HN 15 Years ago
news.ycombinator.com
news.ycombinator.com
You'd think the comments were made last year, not in 2008:
> I discovered HN in spring and Reddit to and I have found the quality of HN going down in the last month
> Personally I find nearly all the mass-media submissions to be a dilution, no matter how techie or startup they sound.
Although I relate the most to the PG's comment:
> There are always a few highly ranked stories that make me think "how could anyone vote that up?" but on average they're pretty interesting. There's no other site I prefer.
I'm curious about this one too:
> If you must have a resume or portfolio, you should most definitely add your HN username and link to it.
Did anyone do it?
> Did anyone do it?
A cursory search on Google:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycom...
Seems to indicate that not many people did.
Could you say a little about the motivation behind your LikeBetter?
I don't think it's easy to appreciate just how "weird" it was to be in tech in 2004-2006 from our current perspective. I recall sitting in for a talk at UC Berkeley by PG in around 2004, promoting his "crazy" new idea. There were maybe a dozen people there at most. And I remember thinking "I don't really know what this startup thing is, but I know I want to be a part of this movement".
And doing something like starting a startup then was actually really hard. My family definitely judged me for making this choice, many of my friends didn't understand why I would go this route. But it was an excellent filter - the people who came to this space at that time were passionate about building something amazing. Very few of us had dollar signs in our eyes at the time, and yet many of the big names of today were forged in that fire.
None of us knew what we were doing, and that was the best part! Everything was new, exciting. But you also had to build most everything from scratch because the SaaS ecosystem wasn't there. In this early time, despite the challenge, there was room to explore and forge new paths. To make mistakes and be creative.
LikeBetter started as a dating app. The concept was simple - I thought that current dating apps at the time were stupid in that they asked users to fill out profiles (eHarmony, Yahoo Dating). You essentially had to trust that everyone was being honest, which was never the case. What if there was a dating site that "knew you" better than you even knew yourself, and matched you with people that were actually like you?
So we build a bifurcating personality classifier with the simple and addictive prompt "What do you like better?" and the choice between two distinct images. We had a responsive interface which felt unbelievably fast for the time, and people were just so drawn into this concept. We were featured on the front page of Digg (lol) and got a lot of press too.
We also launched with no data model whatsoever - we just presented "guesses" and allowed the users to correct us if we were wrong. But over time we were able to accurately guess all sorts of interesting things about a person's personality, just from their choosing between 20 or so pairs of images.
But as with many things, the course of my own life forged a different path. We were part of YC Summer 2006, back when it was in Boston. We relocated back to SF, my cofounder and I had a falling out, and we decided to shut down the company rather than raise capital. We had hit upon an exciting spark, but were not the right torch bearers to see it through.
The path in startup land that began with LikeBetter eventually led me to successful outcomes, and for that I am forever grateful. And it all started by being brave and joining a movement that I felt passionate about.
In your own life, it's so easy to follow the "head": what makes sense and will make me the most money? But I encourage you to look for those moments of passion and inspiration, even if they seem strange - for they will lead you to great things.
I'd like to ask, though: looking back, what were (or have become) the best resources to you - read: books, articles, conference videos, etc. - which have unequivocally helped you in the years since?
Thank you
I’m always happy to connect more deeply and provide guidance if this resonates with you - PM me.
This is interesting to me. Similarly, although I know "hiring" isn't quite the same thing, through that process, I've come to realise how difficult it is to find passionate and skilful people. I wonder if startups are as good a filter in 2021 as they were in 2006.
Passion is love. Love is the force of creation. When we love something unconditionally, we pour the energy of creation into it.
When we love with conditions/incentives (ie I love this be because I’m making money), that pure energy is distorted/blocked. The most powerful way to create something is by unconditionally loving it.
But how do we filter on passion, when incentives seem to be required to attract anyone these days?
Maybe in 2035 we'll look back at the 10s with the same nostalgia and sharing stories about how it was different and special "back then". It reminds me of an essay often posted on HN which I can't find now but that went something like "we always think this is the end of the story, there won't be new revolutionary startups/techs, and yet there's always new players who emerge that no one saw coming".
Anyway I like stories like yours about times long gone.
The freshness of a thing cannot stay that way - it must go stale and be renewed. It is this cycle that gives us contrast. When a thing goes stale, you can choose to either stay in that energy, wait until the freshness returns, or forge a new path.
I wouldn't be too surprised if in a comment thread about an article about the first moon landings Werner Braun would chime in with a few anecdotes and correct some errors in the article.
And Buzz Aldrin would debate him on that.
I've upvoted 14,129 submissions, here's the first three:
14129. Oct 22, 2009: The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=923722
14128. Feb 24, 2010: Isaac Asimov - The Relativity of Wrong (1989) , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1147968
14127. Marc 10, 2010: Putting Google to the Test in Translation, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1180926
The Asimov entry has my first HN comment ever, with 19 upvotes! How happy I must have been at the time. The crazy thing is that it took me 5 months to upvote three submissions, now I do more than that in my morning round! I must have been more discerning at the time.
When I had slightly more than 10,000 links I thought of starting a blog called "The March of the 10,000", to write about selected bookmarks from my upload list; never got around doing it. I must have been busy accumulating more HN bookmarks :-)
I had the exact same idea when I reached 3000 bookmarks in a "curiosity" folder. I thought about taking 10 of those links and publishing an article about it every week.
2384.
Why Your Start-up Will Fail (forbes.com)
30 points by drm237 on Sept 25, 2007 | 15 comments
2385.
The Genius is in the Details (aaronsw.com)
43 points by brl on Sept 24, 2007 | 15 comments
2386.
The Age/Entrepreneurship Myth (kedrosky.com)
5 points by far33d on May 4, 2007
I wish it were easy to go look at my first few comments!
my first three comments, 14 years ago, were:
- telling somebody it's worthwhile to learn vim (still using vim all day erryday)
- posting a desktop screenshot (which URL, sadly, does not resolve... I'll have to see if I can dig it up)
- praising the Dina font (I forgot that I ever used that, I've been on Iosevka for a while and Hack before that)
I'm sensing you said that partly in jest, because who doesn't absolutely love bacon? Me, I eat it at least once a week. It does make me wonder, though, what if we lived in a world were there wasn't an abundance of bacon? What would that world look like? Would it be a better world? Better for whom? Our children?
I kept up with both HN and Slashdot for about a year, but then found that my need for tech news and discussion was served very well by HN. I remember Slashdot was a chore to navigate owing to the way they set up threaded discussions, which forced a lot of unnecessary clicking. HN was just easy to read, and a pleasure to participate in.
Through HN I was able to get to know more about YC's mission, and even visited the last YC summer session in Cambridge (2008, IIRC) on one of their open discussion nights, and met pg and jessica. That was pretty cool. I also applied to YC a few years later (didn't get in, which was probably for the better).
I'm very grateful that /. survived beta. We've lost so much of the early internet - a completely different place than it is now - that even the evolved /. is still a welcome site for sore eyes.
Gubhtu n glcb, V'z yrnivat "fvgr" va gurer nf V yvxr gur cha.
Humor on HN was rare, but much more original/smart.
This was long before pg was known in general, let alone famous. For context, I ended up visiting SV about a year after this for Startup School. We were staying with a relative, who was also tied in to the VC scene somehow. I remember her asking some question that prompted a “Paul Graham” response. I think she was asking something like “so who might your investors be if things go well?” And being 19 and confident, I foolishly felt I might have what it took to run a YC co. Her reply was illuminating, though: “Who?”
The run-up to YC’s worldwide takeover was truly a cool thing to watch. And I think HN was the central reason it was able to grow at all. Most people seem to disagree, but this snapshot provides a glimpse into a time when YC was a sapling, just like every startup in the YC batches now.
I rather enjoyed the internet 2000-2005. It was like squatting and having a rave in an recently abandoned factory.
It sucks that a bunch of nimbys came here and threw everyone fun out.
Hell even pg would get flagged off hn if he said the stuff he used to in the 00s.
Yeah, it's not google or facebook. The people who go there today went to Wall Street/law firms 20 years ago. The shift started 10 years ago which is when it stopped being fun to work at google/facebook. Sure the people going there have the grades and cv but they don't have the brains.
I still get that even when talking about pmarca or pg (or even rms) outside of tech circles. Sometimes I think I may be further down the rabbit hole than I think I am.
0.016̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅% of the world's population is following Graham on twitter.com, which is a lot of people!
(Edited s/0.00016̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅%/0.016̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅%; forgot to move the decimal. Thanks, shric.)
edit: this is a joke in theme with the discussion of relative obscurity.
Since 2005, the accepted internet convention[1] has been 'repeating of course'
On MacOS, here's what we see: https://i.imgur.com/c90WOgO.png
I can imagine that this wasn't your intent, and maybe it shows up differently on Windows or Linux. If so, you might want to say so.
(If it was your intent for it to look like that, though, then I agree it's the pedantic equivalent of Zalgo.)
I see what may have been the problem, though. It looks like somewhere in the process the overline was duplicated. Probably an issue with my IME (I've been working on it for a while now, but it's still got a few quirks). Does this (6̅) look right to OS X users?
Always nice to clear up a miscommunication. dances around
Have a great evening.
I distinctly remember listening to podcast around ~’08 where much the same subjects were being discussed as today - low startup payout probability vs big stable income corp. I don’t think it’s really changed that much tbh
The period was electrifying. Even if one wishes to take a cynical view, that YC needed to fool a bunch of young engineers into gambling on the prospect of getting rich, the execution was marvelous. pg’s essays were the epicenter.
(I don’t buy the cynical take. The engineers that try and fail to build an early startup are well-positioned to transition to a traditional career path with minimal long term loss of income or opportunity cost. The only area where that isn’t really true is probably ads or ML, the latter being a recent phenomenon.)
HN has always been about disrupting everything, so that's not so surprising. When Uber can't hire drivers as contractors, or AirBnb isn't allowed to operate somewhere, or Tesla is scrutenized, this place can get wild. "Old tech" FAANG receives heavy criticism and "new tech" is lauded. I think it's leveled out in the last year though.
> A profitless Web site started by three 20-somethings after a late-night dinner party is sold for more than a billion dollars, instantly turning dozens of its employees into paper millionaires. It sounds like a tale from the late 1990’s dot-com bubble, but it happened yesterday.
Crazy to think how long Google has been betting on YT. Imagine telling someone 15 years ago that YouTube was going to turn into the biggest entertainment entity ever.
Disney holds that crown. There's no likely scenario where YouTube by itself will surpass Disney, especially given how well Disney+ has performed.
Netflix is also a lot more valuable than YouTube and far larger in terms of sales.
YouTube seems to be on track to overtaking Netflix this year in terms of revenue as well, if it hasn't already. [0]
[0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/with-skyrocketing-sales-yo...
(It was a troll user. Someone made a parody account named Aarington, who was running TechCrunch at the time. I suppose TechCrunch’s influence has dwindled dramatically, since I can’t remember the last time I got a scoop from them. But back in 2008, TechCrunch seemed to matter a lot.)
Let’s pick climate change, for example, and see how our expectations were met:
2006-2008
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1223424000&dateRange=custom&...
It’s awesome seeing the posts from back then, stuff like ”PhotoShow: Broadcast Photos to Cable TV” give some good perspective on how the world has changed very quick.
.
”No need to get your grandmother online. Just point her to channel 917 and she can see your most recent vacation pictures right there on her television.”
”If Photoshow is successful in closing deals with local cable channels, this differentiating factor with competitors could make it a winner.
The company has raised $6.3 million from Venrock in August 2005.”
It was something like "when a link starts getting multiple posts on hacker news that's when we know we've hit on something..."
I'd not heard about hacker news until that point. I was probably hanging around codeproject.com. Since then I lurk almost daily, and am always amazed by the breadth and depth of articles and commments, both tech and non tech.
People assume that once it's on the internet it's there forever, but it's really not true. Some of our favorite articles and insights from past days are long gone.
https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/2b54ux/google_compl...
There was a thread on Google forums about that, and I recall many upset users asking for the option to be reactivated, but (the irony) that discussion was removed as well.
archive.org, available via webtorrent: https://dweb.archive.org/
It's pretty slow, though.
Therefore I try to save webpages that I care about, but it's getting harder and harder. Not to mention the space it takes - is it really worth the hundreds of GiB of personal archives when I'll likely want - not need - maybe a few KiBs of it decades down the line. And even then, will I be able to find it?
Sometimes I think about just archiving a screenshot and the text of websites, instead of markup and related files.
[1]: https://github.com/lycheeverse/lychee [2]: https://archive.org/donate/
also, one of the very first times i visited this site, this link was also number 1 on the front page. It was just a little confusing...
This resonates a lot with me, as I decided, as a fresh computer engineer grad circa 2006, to choose Wall Street over other places.
With the GFC unfolding over the next 2 years, the incredible rise of tech, the emergence of mobile computer, the iPhone, etc... the money and power clearly shifted very quickly to the West Coast.
I think NYC is still definitely not startup friendly due to the high costs - but maybe its a little less "irresponsible" than when the 2006 blog was written.
By the user "sama", presumably referencing something YCombinator had listed on their website:
> "the rising star of venture capital" -unknown VC eating lunch on SHR
Paul Graham responds:
> Is there anywhere to eat on Sandhill Road?
Maybe it's just the way I'm wired but I'd love to know from them directly what their reasons were for moving on and what they did after HN - or maybe I just spend too much time on here myself :-/
Finally made an account to make a comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272119
Walking back through time triggers all sorts of ideas, partially formed, just sitting there...
Thanks everyone for being you and doing what you do!
What stands out to me the most now is just how little, threaded, simply presented, discussion there is now on the general Internet. So many people won't know what it is, and that's a loss in my book.
A peeve:
Reading that discussion caused me to revisit something I find terribly annoying, and that is one space between the end of sentence period and the first character of the next sentence.
I get it, readability and all that, BUT:
Doing this breaks our ability to correctly parse when to capitalize the next word!
And I hate that, because touch input on my Android would be so much less hassle if this were done correctly.
Done now, thanks for hearing me.
I clicked on the link to go forward by a day and the top submission was by Steve Huffman (Hipmunk, Reddit, Udacity course) on Google’s acquisition of YouTube: http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/google_youtube.html
It’s also strange to see so few comments and so few submissions per day. There’s also a curiously large gap of no submissions during the months preceding 19th February 2007 (when there are 50 submissions): https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-19
Seattle isn’t even on the map.
Edit: Heck yeah. Cheers for Jack and Ardour and being awesome. I work for a certain outdoor retailer based in the area that I'm sure you've been to. I am a musician and a cyclist as well!
https://web.archive.org/web/20070312172247/http://www.founde...
HN Nostalgic Mode or something lol
when did HN actually launch?
PS: It is funny that you can still upvote old posts!
Oh, to imagine what could have been...