Would this perhaps be a better question for StackOverflow?
A thousand times no! This was great!
More Lisp implementation posts, please!
That was a bit harsh. I'm saying we should try hard to retain the culture of the site.
It was delightful to see this question pop up on the front page. And of course, what was the top comment but a reminder that the old HN is now firmly "the old HN," rather than "the present HN."
This is just an old guy being cranky for the old days. Maybe with a dash of ineffectual rose-tinted glasses thrown in. It's probably more a reflection of me than of the site.
The feeling you got when you discovered HN a month after pg opened it up was just electric. When it went away, I started scheming to get it back. Then half a decade passed, and now I can't stop wondering whether it was just a fluke of the world. Maybe it can never happen again, and it's therefore ridiculous to expect it to stay. Or maybe pining for the old days is what people have been doing for ten thousand years in spite of all the amazing progress.
I just miss the feeling of sneaking into a secret club where everyone is way smarter than I am. This current thread is way beyond my abilities to even address, but I love to listen to people who can. Then I realized maybe it's beyond everyone's abilities on the site. Realizing that there are really capable people over on SO made me wonder: where are those people? Can I go listen to them talk about really hard technical topics and then ask them questions? You can't really ask questions on SO, since your words will be ruthlessly purged (with good reason); it's pretty much the opposite of a relaxed setting.
All of this is entirely off-topic of course, so it should probably be detached from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10737507 and marked as such.
But the old days existed. It was so weird. Seeing what it was, and then realizing that it went away, and then realizing it never "should" have even happened in the first place... That it was either an accident or a brilliant design... Everything about it is just so weird.
https://web.archive.org/web/20091215131033/http://news.ycomb...
That's surprisingly little different than how HN would look today, except there's arguably more fluff there.
I remember precisely when the time period ended, because it was so disappointing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604359
What was it about the early comments that were so good?
The commenters were happy, for one. Most of life was pretty dull, and it felt like HN was where people came to life. There was less drama; people were less likely to type out a comment due to anger or frustration.
They were also stronger. People felt like they could influence the world, so they didn't spend a lot of time talking about how to do that, or how the world should be. There was more discussion about intellectual pursuits, or just interesting observations about the world.
The comment threads nowadays are pushy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10748834 This is the opposite of how it felt in the early days, I think. People were more inquisitive, so they were less aggressive.
There is certainly a component of rose-tinted glasses here, though. Most of my feelings are because I was still pretty young. It was almost a decade ago.