Ask HN: Its the year 1996

Personally, I would write a game such as Quake.

But I have about ten years experience with game dev, which is probably a special-case situation.

(P.S. tasteful use of C++ features allows you to approach the productivity level of other languages.)

(But the fact is I tend to prefer writing in C over C++, and Lua over both.)

(But yeah it would be silly to write a web app in C or C++.)

1. Get a crap job, live with your parents, and start buying domain names.

2. Spend a year writing your own scripting language.

3. Then start building basic services (free email service!).

I would convince my parents to buy tons of Apple stock.

I would ask that girl on a date and follow through.

I would get a cochlear implant sooner.

I'm in my mid-30s, so I sometimes look back and wonder what I could have done differently. I launched my first ecommerce site in 1997, and it was just much too early. If anything, I wish I had just spent more time thinking about domain names to register and keep.

That's a fun thing to think about. In 1996 I was 12, and quite shy. So I'd probably start to have fun with soon, being a lot more confident than I was back then.

I'd be terribly bored in classes, and thus I'd start to get bad grades. Still I might catch up on some foreign languages that I neglected in school.

I'd immediately start to play my favorite sport (table tennis) in a club, and thus have chances to actually excel at it.

At the end of my school career I'd invest a bit of money in companies that I happen to know turn out to be quite successful.

But most of all I'd enjoy having time and energy for studying another topic besides the ones I'm relatively good at. And when bored, I could try to write a good, distributed version control system, or some fun web application that nobody thought of back in the days...

In 1996 I was in school and broke :-)

One major difference for me in the intervening period is the availability of free development platforms. In 1996 I couldn't have coded up a basic LAMP webapp even if I knew how and options for free desktop app development were rather restricted; the idea of, as a relative novice, coding what I could with today's tools but in gcc and a text editor just doesn't bear thinking about. The barriers to entry were just so much higher.

Plus, as you mentioned, if you want to host online then that becomes vastly more expensive too. A good part of the explosion of technology that we're enjoying now is a product of it becoming far more viable for students to play and produce something of comparable quality to commercial endeavours, at least superficially.

All that said:

It took me years to learn that action today is almost invariably better than action tomorrow. Still not always great at putting that knowledge into practice. I'd have drummed that into myself, hard. Tinker. Experiment. Test concepts. Remember that what isn't viable today may be perfectly viable in a few years time as technology and adoption levels improve. Ideas multiply when you execute because you gain a better insight into the possible.

Don't just think, do.

I would have bought basketball.com. Looking back, it was a deal back then.

"Register business.com" is an easy one.

But really, looking back is rather painful--too much heartache, too many missed opportunities.

It would be far better to look at today with tomorrow's hindsight.

I would lobby for improved ballots in West Palm Beach.

I'm not sure as a 10 year old I'd have had that much ability to persuade my parents of the virtues of domain names or selected tech stocks as investments. In my early teens on the other hand...

The opportunity that immediately springs to mind as having the lowest technical barrier to entry is a Craigslist-type service, starting off in the same way at round about the same time as a mailing list. A sufficiently smart ten year old with indulgent parents probably could have started that that on dialup AOL too...