20 ms·

The internet changed my life

578 points by janvdberg 5y ago

sylens 5y ago
I had a much more stable upbringing and family life than the author, but one area that I can relate to is being incredibly bored as a kid - most of my friends lived across major roads or outside of walking distance in suburbia. The internet and all it offered was an endless fountain of entertainment for me. I really don't know what I would have done without it.
birdyrooster 5y ago
Nah, just a passing fad
- tamaharbor 5y ago
  I used to think digital was just a fad.
amatecha 5y ago
Neat, I love this. The internet hugely changed my life too, and was utterly fundamental to my development as a person. I wonder if I'd ever take the time to write a story like this, but I think I wouldn't be able to resist going into way deeper detail haha
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Then I'm guessing you probably would go into way deeper detail. But I suspect if you let it sit on your computer for a few days after writing it, coming back to it you will see the parts you needed to hew out and could then post something more succinct to your liking.
  - maxime_cb 5y ago
    I can tell you that I've been thinking about writing up this story for a couple of years, but I kept self-censoring because my blog is mostly about tech, and because I was still afraid of the judgment that comes with having a schizophrenic parent. In the end, I decided that I do have a story to tell, and I don't care about the judgment. These things shouldn't be stigmatized, the stigma is what prevents people from getting help, and the only way to remove the stigma is to talk. So I wrote the story up one evening two weeks ago. Then I had a few friends proofread it by sharing with them on Google Doc. Then I finally decided to post it. Because my blog is focused on tech, I focused more on the tech angle when telling the story. I knew that would appeal to my audience more, but I think it's only fair, because tech has been a huge part of my life. It's a huge part of what makes me get up in the morning.
CyberRabbi 5y ago
Heartwarming story, I would only say to be careful about diagnosing close friends or family with mental illness based on internet research. Even non mental illnesses.
- booboofixer 5y ago
  Good advice, much needed for a lot of people. I’d say I’m a victim of this. Once people think you need some sort of help, they never let you live life as a normal person again, they’re never just “cool” to hang around and talk to ever again. It takes a lot of effort to find new people who dont look at you the same way or to weed out the smarter friends (who get over their obsession to help you) you have from the rest so you can feel comfortable socializing with them.
- nickkell 5y ago
  The rest of my family have armchair-diagnosed my father as being on the autism spectrum. I’m fairly sure his lack of responsiveness is due to his hearing loss and the plain fact he doesn’t like his family as much as the friends he plays cards with every Friday!
Brajeshwar 5y ago
I have a cousin much older than me. Everyone thinks he is weird, and he is indeed. Absolutely no one understood the things he do, why he does a particular thing but I found him pretty fascinating. Once in a particular talk session with him, we discussed about the upcoming thing called Internet. This was 1993 or 1995 — about the time Internet was a buzzword and soon to be introduced in India. Besides all the talks, I will never forget what he told me. Something in the lines of — anyone from anywhere can do anything they want for anyone anywhere. I would spend hours reading the magazines he bought, and tinkering with his computer. It wasn’t until 1999 that I was introduced to the Internet and (maybe) another 5-7 years for him. Well, I felt right at home on day-zero, and I knew that changed everything for me.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  So what did you do with this knowledge? I was 11 in 1999 and couldn’t do much.
  - Brajeshwar 5y ago
    Well, here is the brief https://brajeshwar.com/about/ https://brajeshwar.com/about/
  - laputan_machine 5y ago
    I was 11 in '99 too, we had the internet since 97/98. I spent my time making dumb websites and playing Half-Life mods online (tf/cs/sven coop). Great times. The one strange thing I often think about is that I don't remember any toxicity, nothing like it is today in online games.
    - fy20 5y ago
      Same age, but I didn't really get into online communities until the early noughties. I got into programming working with a gaming community to build out their website (building phpBB themes and mods) and building a matching service, and then it went from there... There was definately a lot of toxicity in that community though (even though we had maybe 20 regular members), so I think you were lucky :)
ditegashi 5y ago
What a beautiful, well written article. Good for you OP!
sitkack 5y ago
Very personal, well written story. Thanks for sharing it. The author frequents hn. I wonder what their take is on this making to hn? At the risk of oversharing this has so many similarities to my own story, only time shifted a little earlier, pre-web. Most things were telnet,ftp,uucp,netnews. I had read an article in Byte Magazine about the Transputer, so wrote an email, I think this was literally the Unix mail command, I wrote this email to the author and we chatted a bit about the Transputer. I'd stay up late at night, calling into a long distance Unix machine on the internet. It only lasted a couple months until I was busted for the phone charges. You can still basically email/chat with anyone in the world.
- maxime_cb 5y ago
  I was surprised because when I posted it yesterday, I got a few comments on twitter, but today my inbox was full of comments on the blog post. I was afraid to post a story with many personal details like this, but I figured, I've been self-censoring too much recently. I have a story to tell, and I'm sure many people will be able to relate. I had a similar experience. I watched a YouTube talk about using stacked k-means to do deep learning without artificial neurons (deep learning without neural networks). I found that super fascinating and I had a bunch of questions, so I managed to find the author's email (public because he was an academic) and we chatted about his research for a while. It was amazing being able to talk directly to the researcher.
  - sitkack 5y ago
    I was also a single child of a single mother who wasn’t doing well. I didn’t consciously make them same calculation, but did. Continue to make the world a better place by just being you. *edit, We really should foster a better culture of making these kinds of contacts. Even if occasionally we get snubbed I have found most people to be delighted that someone is interestin their work.
Barrin92 5y ago
as a working class kid growing up in a German village of 800 people I credit the internet for a lot of the stuff I learned. From coding, to learning English, to talking to people from other walks of life, and so on. That together with the fact that I could go to a good school with a healthy mix of people from other backgrounds I'd credit with 90% of what got me to university. Today there's a lot of negative discourse about the internet and the post-truth world it creates, but people have to keep in mind on the other hand it had and has an incredibly liberating effect for a lot of people.
- LoveMortuus 5y ago
  Same here, but from Slovenia, equally a small village. I think people forget the incredibly huge role internet has in terms of openly available knowledge. In my opinion the majority of negativity around internet is from the general public and about the websites that the general public uses aka. facebook, twitter, instagram, ... This has became even more apparent when I started teaching computer science to students and adults. The most noticeable was their inability to use Google, actually being able to find information online. Techy people quite often forget that, since we're so used to solving problems. Imagine programming without internet... <insert stackoverflow joke here>
  - adamddev1 5y ago
    The fact that both of you could grow up in small, non English-speaking villages and write such beautiful English is a testament to the power of learning English through the internet. It's amazing how natural and clear non-native-speakers' English feels when they've learned it as they're interacting with the wealth of discourse on the internet. People who haven't learned foreign languages (looking at you, fellow North Americans) won't quite appreciate what a huge achievement this is. (To be able to write and communicate freely in a way that feels native.)
- mclbdn 5y ago
  Also the same here - I'm from a little village (~2000 people) in the Czech Republic. I remember how (thanks to the internet) in the late 90's, I started listening to English music and playing video games without knowing any English. A few years forward I had much better English than all of my classmates, but without putting any work in. Then, I learned Spanish also online and moved to the Central America. Anyway, I still wonder if my old classmates aren't better off in that small village since they don't really know about the huge and complicated world that's outside of their country. Having a few friends that live a few hundred meters from your house and working as a plumber seems liberating in a way. Maybe ignorance is bliss?
marban 5y ago
Speaking of fads, it's always fun to revisit the naysayer comments on Slashdot when the iPod, iPhone, etc. were announced.
- chinathrow 5y ago
  The famous reply to the introduction of Dropbox [1] here on HN in 2007 comes to mind: "1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- phone8675309 5y ago
  No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
- bserge 5y ago
kewp 5y ago
I agree completely. The internet was such a blessing. Thanks for posting this
toyg 5y ago
The internet to me was a blessing and a curse. In economic terms, it has granted me lots of opportunities I might have not otherwise had; in social terms, it has taken a big toll, significantly isolating me from the world, which I didn't admit until very recently. I remember a smart classmate at university who, one day, just stopped attending and sold his computers, saying something like "these little colored lights have turned me into something I don't like". Some days I wish I had done the same.
- Simon321 5y ago
  You've isolated yourself from the world man, if it wasn't Internet it would've been something else. If you really don't want to be isolated you can change that right now.
  - mchaver 5y ago
    > if it wasn't Internet it would've been something else I think that is a big assumption to make for someone we don't know well. I do believe some unique experiences can have a huge effect on individuals and other experiences might not replicate the same results.
  - periphrasis 5y ago
    Agreed on the latter point. But on the former, would it though? Prior to the internet, isolating yourself from the world involved making a very deliberate and drastic life choice that completely changed your environment, like joining a monastery. Now though, a compelling and addictive alternate world awaits us in our pocket at all times. Indeed, I doubt either of us really cares much about this “conversation” or each other yet here we are wasting part of our morning shouting into the void. On that note I think I’m done with unintentional internet use for the day.
    - JKCalhoun 5y ago
      Spot on. Much, much easier to isolate yourself now. In fact, I'll concede it is even possible that you have to work not to isolate yourself when, after dipping your toe into the internet, you trip into the rabbit hole.
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lordnacho 5y ago
Great essay. I also got on IRC in the late 90s and ran into someone who was feeling down. They didn't say they were about to kill themselves, luckily, just that they were quite depressed. Somehow before the everyone got online I had a number of quite deep conversations with people. The internet now is a double edged sword. You can learn a lot from it, you can give or get help, you can do things that you couldn't just a few years ago. But you can also get helplessly addicted to things you find there, spending years looking for a dopamine hit that you perhaps thought was on the other side of the sword.
burntoutfire 5y ago
The Internet was an important stepping stone towards web3.0.
- qnsi 5y ago
  web 3 is going great https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
  - exikyut 5y ago
    I honestly don't think the cynicism this site is basically powered by is unwarranted. One needs sharp needles to pop thick balloons, or something. It also has a pretty nice design too.
richardfey 5y ago
This story is so heart warming! Loved it
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af8a90n2mr 5y ago
I hope his mother eventually received the help she needed. I know it can be difficult as a child to see through the flaws of a troubled parent, it's difficult to feel more than resent when you have to live through it night and day - an occasional glimmer of their vulnerability might open your eyes as child, that they are just another human struggling like you, but it can be fleeting. I've been in a similar but far less extreme situation. With time it's possible to appreciate what was essentially a dysfunctional yet supportive parent, she was clearly a well intentioned, good person trying to do the right thing. As much as her mental health troubled her, she clearly cared far more than many better positioned parents out there.
- pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
  > I hope his mother eventually received the help she needed. "His"?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mmcgaha 5y ago
    Thank you for making me go back and look. I was reading this from the perspective of a young boy too. For whatever reason I visualized myself when I was reading this.
    - maxime_cb 5y ago
      I specifically didn't mention gender in the story because I figured that it would make it easier for more people to relate. When you write a story, you get to choose which aspects to highlight on or not :)
  - 8addd76a 5y ago
  - deleted 5y ago
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ospzfmbbzr 5y ago
General Purpose Computing changed my life. The Network is the Computer. For some like me it's the Memex, for many it's the Panopticon.
- ospzfmbbzr 5y ago
  Both things in varying degrees actually
throwaway2037 5y ago
I cried when I read this blog post. Thank you for taking the time to share such a personal story!
specialist 5y ago
Terrific story. Personal, authentic, and very relatable. Interest in and an aptitude for computers also saved me. (I even had a job in a computer store.) > I made the cold calculation that as painful as my life was, it was probably better than rolling the dice with the child protection services. Yup. I too decided at age 11, choosing to live with the less bad parent. And shortly thereafter, those decisions were made for me, resulting in the state putting me into foster care. Somehow I avoided the worst; while the 1st family was pretty much what you'd expect, I later lucked into a good family. -- I wonder how many of us there are. I've known so many runaways, beaten kids, sexually abused kids, kids with broken parents. And that's just in my wealthy, prosperous city. I can't imagine how much worse it is every where else. I also marvel that somehow some of us find a way out, while seemingly most others get sucked into the abyss. So much human potential lost due to poor circumstances and stupid luck. It fills me with deep sadness. And I wonder what the difference is. How are some able to escape their fate? If we can identify those success factors, maybe we can maximize chances for success. Could even be small measures, like how we now have suicide prevention hotlines, and resources for victims of human trafficking. -- I had many, many people help me over the years. People who had no reason to help, but did nonetheless. I call them my angels. People like a little league coach (who'd drive me to practice), a youth pastor (who mentored me), the foster family that raised me, etc, etc. As society becomes harsher, more coarse, more dog-eat-dog, I worry that other lost kids won't have their own angels.
- indigochill 5y ago
  > If we can identify those success factors I don't have complete answers, but my capstone project in college involved interviewing a handful of people who volunteered in their communities to see if we could come up with some hypotheses about hooks to get more people to engage with their local communities. My takeaway from the interviews was that people's reasons for volunteering were essentially intrinsic, not extrinsic. One guy had benefited from books donated to his prison so felt he should pay it forward after he was out. A mom volunteered in activities her kids were engaging in. Someone else volunteered as a way of staying socially active. There _were_ clear motivations, but not something you'd likely have much luck leveraging en masse without knowing someone's history and what they personally cared about. However, you can maybe approach the problem preemptively by creating an environment that creates the sorts of people who will give back to their community (maybe being a good foster parent to a kid who decides it's important to be a good faster parent to someone else). It's not fool proof - even good parents can see their kids go bad - but it's a start.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I am happy the Internet is here. I feel that it was inevitable, and I also believe that we are just starting to emerge from the "rough teenage years" of teh Internets Tubes. Maturity can be a real bitch. We'll be seeing a lot more guardrails and walled gardens. People that have become accustomed to (and thrived in) the "Wild West" nature of early Internet, will throw tantrums, but it will be for naught. I definitely couldn't do my work, without the Internet, a persistent, high-speed connection, and a whole lot of folks that contribute to various sites out there. I often have to google even the most basic stuff. Because of the Internet, these sidebars seldom take more than about five minutes. I do it several times a day. I have a Facebook account that I barely use. The place is a cesspool. I just keep it, because I need to help support a technical initiative that has a fairly prominent Facebook presence. What struck me most about her story, is how little help her mother got. Sadly, I am familiar with exactly that type of mental disease, and know how destructive it can be, and how treatable it is, nowadays.
- Underphil 5y ago
  I'm interested to dig deeper into this. What is your job and would it even exist without the internet?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    I am "semi-retired," but spend 60 hours (or more) per week, writing software (mostly Apple stuff, in Swift). It would probably not be here, without the Internet. It would certainly not be as lucrative, or as easy.
whoomp12342 5y ago
this domain name is a relic of when people on the internet were actually clever.
tomhoward 5y ago
I often wonder how I would have made a living and a good life without the internet. I finished high school in 1994 with little career inspiration, landed in a generic business degree that held little interest for me, but it was at that uni campus I discovered the internet in early 95. I immediately found it exciting and grasped how transformative it would be, and quickly got to work learning web development and finding material and communities related to my interests (mostly obscure Australian rock bands). It's been the platform for my career ever since, and has also enabled me to go deep learning about some unusual health and emotional challenges that had afflicted me since early life, and enabled me to make profound changes to my health and wellbeing, leading to the place I'm at now, with a solid career, great relationship and a wonderful young son. When I think about the person I was and the path I was on when I finished high school, it's hard to imagine how it would have turned out well had I come of age in a different era. Which is not to say life has been easy or simple; quite the opposite, and the internet has no doubt made life more complicated and challenging in many ways, My life has had several major ups and downs that probably wouldn't have been as pronounced without the internet. But I still have no doubt at all I'm in a much better place than I'd have been without it.
- _uoud 5y ago
  It’s nice to hear about the positive side of internet and all these stories people share here. Usually it’s much more about the negative aspects like one of my own personal posts I wrote from the middle of lockdowns about a year ago, touching upon the distractions of the internet and how it’s been slowly re-wiring my brain: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/age-of-distractions/ https://www.lostbookofsales.com/age-of-distractions/ Since I moved to a smaller town here in northern Finland from the heart of Germany, thanks to the internet I feel no less connected to communities, teachers (MIT, Harvard, etc. as I’m doing my masters degree) and friends than before. You have to balance the negative and positive sides and control yourself. I think it’s a huge net positive though as becomes obvious from this thread.
exikyut 5y ago
> The next day, I had the TV on in the background and the evening news program was just starting. At the start of the bulletin, they gave a quick outline of the stories they were going to cover. Among those stories, the news anchor read something to the lines of “an internet user saves the life of a young woman in distress”. Then they cut for an ad break. I was very excited to hear the actual news story, but suddenly, my mother called out “dinner is ready!” and insisted that I come and sit down to eat. I got distracted, and I never did hear the full news story (ha!). It would be really cool if it were somehow possible to pin down the time this was aired on TV and identify the full bulletin. I wonder if the author remembers the rough time period this happened within. Even a span of months to years doesn't produce an intractably-sized search space.
- maxime_cb 5y ago
  I honestly don't remember which exact year this happened. I can give you a super wide time bracket to make sure it's in this range, which is between 1998 and 2004. In actuality it was probably closer to 2000-2002. It was aired on one of the big French Montreal news channels (TVA, TQS). It was probably TVA because we watched the news there most of the time. The new bulletin aired ~6PM. They used the French term "internaute" to talk about an internet user. So you might try keywords like "internaute sauve jeune femme". I'd be curious to watch it if it's somehow possible to find it. I don't need to contact the person and I don't need a "thank you" though. I just hope that wherever she is, she's doing okay :)
- mooreds 5y ago
  I got the chills when I read this section. What an act of kindness!
Markoff 5y ago
from someone whose life was changed by internet I'd expect they would use at least readable font for their website, not that HN comments would use better size...
photochemsyn 5y ago
The thing about the Internet is that the ratio of high-quality educational and informational content to complete garbage is fairly low. I couldn't say whether its falling or not, but it seems to have been rather higher in the Internet's early days, before the rush to commercialize everything in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In particular, social media engagement algorithms have gotten out of hand, it's kind of a problem. They're designed to be addictive and you have to actively resist that kind of thing. Currently I'm leaning towards adopting a much more rigorous attitude towards time spent online. My short list is : (1) have specific goals for each online session, (2) don't get sucked down distracting rabbit holes, (3) spend at least as much time reading books as reading online content, (4) try to spend as much time on physical activity as on mental activity, (5) don't just be a passive absorber of information, try to create things as well. As far as online social interaction as a substitute for offline human interaction, I don't think it's that great of an idea, particularly for children and young adults, but some people do appear to benefit greatly from it in some circumstances, so I remain neutral on the topic.
- jonas21 5y ago
  I think there's just a lot more of the Internet these days. Much more garbage, but much more high-quality content too. And the same engagement algorithms that can drive you down into rabbit holes can also lead you to deep wells of high-quality educational content on whatever topic you choose. Today's Internet is whatever you want make of it. And to me at least, that's what makes it so exciting.
byteface 5y ago
I remember the world before the internet. Full of rumour and supersition and gossip and people you go to for certian knowledge about things. Lots of people outside, all over the place. climbing trees, riding bikes. Filling the spaces. Now you come home from being on it all day working. your family are all on it. don't talk to you, bark if you interupt them. You can access all the facts and know everything. I kinda hate it. Here I am on it.
- pragmatic 5y ago
  “Full of rumour and supersition and gossip and people you go to for certian knowledge about things.” The more things change… We’ve recreated that online. There was a brief golden age when only the early adopters were online with visions of a digital utopia and now it’s just like real life but crazier. The same thing will happen if we go to mars. It will just be the same stuff just on another planet. Wherever you go, there you are.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    The people of Mars would likely be somewhat different from the people of Earth, since they'd be so heavily influenced by whatever idiosyncrasies they inherited from the first colonists. If there are genetic propensities to whatever would make someone healthy enough to travel to Mars, intelligent enough to run the machines, yet disconnect enough from Earthbound society that they wouldn't mind leaving the planet, that is what Martians would generally be like.
    - byteface 5y ago
      funny you say this. i was reading about peri wigs the other day. and apparently washington didn't wear one. he fashioned his hair that way. I guess he didn't have syphilis and wanted to fit in.
  - supperburg 5y ago
    It’s true but you’re skipping over the early golden age that mars will also have. Life is surfing and early golden ages are the waves.
remorses 5y ago
Being born with the internet i cannot even imagine what would be my life without it.
- byteface 5y ago
  It was like world of warcraft but in reality. say for example there was a rumour that someone called 'smokey' could catch an eel. and you wanted to catch an eel. someone would say. Smokey can catch eels. So you and 5 pals would walk 6 miles to find Smokey. You'd sit in the sun and he'd share his stories of how to carry out the task. Then you'd go to the said location at night and fulfill the task. etc. It was fun.
  - gnramires 5y ago
    That's interesting: It's like we've introduced "spoilers" into almost everything we do. I mean, if you have some discipline you can still do things "spoiler-free", I guess (specially if it's not a job or particularly dangerous), which I agree sometimes presents a great learning opportunity and completely different experience.
bityard 5y ago
My story pales in comparison to the author's but having access to the Internet in my teen years probably saved me from a life of full-on mediocrity or worse. I grew up in an extremely rural area of the Midwest. Town so small it didn't even have a stoplight. One school served three villages, grades K-12. You were considered rich if you didn't buy your groceries with food stamps. As a teen, if you didn't have a job (which was impossible to get if your parents didn't give you a car), the only things to do with your free time were watch TV or hope one of your friends was willing to pick you up and hang out. Nobody from there went to college. The brightest ones went to trade school. The best thing my mother ever did for us was buy a computer we could barely afford, and then eventually subscribe us to dial-up Internet once it came to our town. I always liked computers and electronics but reading about things in books and magazines only takes you so far. It was until I could actually _look things up_ and see what others were doing that I became halfway proficient at computer hardware, operating systems, and programming. My crowning achievement while I was still living at home was downloading two dozen floppies worth of Slackware Linux and managing to make it dual-boot with Windows 98. Today I live in a decent-sized city, have two decades of tech career under my belt, a very solid financial situation, and a great family. My parents did their best but the mid-90's Internet (and beyond) is what got me here and I'm forever thankful for that.
carapace 5y ago
I'm getting all verklempt reading this! - - - - I just want to add that Maxime is the genius who wrote Turing Drawings, one of my personal all-time favorite uses of the computer ever. https://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/ https://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2012/12/31/turing-drawings/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2012/12/31/turing-drawings/ It's worth looking at the code too, IMO. It made me realize that JS could be beautiful. https://github.com/maximecb/Turing-Drawings https://github.com/maximecb/Turing-Drawings - - - - You rock Maxime!
peter303 5y ago
For people growing up in the 1900s, the local library served a similar function of releasing one from suffocating local life into the wonders of the wide world.
leshow 5y ago
> Thanks to Canada’s low tuition costs I went to school in canada and I'm not sure I'd call it "low" (especially when you're a broke student) but I don't have any number to compare it to. I went to uni in the 2010's and I remember it being like 8-10K/year or so for engineering. What's the average price elsewhere? I think in the UK it's mostly paid for through taxes?

578 points by janvdberg 5y ago

I had a much more stable upbringing and family life than the author, but one area that I can relate to is being incredibly bored as a kid - most of my friends lived across major roads or outside of walking distance in suburbia. The internet and all it offered was an endless fountain of entertainment for me. I really don't know what I would have done without it.

birdyrooster 5y ago

Nah, just a passing fad

tamaharbor 5y ago
I used to think digital was just a fad.

amatecha 5y ago

Neat, I love this. The internet hugely changed my life too, and was utterly fundamental to my development as a person. I wonder if I'd ever take the time to write a story like this, but I think I wouldn't be able to resist going into way deeper detail haha

JKCalhoun 5y ago
Then I'm guessing you probably would go into way deeper detail. But I suspect if you let it sit on your computer for a few days after writing it, coming back to it you will see the parts you needed to hew out and could then post something more succinct to your liking.
- maxime_cb 5y ago
  I can tell you that I've been thinking about writing up this story for a couple of years, but I kept self-censoring because my blog is mostly about tech, and because I was still afraid of the judgment that comes with having a schizophrenic parent. In the end, I decided that I do have a story to tell, and I don't care about the judgment. These things shouldn't be stigmatized, the stigma is what prevents people from getting help, and the only way to remove the stigma is to talk. So I wrote the story up one evening two weeks ago. Then I had a few friends proofread it by sharing with them on Google Doc. Then I finally decided to post it. Because my blog is focused on tech, I focused more on the tech angle when telling the story. I knew that would appeal to my audience more, but I think it's only fair, because tech has been a huge part of my life. It's a huge part of what makes me get up in the morning.

CyberRabbi 5y ago

Heartwarming story, I would only say to be careful about diagnosing close friends or family with mental illness based on internet research. Even non mental illnesses.

booboofixer 5y ago
Good advice, much needed for a lot of people. I’d say I’m a victim of this. Once people think you need some sort of help, they never let you live life as a normal person again, they’re never just “cool” to hang around and talk to ever again. It takes a lot of effort to find new people who dont look at you the same way or to weed out the smarter friends (who get over their obsession to help you) you have from the rest so you can feel comfortable socializing with them.
nickkell 5y ago
The rest of my family have armchair-diagnosed my father as being on the autism spectrum. I’m fairly sure his lack of responsiveness is due to his hearing loss and the plain fact he doesn’t like his family as much as the friends he plays cards with every Friday!

Brajeshwar 5y ago

I have a cousin much older than me. Everyone thinks he is weird, and he is indeed. Absolutely no one understood the things he do, why he does a particular thing but I found him pretty fascinating. Once in a particular talk session with him, we discussed about the upcoming thing called Internet. This was 1993 or 1995 — about the time Internet was a buzzword and soon to be introduced in India. Besides all the talks, I will never forget what he told me. Something in the lines of — anyone from anywhere can do anything they want for anyone anywhere. I would spend hours reading the magazines he bought, and tinkering with his computer. It wasn’t until 1999 that I was introduced to the Internet and (maybe) another 5-7 years for him. Well, I felt right at home on day-zero, and I knew that changed everything for me.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
So what did you do with this knowledge? I was 11 in 1999 and couldn’t do much.
- Brajeshwar 5y ago
  Well, here is the brief https://brajeshwar.com/about/ https://brajeshwar.com/about/
- laputan_machine 5y ago
  I was 11 in '99 too, we had the internet since 97/98. I spent my time making dumb websites and playing Half-Life mods online (tf/cs/sven coop). Great times. The one strange thing I often think about is that I don't remember any toxicity, nothing like it is today in online games.
  - fy20 5y ago
    Same age, but I didn't really get into online communities until the early noughties. I got into programming working with a gaming community to build out their website (building phpBB themes and mods) and building a matching service, and then it went from there... There was definately a lot of toxicity in that community though (even though we had maybe 20 regular members), so I think you were lucky :)

ditegashi 5y ago

What a beautiful, well written article. Good for you OP!

sitkack 5y ago

Very personal, well written story. Thanks for sharing it. The author frequents hn. I wonder what their take is on this making to hn? At the risk of oversharing this has so many similarities to my own story, only time shifted a little earlier, pre-web. Most things were telnet,ftp,uucp,netnews. I had read an article in Byte Magazine about the Transputer, so wrote an email, I think this was literally the Unix mail command, I wrote this email to the author and we chatted a bit about the Transputer. I'd stay up late at night, calling into a long distance Unix machine on the internet. It only lasted a couple months until I was busted for the phone charges. You can still basically email/chat with anyone in the world.

maxime_cb 5y ago
I was surprised because when I posted it yesterday, I got a few comments on twitter, but today my inbox was full of comments on the blog post. I was afraid to post a story with many personal details like this, but I figured, I've been self-censoring too much recently. I have a story to tell, and I'm sure many people will be able to relate. I had a similar experience. I watched a YouTube talk about using stacked k-means to do deep learning without artificial neurons (deep learning without neural networks). I found that super fascinating and I had a bunch of questions, so I managed to find the author's email (public because he was an academic) and we chatted about his research for a while. It was amazing being able to talk directly to the researcher.
- sitkack 5y ago
  I was also a single child of a single mother who wasn’t doing well. I didn’t consciously make them same calculation, but did. Continue to make the world a better place by just being you. *edit, We really should foster a better culture of making these kinds of contacts. Even if occasionally we get snubbed I have found most people to be delighted that someone is interestin their work.

Barrin92 5y ago

as a working class kid growing up in a German village of 800 people I credit the internet for a lot of the stuff I learned. From coding, to learning English, to talking to people from other walks of life, and so on. That together with the fact that I could go to a good school with a healthy mix of people from other backgrounds I'd credit with 90% of what got me to university. Today there's a lot of negative discourse about the internet and the post-truth world it creates, but people have to keep in mind on the other hand it had and has an incredibly liberating effect for a lot of people.

LoveMortuus 5y ago
Same here, but from Slovenia, equally a small village. I think people forget the incredibly huge role internet has in terms of openly available knowledge. In my opinion the majority of negativity around internet is from the general public and about the websites that the general public uses aka. facebook, twitter, instagram, ... This has became even more apparent when I started teaching computer science to students and adults. The most noticeable was their inability to use Google, actually being able to find information online. Techy people quite often forget that, since we're so used to solving problems. Imagine programming without internet... <insert stackoverflow joke here>
- adamddev1 5y ago
  The fact that both of you could grow up in small, non English-speaking villages and write such beautiful English is a testament to the power of learning English through the internet. It's amazing how natural and clear non-native-speakers' English feels when they've learned it as they're interacting with the wealth of discourse on the internet. People who haven't learned foreign languages (looking at you, fellow North Americans) won't quite appreciate what a huge achievement this is. (To be able to write and communicate freely in a way that feels native.)
mclbdn 5y ago
Also the same here - I'm from a little village (~2000 people) in the Czech Republic. I remember how (thanks to the internet) in the late 90's, I started listening to English music and playing video games without knowing any English. A few years forward I had much better English than all of my classmates, but without putting any work in. Then, I learned Spanish also online and moved to the Central America. Anyway, I still wonder if my old classmates aren't better off in that small village since they don't really know about the huge and complicated world that's outside of their country. Having a few friends that live a few hundred meters from your house and working as a plumber seems liberating in a way. Maybe ignorance is bliss?

marban 5y ago

Speaking of fads, it's always fun to revisit the naysayer comments on Slashdot when the iPod, iPhone, etc. were announced.

chinathrow 5y ago
The famous reply to the introduction of Dropbox [1] here on HN in 2007 comes to mind: "1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
phone8675309 5y ago
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
bserge 5y ago

kewp 5y ago

I agree completely. The internet was such a blessing. Thanks for posting this

toyg 5y ago

The internet to me was a blessing and a curse. In economic terms, it has granted me lots of opportunities I might have not otherwise had; in social terms, it has taken a big toll, significantly isolating me from the world, which I didn't admit until very recently. I remember a smart classmate at university who, one day, just stopped attending and sold his computers, saying something like "these little colored lights have turned me into something I don't like". Some days I wish I had done the same.

Simon321 5y ago
You've isolated yourself from the world man, if it wasn't Internet it would've been something else. If you really don't want to be isolated you can change that right now.
- mchaver 5y ago
  > if it wasn't Internet it would've been something else I think that is a big assumption to make for someone we don't know well. I do believe some unique experiences can have a huge effect on individuals and other experiences might not replicate the same results.
- periphrasis 5y ago
  Agreed on the latter point. But on the former, would it though? Prior to the internet, isolating yourself from the world involved making a very deliberate and drastic life choice that completely changed your environment, like joining a monastery. Now though, a compelling and addictive alternate world awaits us in our pocket at all times. Indeed, I doubt either of us really cares much about this “conversation” or each other yet here we are wasting part of our morning shouting into the void. On that note I think I’m done with unintentional internet use for the day.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Spot on. Much, much easier to isolate yourself now. In fact, I'll concede it is even possible that you have to work not to isolate yourself when, after dipping your toe into the internet, you trip into the rabbit hole.

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lordnacho 5y ago

Great essay. I also got on IRC in the late 90s and ran into someone who was feeling down. They didn't say they were about to kill themselves, luckily, just that they were quite depressed. Somehow before the everyone got online I had a number of quite deep conversations with people. The internet now is a double edged sword. You can learn a lot from it, you can give or get help, you can do things that you couldn't just a few years ago. But you can also get helplessly addicted to things you find there, spending years looking for a dopamine hit that you perhaps thought was on the other side of the sword.

burntoutfire 5y ago

The Internet was an important stepping stone towards web3.0.

qnsi 5y ago
web 3 is going great https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
- exikyut 5y ago
  I honestly don't think the cynicism this site is basically powered by is unwarranted. One needs sharp needles to pop thick balloons, or something. It also has a pretty nice design too.

richardfey 5y ago

This story is so heart warming! Loved it

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af8a90n2mr 5y ago

I hope his mother eventually received the help she needed. I know it can be difficult as a child to see through the flaws of a troubled parent, it's difficult to feel more than resent when you have to live through it night and day - an occasional glimmer of their vulnerability might open your eyes as child, that they are just another human struggling like you, but it can be fleeting. I've been in a similar but far less extreme situation. With time it's possible to appreciate what was essentially a dysfunctional yet supportive parent, she was clearly a well intentioned, good person trying to do the right thing. As much as her mental health troubled her, she clearly cared far more than many better positioned parents out there.

pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
> I hope his mother eventually received the help she needed. "His"?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mmcgaha 5y ago
  Thank you for making me go back and look. I was reading this from the perspective of a young boy too. For whatever reason I visualized myself when I was reading this.
  - maxime_cb 5y ago
    I specifically didn't mention gender in the story because I figured that it would make it easier for more people to relate. When you write a story, you get to choose which aspects to highlight on or not :)
- 8addd76a 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

ospzfmbbzr 5y ago

General Purpose Computing changed my life. The Network is the Computer. For some like me it's the Memex, for many it's the Panopticon.

ospzfmbbzr 5y ago
Both things in varying degrees actually

throwaway2037 5y ago

I cried when I read this blog post. Thank you for taking the time to share such a personal story!

specialist 5y ago

Terrific story. Personal, authentic, and very relatable. Interest in and an aptitude for computers also saved me. (I even had a job in a computer store.) > I made the cold calculation that as painful as my life was, it was probably better than rolling the dice with the child protection services. Yup. I too decided at age 11, choosing to live with the less bad parent. And shortly thereafter, those decisions were made for me, resulting in the state putting me into foster care. Somehow I avoided the worst; while the 1st family was pretty much what you'd expect, I later lucked into a good family. -- I wonder how many of us there are. I've known so many runaways, beaten kids, sexually abused kids, kids with broken parents. And that's just in my wealthy, prosperous city. I can't imagine how much worse it is every where else. I also marvel that somehow some of us find a way out, while seemingly most others get sucked into the abyss. So much human potential lost due to poor circumstances and stupid luck. It fills me with deep sadness. And I wonder what the difference is. How are some able to escape their fate? If we can identify those success factors, maybe we can maximize chances for success. Could even be small measures, like how we now have suicide prevention hotlines, and resources for victims of human trafficking. -- I had many, many people help me over the years. People who had no reason to help, but did nonetheless. I call them my angels. People like a little league coach (who'd drive me to practice), a youth pastor (who mentored me), the foster family that raised me, etc, etc. As society becomes harsher, more coarse, more dog-eat-dog, I worry that other lost kids won't have their own angels.

indigochill 5y ago
> If we can identify those success factors I don't have complete answers, but my capstone project in college involved interviewing a handful of people who volunteered in their communities to see if we could come up with some hypotheses about hooks to get more people to engage with their local communities. My takeaway from the interviews was that people's reasons for volunteering were essentially intrinsic, not extrinsic. One guy had benefited from books donated to his prison so felt he should pay it forward after he was out. A mom volunteered in activities her kids were engaging in. Someone else volunteered as a way of staying socially active. There _were_ clear motivations, but not something you'd likely have much luck leveraging en masse without knowing someone's history and what they personally cared about. However, you can maybe approach the problem preemptively by creating an environment that creates the sorts of people who will give back to their community (maybe being a good foster parent to a kid who decides it's important to be a good faster parent to someone else). It's not fool proof - even good parents can see their kids go bad - but it's a start.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I am happy the Internet is here. I feel that it was inevitable, and I also believe that we are just starting to emerge from the "rough teenage years" of teh Internets Tubes. Maturity can be a real bitch. We'll be seeing a lot more guardrails and walled gardens. People that have become accustomed to (and thrived in) the "Wild West" nature of early Internet, will throw tantrums, but it will be for naught. I definitely couldn't do my work, without the Internet, a persistent, high-speed connection, and a whole lot of folks that contribute to various sites out there. I often have to google even the most basic stuff. Because of the Internet, these sidebars seldom take more than about five minutes. I do it several times a day. I have a Facebook account that I barely use. The place is a cesspool. I just keep it, because I need to help support a technical initiative that has a fairly prominent Facebook presence. What struck me most about her story, is how little help her mother got. Sadly, I am familiar with exactly that type of mental disease, and know how destructive it can be, and how treatable it is, nowadays.

Underphil 5y ago
I'm interested to dig deeper into this. What is your job and would it even exist without the internet?
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I am "semi-retired," but spend 60 hours (or more) per week, writing software (mostly Apple stuff, in Swift). It would probably not be here, without the Internet. It would certainly not be as lucrative, or as easy.

whoomp12342 5y ago

this domain name is a relic of when people on the internet were actually clever.

tomhoward 5y ago

I often wonder how I would have made a living and a good life without the internet. I finished high school in 1994 with little career inspiration, landed in a generic business degree that held little interest for me, but it was at that uni campus I discovered the internet in early 95. I immediately found it exciting and grasped how transformative it would be, and quickly got to work learning web development and finding material and communities related to my interests (mostly obscure Australian rock bands). It's been the platform for my career ever since, and has also enabled me to go deep learning about some unusual health and emotional challenges that had afflicted me since early life, and enabled me to make profound changes to my health and wellbeing, leading to the place I'm at now, with a solid career, great relationship and a wonderful young son. When I think about the person I was and the path I was on when I finished high school, it's hard to imagine how it would have turned out well had I come of age in a different era. Which is not to say life has been easy or simple; quite the opposite, and the internet has no doubt made life more complicated and challenging in many ways, My life has had several major ups and downs that probably wouldn't have been as pronounced without the internet. But I still have no doubt at all I'm in a much better place than I'd have been without it.

_uoud 5y ago
It’s nice to hear about the positive side of internet and all these stories people share here. Usually it’s much more about the negative aspects like one of my own personal posts I wrote from the middle of lockdowns about a year ago, touching upon the distractions of the internet and how it’s been slowly re-wiring my brain: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/age-of-distractions/ https://www.lostbookofsales.com/age-of-distractions/ Since I moved to a smaller town here in northern Finland from the heart of Germany, thanks to the internet I feel no less connected to communities, teachers (MIT, Harvard, etc. as I’m doing my masters degree) and friends than before. You have to balance the negative and positive sides and control yourself. I think it’s a huge net positive though as becomes obvious from this thread.

exikyut 5y ago

> The next day, I had the TV on in the background and the evening news program was just starting. At the start of the bulletin, they gave a quick outline of the stories they were going to cover. Among those stories, the news anchor read something to the lines of “an internet user saves the life of a young woman in distress”. Then they cut for an ad break. I was very excited to hear the actual news story, but suddenly, my mother called out “dinner is ready!” and insisted that I come and sit down to eat. I got distracted, and I never did hear the full news story (ha!). It would be really cool if it were somehow possible to pin down the time this was aired on TV and identify the full bulletin. I wonder if the author remembers the rough time period this happened within. Even a span of months to years doesn't produce an intractably-sized search space.

maxime_cb 5y ago
I honestly don't remember which exact year this happened. I can give you a super wide time bracket to make sure it's in this range, which is between 1998 and 2004. In actuality it was probably closer to 2000-2002. It was aired on one of the big French Montreal news channels (TVA, TQS). It was probably TVA because we watched the news there most of the time. The new bulletin aired ~6PM. They used the French term "internaute" to talk about an internet user. So you might try keywords like "internaute sauve jeune femme". I'd be curious to watch it if it's somehow possible to find it. I don't need to contact the person and I don't need a "thank you" though. I just hope that wherever she is, she's doing okay :)
mooreds 5y ago
I got the chills when I read this section. What an act of kindness!

Markoff 5y ago

from someone whose life was changed by internet I'd expect they would use at least readable font for their website, not that HN comments would use better size...

photochemsyn 5y ago

The thing about the Internet is that the ratio of high-quality educational and informational content to complete garbage is fairly low. I couldn't say whether its falling or not, but it seems to have been rather higher in the Internet's early days, before the rush to commercialize everything in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In particular, social media engagement algorithms have gotten out of hand, it's kind of a problem. They're designed to be addictive and you have to actively resist that kind of thing. Currently I'm leaning towards adopting a much more rigorous attitude towards time spent online. My short list is : (1) have specific goals for each online session, (2) don't get sucked down distracting rabbit holes, (3) spend at least as much time reading books as reading online content, (4) try to spend as much time on physical activity as on mental activity, (5) don't just be a passive absorber of information, try to create things as well. As far as online social interaction as a substitute for offline human interaction, I don't think it's that great of an idea, particularly for children and young adults, but some people do appear to benefit greatly from it in some circumstances, so I remain neutral on the topic.

jonas21 5y ago
I think there's just a lot more of the Internet these days. Much more garbage, but much more high-quality content too. And the same engagement algorithms that can drive you down into rabbit holes can also lead you to deep wells of high-quality educational content on whatever topic you choose. Today's Internet is whatever you want make of it. And to me at least, that's what makes it so exciting.

byteface 5y ago

I remember the world before the internet. Full of rumour and supersition and gossip and people you go to for certian knowledge about things. Lots of people outside, all over the place. climbing trees, riding bikes. Filling the spaces. Now you come home from being on it all day working. your family are all on it. don't talk to you, bark if you interupt them. You can access all the facts and know everything. I kinda hate it. Here I am on it.

pragmatic 5y ago
“Full of rumour and supersition and gossip and people you go to for certian knowledge about things.” The more things change… We’ve recreated that online. There was a brief golden age when only the early adopters were online with visions of a digital utopia and now it’s just like real life but crazier. The same thing will happen if we go to mars. It will just be the same stuff just on another planet. Wherever you go, there you are.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  The people of Mars would likely be somewhat different from the people of Earth, since they'd be so heavily influenced by whatever idiosyncrasies they inherited from the first colonists. If there are genetic propensities to whatever would make someone healthy enough to travel to Mars, intelligent enough to run the machines, yet disconnect enough from Earthbound society that they wouldn't mind leaving the planet, that is what Martians would generally be like.
  - byteface 5y ago
    funny you say this. i was reading about peri wigs the other day. and apparently washington didn't wear one. he fashioned his hair that way. I guess he didn't have syphilis and wanted to fit in.
- supperburg 5y ago
  It’s true but you’re skipping over the early golden age that mars will also have. Life is surfing and early golden ages are the waves.

remorses 5y ago

Being born with the internet i cannot even imagine what would be my life without it.

byteface 5y ago
It was like world of warcraft but in reality. say for example there was a rumour that someone called 'smokey' could catch an eel. and you wanted to catch an eel. someone would say. Smokey can catch eels. So you and 5 pals would walk 6 miles to find Smokey. You'd sit in the sun and he'd share his stories of how to carry out the task. Then you'd go to the said location at night and fulfill the task. etc. It was fun.
- gnramires 5y ago
  That's interesting: It's like we've introduced "spoilers" into almost everything we do. I mean, if you have some discipline you can still do things "spoiler-free", I guess (specially if it's not a job or particularly dangerous), which I agree sometimes presents a great learning opportunity and completely different experience.

bityard 5y ago

My story pales in comparison to the author's but having access to the Internet in my teen years probably saved me from a life of full-on mediocrity or worse. I grew up in an extremely rural area of the Midwest. Town so small it didn't even have a stoplight. One school served three villages, grades K-12. You were considered rich if you didn't buy your groceries with food stamps. As a teen, if you didn't have a job (which was impossible to get if your parents didn't give you a car), the only things to do with your free time were watch TV or hope one of your friends was willing to pick you up and hang out. Nobody from there went to college. The brightest ones went to trade school. The best thing my mother ever did for us was buy a computer we could barely afford, and then eventually subscribe us to dial-up Internet once it came to our town. I always liked computers and electronics but reading about things in books and magazines only takes you so far. It was until I could actually _look things up_ and see what others were doing that I became halfway proficient at computer hardware, operating systems, and programming. My crowning achievement while I was still living at home was downloading two dozen floppies worth of Slackware Linux and managing to make it dual-boot with Windows 98. Today I live in a decent-sized city, have two decades of tech career under my belt, a very solid financial situation, and a great family. My parents did their best but the mid-90's Internet (and beyond) is what got me here and I'm forever thankful for that.

carapace 5y ago

I'm getting all verklempt reading this! - - - - I just want to add that Maxime is the genius who wrote Turing Drawings, one of my personal all-time favorite uses of the computer ever. https://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/ https://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2012/12/31/turing-drawings/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2012/12/31/turing-drawings/ It's worth looking at the code too, IMO. It made me realize that JS could be beautiful. https://github.com/maximecb/Turing-Drawings https://github.com/maximecb/Turing-Drawings - - - - You rock Maxime!

peter303 5y ago

For people growing up in the 1900s, the local library served a similar function of releasing one from suffocating local life into the wonders of the wide world.

leshow 5y ago

> Thanks to Canada’s low tuition costs I went to school in canada and I'm not sure I'd call it "low" (especially when you're a broke student) but I don't have any number to compare it to. I went to uni in the 2010's and I remember it being like 8-10K/year or so for engineering. What's the average price elsewhere? I think in the UK it's mostly paid for through taxes?