS graduates from top schools go
| to.
| kongin wrote:
| > Just look where the best and brightest CS graduates from
| top schools go to.
|
| Yeah, it's not google or facebook. The people who go there
| today went to Wall Street/law firms 20 years ago. The shift
| started 10 years ago which is when it stopped being fun to
| work at google/facebook. Sure the people going there have
| the grades and cv but they don't have the brains.
| prayingforexits wrote:
| 2000-2005 Internet truly was a dirty Berlin aircraft hanger
| deep house rave
| kongin wrote:
| Yeah and it's been getting gentrified since.
|
| It sucks that a bunch of nimbys came here and threw
| everyone fun out.
|
| Hell even pg would get flagged off hn if he said the stuff
| he used to in the 00s.
| siva7 wrote:
| Even early HN ca. 2008 felt a bit like that. But honestly i
| don't have the feeling that much changed and i've been
| lurking on HN pretty much since since the beginning as a
| kid.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I remember how people thought they were going to do something
| help mankind, while making a profit. They were excited to be
| programming, excuse me Coding. They wanted a different life
| than their buttoned down parents.
|
| I remember thinking I like this generation. They despised
| ties. They wouldn't use, "I going to start a business." It
| was a Start-up instead.
|
| They didn't seem greedy. They seemed very liberal, but
| prudent at the same time.
|
| I remember watching that movie about Zuckerburg, and
| thinking; I hope they don't emulate, and worship this guy. I
| was wrong.
|
| Fast forward, and monopoles ruled, and all humanitarian hope
| just went to greed.
|
| I guess it's just capitalism. I haven't heard an original
| idea forever. It all turned into business, and who can out
| screw the other guy. Open source is for suckers now.
|
| It's not the future I expected.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Best time of my life.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| > The prevailing wisdom was to get a job after attending the
| university gauntlet.
|
| I distinctly remember listening to podcast around ~'08 where
| much the same subjects were being discussed as today - low
| startup payout probability vs big stable income corp. I don't
| think it's really changed that much tbh
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| You're correct. Today is now pretty much the same climate as
| it was pre-HN. At least, that's how I feel each day.
|
| The period was electrifying. Even if one wishes to take a
| cynical view, that YC needed to fool a bunch of young
| engineers into gambling on the prospect of getting rich, the
| execution was marvelous. pg's essays were the epicenter.
|
| (I don't buy the cynical take. The engineers that try and
| fail to build an early startup are well-positioned to
| transition to a traditional career path with minimal long
| term loss of income or opportunity cost. The only area where
| that isn't really true is probably ads or ML, the latter
| being a recent phenomenon.)
| sneak wrote:
| > _I remember her asking some question that prompted a "Paul
| Graham" response. I think she was asking something like "so who
| might your investors be if things go well?" And being 19 and
| confident, I foolishly felt I might have what it took to run a
| YC co. Her reply was illuminating, though: "Who?"_
|
| I still get that even when talking about pmarca or pg (or even
| rms) outside of tech circles. Sometimes I think I may be
| further down the rabbit hole than I think I am.
| metagame wrote:
| Paul Graham has a million and a third followers on Twitter.
| He's what you'd call "off-mainstream." Andreesen is off-off-
| mainstream. RMS, on the other hand, is pretty niche,
| unfortunately. The world would be a lot better if their
| positions were reversed.
|
| 0.016% of the world's population is following Graham on
| twitter.com, which is a lot of people!
|
| (Edited s/0.00016%/0.016%; forgot to move the decimal.
| Thanks, shric.)
| dang wrote:
| Please don't zalgo.
| metagame wrote:
| It isn't Zalgo (Zalgo is abusive use of Unicode symbols,
| not for their intended purpose). It's using a unicode
| symbol (combining overline) for its intended purpose,
| repeating decimals.[1][2] Is there a better, built-in Arc
| md way of displaying a repeating decimal?
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_decimal
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overline
| pvg wrote:
| _Is there a better_
|
| Since 2005, the accepted internet convention[1] has been
| 'repeating of course'
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLyOj_QD4a4&t=71s
| dang wrote:
| Ah ok.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| You may be on an OS that renders the overline in a not-
| annoying way.
|
| On MacOS, here's what we see:
| https://i.imgur.com/c90WOgO.png
|
| I can imagine that this wasn't your intent, and maybe it
| shows up differently on Windows or Linux. If so, you
| might want to say so.
|
| (If it was your intent for it to look like that, though,
| then I agree it's the pedantic equivalent of Zalgo.)
| metagame wrote:
| It renders as-expected on NetBSD, Linux and Haiku. If you
| check the linked Overline Wikipedia page, <<Overline
| (markup)>> and <<Overline (character)>> look near-
| equivalent.
|
| I see what may have been the problem, though. It looks
| like somewhere in the process the overline was
| duplicated. Probably an issue with my IME (I've been
| working on it for a while now, but it's still got a few
| quirks). Does this (6) look right to OS X users?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Bingo! That looks perfect. :)
|
| Always nice to clear up a miscommunication. _dances
| around_
|
| Have a great evening.
| metagame wrote:
| You too, Shawn.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| Oddly enough, the repeating symbol looks fine on iOS but
| not macOS..
| jpster wrote:
| What's RMS?
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Root Mean Square. It's a math thing that comes up in
| audio processing.
|
| edit: this is a joke in theme with the discussion of
| relative obscurity.
| simlevesque wrote:
| He's that guy. He did almost everything except the kernel
| [deleted]
| metagame wrote:
| Richard Matthew Stallman. He was the catalyst for the
| free software movement.
| shric wrote:
| You're off by a factor of 100. It's 0.016% or approximately
| 1 in 6000 people.
| metagame wrote:
| Ah, yeah, did the conversion wrong.
| iamwil wrote:
| I imagine a lot of those green users are sock puppets submitting
| the first couple of articles.
| pknerd wrote:
| It was fun to explore HN in those days.
|
| PS: It is funny that you can still upvote old posts!
| dang wrote:
| It was a frequently requested feature before we implemented it
| (or a frequently complained-about bug, depending on how you
| look at it), because many users use their 'upvoted' list as a
| kind of bookmark repository.
| Jun8 wrote:
| I started reading HN around 2008 but created my account on
| October 22, 2009 when I made my first of two submissions to YC
| (didn't succeed in either). I just looked at my submission upvote
| history and its pretty much a history of my interests and time
| wasted in the past 12 years. Wow, time does fly!
|
| I've upvoted 14,129 submissions, here's the first three:
|
| 14129. Oct 22, 2009: The "Interview" with Y Combinator That's
| Not, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=923722
|
| 14128. Feb 24, 2010: Isaac Asimov - The Relativity of Wrong
| (1989) , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1147968
|
| 14127. Marc 10, 2010: Putting Google to the Test in Translation,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1180926
|
| The Asimov entry has my first HN comment ever, with 19 upvotes!
| How happy I must have been at the time. The crazy thing is that
| it took me 5 months to upvote three submissions, now I do more
| than that in my morning round! I must have been more discerning
| at the time.
|
| When I had slightly more than 10,000 links I thought of starting
| a blog called "The March of the 10,000", to write about selected
| bookmarks from my upload list; never got around doing it. I must
| have been busy accumulating more HN bookmarks :-)
| llimllib wrote:
| The first three I upvoted, that was a good idea to go back and
| look at: 2384. Why Your Start-up Will
| Fail (forbes.com) 30 points by drm237 on Sept 25, 2007
| | 15 comments 2385. The Genius is in the
| Details (aaronsw.com) 43 points by brl on Sept 24, 2007
| | 15 comments 2386. The Age/Entrepreneurship
| Myth (kedrosky.com) 5 points by far33d on May 4, 2007
|
| That first upvote doesn't even have comments, I don't know if
| that was before comments or what
|
| I wish it were easy to go look at my first few comments!
| llimllib wrote:
| here's a script to walk back to your oldest comment URL: http
| s://gist.github.com/llimllib/b96bf6e63246f50ecfc6e70c884...
|
| my first three comments, 14 years ago, were:
|
| - telling somebody it's worthwhile to learn vim (still using
| vim all day erryday)
|
| - posting a desktop screenshot (which URL, sadly, does not
| resolve... I'll have to see if I can dig it up)
|
| - praising the Dina font (I forgot that I ever used that,
| I've been on Iosevka for a while and Hack before that)
| Digit-Al wrote:
| I can hardly believe I've been a member for 9 years. I looked
| up my first ever submission; it was on Sept 2012 and was an
| article claiming that a global bacon shortage was
| "unavoidable". Thankfully history proved the author was
| completely wrong on that one lol
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4580285
| kreeben wrote:
| >> global bacon shortage was "unavoidable". Thankfully
| history proved the author was completely wrong
|
| I'm sensing you said that partly in jest, because who doesn't
| absolutely love bacon? Me, I eat it at least once a week. It
| does make me wonder, though, what if we lived in a world were
| there wasn't an abundance of bacon? What would that world
| look like? Would it be a better world? Better for whom? Our
| children?
| Zababa wrote:
| > When I had slightly more than 10,000 links I thought of
| starting a blog called "The March of the 10,000", to write
| about selected bookmarks from my upload list; never got around
| doing it. I must have been busy accumulating more HN bookmarks
| :-)
|
| I had the exact same idea when I reached 3000 bookmarks in a
| "curiosity" folder. I thought about taking 10 of those links
| and publishing an article about it every week.
| mkaic wrote:
| "Google, YouTube acquisition announcement could come tonight"
|
| Crazy to think how long Google has been betting on YT. Imagine
| telling someone 15 years ago that YouTube was going to turn into
| the biggest entertainment entity _ever_.
| adventured wrote:
| > Imagine telling someone 15 years ago that YouTube was going
| to turn into the biggest entertainment entity ever.
|
| Disney holds that crown. There's no likely scenario where
| YouTube by itself will surpass Disney, especially given how
| well Disney+ has performed.
|
| Netflix is also a lot more valuable than YouTube and far larger
| in terms of sales.
| TedShiller wrote:
| People are on YT literally all day long, for both long and
| short content. Not true for the other stuff you mentioned.
| anxrn wrote:
| Disney's market cap is about $320B, and Netflix at about
| $280B. It isn't unreasonable to expect that YouTube would be
| valued at at least that if it were valued independently
| (Alphabet overall is $1.9T - YouTube as 15% of that value
| seems reasonable).
|
| YouTube seems to be on track to overtaking Netflix this year
| in terms of revenue as well, if it hasn't already. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/with-skyrocketing-
| sales-yo...
| Kiro wrote:
| YouTube is bigger than Disney and Netflix combined.
| 123jay7 wrote:
| disagree. i pay for Netflix and YouTube, but I get a lot more
| value out of YouTube.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| If you measure by market cap perhaps, but if measured by time
| watched YT probably comes up on top (but that's just guess)
| emllnd wrote:
| Wow, cant remember when I started coming back to HN regularly but
| it's cool to know its been around for so long.
|
| It's awesome seeing the posts from back then, stuff like
| "PhotoShow: Broadcast Photos to Cable TV" give some good
| perspective on how the world has changed very quick.
|
| .
|
| "No need to get your grandmother online. Just point her to
| channel 917 and she can see your most recent vacation pictures
| right there on her television."
|
| "If Photoshow is successful in closing deals with local cable
| channels, this differentiating factor with competitors could make
| it a winner.
|
| The company has raised $6.3 million from Venrock in August 2005."
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Then there are posts like
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-des...
| which are still informative today.
| chrisbuc wrote:
| It was actually as throwaway comment [1] that Joel made in a
| talk I went to back in 2011 that brought me to hacker news.
|
| It was something like "when a link starts getting multiple
| posts on hacker news that's when we know we've hit on
| something..."
|
| I'd not heard about hacker news until that point. I was
| probably hanging around codeproject.com. Since then I lurk
| almost daily, and am always amazed by the breadth and depth
| of articles and commments, both tech and non tech.
| anonu wrote:
| > NYC Developer Dilemma https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4
|
| This resonates a lot with me, as I decided, as a fresh computer
| engineer grad circa 2006, to choose Wall Street over other
| places.
|
| With the GFC unfolding over the next 2 years, the incredible rise
| of tech, the emergence of mobile computer, the iPhone, etc... the
| money and power clearly shifted very quickly to the West Coast.
|
| I think NYC is still definitely not startup friendly due to the
| high costs - but maybe its a little less "irresponsible" than
| when the 2006 blog was written.
| gnicholas wrote:
| In answer to PG's question, there still aren't many places to eat
| on Sand Hill Road.
| ilamont wrote:
| Like a lot of early HN fans, I came from Slashdot which in
| 2006-2007 was having a lot of issues relating to user growth,
| moderation, redesigns, and changes of ownership.
|
| I kept up with both HN and Slashdot for about a year, but then
| found that my need for tech news and discussion was served very
| well by HN. I remember Slashdot was a chore to navigate owing to
| the way they set up threaded discussions, which forced a lot of
| unnecessary clicking. HN was just easy to read, and a pleasure to
| participate in.
|
| Through HN I was able to get to know more about YC's mission, and
| even visited the last YC summer session in Cambridge (2008, IIRC)
| on one of their open discussion nights, and met pg and jessica.
| That was pretty cool. I also applied to YC a few years later
| (didn't get in, which was probably for the better).
| dotancohen wrote:
| I followed a similar path, but stuck out at /. for a while
| longer. I still pop in every now and then like visiting an old
| childhood friend.
|
| I'm very grateful that /. survived beta. We've lost so much of
| the early internet - a completely different place than it is
| now - that even the evolved /. is still a welcome site for sore
| eyes.
|
| Gubhtu n glcb, V'z yrnivat "fvgr" va gurer nf V yvxr gur cha.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Slashdot was also filled by 'humorous' commenters fighting over
| first posts and beating dead horse memes that had quit being
| funny a decade ago.
| ilamont wrote:
| I had forgotten about that. Stupid stuff like goatse links.
|
| Humor on HN was rare, but much more original/smart.
| Jun8 wrote:
| This was exactly my path, too! One additional factor after I
| switched to HN that increased the stickiness for me was the joy
| of discovering pg's essays.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| For me, it was the difference in comment quality. HN was far
| better; Slashdot was turning into a place I didn't care to be
| any longer.
| romanhn wrote:
| Same here. After religiously following Slashdot since '99 or
| so, I eventually realized that the links on the Slashdot front
| page appeared on HN days prior. It was not long before HN
| became my daily go-to. Just occurred to me that it's been a
| longer part of my life, in fact, than Slashdot... 20+ years of
| tech news between the two of them.
| ixtli wrote:
| More than half of these links are dead. We've regressed on
| microfilm, honestly.
| pgayed wrote:
| back when even pg's handle was green
| dang wrote:
| That's an anachronism. We made handles be retroactively green
| only about a year ago, and it wouldn't have been green at the
| time. But it was morally green. (Edit: a la
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816050)
| rzzzt wrote:
| Didn't he have a different color/tint of green for the
| username?
| dang wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand your question but there has been
| only one "noob green" since I've known the code.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Sorry, it is almost certainly a Mandela effect-thing -- I
| (mis-)remember the username subtly standing out. I looked
| at old page renders on archive.org but none seems to
| support my claim.
| bitexploder wrote:
| Sort of amusing in an earlier thread someone was lamenting how HN
| is more business and politics focused today. People have fuzzy
| memories. HN has always been about more than nutty gritty tech.
| VC, startups and startup life, including the business side has
| always been a huge part of HN in addition to the tech. Seeing
| this really brought that home for me (been here since HN started)
| :)
| vincentmarle wrote:
| The first time when I saw HN in 2006, I was not impressed. It was
| a weird looking site with an insiders community and it didn't
| seem interesting to me at the time because I was a big TechCrunch
| reader and Arrington's daily drama was way more fun/interesting
| to read. A couple years later (around 2009), another engineer
| that I met shared his habit of compulsively checking HN everyday
| and I was shocked to hear that the site still existed and that
| people were actually using it. Soon after I started checking it
| more and more to figure out what he was talking about... and
| eventually developed the same habit!
| lanbanger wrote:
| Wow, HN started the day before my kids were born. This morning we
| celebrated their 15th birthdays.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| 15 years ago I was posting on Slashdot as Anonymous Coward.
| halotrope wrote:
| This is really great! The only thing that is concerning is that
| half the links are dead. It is expected, yet I can see historians
| having a much harder time with the digital age than with physical
| records.
| simonh wrote:
| A lot of it's probably in the Wayback Machine. I wanted to read
| the Woz interview and while the HN link is dead it's in WBM:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070312172247/http://www.founde...
| agustif wrote:
| Someone could make a plugin for HN that added a little link
| to the wayback machine or archive or whatever if available.
|
| HN Nostalgic Mode or something lol
| Toobam wrote:
| I joined ycombinator 5years ago. The website not too great, no
| fancy UI but the posts and the comments have known to enlighten
| me more in my career field more than what college could have
| offer me.
| punnerud wrote:
| I thought MVP came from Lean Startup (2008), but it's rule 1 from
| Paul Graham and StartupSchool (2006):
| http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
| ddingus wrote:
| I had been lurking forever. The discussion quality was notable
| and the stories linked here useful, entertaining and informative
| too.
|
| Finally made an account to make a comment:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272119
|
| Walking back through time triggers all sorts of ideas, partially
| formed, just sitting there...
|
| Thanks everyone for being you and doing what you do!
|
| What stands out to me the most now is just how little, threaded,
| simply presented, discussion there is now on the general
| Internet. So many people won't know what it is, and that's a loss
| in my book.
|
| A peeve:
|
| Reading that discussion caused me to revisit something I find
| terribly annoying, and that is one space between the end of
| sentence period and the first character of the next sentence.
|
| I get it, readability and all that, BUT:
|
| Doing this breaks our ability to correctly parse when to
| capitalize the next word!
|
| And I hate that, because touch input on my Android would be so
| much less hassle if this were done correctly.
|
| Done now, thanks for hearing me.
| qqtt wrote:
| A shame how many of these links are now pointing to 404 not found
| pages.
|
| People assume that once it's on the internet it's there forever,
| but it's really not true. Some of our favorite articles and
| insights from past days are long gone.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Personally I figure that if my link happens to end up dead that
| anybody that really wanted to see it could check it out on web
| archive.
| fedbook wrote:
| I see an opportunity here... in the days of multiterrabyte hard
| drives, why not make an extension that simply saves the HTML
| and images for every site you visit? Maybe not appropriate for
| a phone, but perhaps there could be an option to sync browser
| activity...
| vimy wrote:
| I don't remember the name but a project like that exists on
| github.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox
| MisterBiggs wrote:
| As someone who uses the search function on HN regularly I have
| to agree its pretty jarring to see how many webpages totally
| disappear. Thankfully the wayback machine exists.
| yen223 wrote:
| One day, the wayback machine will start returning 404s too
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| That's... a bit sobering. At that point, we will really
| have lost a lot of history.
| twodai wrote:
| It's possible some other group will buy the data, or they
| will make it easily download able
| jlokier wrote:
| Like the way Google did with the Usenet archive. Make it
| available via a searchable interface, then gradually
| degrade the archive until old posts can't be found any
| more.
| squarefoot wrote:
| They also degraded the interface so that the posts that
| once would be found via normal searching now aren't
| anymore. After the removal of the discussion filter,
| searches for X started returning more sites selling X
| than forums talking about X.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/2b54ux/google_co
| mpl...
|
| There was a thread on Google forums about that, and I
| recall many upset users asking for the option to be
| reactivated, but (the irony) that discussion was removed
| as well.
| metagame wrote:
| Actually, archive.org is _already_ easily downloadable,
| in that you can already help host the dweb copy.
|
| archive.org, available via webtorrent:
| https://dweb.archive.org/
|
| It's pretty slow, though.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I think that the Wayback machine supports either an HTTP
| status code or meta tag that causes it to not serve
| previously-cached contents.
|
| Therefore I try to save webpages that I care about, but
| it's getting harder and harder. Not to mention the space it
| takes - is it really worth the hundreds of GiB of personal
| archives when I'll likely want - not need - maybe a few
| KiBs of it decades down the line. And even then, will I be
| able to find it?
|
| Sometimes I think about just archiving a screenshot and the
| text of websites, instead of markup and related files.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| One day there will be no more 404s _or_ 200s.
| omn1 wrote:
| I maintain a couple of bigger Github repos and blogs and was
| shocked at how many links break on a regular basis, so I
| wrote my own link checker in Rust [1] and started donating to
| the Wayback Machine. Please consider doing so, too as the web
| would be a worse place without them. [2]
|
| [1]: https://github.com/lycheeverse/lychee [2]:
| https://archive.org/donate/
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Two things: the headline from wired ( desktop is dead!)
|
| also, one of the very first times i visited this site, this link
| was also number 1 on the front page. It was just a little
| confusing...
| dcow wrote:
| Seeing `pg` in green.. wow!
| version_five wrote:
| I went forward one day from there and found a NYT "Echoes of dot-
| com boom in Google's acquisition of YouTube" story:
|
| > A profitless Web site started by three 20-somethings after a
| late-night dinner party is sold for more than a billion dollars,
| instantly turning dozens of its employees into paper
| millionaires. It sounds like a tale from the late 1990's dot-com
| bubble, but it happened yesterday.
| tofukid wrote:
| It seems much more tech/startup focused. So much of what is
| posted today is current events, politics, and popsci.
| iamwil wrote:
| It originally was. It was originally Startup News. But PG
| thought it got boring, so expanded the scope to what Hackers
| might find interesting, so it became Hacker news.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| That's not fair. Don't forget submissions whining about account
| suspension or otherwise getting "customer support" (as if you
| were a customer) at random FAANG to care. Or connect-the-dots
| submissions about the latest cloud zoo, Javascript, CSS, REST,
| or Rust fad. Or scary outlooks into the minds and state of
| Functional Programming community members, ycombinator and all.
| Or meme-y post-acquihire Incredible Journey submissions, or
| faux let's disrupt x ones. Or MS tech stack shillfests.
| Wondering how far labeling posts by above categories would get
| us towards S/N discrimination.
| duckmysick wrote:
| On a whim I changed the date to something else: 2008-08-08. One
| of the submissions on top was "Ask PG: What are your thoughts on
| current YC News community?"
|
| You'd think the comments were made last year, not in 2008:
|
| > I discovered HN in spring and Reddit to and I have found the
| quality of HN going down in the last month
|
| > Personally I find nearly all the mass-media submissions to be a
| dilution, no matter how techie or startup they sound.
|
| Although I relate the most to the PG's comment:
|
| > There are always a few highly ranked stories that make me think
| "how could anyone vote that up?" but on average they're pretty
| interesting. There's no other site I prefer.
|
| I'm curious about this one too:
|
| > If you must have a resume or portfolio, you should most
| definitely add your HN username and link to it.
|
| Did anyone do it?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-08-08
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=270991
| Debug_Overload wrote:
| Adding your HN username to a resume sounds insufferable.
| dang wrote:
| Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to
| Hacker News.
| app4soft wrote:
| Its funny that on November 1, 2006 HN frontpage was empty.[0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-11-01
| dang wrote:
| It went offline for a few months before launching publicly in
| (I think) Feb 2007.
| aurora72 wrote:
| The exact launch date seems to be Feb 19, 2007
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| >> _If you must have a resume or portfolio, you should most
| definitely add your HN username and link to it._
|
| > _Did anyone do it?_
|
| A cursory search on Google:
|
| https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycom...
|
| Seems to indicate that not many people did.
| sebmellen wrote:
| The best thread indexed in this page is the top one on
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1.
|
| By the user "sama", presumably referencing something YCombinator
| had listed on their website:
|
| > _" the rising star of venture capital" -unknown VC eating lunch
| on SHR_
|
| Paul Graham responds:
|
| > _Is there anywhere to eat on Sandhill Road?_
| romanhn wrote:
| "sama" is Sam Altman, who succeeded Paul Graham as the
| president of YC.
| grimgrin wrote:
| Arrington, you here?
| smoldesu wrote:
| > weekendr: social network for the weekend
|
| Oh, to imagine what could have been...
| rikroots wrote:
| I've no idea if these people are the same people, or if they
| just took over the name at some point -
| https://www.weekendr.co.uk/ - but they haven't updated the
| copyright in their footer since 2018
| Red_Tarsius wrote:
| I signed up in 2013 but I had been lurking for way longer. I have
| unreliable memories of discovering the site back in 2008. I
| immediately knew I stumbled upon something special and the
| comment section ended up having a huge influence in my life. I
| was only in high school back then, so pretty much everything felt
| more intimate and meaningful. Most of all, reading Hacker News
| fueled my vicarious fantasy of a better life in the US. In the
| last few years I've been growing increasingly disillusioned with
| American culture though. My heart is just not there anymore.
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| > In the last few years I've been growing increasingly
| disillusioned with American culture though. My heart is just
| not there anymore.
|
| HN has always been about disrupting everything, so that's not
| so surprising. When Uber can't hire drivers as contractors, or
| AirBnb isn't allowed to operate somewhere, or Tesla is
| scrutenized, this place can get wild. "Old tech" FAANG receives
| heavy criticism and "new tech" is lauded. I think it's leveled
| out in the last year though.
| tjr225 wrote:
| Check out the salaries on this blog post:
| https://avc.com/2006/10/search_by_salar/
|
| Seattle isn't even on the map.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Imagine 1994.
| tjr225 wrote:
| I wish I could, I was 5 :P
|
| Edit: Heck yeah. Cheers for Jack and Ardour and being
| awesome. I work for a certain outdoor retailer based in the
| area that I'm sure you've been to. I am a musician and a
| cyclist as well!
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Thanks for that, After being told to "suck moose dick white
| man" yesterday, and "just fuck off and die" today (not on
| HN), any positive feedback is appreciated. REI forever (I
| joined in 1981 on my first ever trip to the USA). Play and
| ride on!
| mathattack wrote:
| Every comment seems to be Arrington saying "This is why we can't
| have nice things"
| dang wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816035
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