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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

Ah yeah dude. I'm having a midlife crisis too. But the dot-com era was only about 97-99. I miss the bitcoin casino era, when anyone who could write a poker parser could make real money. Wait. I miss the time when we got our news from 60 Minutes and Peter Jennings.

Here's another thought: We've never had it so good. We can write anything we can dream of, on any device, and deploy it anywhere, without corralling physical servers or prepaying for bandwidth. If you dream of it, you can make it. There are literally children playing with neural network APIs in ways that would have been inconceivable a decade ago. They're going to produce some amazing software.

Me - I'm a bit of a 90s dot-com casualty, secure in a career but lost the move fast and break things mentality awhile ago. I make sure to keep myself up to date. Part of it's just keeping your mind alive to new ideas.

There is no - I repeat no wonderful fairy tale to tell about the years from 97-99. People were just as rapacious and greedy as they are now; they were using cruder tools but it was the same thing. The open web existed, still exists, and will always be buried under a mountain of corporate shit; that doesn't mean it isn't the font of creativity. We get old but the things we build survive in new forms.

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Just for the hell of it because I can't wind down tonight, here's a fun story from 1998.

The "web shop" I worked for got a contract with a company I believe was called Sansom Street Associates. They controlled the Gap, Old Navy, and the Mendocino Redwood Co. The last of which we were tasked with designing a website for.

It quickly became known in the office the MRC was in the business of chopping down old-growth redwood forests. They wanted a website that looked eco-friendly for this purpose. I was one of the two designers on the job. We built a prototype and were told in no uncertain terms that it was too glossy, too slick. This is 1998. We're dealing in <img> tags and every mockup has to be set with table slices in photoshop with rollovers as a second layer.

Too glossy? Yes. They wanted it to look more like it was designed by a high school student. Lower the images to dithered 256-color GIFs. Get rid of the font and color choices. Everything should be in random fonts.

I remember being told, "they just want some website where the hippies can dump their emails into a black hole".

Then we got wind that this company had paid our bosses something over $150k up front for this simple website job - downgrade included. At that point it became toxic among the designers.

What's funny is, I bet MRC paid triple that for the stupid site they have now, because money means nothing to them. But I'd never work for them again in this or any other lifetime. /rant.

> The open web existed, still exists, and will always be buried under a mountain of corporate shit;

Thinking about the time from 2003 onwards (my personal dot-com era) until maybe 2009-ish, I nowadays miss the forums. Not so much because of the interaction with others (I get that on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Discord too), but because of "searchability". I typed my question into Google, and got greeted with several links to different forums or blogs.

There is no similar searchability of Discord, Facebook and Twitter that I'm aware of. Maybe that's where the "more open back in the days" comes from.

The thing about the forums (and probably why we're here on HN) is that they were personally run, cared for and moderated by people who were good in their field, who cared about the environment they were cultivating. This was especially true in the dialup era when sysops literally read every comment and hung up their modem on people who were spreading something stupid. It led to a culture of total free speech and tolerance, as long as you found the right place to meet your peers, and as long as what you were saying made some kind of intelligent sense. That doesn't exist in any social media platform today. Social media rewards people for saying the dumbest possible thing that everyone else will agree with, or else the dumbest thing that will anger people.

For context, we're on the old web and the BBS forums right now. Upvoting is a modest improvement. The way a place is run, the culture, is everything. Twitter is the Carnival Cruise. Smart speech is always on the leaky freighter. People with smart phones forget that the internet was for nerds, outcasts and rebels, while they were absorbed in TV. The nerds and rebels haven't disappeared. (We just need to stop the really angry ones who took over retail and software).

Upvoting and downvoting especially incentivizes echo chambers. I take it you've never had people follow you around threads and downvote everything you posted? Happens bizarrely often.

HN disappoints me more than the average Reddit or Twitter thread because some of the highs are really high here, but when you see brilliant people arguing about stuff they were arguing about six years ago, or adults that are so ideological that they aren't even rational, that happens all the time on HN and I feel in a way it is worse because we should know better.

I think HN, as a place for nerds, largely succeeds, but it also has a very very limited demographic.

Sure. Comparatively, I find it far less ideological and more cerebral than most places. Nothing's perfect.

I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems. As it happens, the less dogmatic are people who gravitate toward hacking solutions to things. People might deride that as seeking technological fixes to intractable problems, but it's essentially apolitical - and critiquing logic in the form of code is immune to emotional arguments to some extent, even though those arguments arise around the borders of what code is used for.

I have a kind of similar view about Judaism and Buddhism. You can argue endlessly about the state of the universe but you have to agree that logic is logic. Weirdly, we live in a world where that agreement is vanishingly rare in everyday discourse.

> The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems.

This is a gross simplification that ironically lacks logical rigor. As long as you live in a society and have opinions about how it should work, you have politics. The two dimensional left/right spectrum is less than helpful. The quadrant model that includes authoritarian->libertarian is slightly more useful. The “politic free” group you’re speaking about are presumably the classic center-right libertarians. It’s definitely an ideology.

@luffapi Taking into account what I meant by "ideological", the northbound side of the authoritarian axis is fully covered by those groups. You're right, I took it for granted that anti-authoritarian sentiment was a prerequisite for the third set of society I'm describing. But I don't view that as a political opinion.

I'm not trying to describe the prevailing group-think technocratic culture in silicon valley. But ideologically, anyone who has no ideology except answering logical problems fits into a category that is always going to be reviled by people who have a political agenda, because their answers won't necessarily comport with what you want them to look like.

There exists a left and a right on the southbound axis as well. For instance, authoritarian left is communism while libertarian left is anarchism. Authoritarian right is fascism and libertarian right is unregulated free market capitalism.

I don’t agree that you can exist in a pure “logic” state outside of this model. If you pay taxes and have opinions about that, you exist somewhere on this spectrum and it’s highly likely that your ideology is influencing your logic (which does exist for all ideologies even if we don’t agree with it).

I see your point. Reasonably, people will have opinions about individual matters, and these add up to having "politics". But these are not politics as an identity, or politics you push on others through persuasion, or a set of pet causes, or whatever passes for debate on Twitter or news outlets.

You may be right that the group I'm describing skews south-east into center-right libertarianism (although I'm pretty far southwest myself). The point I was trying to make was that it's not possible to be an ideologue when your head is in a cloud of math and code; and when you look up, you're the one with your fingers in running the system that runs the platforms that all these know-nothing people use to amplify their pet politics and shout at each other all day. What I'm saying is that to run the machine you actually have to be post-political, and the third group in modern culture are the people who can switch tabs as necessary, or just don't care because they're more concerned with making things function.

I'd be excoriated as being "privileged" by most progressive ideological friends for even suggesting that there exists a neutral position free from racial or historical advantage; and maybe it's not free of those things. But it exists and it attempts to be neutral to the extent that the biggest debate in the country right now is about what some website should or shouldn't censor, while the government itself can barely function, and the people who work for that website only care about making it more responsive and profitable. There is clearly a third group of people to whom most of the left/right debate is just unserious noise. As far as their day-to-day reality, we probably don't disagree that much on what that consists of.

> The point I was trying to make was that it's not possible to be an ideologue when your head is in a cloud of math and code; and when you look up, you're the one with your fingers in running the system that runs the platforms that all these know-nothing people use to amplify their pet politics and shout at each other all day.

This isn’t true though. The very platforms you’re talking about have many employees that are keeping the systems running and also steeped in politics. There are tons of very overt and loud neo-liberals in tech. Same goes for leftists and libertarians.

You seem to dislike social media activism. Fair enough, but like I said it’s orthogonal to one’s politics and technical competence.

>I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems.

Why is "ideology" a bad thing? I have ideological positions that can't be rationally derived from first principles: universal human rights, belief in freedom, belief in tolerance. Why are people with strong values and beliefs mere drones, while the people in the "centre" are the rational people interested in solving problems?

> the less dogmatic are people who gravitate toward hacking solutions to things. People might deride that as seeking technological fixes to intractable problems, but it's essentially apolitical

There is nothing apolitical about this. Accepting the current broad system and ruling class and trying only for "small fixes" is a political position.

You're assuming that technologically-focused folks "accept[] the current broad system and ruling class" and have only small ambitions. Neither of these assumptions seems especially warranted.

I'm simply following the train of thought put forward by GP.

> I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems.

The difficult problems haven't changed much in hundreds or thousands of years. What happens when "people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems" have spent a few centuries actually doing this?

Yep, ideologies. That is, semi-consistent sets of beliefs, assumptions and values that explain why things are the way they are, how they ought to be different and (sometimes) how to go about making the changes. I know it can seem hard to believe, but it turns out that even when extraordinarily smart people think about difficult problems, they don't all converge on the same answers.

If you want to start over from scratch ever generation, be my guest. In your rejection of ideology, you're really just throwing away the work done by our ancestors.

We don't need to throw away everything, just the stuff that we can't reach consensus about. The rest is what we generally call Common Sense.

So, no liberalism, no marxism, no capitalism, no Keynsian economics (probably no economics), no psychotherapy, no rock music ... the list is long for the things we can't reach consensus about.

What's left tends to be not so much "common sense" as "the stuff that supports the status quo, whatever it is", because human psychology tends to have a strong pro-status quo bias.

Couldn't we also say that stripped of their dogmas, these are all useful lenses? They're tools we have access to. Options. We've also collected a lot of information about when they might and might not be the appropriate device, or when they might even be harmful. The idea isn't to throw out history, nor to maintain the status quo. It's to solve individual problems using the best tools for the job, without getting emotional or activistic or wearing a t-shirt or waving a flag or joining the cult that revolves around the tool.

> to solve individual problems

Individual problems like:

* how do you distribute a resource that isn't evenly distributed on the planet?

* what, if anything, do you do about the variation in abilities across different people?

* what, if anything do you as various people in a community start to gain (and wield) more power than others?

* how do you address free riders?

There are so many more. The answers to these questions are not "right" and "wrong". They're not even of the form "this is best compromise we could come up with". The answers someone feels are best will be highly dependent on their values, which we know vary significantly. You can't just wish away the differences between what an eco-socialist would say about these things and an anarcho-capitalist. They are real differences, representing fundamentally different ideas about the nature of humanity, the role of government, the purpose of society and much more.

And as I said above, people have thought about these questions for centuries, and their answers generally fall into distinct groups (even if they are not all identical). We call these "ideologies".

I think I'd sign that, yes. I wonder if there is a road back to this era…

The Fediverse is basically organized the exact same way, with federation as a purely additional layer on top of the individual content hosts.

> There is no - I repeat no wonderful fairy tale to tell about the years from 97-99. People were just as rapacious and greedy as they are now; they were using cruder tools but it was the same thing.

I largely agree with this but I think there was a marked turn for the worse when advertising became the dominant business model for just about everyone. That had two problems: the obvious one being that selling directly to users meant you had to prioritize their interests but a secondary issue being that it trained most people to think of $0 as what just about any service was worth.

There's one other trend which I'd class as a bad trend getting worse. In the mid-90s the expected path for a lot of companies was to build a viable business. By at least 1999, arguably earlier, that had switched to “cash out in the IPO; who cares what happens next” and then the consolidation trend pushed that even further away from having to build a viable business to just having something that a fabulously rich company would buy as an aquihire, eliminate a potential strategic threat, or simply for the lavish bonuses handed out to the executives who signed off on it. As with pricing, that's not just wasteful but actively harmful for anyone who is trying to build a real business and has to compete with money being shoveled around by people who never have to worry about running out.

> I largely agree with this but I think there was a marked turn for the worse when advertising became the dominant business model for just about everyone. That had two problems: the obvious one being that selling directly to users meant you had to prioritize their interests but a secondary issue being that it trained most people to think of $0 as what just about any service was worth.

Wasn't that part of those years? Free webmail, free search, free articles, all with display ads?

It wasn't all free — e.g. for many people, mail was provided by their ISP or a paid service — but I was also thinking that the mentality expanded rapidly. Search is a natural spot for advertising (and doesn't need to be privacy-invading) but over time that moved to include lots of other things, increasingly run by advertising companies like Google or Facebook who were content to run the service at a loss because they could resell user activity data.

The main thing I was thinking in regard to that last point was that while early community sites weren't perfect, there was at least some pressure to maintain community health. If I ran a site like photo.net I had to keep photographers interested — too many scam ads or bad behaviour and the most valuable people will stop visiting. Since you're running your own infrastructure, you have more options for differentiating your site and it was harder for spammers to make sleazy ripoff clones as is now common.

These days a lot of that stuff happens on places like Facebook or Twitter, where they will optimize for “engagement” with little interest in the health of a particular community and things are encouraged to leak across communities unless they reach the level where users stop using the entire service and/or advertisers stop buying ads. As long as people have a boredom behaviour of opening your app it's seen as working well.

>I repeat no wonderful fairy tale to tell about the years from 97-99

This is a weird mentality to me. Of course human nature hasn't changed in the past 25 years. But that isn't where DotCom nostalgia comes from. It comes from the fact that "The Internet" as we know it, the force that has driven the majority of recent technological progress as well as the careers of many people on this site, was brand new.

I have no idea how anyone can be a tech person and not look back fondly (or curiously) at that period in time.

This is an extraordinarily poor comment to see voted so high in the thread on HN.

The original author does not seem to have a "midlife crisis". They seem to have a spot of nostalgia for their first two or three years of real career after college.

They also do not seem to be over-glorifying that period. Suggesting that human nature was more noble than it is today, technology or business more pure, etc. They're simply noting that it was "a fun and wild time", and that some interesting stories are worth preserving since the time period is no longer native for the majority of the industry.

I'm not sure if you're projecting something yourself here, or if you're simply having a bad day.

Oh, I'm definitely projecting. I'm not sure where the line is between romanticizing and glorifying, but no one should do either. A "fun and wild time" is purely a matter of perspective (and self-persuasion). It's an unwholesome post-mortem. Whether we can say the web legitimately sucks more now, or it just seems that way, someone deeply invested in building things who started around that time might describe the current eradication of free content and hopelessness associated with stifling of creative output as a type of midlife crisis. Or they might long for the simpler days. That too is only about perspective. Mine might be dark and his might be light but I wouldn't have responded to this at all if I hadn't been through the same wringer.

> They also do not seem to be over-glorifying that period. Suggesting that human nature was more noble than it is today, technology or business more pure, etc.

"It was the peak of human civilization," replied TIKI as rendered by Microsoft Comic Chat.

Your comment reminded me of the Louis CK rant on Conan regarding nostalgia:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4

The part of the interview before this is great too but I've never been able to find it again. All the clips I can find are just this segment.

Lol. That was fun to watch. It's kinda just sad to me to see so much lost knowledge. No joke, I know a girl who can't read an analog clock. As someone said, if we have all this technology and don't know where it came from or how to build it ourselves, we're a doomed society. We're a cargo cult. When I really need to fall asleep, I lay awake thinking about how I would explain smartphones if I were suddenly deposited in ancient Greece. The problem is even if you had thousands of people at your disposal in the bronze age, how would you start building one from raw materials? I know, this all sounds like an old guy rant. The thing is, society has so quickly started taking these things for granted in my own lifetime - as Louis CK points out - it's unsafe. It's terrifying what would happen if they even had to reinvent one generation of knowledge.

That's a pessimistic interpretation. By contrast, the amazing is now mundane because there other things that are now more amazing and more novel.

I have degrees in math and computer science from good schools, but I would struggle to reinvent basic trigonometry. I don't think we've "lost knowledge" so much as shifted our emphasis to the novel.

I teach Python to 6th graders. These 12-year-olds consider basic coding knowledge akin to algebra. One of the "popular kids" (himself above the 'nerd stuff') is making a little Android app using a public-school-provided chromebook.

The lever of utility (and thus focus) has shifted. It doesn't mean a net loss of knowledge or ability.

That's fair, and overall it's a good thing. I'm not saying I can forge a sword or build a CPU or write an operating system in Assembly. The first language I learned was BASIC, when I was about 7, and after that they showed me Logo in school, moving the turtle around. So since I had a sense of how to turn pixels on and off with arrays and make fireworks, that seemed pretty ridiculous and easy. But even then, Hypercard blew my mind. And I was able to build things on it that I would never understand the low-level nature of.

I'm not saying everyone needs to build every tool they use by starting with a piece of rock. But knowing how things are made and how they work is really important. If python is the new algebra, great! The thing is, someone needs to be able to fix the instrument if it's broken.

Like, this is extreme, but I drive a car that's a simple machine. I can open the hood and know what I'm looking at, and if something is wrong I have a good idea what it is. But I can't make a piston or a fuel injector. I have to rely on people with plant investment, tooling, machines, to keep molding parts. They rely on people who have to forge the steel or iron. The forges rely on people who mine the raw material. The end consumer knowing roughly how that works is what separates us as a society from a cargo cult.

I don't think we can ever successfully separate ourselves from the roots of our technology or the lower layers of it. Anyway, if you're a curious 12-year-old coding in python you should wonder - how does this magic work! I was about that age when someone explained Assembly to me, and though I would never try to write something that way, just seeing it and understanding how it was moving bits around in memory to handle the higher level languages I was writing, blew my mind. I suddenly understood a lot more about what I was doing when I said "print $f"

Pure Gold! Never seen it before

>There is no - I repeat no wonderful fairy tale to tell about the years from 97-99.

I graduated college in 95. IMO, 97-99 was about people trying to get rich off of bullshit. The really fairy tale years were the pre-Netscape Navigator (late 94) era when Usenet and IRC ruled the roost.

I guess it depends what you mean by fairy tale years. In the grand scheme of things, "no one" even had access to the Internet pre-Web.

That's not true. I mean, I was gophering and FTP'ing and pirating all kinds of good stuff on a 2400 baud modem in 1992. By contrast, the guys I worked for in 1998 could barely use a computer. But boy could they sling bullshit to other people who couldn't use computers.

Hence the quotes around "no one." As you suggest, obviously some people had access to the pre-Web Internet--I communicated over the Internet as early as about 1978--but it was a small slice of the population.

>move fast and break things mentality

A lot of todays IT is kind of core infrastructure and it hurt very much if you break things constant.

Just came to my mind now. Todays software is fat and slow like more and more people today vs. command liners are still the slim, sporty ones.

I actually said that because last night I had a revelation. In my software now I want to move slow and don't break anything. That's a more healthy philosophy, I think. It doesn't mean the software is fat or slow -- quite the opposite. The code is better and cleaner because I'm not in a race to make a big tall tower, I'm perfecting a craft to build a perfect cabinet.

It probably went a bit longer than that. When I switched jobs in 2000, there were almost certainly some dark clouds on the horizon but there was still a lot of hiring going on in at least some quarters. 9/11 is the obvious end point (which is when I was laid off--and fortunately slid into another position that did go through hard times but was mostly good), although things were clearly on a big downward slide before that.

The full dot-com boom period was basically 1995 (Yahoo, Amazon, Netscape in full swing) through 2001 (the dot-com crash in April followed by 9/11).

So roughly a 6-7 year period. 1997-1999 was definitely the "hey day"

Just a nit. Amazon wasn't in full swing in 1995. It was only founded the year before. I looked at my order history and my first orders (all books) were in 1999. And I was a fairly heavy "mail order" and then ecommerce consumer.

I pretty much agree with the overall timeframe although I'd argue that the party was still in pretty much full swing up to some point in 2000 when earning misses started happening at some of the large vendors.

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