7 ms·
The first day of HN frontpage
- sam0x17 5y agoThe famfamfam silk icons set is a blast from the past. I can't believe it's still up. I used to use these for everything when I was a teenager.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoAlright boys, I think I have figured out where the timeline went wrong: https://techcrunch.com/2007/02/16/google-to-buy-adscape-for-23-million/ https://techcrunch.com/2007/02/16/google-to-buy-adscape-for-...
- dopidopHN 5y agoI had a similar though. Was is the first foray of Google into targeted ad?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cjsawyer 5y ago“YouTube: "identifying copyrighted material can't be an automated process." Startup disagrees” Things have changed a little since 2007!
- wyclif 5y agoAlso, that "The Desktop Is Dead" story on Wired is pretty funny in retrospect.
- O_H_E 5y agoLoool wow that is hilariously ironic
- codetrotter 5y agoThe article is gone now, but here’s an archived copy of it on IA https://web.archive.org/web/20070221023808/http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/19/business/piracy.php https://web.archive.org/web/20070221023808/http://www.iht.co... Supposedly there was a page 2 of the article, but even though the first attempted capture of page 2 by the IA was only a few days after the article was pusblished, page 2 was returning 404 to IA.
- southerntofu 5y agoFor people who don't understand: What changed is that Youtube acquired such startups, and started developing automated censorship based on copyright which has both a lot of false positives as well as venues for manual abuse when someone claims to be a rightsholder when they're not. Turns out Youtube was right in the first place: this can't be an automated process, unless you accept more than half the videos that will be deleted have nothing to do with copyright infringement.
- throwawaynay 5y agoit can if you're not cutting corners
- oarsinsync 5y agoIf you can build it and prove this to be true, you'll likely become a multimillionaire when you get acquired.
- southerntofu 5y agoNo, it's impossible. AI-based algorithms are fairly bad at recognizing copyrighted works. It's hard to strike a balance between what is an original composition and what's a remix/cover/copy: - if you make it too strict you'll just find bit-by-bit copies: reencoding or slightly altering the data would pass screening easily - if you make it too lax, you will find that many "original compositions" are in fact very similar to or inspired by other works (oh really that bird singing i just recorded is copyrighted?!) Beyond that, when there's an actual copy involved, an algorithm is fairly bad at determining whether this copy is legal: - if it looks very similar to another user's video which claims to have copyright on the content, however what proves the copyright is owned by that other uploader and not by a 3rd party? how can you make sure the license was not copyleft or public domain in the first place? - how do you know whether the content is used in a context of lawful criticism? parody? - how do you know whether the usage is tied to an education or accessibility exception to copyright? - how do you know if the usage of the copyrighted content is legal in the uploader's country? in the copyright owner's country? in the host's country? how do you decide which is more important? If censorship is bad, automated censorship is even worse. There's no way to make it right.
- dmarchand90 5y agoQuickly browsing through leaves me with the impression that HackerNews has really done a great job of preserving the culture of the website. Meanwhile, Reddit has gotten so much worse, so much more political, even in the last ~7 years.
- jasfi 5y agoReddit is trying to be everything to everyone. HN has a very specific group of people in mind.
- khazhoux 5y agoThe political subreddits get political, yes. And hot-topic ones. But the subreddits for your favorite band or hobby are alive and healthy. HN’s culture might be “preserved” but it’s not perfect. Personally, it irks me how humorless this place is. Jokes are often not allowed here.
- Stratoscope 5y agoIt's often said that HN is a humorless place, but it may depend on the kind of humor. You have to know your audience. Some of my highest-voted comments have been pure humor or satire. Here's an example (my two comments in the thread; start at the top for context): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8690893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8690893
- khazhoux 5y agoHeh, yeah, my top comments are also humor. Thing is, I put a ton of effort into crafting a good laugher, and then once in a while it gets kicked and that just makes me sad.
- JaumeGreen 5y agoJokes not being welcomed is one of the reasons I love this site. When jokes are fully accepted they tend to be lower effort than a comment that is thoughtful, and in reddit they tend to get more upvotes than the thoughtful one. This incentives people to write low effort jokes in order to get more fake points. The tendency thus created alienates rational discussion and doesn't bring much information. There are already places in where you can be witty instead of wise, but this is not one of them.
- modeless 5y agoDang, that's a ton of upvotes for the first day. HN really had a leg up at the beginning. I bet a lot of reddit clones never get half as many users as HN had at the start. Funny to see everyone's username green because their accounts were just created. Although I see a few accounts that were created months before launch. Maybe there was internal usage before launch that wasn't archived. Edit: ha, I see the internal usage was archived after all. Here's the real first day, pg's account creation date: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09 Seems like it didn't catch on internally and usage died out after a few days, and then there's pretty much nothing until the public launch.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoI think it wasn’t entirely organic. But I’ve gone back and forth on that over the years. I remember I arrived there from reading pg’s essays, which linked to it. So it’s possible pg’s essays really were that popular back then.
- aspenmayer 5y agoI remember seeing his essays on Digg before it cratered and I moved to Reddit.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoThis is mistaken, sort of. The first day was prior to this by many months. The “past” link doesn’t let you get to it unless you manually edit the url. Think of it like a secret Easter egg. I’m on mobile but maybe I’ll do it later. Or one of you could claim the honor of discovering and sharing it. Initially I suspected that all the people on the actual-first-day weren’t actually people — that pg seeded HN during its early days, much like Reddit, with multiple personas that only seemed real at a glance. But now I think pg emailed a link to all@ycombinator.com and those initial users were the people from the 2005 batch. Then they collectively lost interest (which accounts for the multi month gap) at which point pg made it public as Startup News. I would give a hint on how to find the real first day, but I think I like leaving it as an open puzzle. As a hint, pay close attention to the URLs on the page that this submission points to.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Semaphor 5y agoLooks like this is it: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09 Anything earlier gives HN didn’t exist yet.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoYou win the prize! The casual conversation between pg and sama on the top link is interesting. Also neat that Sam was like 17 at the time. I didn’t know the “HN didn’t exist yet” error. That’s neat, because it implies that this page was intended to be a secret Easter egg, rather than it being a bug. The last interesting tidbit is to go forward starting from that day, and pay close attention to how rapidly organic interest in the site went to zero. It’s astonishing that Startup News didn’t suffer the same fate; it’s the hardest part of launching something like HN. I still 40% suspect that lots of the early activity was artificial, and that real users eventually supplanted the artificial activity. pg once alluded to a “secret sauce”, and I think it was as simple as “keep the front page fresh and interesting each day,” which absolutely requires manual intervention. So the secret sauce seems likely to be something along the lines of “have a big backlog of interesting links, then automatically submit them and give them a few artificial upvotes each day.” I’ll admit, I’m probably more obsessed with HN’s early days than I should be. But it’s such a pleasing example of Lisp proving its value that I can’t help it.
- guiambros 5y agoSadly, 15 out of 30 stories now have broken links. Please remember to make your regular donation to the Internet Archive.
- 6510 5y agoIts our collective badge of shame. Where are the ancient texts? With a different mind set we could have a mobile device with the first x years of internet preloaded. I kinda like that theme: There are lots of things that could have happened with a different mind set. The network before Eternal September was rather revolutionary on its own. If there is anything to learn for me it is that those who had the guts to think big never went big enough. In the end everything is politics. Programmers [like many other fields] like to live in denial there so the closest thing to a constructive effort was the pirate party which did nothing. We gave the world corporate monstrosities that lobby out of self interest. Who cares if your brain falls out.
- keewee7 5y agoAnd please remember to make good old server-rendered websites that can be archived by the Internet Archive.
- capableweb 5y agoIn general I guess you can say that server-rendered websites are easier to assume they are archivable, but that doesn't mean a bit of client-side scripting will break the archiving process. If the scripts are also fetched (and not relying on 3rd party domains), the fetching and rendering process should work the same as long as the UI doesn't depend on API responses. Lightweight scripting, especially done within the <script> tags of the page, will work perfectly fine for most archiving software. Keep in mind all of them already fetch data from <img> tags, and most fetch 1st origin <script> src's as well.
- hansel_der 5y agoif your collection of letters and images is unviewable without some modifiying logic, you're doing it wrong.
- edf13 5y agoI see Web 2.0 makes an appearance… today it’s 3.0
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- djxfade 5y agoWhat's the deal with this one person commenting "This is why we can't have nice things." on every post?
- capableweb 5y agoLooks like good ol' fashion spam. If you turn off showdead (which is off by default), it's effectively deleted already, so give that a try.
- edgyquant 5y agoAppears to be a hacker/troll. They commented on hundreds of posts with the same comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=454679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=454679
- capableweb 5y agoPersonally, I think the second day ("second" day as in the one allowed by the UI, not the "real" second day as sillysaurusx outlined) is much more interesting (https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-20 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-20) as it also features "Why we made this site (ycombinator.com)" (https://web.archive.org/web/20070305045009/https://ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070305045009/https://ycombinat... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=189) but when I made that submission, it got no traction (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21206516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21206516) so happy to see that people care more about the "first" day :)
- mprovost 5y agoSeeing all of those "first name" usernames (eric, matt, greg, justin, ...) reminds me of when my first email address at my university was "matt" because it was on a VAX and almost nobody had accounts. It would be interesting to measure the maturity (half-life?) of a site by the complexity of usernames as all the obvious ones are snatched up. I joined HN pretty early but unfortunately used my standard username instead of grabbing a short one.
- krallja 5y agoOne of the sure-fire signals of a startup getting old and successful is when the IT department declares a standardized account name template for new hires like firstinitial.lastname(.optional_number). So far I’ve only worked at places where I could get firstname@company.tld, which says something about my preferences, I think.
- wyclif 5y agoYep, and you could often tell who was a real old timer (or maybe who had institutional clout in the company) by who got to keep their firstname@company.tld instead of being forced to change to the standard naming template, which could create a lot of problems with longstanding workflows (in my case it has always been (mylastname@company.tld).
- tmvnty 5y agoThe first day should be 2006-10-09 reference: https://hnhd.io/ https://hnhd.io/
- mdolon 5y agoWhat were the other sites HN users would hang out at back then? Slashdot? Google groups and listservs? Was HN really the first true "community" for this audience?
- pfarrell 5y agoFor me: Slashdot, though the peak days were behind it Digg, which would be fun for a while still Blogs like the old new thing, and Joel Spolsky Del.icio.us and Stumbleupon and (I’ll admit it) Fark
- wyclif 5y agoI had a del.icio.us account since the beginning until it got sold, but it wasn't really a forum or hangout. It was a link aggregator. I still have a Slashdot account, but I can't remember the last time I logged in there. Peak Slashdot was really 1998 for me, when I was working in my first IT job and would check it as much as 5x a day. By 2011, it had declined greatly in readership because of the combined effects of Twitter, Reddit, and HN.
- mdolon 5y agoAh yes, Digg! Definitely spent a lot of time on there hunting for tech news.
- buttocks 5y agoCan't help but notice that two of the frontpage articles feature "balls" in their titles. Sincerely, -buttocks
- wildmanx 5y ago2 of the top-10 entries feature balls in their headings. Didn't age well.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- taurusnoises 5y agoMultiple mentions of "having the balls"
- EastSmith 5y agoSo many broken links.
- wyclif 5y agoThere's a real startup opportunity to fix the linkrot problem, but nobody has found product/market fit possible.