It feels like HN still upholds the early promise of the internet (along with Wikipedia and very small number of other websites). But what will the next 15 year bring about?
I also recommend people revisit archives of some high-quality web forums and websites like Geocities. There is a lot of revisionism going on in tech sector right now. Conveniently, it's nearly impossible to challenge in a space where a handful of people can disappear your posts by downvoting and a conversation stays "relevant" only for a few hours.
There was also a lot less diversity (in some ways) however with Web 1. You were fairly likely to be talking to someone quite nerdy or at least with similar hobbies. The barrier to entry is also of course much lower now generally. I agree the upvote / downvote system can SOMETIMES disappear a valid opinion but I cannot currently think of a better way to self moderate discussions like we have here.
The same thing does happen to an extent during in person conversations but the barrier for both making a challenging statement and "downvoting" a challenging statement or action is higher.
HN may not be able to actually BE what Web 1.0 was but it seems to make an honest attempt at it in the modern world.
In a billion years, when an alien species reaches earth and sees the ruins of human civilization, somehow one of the last remaining transmissions is that voice, calmly reminding everyone that anything is possible… at Zombocom
What's the "early promise of the internet" to you?
The Venture Capitalists and startuppers that made HN like the internet to be Free enough that new businesses and services can thrive, and Open Source for the accessible and reusable building blocks for their projects, but clearly like commercialization and being the middleman, like in the good old offline days. The headache of moderating their platforms feels more urgent than thinking about Freedom of Speech.
The early internet, to me, was the promise to remove those middlemen and have us directly connect, and, while using mostly free and low-overhead websites or services, contribute back. I expected real estate classifieds posted in an open format to open databases by now, and the job description of "real estate agent" retired.
When I think if "upholding" anything I might think of Slashdot clearly preaching Open Source and the Evils of Microsoft. Naive by today's standards but hey, it kept the old ethos alive for a little longer.
Edit: No doubt many other excellent values were upheld by HN and the moderators, so thanks for that!
What's the "early promise of the internet" to you?
That should probably be a whole separate post of its own! In fact, I'd encourage you, if you're interested, to consider writing up something on the topic and submit it as a new post. I think there's a lot to dig into with regards to what we all thought the "early promise of the Internet" was, and analyze it in terms of where we were wrong, where we've fallen short of the ideas, and - maybe most importantly - where there's room to take specific action(s) to get "back on the rails" so to speak.
It's not possible to go back though, so I wouldn't want to dwell on the past too much. There is probably a really good reason why everything is run by companies, why we have Discord instead of connecting with a variety of clients to an open protocoll. Probably because it's too difficult to make everything run smooth everywhere, so you need a team, so you need monetization. People like the reach and impact they can have on Twitter and Youtube, it's just so much louder than a little, undiscovered self-hosted blog could ever be, so what's the point?
Maybe tech will eventually be commodizided enough to give key infrastructure applications back to the "people". Or maybe the cloud providers will control it all? We'll see.
I agree - this could make an excellent discussion on its own. I bet we would see a large variety of opinions - the internet enabled all kinds of new methods of communication which in turn inspired different dreams in different people.
Greed killed the golden goose and this article points this out in a simple and convincing way.
> The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge
This doesn't immediately provide a solution because knowledge sharing does need infrastructure (which needs to be developed and maintained etc.) But as the (relatively) tiny budgets of organizations like wikimedia indicate, if you have the right incentives less might be more.
There is room for money to made in the digital economy, lots of it actually, but it will require us to pull the plug on adtech and all the ways it has degenerated. In broad brush we need to cleanly bifurcate into 1) trully free commons and 2) pay-to-play services that respect and are accountable to the client/user
I think the article makes a very important point about under-resourced developer teams but misses an opportunity to point out that most other teams within organizations and businesses face similar constraints.
I think this favors stacks and frameworks where the business logic of a domain is already reflected, at least partially.
This might explain why some open source frameworks persist and thrive even while their "tech" is deemed obsolete / deficient...
Something that people with casual exposure to musical notation probably don't know is that before the standard 5-staff notation became ubiquitus there were quite a few alternatives, maybe the most interesting from a mathematical perspective being the Byzantine notation
Broadly speaking, while the modern system focuses on pitch values and an elaborate (modulated) map from frequency space to physical space (paper), older systems used in the Byzantium used "deltas" or the first differences of pitch values.
So you start with a base note (lets say C) and then you go +1, +1, -2 to indicate pitch changes (in semitones). This is quite well adapted to monophonic chant. This notation was never developed to cope with the complexity of modern music but its not immediately obvious that it can't be done
"Google's results are clearly getting worse". Can somebody quantify this in some objective way?
As in: I have this concrete metric (that anybody can inspect / replicate) and I saw it declining from 201X to 2022 etc.
I don't dispute that it is a true fact. The comments reveal both ways that this manifests, inventive workarounds and possible causes. But without having read through the 765 comments(!) (at time of posting) I don't see something that can be quoted as a measured reality.
NB: It would be really useful to have such an independent quality index, also for future reference when invariably somebody provides a "better" search engine.
I get a sense that the julia community is more anxious about adoption than, e.g. python or R communities. Its probably natural given it is a relative newcomer in the broader "data science" / "scientific computing" thing and in the past years there was an explosion of interest / hype around some of its subsets (in particular anything that can be labelled machine learning or AI)
But participating in that "hype" is not necessarily what will entrench julia for the long term. Turning its unique characteristics (unique versus these other two open source contestants, not across the entire programming language landscape) into unmissable developer / user experiences seems to me a safer route. E.g what makes R impossible to ignore is the richness of its statistical toolkit. What makes python impossible to ignore is the productivity boost for typical tasks etc.
Ideally you'd want some distilled and organized subset of "good" (informative) discussions, comments etc to persisted as a separate hierarchy that is subject focused and not timeline oriented. A subjective wikipedia of sorts (less encyclopedic, less moderated) that is composed on the fly.
For a long time advertising was the art of creating "wants". For a century it worked "like a charm". We are now living in a world that (at least in so called developed world) is overconsuming by a very large factor.
The proliferation of the incredibly regressive practice of building and selling behavioral profiles of unsuspecting "consumers" may in part be due to the cannibalistic arms race of an exhausted economic paradigm.
Somehow we need to find sane digital ways to connect people who have to say, sell, announce something with people who want to hear, buy, be informed about something.
It doesn't sound that complicated if we lose our unsustainable ways of thinking and acting
it sooths my soul that next to the cryptobros and data oligarchs there is a small community that chips away at making the world a better place - one command line tool at a time
