
HN on second day from launch - garciagomezluis
https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/https://news.ycombinator.com/
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minimaxir
You don't need an archive link to view HN at a given time.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-20](https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-20)

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jessedhillon
Why does Michael Arrington have the same dead comment on every post?

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minimaxir
That's not actually Michael Arrington.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=454679](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=454679)

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koolba
Interesting how pg publicizes the user’s IP addresss and possible alts sharing
the same IP. I bet that wouldn’t happen in 2019.

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buboard
Clickbait titles, useful advice "how to track user's mouse movement" (!!) ,
and Europe's osteoporosis. Good times though; for me Hacker news has lost a
lot of its appeal in the past 4-5 years, as for some reason it has become
overly political and "suits-oriented". I used to read a lot of technical
commentary, which i now find on reddit instead.

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oskkejdjdkjd
I so rarely come across a commenter who shares this opinion that I feel like I
want to hug you. Hacker news _has_ declined in quality. The most precipitous
drop in my opinion was right after all the buzz about Facebook becoming less
popular, musk joining mastodon and everyone in the comments brainstorming
about alternative social media schemes. After that things really took a dive.

I think it has to do with the influx of new programmers and the growth of
programming as an industry. Programming is becoming easier and more mainstream
so the natural result is the ratio of excellent people to disappointing people
changing for the worse. computer forums no longer intrisincly filter out
stupid people.

Googling “reddit alternative,” HN is on of the first results.

I find lobste.rs to still be good. It probably has to do with the fact that
you need an invite to post there.

I’m really scared and disappointed by HNs decline. HN is the only good
intellectual watering hole on the internet as far as I know, and I have
looked. If HN were to continue getting worse or if it shut down, it would be a
huge loss for me.

I’ve considered starting a new website, filling it with a hand-curated pool of
users gathered from around the internet, and then launching an invite system.
Lobsters isn’t good enough because it focuses too narrowly on web development
and also people are really afraid to comment there because they might mar
their image or get their invite revoked, I think. I believe there is a very
large amount of arbitrage when it comes to online communities.

There is so much arbitrage! A new Wikipedia that’s actually good at teaching
rather than just being a reference book for experts. Social sites that
differentiate between curation, storing and fluid, in-flux communication and
exchange. And most of all, using new techniques for raising the quality of
content and comments. The space of incentive schemes is virtually boundless
and there are def some veins of gold out there.

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dabockster
> Hacker news has declined in quality.

Alright, y'all are getting virtual hugs. I agree completely as well.

I also agree that the changing trends are a biproduct of the increasing levels
of access to software development as a profession. However, I do not think
that computer forums should filter out "stupid people". I had the pleasure of
hearing Code.org President Alice Steinglass talk about how her professor in
undergrad told her to stop studying CS after she asked what a debugger was. If
we begin arbitrarily filtering out "stupid people", we are no better than that
professor.

> The most precipitous drop in my opinion was right after all the buzz about
> Facebook becoming less popular, musk joining mastodon and everyone in the
> comments brainstorming about alternative social media schemes.

I think it happened earlier than that. Around 2015-ish to be exact. That's
when I personally noticed an uptick in "pat yourself on the back" posts
instead of actual good signal.

> I’m really scared and disappointed by HNs decline. HN is the only good
> intellectual watering hole on the internet

I was a bit fearful as well. But after reading your full comment, I don't
really fear that much now. My idea:

 _Let HN die._

More decentralized sites (like the one you proposed with hand curated content)
will crop up. I'm personally investigating the Linus Tech Tips forum as an HN
alternative since it seems to have the maker and hacker vibes that I used to
see here (and on Reddit and JCXP before I found HN).

In short, yeah HN is dying. But I'm not really going to mourn its loss since
it will free up room for better websites to come along. After all, that spirit
of adventure and "what will we think of next" is what pushed me to become an
engineer in the first place.

As for me, I'll probably leave here forever in a week or two if things don't
improve.

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toomuchtodo
> More decentralized sites (like the one you proposed with hand curated
> content) will crop up. I'm personally investigating the Linus Tech Tips
> forum as an HN alternative since it seems to have the maker and hacker vibes
> that I used to see here (and on Reddit and JCXP before I found HN).

What if _gasp_ mailing lists made a come back? The longer I exist, the longer
I realize I don't want the next iteration of Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, or
whatever comes after and uses IPFS and Filecoin for the foundation. I just
want high signal and civil discussion in my inbox with a firm but benevolent
dictator moderating. So, HN, but through my email client.

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mikekchar
I would _love_ a truly hacker mentality oriented mailing list focusing on
doing stuff rather than what's cool/not cool. I don't want to complain about
HN, it is what it is and a lot of people like it the way it is. But I'd really
like a place where the vast majority of links point to blogs of people doing
things in tech, or giving me ideas about what I can do in tech, rather than
links to news agencies or news papers or long format writing on non-tech
related topics. If it was a mailing list it would be incredible. I'd love to
go back to being able to plonk people into kill files and filter/sort topics
however I want.

Of course, ironically my most upvoted comments are all about news or long
format writing on non-tech related topics. But I _really_ don't have time for
that and I keep getting lured in ;-)

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jv22222
Peter Cooper could, and should, make that mailing list.

[https://cooperpress.com](https://cooperpress.com)

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Daktest
Looks like it hasn't changed much... which is a good thing!

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faitswulff
Design that stands the test of time :)

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brianpgordon
It's still as bad as it always was, if that's what you mean. :P

[http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/) is much better.

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wtmt
[https://hackerweb.app](https://hackerweb.app) is also nice if you'd like to
skim through the story list and the top level comment threads using a better
interface (YMMV). You can also expand specific comment threads.

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DoreenMichele
I think people are fascinated with stuff like this because it seems impossible
to predict where it is going at the time, but we hope that if we look back we
can either see some king of indicator of future greatness or at least reassure
ourselves that our crappy looking early stage project isn't necessarily
doomed. After all, x, y or z didn't look that different back in the day. (Or
whatever.)

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duck
I use to run a project that looked back in time on HN, but it was pretty
depressing to see so many dead links each week. Thankfully the Internet
Archive solves a lot of this, but it makes you think how fragile the web is.

[http://www.waybackletter.com/issue/2012-06-06.html](http://www.waybackletter.com/issue/2012-06-06.html)

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nickpsecurity
Much prefer it in its current form. Way more interesting content across so
many subject areas. We still have plenty of interesting stuff for startup
fans, too. If anything, it's strange and kind of amazing that it got here
starting from a narrowly-focused beginning. I came in too late to see how that
transition happened. Would've been interesting to watch.

~~~
conductr
Slow and mostly in hindsight.

I’m not a big fan that many front page links are to big news outlets nowadays.
It’s not hard to find NYT, WSJ, Economist, etc news and I’m not generally
seeking out that type of content here. But I see a lot of it on HN now. And
geez so many paywall links.

I liked it much more when it was more independent content. More focused on
learning and building. It felt like the whole start up thing was new and
everyone was helping each other learn.

Regardless of time, the comments keep me coming back. It feels more like the
“old” internet when it had a net positive vibe.

~~~
nickpsecurity
You could make a custom view that filters that stuff. Maybe logs it so you can
spend some time scanning through any that might be interesting to you. Most of
the time, though, you just see the non-news links.

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scarface74
Another more generic site that lets you look back on HN as well as other sites
as they were a decade ago.

[http://tenyearsago.io/](http://tenyearsago.io/)

Sometimes it seems to get stuck on a certain date for a week.

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veddox
The second link is interesting: HN's original announcement
([https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html))

Especially the point that they tried to build a community where people would
actually get to know each other. That didn't scale too well...

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cookingrobot
An interesting nugget here is a post by Evan Williams about putting Odeo up
for sale to focus on Twitter.

Here’s what Twitter looked like then:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20070225121301/http://twitter.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070225121301/http://twitter.com:80/)

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rovyko
_> I dropped out of grad school today_

Second post is the co-founder of Octopart. Not surprising, since they were
funded by YC, but I'm glad things turned out well for Andres.

 _> ... I'm a shell of the personality I used to be. Basically, I had been
languishing in school and had gotten comfortable with mediocrity._

I know this feeling.

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intopieces
The Wayback Machine box is bordered in black. On first glance I thought the
second day of HN had a black banner and I thought damn, we lost someone on day
2?

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jolmg
Shame we can't see the threads.

~~~
ekc
You can, actually:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-20](https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-20)

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chenpengcheng
Reading this for a year and posts have become less interesting.

