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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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?
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!
> 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.
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).
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
> 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 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?
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.
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 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.
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.
"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]
(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.)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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) :)
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 :-/
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.
This is a great feature! I only discovered Hacker News a few years ago so it’s nice to see what it was like when it started and what was being posted at the time (and by who).
It’s also strange to see so few comments and so few submissions per day. There’s also a curiously large gap of no submissions during the months preceding 19th February 2007 (when there are 50 submissions): https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-19
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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