13 ms·

HN 15 Years ago

558 points by tough 5y ago

agustif 5y ago
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 5y ago
  October 9, 2006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1
emllnd 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Then there are posts like https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-design-for-programmers/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-des... which are still informative today.
  - chrisbuc 5y ago
    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.
version_five 5y ago
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.
smoldesu 5y ago
> weekendr: social network for the weekend Oh, to imagine what could have been...
- rikroots 5y ago
  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/ https://www.weekendr.co.uk/ - but they haven't updated the copyright in their footer since 2018
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melling 5y ago
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&dateStart=1159747200&page=0&prefix=false&query=climate&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1223424000&dateRange=custom&...
ardit33 5y ago
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 5y ago
  It really doesn't look all that much different to my eyes.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
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/ https://avc.com/2006/10/the_nyc_develop/
furyofantares 5y ago
If you have showdead on, every single thread has the same user commenting "This is why we can't have nice things."
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  TechCrunch strikes again!
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    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.)
- dang 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Old, unwatched threads are a magnet for referral link spam anyway. Most sites have ended up blocking this.
- tediousdemise 5y ago
  This is why we can’t have nice things.
sillysaurusx 5y ago
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.
- dilyevsky 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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.)
- kongin 5y ago
  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.
Jun8 5y ago
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 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 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 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 :-)
- Zababa 5y ago
  > 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.
- llimllib 5y ago
  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!
qqtt 5y ago
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.
- MisterBiggs 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    One day, the wayback machine will start returning 404s too
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      That's... a bit sobering. At that point, we will really have lost a lot of history.
      - twodai 5y ago
        It's possible some other group will buy the data, or they will make it easily download able
        jlokier 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        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_completely_removed_discussions_search_is/ 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.
FridayoLeary 5y ago
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...
- egfx 5y ago
  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.
solfox 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    (Lots of us rolled the dice. I bet if you ask about experiences in general, you’ll get a flood of replies.)
  - solfox 5y ago
    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.
ilamont 5y ago
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).
- Jun8 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  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.
- romanhn 5y ago
  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.
bitexploder 5y ago
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) :)
grimgrin 5y ago
Arrington, you here?
Red_Tarsius 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
I note how few comments the top stories have.
mkaic 5y ago
"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 5y ago
  > 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.
  - 123jay7 5y ago
    disagree. i pay for Netflix and YouTube, but I get a lot more value out of YouTube.
  - mupuff1234 5y ago
    If you measure by market cap perhaps, but if measured by time watched YT probably comes up on top (but that's just guess)
  - anxrn 5y ago
    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-youtube-is-as-big-as-netflix-11627487889 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/with-skyrocketing-sales-yo...
  - TedShiller 5y ago
    People are on YT literally all day long, for both long and short content. Not true for the other stuff you mentioned.
  - 5y ago
ixtli 5y ago
More than half of these links are dead. We’ve regressed on microfilm, honestly.
dcow 5y ago
Seeing `pg` in green.. wow!
tjr225 5y ago
Check out the salaries on this blog post: https://avc.com/2006/10/search_by_salar/ https://avc.com/2006/10/search_by_salar/ Seattle isn’t even on the map.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Imagine 1994.
  - tjr225 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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!
sharmin123 5y ago
Let’s Secure WiFi Network and Prevent WiFi Hacking: https://www.hackerslist.co/lets-secure-wifi-network-and-prevent-wifi-hacking/ https://www.hackerslist.co/lets-secure-wifi-network-and-prev...
gnicholas 5y ago
In answer to PG’s question, there still aren’t many places to eat on Sand Hill Road.
lanbanger 5y ago
Wow, HN started the day before my kids were born. This morning we celebrated their 15th birthdays.
tofukid 5y ago
It seems much more tech/startup focused. So much of what is posted today is current events, politics, and popsci.
- iamwil 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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.
msb 5y ago
Good memories. Anyone remember the user nickb?
sebmellen 5y ago
The best thread indexed in this page is the top one on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 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 5y ago
  "sama" is Sam Altman, who succeeded Paul Graham as the president of YC.
sli 5y ago
I wonder what that Arrington guy from the YouTube thread is up to these days. They were very concerned about everything.
iamwil 5y ago
I imagine a lot of those green users are sock puppets submitting the first couple of articles.
mathattack 5y ago
Every comment seems to be Arrington saying “This is why we can’t have nice things”
- dang 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816035
pgayed 5y ago
back when even pg’s handle was green
- dang 5y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816050)
  - rzzzt 5y ago
    Didn't he have a different color/tint of green for the username?
    - dang 5y ago
      I'm not sure I understand your question but there has been only one "noob green" since I've known the code.
      - rzzzt 5y ago
        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.
Toobam 5y ago
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.
headmelted 5y ago
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 :-/
DeathArrow 5y ago
15 years ago I was posting on Slashdot as Anonymous Coward.
halotrope 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.foundersatwork.com/stevewozniak.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070312172247/http://www.founde...
  - agustif 5y ago
    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
punnerud 5y ago
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 http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
duckmysick 5y ago
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/front?day=2008-08-08 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=270991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=270991
- Debug_Overload 5y ago
  Adding your HN username to a résumé sounds insufferable.
  - dang 5y ago
    Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
- app4soft 5y ago
  Its funny that on November 1, 2006 HN frontpage was empty.[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-11-01 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-11-01
  - dang 5y ago
    It went offline for a few months before launching publicly in (I think) Feb 2007.
    - aurora72 5y ago
pknerd 5y ago
It was fun to explore HN in those days. PS: It is funny that you can still upvote old posts!
- dang 5y ago
  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.
vincentmarle 5y ago
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!
domador 5y ago
How long has this Hacker News archive browsing feature been available? Is it brand new?
anonu 5y ago
> NYC Developer Dilemma https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 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.
ddingus 5y ago
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 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.
Anthony-G 5y ago
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). I clicked on the link to go forward by a day and the top submission was by Steve Huffman (Hipmunk, Reddit, Udacity course) on Google’s acquisition of YouTube: http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/google_youtube.html http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/google_youtube.html 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-19
kexx 5y ago
"Wired: The desktop is dead". I laughed out loud. For real. Not doing too often...

558 points by tough 5y ago

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 5y ago
October 9, 2006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1

emllnd 5y ago

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 5y ago
Then there are posts like https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-design-for-programmers/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-des... which are still informative today.
- chrisbuc 5y ago
  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.

version_five 5y ago

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.

smoldesu 5y ago

> weekendr: social network for the weekend Oh, to imagine what could have been...

rikroots 5y ago
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/ https://www.weekendr.co.uk/ - but they haven't updated the copyright in their footer since 2018

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melling 5y ago

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&dateStart=1159747200&page=0&prefix=false&query=climate&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1223424000&dateRange=custom&...

ardit33 5y ago

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 5y ago
It really doesn't look all that much different to my eyes.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

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/ https://avc.com/2006/10/the_nyc_develop/

furyofantares 5y ago

If you have showdead on, every single thread has the same user commenting "This is why we can't have nice things."

Apocryphon 5y ago
TechCrunch strikes again!
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  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.)
dang 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Old, unwatched threads are a magnet for referral link spam anyway. Most sites have ended up blocking this.
tediousdemise 5y ago
This is why we can’t have nice things.

sillysaurusx 5y ago

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.

dilyevsky 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  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.)
kongin 5y ago
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.

Jun8 5y ago

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 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 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 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 :-)

Zababa 5y ago
> 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.
llimllib 5y ago
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!

qqtt 5y ago

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.

MisterBiggs 5y ago
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 5y ago
  One day, the wayback machine will start returning 404s too
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    That's... a bit sobering. At that point, we will really have lost a lot of history.
    - twodai 5y ago
      It's possible some other group will buy the data, or they will make it easily download able
      - jlokier 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        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_completely_removed_discussions_search_is/ 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.

FridayoLeary 5y ago

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...

egfx 5y ago
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.

solfox 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  (Lots of us rolled the dice. I bet if you ask about experiences in general, you’ll get a flood of replies.)
- solfox 5y ago
  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.

ilamont 5y ago

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).

Jun8 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
dotancohen 5y ago
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.
romanhn 5y ago
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.

bitexploder 5y ago

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) :)

grimgrin 5y ago

Arrington, you here?

Red_Tarsius 5y ago

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 5y ago
> 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.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

I note how few comments the top stories have.

mkaic 5y ago

"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 5y ago
> 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.
- 123jay7 5y ago
  disagree. i pay for Netflix and YouTube, but I get a lot more value out of YouTube.
- mupuff1234 5y ago
  If you measure by market cap perhaps, but if measured by time watched YT probably comes up on top (but that's just guess)
- anxrn 5y ago
  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-youtube-is-as-big-as-netflix-11627487889 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/with-skyrocketing-sales-yo...
- TedShiller 5y ago
  People are on YT literally all day long, for both long and short content. Not true for the other stuff you mentioned.
- 5y ago

ixtli 5y ago

More than half of these links are dead. We’ve regressed on microfilm, honestly.

dcow 5y ago

Seeing `pg` in green.. wow!

tjr225 5y ago

Check out the salaries on this blog post: https://avc.com/2006/10/search_by_salar/ https://avc.com/2006/10/search_by_salar/ Seattle isn’t even on the map.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
Imagine 1994.
- tjr225 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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!

sharmin123 5y ago

Let’s Secure WiFi Network and Prevent WiFi Hacking: https://www.hackerslist.co/lets-secure-wifi-network-and-prevent-wifi-hacking/ https://www.hackerslist.co/lets-secure-wifi-network-and-prev...

gnicholas 5y ago

In answer to PG’s question, there still aren’t many places to eat on Sand Hill Road.

lanbanger 5y ago

Wow, HN started the day before my kids were born. This morning we celebrated their 15th birthdays.

tofukid 5y ago

It seems much more tech/startup focused. So much of what is posted today is current events, politics, and popsci.

iamwil 5y ago
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 5y ago
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.

msb 5y ago

Good memories. Anyone remember the user nickb?

sebmellen 5y ago

The best thread indexed in this page is the top one on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 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 5y ago
"sama" is Sam Altman, who succeeded Paul Graham as the president of YC.

sli 5y ago

I wonder what that Arrington guy from the YouTube thread is up to these days. They were very concerned about everything.

iamwil 5y ago

I imagine a lot of those green users are sock puppets submitting the first couple of articles.

mathattack 5y ago

Every comment seems to be Arrington saying “This is why we can’t have nice things”

dang 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816035

pgayed 5y ago

back when even pg’s handle was green

dang 5y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816050)
- rzzzt 5y ago
  Didn't he have a different color/tint of green for the username?
  - dang 5y ago
    I'm not sure I understand your question but there has been only one "noob green" since I've known the code.
    - rzzzt 5y ago
      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.

Toobam 5y ago

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.

headmelted 5y ago

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 :-/

DeathArrow 5y ago

15 years ago I was posting on Slashdot as Anonymous Coward.

halotrope 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.foundersatwork.com/stevewozniak.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070312172247/http://www.founde...
- agustif 5y ago
  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

punnerud 5y ago

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 http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html

duckmysick 5y ago

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/front?day=2008-08-08 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=270991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=270991

Debug_Overload 5y ago
Adding your HN username to a résumé sounds insufferable.
- dang 5y ago
  Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
app4soft 5y ago
Its funny that on November 1, 2006 HN frontpage was empty.[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-11-01 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-11-01
- dang 5y ago
  It went offline for a few months before launching publicly in (I think) Feb 2007.
  - aurora72 5y ago

pknerd 5y ago

It was fun to explore HN in those days. PS: It is funny that you can still upvote old posts!

dang 5y ago
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.

vincentmarle 5y ago

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!

domador 5y ago

How long has this Hacker News archive browsing feature been available? Is it brand new?

anonu 5y ago

> NYC Developer Dilemma https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 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.

ddingus 5y ago

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 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.

Anthony-G 5y ago

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). I clicked on the link to go forward by a day and the top submission was by Steve Huffman (Hipmunk, Reddit, Udacity course) on Google’s acquisition of YouTube: http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/google_youtube.html http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/google_youtube.html 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-19

kexx 5y ago

"Wired: The desktop is dead". I laughed out loud. For real. Not doing too often...