It just links to Archive.org, and spoofs the address bar. So the content is 100% loaded from Archive.org. A very trivial website, but interesting looking back for a few minutes nevertheless. You can do the same with a more complex interface on Archive.org.
HN is a hivemind. Post wrongthink and you will be downvoted to oblivion. I posted a scientific paper that shows legalizing prostitution increases the volume of human trafficking and I was shit on because it goes against HN social-libertarian dogma.
So are these our choices: a hivemind or a shitstorm of trolls, griefers, and 4chan kiddies? I don't have any answers here.
The 'race to the bottom' of reddit has been fascinating to watch. I think it clearly demonstrates that without moderation popular forums will necessarily devolve to lowest common denominator content. (I do, however, appreciate there are still quality subreddits).
agree, though i think its tempting to view this cynically rather than as an almost inevitable product of the circumstances. i think it was david foster wallace who made a similar point about tv, namely that it caters to the lowest common denominator because thats what we all share- you cannot have the "mass" part of mass media without doing that. we all have more deep interests, but they are disparate- so the venn diagram essentially dictates the subject matter.
For sure, but technological trends have certainly catalysed the process, at least with respect to reddit. The ubiquity of the gif, and incredibly low friction image hosting services come to mind.
I remember reading this exact story in college thinking, I'll happily move to a place where he had a million and don't feel rich... I'd still have a million.
And more or less, it's worked out. You still live vastly better here with a million than many other parts of the world without a million.
Haha, the HN post about Facebook has a very interesting comment which mentions the internet "a decade from now":
> It is just a joke that Facebook could be valued at $6 billion. An absolute joke.
> FB has 30 million users, and that's not considering potential duplicates.
> The number of active users may be even smaller than that, and some people like I only log on once a week or so.
> If FB gets sold for $6 billion, that means the new owning company would need to make $500 million a year for 12 years(!) to break even.
> Frankly, the Internet will probably be drastically different a decade from now.
> FB doesn't even make $50 million a year, who in their right mind thinks that they will all of a sudden make a profit off Facebook by spending that much money?
> I swear some of these big companies just like throwing money at things. Yes, the dot-com bubble is here once again.
Sounds like people talking about Uber today. "No way in hell is Uber worth xxx billion. An Absolute joke. Uber is losing xxx million dollars every quarter. Who in their right mind thinks that they will all of a sudden make a profit off Uber by spending that much money?"
I mean this tells me that engineers (assuming on average there are more technical readers on hacker news) don't know anything about products and their values. Or it's just that people aren't capable of thinking long-term.
Or maybe different things are different, and pointing at facebooks unlikely story to make a case for ubers long-term chances or broad claims about what engineers do or dont know is just as lazy as shunning uber without substantial insight into the field.
Any discussion about company valuations is as political as a discussion about US elections. Pretending that "business" and "politics" and "technology" are separated by clearly discernible walls is itself toxic to discussions about any of them.
But politics are hardly relevant here. Somebody was pointing out interesting comments about Facebook and now I'm reading about Trump? It's low-quality material and has nothing to do with the discussion.
I can understand your reaction, but I will say that it provoked an interesting thought in me. I think that the matter of how well material ages is an interesting and difficult-to-predict metric, and that it is quite interesting that we are now measuring this metric using the unit of tweets from one head-of-state about a former one.
That may or may not be the case (I would dispute it) but the rules here expressly place political discussions as off-topic. From what I have seen, banning accounts seems to be a last resort for people who post almost exclusively political attacks; one has to be fairly intent on making oneself unpleasant to raise attention. I tend to agree with you that there can be value to political debate, but we must abide by the rules of the forum.
> but the rules here expressly place political discussions as off-topic
This is absolutely untrue. How many times (and how many ways) does dang have to clarify this? Here's the guideline in question:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
I'm prepared to argue that a comparison of the aging process of HN comments to tweets from a current US President about a former one is an interesting and novel set of phenomena. And even if it weren't, I think that it's well outside the kinds of stories that are identified by the guideline as off-topic.
I'm sure that there is some interesting technical work being done by various political participants. Tweets do not present novel technological problems; I'm not sure what the HN interest might be.
Looked at the Apple website and before they opened iOS for native development (and monetarization through the App Store) they tried to push Web-Apps, but maybe this was just a experiment to validate if people will use it:
> Developers can create Web 2.0 applications that look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and provide seamless integration with iPhone applications and services including making a phone call, sending an email, and displaying a location in Google Maps. Third-party applications created using web standards can extend iPhone's capabilities without compromising its reliability or security.
A collegue (in college) told me that they initially did not want to release a developer kit (Steve did not "believe" in apps) and that they were a bit ashamed of the state the SDK was in at the time. I've found no article verifying this though.
One pattern I notice and dislike is the increase of average font size on the web (and in OSes), and the overall decrease in density of information. BBC 10 years ago vs now side by side shows the difference [1].
Don't forget that screen resolutions were lower on average back then, which means that the side-by-side comparison doesn't really account for relative scale.
I don't think the BBC is doing that bad, but I do notice allot of sites these days do look huge on my 15" MBP, and you have to scroll a tonne to see very little. Though these sites usually work pretty well on my 27" iMac, I feel like no one makes responsive sites anymore.
I think the anti-modern layout has become too much of a cultural shibboleth at this point, people cherish any feature they feel will drive away casual users and preserve the intellectual purity of the community. PG once mentioned that he wasn't concerned with such trivial things, which makes updating the design difficult without sparking a minor revolt among the userbase, especially if such an update causes the site to look or feel more like Reddit, which it likely would.
Plus, bear in mind that HN doesn't separate its logic from layout in templates, unless it deviates wildly from the original Arc forum code, so redesigning the layout around, say, lists as opposed to tables may be more complicated than it would be on another site.
But on the plus side, since i've been here at least, the expired links bug has been fixed, shadowbanning is community-reversible, Show HN is a thing, users can hide and favorite threads, and there's thread folding. Those are all definite improvements to the user experience.
I agree with you that the text could be more readable - a site meant for intellectual and technical discussion should be encouraging long-form comments, not discouraging it (as it does by fading the text for non-link post) but it does seem that the staff have been improving what they can, when they can get around to it.
IDK, doesn't really bother me anymore, not since some pretty good Chrome extensions came out, e.g. Georgify, which makes HN 1000% easier to read. + I built my own minimal front end to HN with just the info I'm interested in ( https://news.adriel.co.nz/ )
You can have fast loading and everything else and not have out-dated / bad design.
All you're doing is listing bad things, but there's literally no attempt to make the site readable or clickable. Most fonts are size 9 at the moment; you can't defend this given phones and modern screens.
87 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadIt used to be far more reputable IIRC.
But I'm disappointing that the website doesn't use SSL at all.
* programming
* science
Oh, how times have changed.
So are these our choices: a hivemind or a shitstorm of trolls, griefers, and 4chan kiddies? I don't have any answers here.
>504 Gateway Time-out
>The server didn't respond in time.
Sounds familiar...
And more or less, it's worked out. You still live vastly better here with a million than many other parts of the world without a million.
> It is just a joke that Facebook could be valued at $6 billion. An absolute joke.
> FB has 30 million users, and that's not considering potential duplicates.
> The number of active users may be even smaller than that, and some people like I only log on once a week or so.
> If FB gets sold for $6 billion, that means the new owning company would need to make $500 million a year for 12 years(!) to break even.
> Frankly, the Internet will probably be drastically different a decade from now.
> FB doesn't even make $50 million a year, who in their right mind thinks that they will all of a sudden make a profit off Facebook by spending that much money?
> I swear some of these big companies just like throwing money at things. Yes, the dot-com bubble is here once again.
Original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34165
http://web.archive.org/web/20070716155904/http://news.ycombi... is a good rebuttal to the FB criticism though.
I mean this tells me that engineers (assuming on average there are more technical readers on hacker news) don't know anything about products and their values. Or it's just that people aren't capable of thinking long-term.
One of the stories "PG: What's your current take on reddit's comment system? (reddit.com)": http://web.archive.org/web/20070714221535/http://news.ycombi...
Another story was about Justin.tv, nowadays know as Twitch: http://web.archive.org/web/20070708190608/http://news.ycombi...
Look at Apple.com, the introduction to the first iPhone. Notice the YouTube app on iOS 1-4 looked like a vintage CRT TV, I remember it.
IMDb received a new CSS stylesheet, and the invaluable comments system got unfortunately removed - otherwise little changes.
YouTube changed a lot. Ten years ago it looks still like the early days before Google.
Any discussion about company valuations is as political as a discussion about US elections. Pretending that "business" and "politics" and "technology" are separated by clearly discernible walls is itself toxic to discussions about any of them.
This is absolutely untrue. How many times (and how many ways) does dang have to clarify this? Here's the guideline in question:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
I'm prepared to argue that a comparison of the aging process of HN comments to tweets from a current US President about a former one is an interesting and novel set of phenomena. And even if it weren't, I think that it's well outside the kinds of stories that are identified by the guideline as off-topic.
For those unfamiliar:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14936809 and marked it off-topic.
Tells you how important HN launches are.
Minimalism FTW.
Apple, Youtube, and Amazon especially.
All sorts of feels.
What phone was i using?
When did i last buy a roll of film?
First amazon order and what was it?
First online order?
When did i get rid of landline?
When did i stop using aol? When did i get gmail?
Roll of film? What's that again?
I think I still haven't ordered anything off Amazon, hadn't bought much online at all back then.
I've never had a landline in my own name (that we actually used, had a couple that came with an ADSL bundle when naked ADSL wasn't cheaper).
What's AOL? Got Gmail in '04 I think, late in the 'invite only' phase before they got evil.
> BUSH BAD BUSH BAD BUSH BAD
Reddit today
> TRUMP BAD TRUMP BAD TRUMP BAD
Looked at the Apple website and before they opened iOS for native development (and monetarization through the App Store) they tried to push Web-Apps, but maybe this was just a experiment to validate if people will use it:
> Developers can create Web 2.0 applications that look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and provide seamless integration with iPhone applications and services including making a phone call, sending an email, and displaying a location in Google Maps. Third-party applications created using web standards can extend iPhone's capabilities without compromising its reliability or security.
[1] http://instantshare.virtivia.com:27080/1k6i3cajkox2c.png
Ads take a lot of space on current BBC capture.
No redesigns in how long now?
The fonts on this site are hilariously small. Padding is tiny. All the feel of the 1990s, today!
Still good content, but come on -- do we not have a designer or artistic front-end who can help out?
Plus, bear in mind that HN doesn't separate its logic from layout in templates, unless it deviates wildly from the original Arc forum code, so redesigning the layout around, say, lists as opposed to tables may be more complicated than it would be on another site.
But on the plus side, since i've been here at least, the expired links bug has been fixed, shadowbanning is community-reversible, Show HN is a thing, users can hide and favorite threads, and there's thread folding. Those are all definite improvements to the user experience.
I agree with you that the text could be more readable - a site meant for intellectual and technical discussion should be encouraging long-form comments, not discouraging it (as it does by fading the text for non-link post) but it does seem that the staff have been improving what they can, when they can get around to it.
loads fast.
no autoplay videos
no scroll jack
no social sharing buttons
no tracking scum
no page moving when you are about to click on something because some more bullshit just loaded.
usable in lynx and links across ssh.
so tell me, what is bad about it?
You can have fast loading and everything else and not have out-dated / bad design.
All you're doing is listing bad things, but there's literally no attempt to make the site readable or clickable. Most fonts are size 9 at the moment; you can't defend this given phones and modern screens.