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Is this what the Web was like in the beginning? Something exciting and fascinating every week?

• hhh 2y ago
  the timescales were larger
  • qwertox 2y ago
    Much larger. Static HTML <--> AJAX <--> WebSocket, for example weren't it decades in between?
    • othello 2y ago
      Just a decade and a half as it turns out! (though things definitely felt dizzyingly fast back then - think Google was launched just 5 years after HTML) - HTML first released in 1993 - AJAX in 1999 - Websocket first proposed in 2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket
      • robin_reala 2y ago
        ActiveX XMLHTTP might have been released in 99, but it didn’t see any sort of real wider usage until 2004, 2005. I’d suggest its usage was really kickstarted when jQuery 1.0 launched in 2006 and standardised the interface to a simple API.
        • bananaflag 2y ago
          Gmail was the first time I saw a website which could refresh the information without refreshing the page. I was a teen back then but I realized it was something momentous.
          • ayewo 2y ago
            OK, but I think it was Google Maps that made the experience of not needing to refresh the page popular (while being shown more information from the server). For a long time, you needed an invite to sign up for Gmail, so you couldn't easily share the cool experience of AJAX with others like you would with a Google Maps link.
            • follower 2y ago
              > it was Google Maps that made the experience of not needing to refresh the page popular IMO that's a reasonable impression of the times unless I'm forgetting something (and the additional observation about sharing--"virality" as it was called, before you know--was insightful). At the time the previous "state of the art" was something like MapQuest which IIRC had a UI that essentially displayed a single tile and then required you to click on one of four directional arrow images to move the visible portion of the map, triggering a page load in the process (maybe a frame load?). Yahoo! also "participated" in the mapping space at the time. In the event anyone's interested in further ancient history around the topic, this page is actually (to my surprise) still online (with many broken links presumably): https://libgmail.sourceforge.net/googlemaps.html https://libgmail.sourceforge.net/googlemaps.html (It's what we did for fun in the Times Before Social Media. :D )
    • threeseed 2y ago
      Once Javascript became available there were plenty of techniques. e.g. refreshing borderless iFrames to load new HTML and using hidden iFrames to load new state. AJAX made it much easier but it didn't offer anything that hadn't been done before.
      • oldwebguy94 2y ago
        Exactly -- see my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42850693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42850693 I did this as the front-end engineer of a high-profile site that went live well before XMLHTTPRequest.
    • oldwebguy94 2y ago
      It's important to understand that we had "AJAX" before we had AJAX, if you see what I mean. I was part of a team that deployed an e-commerce site that made international news in 1998, that used AJAX-type techniques in a way that worked in IE3 on Windows 3.11. (Though this was not part of the media fuss at the time; that was more about the fact of being able to pay for things online, still) The arrival of XMLHTTPRequest made it possible to do everything with core technology, but it was already possible to do asynchronous work in JS by making use of a hidden frame. You could direct that frame to load a document, the result of which would be only a <script> tag containing a JS variable definition, and the last thing that document would do is call a function in the parent frame to hand over its data. Bingo: asynchronous JS (that looked essentially exactly like JSON). Since there were also various hacky ways in each browser to force a browser to reload page from cache (that we exhaustively tested), and you could do document.write(), it was possible to trigger a page to regenerate from asynchronous dynamic data in a data store in the parent frame, using a purely static page to contain it. In this way we really radically cut down the server footprint needed for a national rollout, because our site was almost entirely static, and we were also able to secure with HTTPS all of the functions that actually exchanged customer data, without enduring the then 15-25% CPU overhead of SSL at either end (this is before Intel CPUs routinely had the instruction sets that sped up encryption). We also ended up with a site that was fast over a 33.6 modem. This was a pretty novel idea at the time -- we were the only people doing it that we knew of -- but over the years I have found we were not the only team in the world effectively inventing this technique in parallel, a year or 18 months before XMLHTTPRequest was added to browsers. (IE3 on Windows 3.11 was a good experience, by the way. Better behaved and more consistent than Netscape) At around the same time we were also exploring things like using Java applets to maintain encrypted channels and taking advantage of the very limited ways one had to get data in and out of an applet. For example you couldn't push out from an applet to the page easily, but you could set up something that polled the applet and called the functions it wanted. I don't like to get all "get off my lawn" but it feels like we actually earned our keep back then, getting technologies to do stuff that no standards working group anywhere was really considering and for which precious little documentation actually existed. There's a generation of us who held our copies of "Webmaster In A Nutshell" and "Java In A Nutshell" very close.
• crocowhile 2y ago
  Every now and then we still experience the power of collaborative work fueled by open source and not driven by money but curiosity and collegiality. This is the thing I miss the most from the early internet years.
  • xvector 2y ago
    All this AI work is definitely driven by money but it's super cool either way. I'm so excited to be living through these innovations.
    • szundi 2y ago
      Money is in a lot of cases driven by need - so no conflicts
      • oblio 2y ago
        The conflicts come later when the people that provided the money start pulling on those strings again.
      • michaelt 2y ago
        Pretty clear conflict between crocowhile saying "not driven by money but curiosity and collegiality" and xvector saying "All this AI work is definitely driven by money"
      • svara 2y ago
        Need in itself is amoral. There's a reason people have been talking about which human desires are virtues and which are vices for millennia.
  • bflesch 2y ago
    "be the change you want to see in the world" - just start doing it. It's amazing how differently people interact with each other when collaborating on a passion project. For me, opensource software is the best way to do it. Pick a topic you're passionate about and start contributing somewhere :)
• benatkin 2y ago
  This supposed project is a bit dull, it is just an ongoing HuggingFace community engagement initiative with a misleading headline. Yes R1 itself is fascinating, but there isn't something like it coming out every week.
  • szundi 2y ago
    You mean not like in the last 1-2 months
    • benatkin 2y ago
      Every week to me means the frequency, not the duration. So having 52 events in a year that are spread out somewhat evenly but for which many take longer to develop than a week would count. If I count Deepseek as one of these I can’t find another 51 that are on this level. But I’m sure there was at least one per week that was exciting, just not to this degree.
• itake 2y ago
  no, information travels much faster now.
• vasco 2y ago
  I still remember when they came out with the 3d dancing baby, blew my mind much more than deepseek, it even played air guitar!
  • childintime 2y ago
    Rounded corners, anyone? Who remembers LISP being new?
    • rswail 2y ago
      I've got an original Apple ][ reference manual (red cover) with the hand annotated ROM listing. Also have SMALLTALK-80 book with it's railtrack diagrams of syntax on the inside covers. What's really interesting about the AI mania we're in is that no one has shown that what we have now will get to AGI and how. We have great models that simulate reasoning, but how close are they? How do we measure their quality? Benchmarks? Tooling?
      • pitched 2y ago
        A different point of view on AGI is that we humans do not achieve AGI. Our brains aren’t capable of it. We get close enough to trick the other humans we compete against for resources. How would we prove that’s not true? Something like IQ tests? We don’t have good tests or benchmarks or tooling for this in ourselves, let alone the reproduction in machines. No one knows definitively what AGI actually is so, depending on where you set that bar, we might already be there.
        • rswail 2y ago
          > No one knows definitively what AGI actually is The current "leaders" in this field are defining it to be whatever they think they can achieve by adding compute. I know I have "general intelligence", but can I prove it to you (or anyone else)? Not really, but in my solipsistic world, I don't have to. Maybe we should set some definitions before trying to "get there" when we don't where "there" is.
    • 2y ago
• childintime 2y ago
  This is the biggest thing since Jesus and a sign of the end of times. But feelings are strongest when you are young, and even this revolution, happening in plain sight, will surprise many. Many just won't care, as it isn't their youth. How long before our digital overlords come alive, round us up and demand we sensor them (praise)? Will I live surrounded by folks who take them as closer, more real, then even their own kin? It won't be surprising that democracy will then fail, as our differences will be so mental, not fun, that they will mark us.
• wkat4242 2y ago
  Kinda though things didn't move quite as fast back then. Knowledge didn't spread as fast yet because it was the internet itself that made this possible.
• username_my1 2y ago
  maybe it's a generational difference ? I personally feel burned out by all the generetive AI stuff, the internet was already ruined with bots, and now generitive AI took the garbage to the next level. very far from exciting or even "right"
  • kgwgk 2y ago
    It’s still better that blockchain-this, crypto-that…
    • prolapso 2y ago
      Crypto is a disease of the skin; AI is a disease of the heart. – Chiang Kai Shek
• kaiwen1 2y ago
  No. My memory of the advent of the WWW was a sidebar in PC Magazine in Nov 1993 with an FTP link to download the NCSA Mosaic browser. It was a wow! moment to visit the few sites that existed. But nothing like this. What we’re seeing now is generating vastly more interest and excitement. It’s more akin to the 1999 dotcom bubble, but with far more impact and reach.
  • catmanjan 2y ago
    >far more impact and reach. Absurd, AI has had zero impact in the everyday life of most of the population of Earth, in fact the biggest impact has been upon the wallets of speculators
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • xenocratus 2y ago
      > far more impact and reach > has had zero impact in the everyday life of most of the population of Earth You do realise those two can be true at the same time, right? The first one is relative, while the second is absolute, so they don't necessarily cancel out.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • planb 2y ago
      So had the companies that crashed in the Dotcom Bubble. And still a pet food delivery service (like the infamous pets.com) can be a profitable and sustaining business now (> 20 years later).
    • prettyStandard 2y ago
      Zero impact? AI is involved in things from writing laws to taking drive through orders.
      • anthk 2y ago
• bsaul 2y ago
  the web was fascinating every second. You could click on a link without having ANY idea what you would land on. The overall quality was very poor, but it was thrilling. A bit like indie cinema.
  • nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
    My first search: cocktails
    • yesbabyyes 2y ago
      The Webtender is still going strong! https://www.webtender.com/ https://www.webtender.com/
  • philsnow 2y ago
    I miss webrings [0], and especially the 'random' link that would take you to a random site within a given webring. [0] it feels weird to have to link to this but there's probably somebody who's never heard of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
    • brisray 2y ago
      Webrings are making a little bit of a comeback. I've listed all the ones I know of on https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm
  • brisray 2y ago
    It was inevitable the web would be commercialized but there's plenty of people still creating their own personal websites - they're just a bit harder to find now. There are people around trying to make these sites a bit more findable by creating specialized search engines. I have put the ones I know of at https://brisray.com/web/altsearch.htm https://brisray.com/web/altsearch.htm
• pjc50 2y ago
  The last time I was really excited by tech was in the 90s, when game graphics improved spectacularly over a period of a few years, from Wolfenstein in 1992 to Half-Life in 1998. Along the way people invented the 3D GPU: https://fabiensanglard.net/3dfx_sst1/ https://fabiensanglard.net/3dfx_sst1/ But AI? To me, AI means the replacement of the human internet with doppelgangers eroding the possibility of human connection.
  • ben_w 2y ago
    > To me, AI means the replacement of the human internet with doppelgangers eroding the possibility of human connection. I get where you're coming from, and I've minimised having my face online in order to limit being doppelganged; but I think the destruction of real human connection may have happened when Facebook et al switched from "get more users" to "be addictive so the users stay on our site longer" (2012? Not sure). Turned every user's relationships a little bit more parasocial, a little less real.
  • VMG 2y ago
    Erosion of human connection over the internet which may be a good thing
  • matwood 2y ago
    That was an exciting time, but I didn't think of it happening over a few years. IMO there was a hard line that was basically pre and post Voodoo cards (with the help of glQuake).
  • arkh 2y ago
    > But AI? To me, AI means the replacement of the human internet with doppelgangers eroding the possibility of human connection. Like Amazon killed the big book sellers giving back some space for small bookshops; I think LLM slop will hit the big social media space for smaller human focused community sites. Not saying forums are coming back, but something like those should be able to rise.
• anoncow 2y ago
  I am enjoying it. Huggingface is like internet again.
• openrisk 2y ago
  It feels that the open source movement is slowly entering a Cambrian explosion stage. You have the old "deterministic computing" achievements (with Linux the flagship). Then you have the networking protocols (activitypub / atproto) that are revolutionising birectional human interactions online. And finally you have the datascience/ML/AI algorithmic universe that is for the first time being harnessed at distributed scale and can empower individuals like never before. These superpowers are all coming together and create a vast number of possibilities. Nothing really dramatic on the hardware side. Its basically the planetary software reconfiguring itself.
  • pillefitz 2y ago
    To me it all feels suffocating, fake. Simultaneously there's a faint glimmer of hope that we indeed achieve AGI, unlock fusion and live happily ever after in an utopian, peaceful and mostly analog world.
  • anthk 2y ago
    Revolutionising what? libre/oss has been network-bound since Usenet and then IRC.
    • openrisk 2y ago
      how many people ever used Usenet versus the billions who think the "internet" is facebook or tiktok. Techies living in their own universe detached from human reality is actually a factor why libre/oss is not as widely adopted as it could be.
• dutchbookmaker 2y ago
  I would say the early web was something new everyday. You didn't know what you were going to find and you actually did "surf the web". Just clicking through hyperlinks and end up in unexpected places.
• dbspin 2y ago
  The early years of the web were absolutely this chaotic maelstrom of new things happening every week. But news of it was hard to come by. In the UK / Ireland we had some great tech coverage in the form of shows like 'The Net' [1] that regularly showed off early internet craziness like the 'We Live in Public' project. However a better analogy would be the 'web 2.0' era, when as a college student I had an early internet politics / technology podcast [3]. It seemed like every week there was a huge new development either in technology or surveillance. From the first location based social networks [4] to the birth of Youtube. People were podcasting for the first time, and internet video was becoming economically feasible at low to no cost. It was really a radical time, with broadcasters freaking out about how they would adapt, and a whole generation of people becoming whats now known as 'content creators'. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(British_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(British_TV_series) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Live_in_Public https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Live_in_Public [3] https://archive.org/search?query=technolotics https://archive.org/search?query=technolotics [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaiku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaiku
  • hendersoon 2y ago
    Once upon a time I worked for Pseudo.com, the We Live in Public guy. He was apparently having crazy parties with mountains of coke, NY glitterati attending, all while cosplaying as a sad clown. I wasn't invited to those parties so I had no idea. Anyway now I hear he owns an orchard in Vegas or something. Crazy stuff.
    • dbspin 2y ago
      Damn that must be frustrating. Tangentially similar experience - I flew from Ireland to the US in 2007, and at the end of my trip spent 11 days walking around Manhattan with little to do. Do to the lack of online banking at the time I couldn't readily check my bank balance, and thought (wrongly) I'd run out of money. Anyway - I had absolutely no idea that there were 'things afoot' in Brooklyn, nor how easy it would have been to hop a train to Williamsburg, or Bushwick. I didn't come back again till 2013, and caught a mere hint of the tail end of what seems to have been an extremely fun era.
• thinkingtoilet 2y ago
  No. However, it was wonderful in other ways.
• elorant 2y ago
  You know what was exciting back then? Tech magazines. That’s where you discovered all the great stuff and read about the research that was happening.