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.”
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
0.016̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅% of the world's population is following Graham on twitter.com, which is a lot of people!
(Edited s/0.00016̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅%/0.016̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅%; forgot to move the decimal. Thanks, shric.)
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?
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 (6̅) look right to OS X users?
> 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
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.)
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:
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 :-)
> 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.
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!
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
>> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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…
Yeah the headline stood out for me too. Wired is usually on point but what they meant was the movement to cloud which is right but the desktop is definitely not dead.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
Ah, I’m sorry if I came across in that way, that these days where gone. I believe that all things go in cycles. And I believe opportunities exist all around to find what we want. I myself experienced a beautiful opening in my own life that required bravery, which has nothing to do with tech.
The freshness of a thing cannot stay that way - it must go stale and be renewed. It is this cycle that gives us contrast. When a thing goes stale, you can choose to either stay in that energy, wait until the freshness returns, or forge a new path.
That is so interesting! Thanks for sharing! I liked the example with dating apps. This would definitely be a huge step forward, cause there are so many ppl who just can't match with the right person. Me, for example, I'm not too successful with dating apps. That's why each time I register my new profile (like my last registration on https://megapersonals.one/), I add more truthful info.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Same. I was sorry to abandon Slashdot because I really admired the complex user-generated moderation system and its multiple meta-moderation levels. Over time, though, it produced too many +5s for comments that didn’t deserve it and I wasn’t able to set my filters correctly. HN doesn’t produce better comments but it’s easier to skim the ones I don’t want to read. Since PG disabled displayed upvotes it’s been even easier to skim as well as enjoy reading without worrying I’m investing time into a mediocre comment.
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) :)
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.
> 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.
"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.
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]
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!
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!
155 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadwhen did HN actually launch?
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.”
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.
> 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.
Oh, to imagine what could have been...
Let’s pick climate change, for example, and see how our expectations were met:
2006-2008
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1223424000&dateRange=custom&...
https://avc.com/2006/10/the_nyc_develop/
(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.)
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.
I rather enjoyed the internet 2000-2005. It was like squatting and having a rave in an recently abandoned factory.
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.
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.
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.
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.
0.016̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅% of the world's population is following Graham on twitter.com, which is a lot of people!
(Edited s/0.00016̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅%/0.016̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅%; forgot to move the decimal. Thanks, shric.)
edit: this is a joke in theme with the discussion of relative obscurity.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_decimal
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overline
Since 2005, the accepted internet convention[1] has been 'repeating of course'
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLyOj_QD4a4&t=71s
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.)
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 (6̅) look right to OS X users?
Always nice to clear up a miscommunication. dances around
Have a great evening.
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
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.)
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 :-)
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.
I wish it were easy to go look at my first few comments!
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)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4580285
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?
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/2b54ux/google_compl...
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.
archive.org, available via webtorrent: https://dweb.archive.org/
It's pretty slow, though.
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.
[1]: https://github.com/lycheeverse/lychee [2]: https://archive.org/donate/
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...
Could you say a little about the motivation behind your LikeBetter?
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.
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
I’m always happy to connect more deeply and provide guidance if this resonates with you - PM me.
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.
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?
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.
The freshness of a thing cannot stay that way - it must go stale and be renewed. It is this cycle that gives us contrast. When a thing goes stale, you can choose to either stay in that energy, wait until the freshness returns, or forge a new path.
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.
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).
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.
Humor on HN was rare, but much more original/smart.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Seattle isn’t even on the map.
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!