5 ms·

I don’t know if this is a self selecting group on HN but I’d think a disproportionate amount of us read it growing up. Even the sections that talked about cool

by atonse 3y ago

I don’t know if this is a self selecting group on HN but I’d think a disproportionate amount of us read it growing up. Even the sections that talked about cool (and futuristic) stuff were great. This and Popular Mechanics, I’m not sure how we got them in our house in India growing up but I fondly remember both of them. Have we lost something? Where will future hackers get their inspiration from? Maybe a million different YouTube channels and proliferation of cheap ways to learn and tinker are fueling the next generation. Let’s hope so.

sneak 3y ago
More people are reading more things more often than ever before. Indie hackers (as well as anyone else) can now cheaply publish their own magazines to the globe. I don’t think we lost something other than paper and postage. Pretty soon (in the scheme of things) they’ll stop printing books and paper money too. (I say this as a vinyl and book collector. It’s just facts. Our great grandchildren will not use physical books.)
- nerdponx 3y ago
  I don't think it will disappear entirely. Just like vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CDs, some people deliberately choose to buy dead tree media for one reason or another. Maybe print magazines will go first, and maybe print newspapers at some point in the future, but actual books will probably never go away.
  - HomeDeLaPot 3y ago
    Yes. Books might go the same way the horse has gone. No longer dominant, but still occupying niches.
  - sneak 3y ago
    Vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CDs will also be unused in 100 years. Cassettes and VHS will by then be unreadable, just as most floppies are now. Hell, in 100 years, there won’t even be the mp3 codec anymore. You don’t need to tell me that people deliberately choose dead trees; I am one of them: I collect books and have more than most collectors. Same goes for vinyl. The writing is on the wall, however. In 100 years it won’t be a thing, just as fountain pens and wax seals aren’t today. Yes, they will still exist, and yes, people into whatever type of historical reenactment that is will still have them, but there will be no industry around them like there is now.
    - mfragin 3y ago
      Yeah I understand your point, but vinyl is kinda sacred. I mean, of all the things you mentioned, it's by far the most likely to still be usable in the future. Even in a post-apocalyptic world people might figure out how to play vinyl. MP3s? Not a chance. Full disclosure: I never liked cassettes. Oh, and I made the mistake of choosing Beta over VHS....
    - rchaud 3y ago
      > Cassettes and VHS will by then be unreadable, just as most floppies are now. And yet, the longevity of a humble cassette tape far exceeds that of the average website. Websites ("digital products" if we must) change, they delete old/offtopic articles for SEO reasons, they change designs to fit in more ads, their owner ship changes hands, the image links break...the list is endless. There are Gizmodo articles from < 10yrs filled with blank blocks with an "image not found" message in them. At least the cassette's changes are due to physical degradation only.
- echelon 3y ago
  > I don’t think we lost something other than paper and postage. Popular Science was nostalgic. It was a callback to an earlier time, and it tracked within its pages the series of changes led to today. It's like losing a species to extinction, albeit not quite as drastic or irrecoverable. I remember the magazine fondly. Once I got into my later teens, it felt a little too general audience for my taste. But it always made me wonder about the possibilities of science and engineering. Jetpack futures, cloud cities, and millennium ships. > Indie hackers (as well as anyone else) can now cheaply publish their own magazines to the globe. It won't be long and even blogs and news websites will see the margin set to zero. LLMs will ingest and rephrase (with accuracy) all kinds of content. There will be no money in running CNN or the New York Times. > Our great grandchildren will not use physical books. It's sad to think that the libraries will get garbage collected, but the books they store will be little more than anachronisms. Perhaps they can be turned into public internet cafes.
  - JackFr 3y ago
    I had an argument with my wife about funding our public libraries. (We live in NYC which I believe supports 3 out of the top 10 public library systems in the country. Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan maintain separate library systems.) I am happy for my tax dollars to support the system, but the bottom line is that branch libraries exist as a free, under-resourced Internet cafe for the indigent. That might be a good use for the public fisc, but the librarians and books are completely ignored. We have three children the youngest of whom just finished high school and we were forced to admit none of us has been in our neighborhood branch in more than 8 years. At the same time I haves seen two exhibits at the main reading room in the past 18 months.
- bawolff 3y ago
  > Pretty soon (in the scheme of things) they’ll stop printing books and paper money too. That seems unlikely to me. E-books have really terrible UX. Paper books aren't going anywhere until that is fixed.
  - dumbfounder 3y ago
    I can't carry a library of 1000 physical books in my pocket and pull them out while on the toilet. I think you have it backward.
    - bigstrat2003 3y ago
      That's not exactly useful. The ability to read a book without any electrical charge, however, is.
      - dumbfounder 3y ago
        Being able to pull out any book, anywhere, any time, is not useful? What happens at night in your electricityless world, are you reading by candlelight? Or you can just light the page you just read on fire, that way your book is also your fuel.
      - nl 3y ago
        As someone who reads quickly a lot on planes (and sees a lot of others doing the same) the ability to have multiple books on a Kindle is much more important than lack of access to electricity for a few days. (I also have a large physical book library.)
      - willywanker 3y ago
        e-readers can go for days to weeks on a full charge depending on how often you use them. Definitely much longer than the average smartphone.
    - hattmall 3y ago
      But that's not really how books work though. I don't ever really need to read more than 1 book at a time. I'm all for e-readers, have a couple and use them, but it's a cost saving measure. I would vastly prefer physical books for the interface.
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  I am reading The Shallows, and I am not so sure. Having replaced my paper books with iPad Kindle versions years ago, I am seriously thinking of going back to paper. https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750 https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...
  - sneak 3y ago
    I read books off of an SD card inserted into an e-ink device that has never had the wifi turned on. The problems with internet overuse are orthogonal.
nerdponx 3y ago
I loved Pop Sci growing up, but in hindsight I felt like the content was already on the decline by the early 2000s. That, or it was never that great and I was just getting more aware as I got older. I remember that most of the things I read about never even came close to reality, and that was pretty disappointing. It seemed like they were more interested in writing speculative sci-fi than reporting on the current state of scientific research. It just wasn't interesting. The only thing that really caught my attention was coverage of the X Prize and Spaceship One. That stuff was cool because it existed in real life, it wasn't just a bunch of artist renderings about what the year 2030 might look like. Can't speak for Popular Mechanics. I probably should have been reading that all along.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  I remember excitedly reading their early articles on e-ink, but that only materialized in a very niche way decades later.
- gumby 3y ago
  > I loved Pop Sci growing up, but in hindsight I felt like the content was already on the decline by the early 2000s. That, or it was never that great and I was just getting more aware as I got older. I remember realizing it was mostly bull and weak articles when I was about 13…around 1977. Didn’t stop me from reading it but I felt it was more SF speculation from some current science news rather than actual science. That was OK.
  - mauvehaus 3y ago
    Turns out sci-fi speculation is more marketable than sci-reality. I still remember thinking how cool it would be if the Lockheed Venturestar came to fruition. Like, Wow! Would that have been cool or what? Maybe it's ok that it's a lot of speculative stuff after all? Maybe there's something to be said for reading about the wild-ass ventures that are high-risk and high reward. Incremental progress gets you a long ways, but the occasional moonshot can really move the needle. Watching the two Falcon Heavy boosters land simultaneously was the kind of thing you feel like you'd have read about 10 years previously in Popular Science
jvanderbot 3y ago
I longed for the days of snipping programs from magazines, or reading how deep internals were implemented in some computer or technology. My whole life I felt like I was born to late to be part of a hacker movement. Now I have GPT-4 and finally my curiosity can be satisfied quickly. The world got so small again. I feel like I can _build_ again.
- ericskiff 3y ago
  This sums up my optimism about AI. I finally have a patient, infallible teacher without a direct agenda to game SEO to sell ads or a product. It feels like the earliest days of the web when I consumed every page of howstuffworks.com and surfed webrings out of curiosity.
pwg 3y ago
> I don’t know if this is a self selecting group on HN but I’d think a disproportionate amount of us read it growing up. I am a member of that group. This was one of my favorite magazines growing up. And I do have to say I felt a twinge of sadness to see this article on HN just now.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  Count me here. I received a subscription to them and Popular Mechanics in 2010 for my birthday. I’m still subscribed to PopMech but the writing is on the wall with the bimonthly releases.
- nytesky 3y ago
  I remember reading over breakfast cereal in the morning, and I won a quiz bowl competition because I had read about buckminster fullerene (buckyball form of carbon).
nyokodo 3y ago
> Have we lost something? Where will future hackers get their inspiration from? Maybe a million different YouTube channels and proliferation of cheap ways to learn and tinker are fueling the next generation. Let’s hope so. I can watch rocket launches live streamed on a handheld device, then consume expert or very well informed layman analysis shortly afterwards. There’s probably 10 substacks for every scientific and engineering specialization written by experts. I can look up primary sources, even preprints, and aggregate a range of expert opinions on them. I can watch a million impeccably animated explainer videos on any topic. It’s harder to choose sources due to the plethora of choices, and the printed medium is tactile and nice, but in practically every other way now is vastly better!
- musicale 3y ago
  > It’s harder to choose sources due to the plethora of choices That's sort of why print magazines are/were helpful and approachable - they're an easy entry point with curation, discoverability, and an editorial staff. They're also somewhat self-contained rather than being an endless rabbit hole of attention-grabbing links (those generally being limited to the cover.) Arguably the best thing about HN and good aggregation blogs is that they provide curation and discoverability as well as some degree of editorial commentary. And hopefully they're not managed by attention-maximizing algorithms. The abundance of options and content - even if you were to limit yourself to a specific category, such as peer-reviewed articles in a particular field, or a particular medium, such as youtube videos - from online ources can be completely overwhelming.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
Popular Science, Popular Mechanics — even just the covers of the magazines exuded a kind of optimism. It was going to be a brave new future ... you can learn to do this yourself ... you can understand it ... you can make this in your garage... Unfortunately the future kind of caught up with it. Or maybe as an adult when I became an engineer some of the mystique of tech evaporated when it became my job five days a week? But in the 70's and 80's when I was perhaps of a more impressionable age (or when maybe the future itself was more measurable) it fueled my curiosity and did impart a kind of optimism that will be missed.
- colechristensen 3y ago
  I got the impression that the quality was on a long slow decline from initially nearly professional science quality articles to something not quite as bad as the modern discovery channel. Surely the mystique evaporates for “popular” publications targeted at people with less experience, but that just means you need to level up what you consume. Physics Today is something to look into today. The media i want to consume is mostly of the “this was written for people on the level of graduate students, but ones in a different field”. I can’t find a lot of it
  - bart_spoon 3y ago
    This has been true for a lot of publications I used to like to read. Wired, Time, Sports Illustrated all are much, much worse today than I remember them being 20 years ago. I don’t know if that’s me or a genuine change in their quality.
    - swells34 3y ago
      This is quite in line with what I remember as well (and have verified by looking through many old editions recently). I think this is just the outcome of modern business practices in the US. It's a race to the bottom of quality, while making that bottom line top out.
      - 3y ago
geerlingguy 3y ago
There are a few magazines by (I think?) the publishing arm of Raspberry Pi: Hackspace and MagPi... they are a little pricey and mostly cover small electronics and programming-related projects, but they're in a similar vein. I wish there were still some decent magazines like these I remember reading through in my youth, but one big challenge for the publishers is the "maker" / "mechanic" these days is much more limited to hobbyists. In my Dad's generation, you kinda had to have a certain level of mechanical ability if you ever wanted to own a house and car/bike and not live in squalor. Nowadays, if you even have the money for a home, it seems like 99% of things are made to be replaced, and for anything that needs fixing, it's impossible to fix it yourself without some pretty strong technical abilities (and a lot of time/patience). There's also a lot more emphasis on practicality, and less on sci-fi-type aspirational content in general.
- basch 3y ago
  I can recommend BBC Science Focus as a half way decent replacement for Popular Science. https://www.sciencefocus.com/magazine https://www.sciencefocus.com/magazine watch for it on sale at https://www.discountmags.com/magazine/bbc-focus https://www.discountmags.com/magazine/bbc-focus it’s also free with an Apple News or Bundle subscription. https://apple.news/TUNNn0U24SRC5LF2bxqxDNA https://apple.news/TUNNn0U24SRC5LF2bxqxDNA

by atonse 3y ago

sneak 3y ago

More people are reading more things more often than ever before. Indie hackers (as well as anyone else) can now cheaply publish their own magazines to the globe. I don’t think we lost something other than paper and postage. Pretty soon (in the scheme of things) they’ll stop printing books and paper money too. (I say this as a vinyl and book collector. It’s just facts. Our great grandchildren will not use physical books.)

nerdponx 3y ago
I don't think it will disappear entirely. Just like vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CDs, some people deliberately choose to buy dead tree media for one reason or another. Maybe print magazines will go first, and maybe print newspapers at some point in the future, but actual books will probably never go away.
- HomeDeLaPot 3y ago
  Yes. Books might go the same way the horse has gone. No longer dominant, but still occupying niches.
- sneak 3y ago
  Vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CDs will also be unused in 100 years. Cassettes and VHS will by then be unreadable, just as most floppies are now. Hell, in 100 years, there won’t even be the mp3 codec anymore. You don’t need to tell me that people deliberately choose dead trees; I am one of them: I collect books and have more than most collectors. Same goes for vinyl. The writing is on the wall, however. In 100 years it won’t be a thing, just as fountain pens and wax seals aren’t today. Yes, they will still exist, and yes, people into whatever type of historical reenactment that is will still have them, but there will be no industry around them like there is now.
  - mfragin 3y ago
    Yeah I understand your point, but vinyl is kinda sacred. I mean, of all the things you mentioned, it's by far the most likely to still be usable in the future. Even in a post-apocalyptic world people might figure out how to play vinyl. MP3s? Not a chance. Full disclosure: I never liked cassettes. Oh, and I made the mistake of choosing Beta over VHS....
  - rchaud 3y ago
    > Cassettes and VHS will by then be unreadable, just as most floppies are now. And yet, the longevity of a humble cassette tape far exceeds that of the average website. Websites ("digital products" if we must) change, they delete old/offtopic articles for SEO reasons, they change designs to fit in more ads, their owner ship changes hands, the image links break...the list is endless. There are Gizmodo articles from < 10yrs filled with blank blocks with an "image not found" message in them. At least the cassette's changes are due to physical degradation only.
echelon 3y ago
> I don’t think we lost something other than paper and postage. Popular Science was nostalgic. It was a callback to an earlier time, and it tracked within its pages the series of changes led to today. It's like losing a species to extinction, albeit not quite as drastic or irrecoverable. I remember the magazine fondly. Once I got into my later teens, it felt a little too general audience for my taste. But it always made me wonder about the possibilities of science and engineering. Jetpack futures, cloud cities, and millennium ships. > Indie hackers (as well as anyone else) can now cheaply publish their own magazines to the globe. It won't be long and even blogs and news websites will see the margin set to zero. LLMs will ingest and rephrase (with accuracy) all kinds of content. There will be no money in running CNN or the New York Times. > Our great grandchildren will not use physical books. It's sad to think that the libraries will get garbage collected, but the books they store will be little more than anachronisms. Perhaps they can be turned into public internet cafes.
- JackFr 3y ago
  I had an argument with my wife about funding our public libraries. (We live in NYC which I believe supports 3 out of the top 10 public library systems in the country. Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan maintain separate library systems.) I am happy for my tax dollars to support the system, but the bottom line is that branch libraries exist as a free, under-resourced Internet cafe for the indigent. That might be a good use for the public fisc, but the librarians and books are completely ignored. We have three children the youngest of whom just finished high school and we were forced to admit none of us has been in our neighborhood branch in more than 8 years. At the same time I haves seen two exhibits at the main reading room in the past 18 months.
bawolff 3y ago
> Pretty soon (in the scheme of things) they’ll stop printing books and paper money too. That seems unlikely to me. E-books have really terrible UX. Paper books aren't going anywhere until that is fixed.
- dumbfounder 3y ago
  I can't carry a library of 1000 physical books in my pocket and pull them out while on the toilet. I think you have it backward.
  - bigstrat2003 3y ago
    That's not exactly useful. The ability to read a book without any electrical charge, however, is.
    - dumbfounder 3y ago
      Being able to pull out any book, anywhere, any time, is not useful? What happens at night in your electricityless world, are you reading by candlelight? Or you can just light the page you just read on fire, that way your book is also your fuel.
    - nl 3y ago
      As someone who reads quickly a lot on planes (and sees a lot of others doing the same) the ability to have multiple books on a Kindle is much more important than lack of access to electricity for a few days. (I also have a large physical book library.)
    - willywanker 3y ago
      e-readers can go for days to weeks on a full charge depending on how often you use them. Definitely much longer than the average smartphone.
  - hattmall 3y ago
    But that's not really how books work though. I don't ever really need to read more than 1 book at a time. I'm all for e-readers, have a couple and use them, but it's a cost saving measure. I would vastly prefer physical books for the interface.
renegade-otter 3y ago
I am reading The Shallows, and I am not so sure. Having replaced my paper books with iPad Kindle versions years ago, I am seriously thinking of going back to paper. https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750 https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...
- sneak 3y ago
  I read books off of an SD card inserted into an e-ink device that has never had the wifi turned on. The problems with internet overuse are orthogonal.

nerdponx 3y ago

I loved Pop Sci growing up, but in hindsight I felt like the content was already on the decline by the early 2000s. That, or it was never that great and I was just getting more aware as I got older. I remember that most of the things I read about never even came close to reality, and that was pretty disappointing. It seemed like they were more interested in writing speculative sci-fi than reporting on the current state of scientific research. It just wasn't interesting. The only thing that really caught my attention was coverage of the X Prize and Spaceship One. That stuff was cool because it existed in real life, it wasn't just a bunch of artist renderings about what the year 2030 might look like. Can't speak for Popular Mechanics. I probably should have been reading that all along.

Terr_ 3y ago
I remember excitedly reading their early articles on e-ink, but that only materialized in a very niche way decades later.
gumby 3y ago
> I loved Pop Sci growing up, but in hindsight I felt like the content was already on the decline by the early 2000s. That, or it was never that great and I was just getting more aware as I got older. I remember realizing it was mostly bull and weak articles when I was about 13…around 1977. Didn’t stop me from reading it but I felt it was more SF speculation from some current science news rather than actual science. That was OK.
- mauvehaus 3y ago
  Turns out sci-fi speculation is more marketable than sci-reality. I still remember thinking how cool it would be if the Lockheed Venturestar came to fruition. Like, Wow! Would that have been cool or what? Maybe it's ok that it's a lot of speculative stuff after all? Maybe there's something to be said for reading about the wild-ass ventures that are high-risk and high reward. Incremental progress gets you a long ways, but the occasional moonshot can really move the needle. Watching the two Falcon Heavy boosters land simultaneously was the kind of thing you feel like you'd have read about 10 years previously in Popular Science

jvanderbot 3y ago

I longed for the days of snipping programs from magazines, or reading how deep internals were implemented in some computer or technology. My whole life I felt like I was born to late to be part of a hacker movement. Now I have GPT-4 and finally my curiosity can be satisfied quickly. The world got so small again. I feel like I can _build_ again.

ericskiff 3y ago
This sums up my optimism about AI. I finally have a patient, infallible teacher without a direct agenda to game SEO to sell ads or a product. It feels like the earliest days of the web when I consumed every page of howstuffworks.com and surfed webrings out of curiosity.

pwg 3y ago

> I don’t know if this is a self selecting group on HN but I’d think a disproportionate amount of us read it growing up. I am a member of that group. This was one of my favorite magazines growing up. And I do have to say I felt a twinge of sadness to see this article on HN just now.

gjsman-1000 3y ago
Count me here. I received a subscription to them and Popular Mechanics in 2010 for my birthday. I’m still subscribed to PopMech but the writing is on the wall with the bimonthly releases.
nytesky 3y ago
I remember reading over breakfast cereal in the morning, and I won a quiz bowl competition because I had read about buckminster fullerene (buckyball form of carbon).

nyokodo 3y ago

> Have we lost something? Where will future hackers get their inspiration from? Maybe a million different YouTube channels and proliferation of cheap ways to learn and tinker are fueling the next generation. Let’s hope so. I can watch rocket launches live streamed on a handheld device, then consume expert or very well informed layman analysis shortly afterwards. There’s probably 10 substacks for every scientific and engineering specialization written by experts. I can look up primary sources, even preprints, and aggregate a range of expert opinions on them. I can watch a million impeccably animated explainer videos on any topic. It’s harder to choose sources due to the plethora of choices, and the printed medium is tactile and nice, but in practically every other way now is vastly better!

musicale 3y ago
> It’s harder to choose sources due to the plethora of choices That's sort of why print magazines are/were helpful and approachable - they're an easy entry point with curation, discoverability, and an editorial staff. They're also somewhat self-contained rather than being an endless rabbit hole of attention-grabbing links (those generally being limited to the cover.) Arguably the best thing about HN and good aggregation blogs is that they provide curation and discoverability as well as some degree of editorial commentary. And hopefully they're not managed by attention-maximizing algorithms. The abundance of options and content - even if you were to limit yourself to a specific category, such as peer-reviewed articles in a particular field, or a particular medium, such as youtube videos - from online ources can be completely overwhelming.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

Popular Science, Popular Mechanics — even just the covers of the magazines exuded a kind of optimism. It was going to be a brave new future ... you can learn to do this yourself ... you can understand it ... you can make this in your garage... Unfortunately the future kind of caught up with it. Or maybe as an adult when I became an engineer some of the mystique of tech evaporated when it became my job five days a week? But in the 70's and 80's when I was perhaps of a more impressionable age (or when maybe the future itself was more measurable) it fueled my curiosity and did impart a kind of optimism that will be missed.

colechristensen 3y ago
I got the impression that the quality was on a long slow decline from initially nearly professional science quality articles to something not quite as bad as the modern discovery channel. Surely the mystique evaporates for “popular” publications targeted at people with less experience, but that just means you need to level up what you consume. Physics Today is something to look into today. The media i want to consume is mostly of the “this was written for people on the level of graduate students, but ones in a different field”. I can’t find a lot of it
- bart_spoon 3y ago
  This has been true for a lot of publications I used to like to read. Wired, Time, Sports Illustrated all are much, much worse today than I remember them being 20 years ago. I don’t know if that’s me or a genuine change in their quality.
  - swells34 3y ago
    This is quite in line with what I remember as well (and have verified by looking through many old editions recently). I think this is just the outcome of modern business practices in the US. It's a race to the bottom of quality, while making that bottom line top out.
    - 3y ago

geerlingguy 3y ago

There are a few magazines by (I think?) the publishing arm of Raspberry Pi: Hackspace and MagPi... they are a little pricey and mostly cover small electronics and programming-related projects, but they're in a similar vein. I wish there were still some decent magazines like these I remember reading through in my youth, but one big challenge for the publishers is the "maker" / "mechanic" these days is much more limited to hobbyists. In my Dad's generation, you kinda had to have a certain level of mechanical ability if you ever wanted to own a house and car/bike and not live in squalor. Nowadays, if you even have the money for a home, it seems like 99% of things are made to be replaced, and for anything that needs fixing, it's impossible to fix it yourself without some pretty strong technical abilities (and a lot of time/patience). There's also a lot more emphasis on practicality, and less on sci-fi-type aspirational content in general.

basch 3y ago
I can recommend BBC Science Focus as a half way decent replacement for Popular Science. https://www.sciencefocus.com/magazine https://www.sciencefocus.com/magazine watch for it on sale at https://www.discountmags.com/magazine/bbc-focus https://www.discountmags.com/magazine/bbc-focus it’s also free with an Apple News or Bundle subscription. https://apple.news/TUNNn0U24SRC5LF2bxqxDNA https://apple.news/TUNNn0U24SRC5LF2bxqxDNA