The first day of HN frontpage
news.ycombinator.com
news.ycombinator.com
I’m on mobile but maybe I’ll do it later. Or one of you could claim the honor of discovering and sharing it.
Initially I suspected that all the people on the actual-first-day weren’t actually people — that pg seeded HN during its early days, much like Reddit, with multiple personas that only seemed real at a glance.
But now I think pg emailed a link to all@ycombinator.com and those initial users were the people from the 2005 batch. Then they collectively lost interest (which accounts for the multi month gap) at which point pg made it public as Startup News.
I would give a hint on how to find the real first day, but I think I like leaving it as an open puzzle. As a hint, pay close attention to the URLs on the page that this submission points to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09
Anything earlier gives HN didn’t exist yet.
The casual conversation between pg and sama on the top link is interesting. Also neat that Sam was like 17 at the time.
I didn’t know the “HN didn’t exist yet” error. That’s neat, because it implies that this page was intended to be a secret Easter egg, rather than it being a bug.
The last interesting tidbit is to go forward starting from that day, and pay close attention to how rapidly organic interest in the site went to zero. It’s astonishing that Startup News didn’t suffer the same fate; it’s the hardest part of launching something like HN.
I still 40% suspect that lots of the early activity was artificial, and that real users eventually supplanted the artificial activity.
pg once alluded to a “secret sauce”, and I think it was as simple as “keep the front page fresh and interesting each day,” which absolutely requires manual intervention. So the secret sauce seems likely to be something along the lines of “have a big backlog of interesting links, then automatically submit them and give them a few artificial upvotes each day.”
I’ll admit, I’m probably more obsessed with HN’s early days than I should be. But it’s such a pleasing example of Lisp proving its value that I can’t help it.
I used to run a stack of private torrent trackers. The first one I made came from the fact that the admin of another site ran off with all the funds and abandoned the users. I moved them all to my site. Then every time I set up a new site I had thousands of users I could message to let them know. On the final one I had 100K+ active users - a message to them was like having your own private army to do your bidding for you.
Things have changed a little since 2007!
Supposedly there was a page 2 of the article, but even though the first attempted capture of page 2 by the IA was only a few days after the article was pusblished, page 2 was returning 404 to IA.
Turns out Youtube was right in the first place: this can't be an automated process, unless you accept more than half the videos that will be deleted have nothing to do with copyright infringement.
- if you make it too strict you'll just find bit-by-bit copies: reencoding or slightly altering the data would pass screening easily
- if you make it too lax, you will find that many "original compositions" are in fact very similar to or inspired by other works (oh really that bird singing i just recorded is copyrighted?!)
Beyond that, when there's an actual copy involved, an algorithm is fairly bad at determining whether this copy is legal:
- if it looks very similar to another user's video which claims to have copyright on the content, however what proves the copyright is owned by that other uploader and not by a 3rd party? how can you make sure the license was not copyleft or public domain in the first place?
- how do you know whether the content is used in a context of lawful criticism? parody?
- how do you know whether the usage is tied to an education or accessibility exception to copyright?
- how do you know if the usage of the copyrighted content is legal in the uploader's country? in the copyright owner's country? in the host's country? how do you decide which is more important?
If censorship is bad, automated censorship is even worse. There's no way to make it right.
But the subreddits for your favorite band or hobby are alive and healthy.
HN’s culture might be “preserved” but it’s not perfect. Personally, it irks me how humorless this place is. Jokes are often not allowed here.
When jokes are fully accepted they tend to be lower effort than a comment that is thoughtful, and in reddit they tend to get more upvotes than the thoughtful one. This incentives people to write low effort jokes in order to get more fake points. The tendency thus created alienates rational discussion and doesn't bring much information.
There are already places in where you can be witty instead of wise, but this is not one of them.
But if you want serious and mostly respectful discussions (people losing their cool and attacking others also gets downvoted quite harshly), you’ve got HN. You can criticise it; it definitely sometimes is just smugness or low-effort cynicism. It’s not perfect, but it sure as heck is one of the best communities I’ve ever seen.
If this place became like Reddit, it’d lose its whole raison d'être.
On Reddit there is a lot of jokes, but most of them are replicas or just pure memes that gets repeated ad infinitum, nothing that really cracks me up except some rare ones. But on HN, when there is a highly upvoted comment with a joke somewhere within, it's always good one that contributes to the comments otherwise insightful points.
The problem is when everyone thinks that they have some unique insight and that their cynical one-liners are worthy to be written down. Put that together with the development of "in-groups", and you'd see most of the threads becoming sequences of re-hashed jokes. You get "ha-ha funny" posts, but you get no one really challenging anything related to the topic and you drown out those that might actually have something to add to the conversation.
Good comedy/satire works when it manages to bring new insight into a topic. If you have such talent and your comment can be insightful and humorous, I doubt you'd have trouble with the crowd.
Some of my highest-voted comments have been pure humor or satire. Here's an example (my two comments in the thread; start at the top for context):
Still, HK is one of the only forum type of sites I visit anymore.
I gave up on Reddit. Most forums are long dead. I don't have time to keep up on some discord channel. Don't use Facebook.
So I'm grateful for HN.
I don't get all of this Golden Age talk. I thought it was less boring when half of it was /b/, but the idea that it was apolitical is weird.
Most of these subcultures have been banned today but reddit acted as a massive force multiplier for these movements.
For example, the 'lesbians' subreddit is full of pornography, and the 'actuallesbians' subreddit is full of men pretending to be women. Any attempt by women to start a subreddit exclusively for women inevitably gets banned.
There are women-only spaces on Reddit (or at least they claim to be, impossible to verify obviously) just like there are male-only spaces on Reddit (and both goes for the internet in general), you just need to know where to look.
> Any attempt by women to start a subreddit exclusively for women inevitably gets banned.
I would love to see where this has happened, as I haven't seen it before. I don't find it hard to believe, but want to see it happening in practice before jumping to any conclusions.
Edit: To add another example from this very submission, which is a common way of framing things (on the internet):
> Alright boys, I think I have figured out where the timeline went wrong [...]
This doesn't prove that it'll happen to _every_ women-only subreddit, but I think the previous poster is alluding to the ban on several radical feminism subreddits. I'm sure more detail can be found on their new home, which rhymes with "we are over it".
https://www.wired.com/story/finding-lena-the-patron-saint-of...
A brief report from a 1997 IS&T conference where Lena was a special guest (also SFW except for one link that has a warning next to it):
http://www.lenna.org/lenna_visit.html
An article from The Pudding about Lena's wish for her Playboy image to stop being used:
https://pudding.cool/2021/10/lenna/
And her Wikipedia page:
By "exclusively for women" he means "excludes trans women".
Funny to see everyone's username green because their accounts were just created. Although I see a few accounts that were created months before launch. Maybe there was internal usage before launch that wasn't archived.
Edit: ha, I see the internal usage was archived after all. Here's the real first day, pg's account creation date: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09 Seems like it didn't catch on internally and usage died out after a few days, and then there's pretty much nothing until the public launch.
I remember I arrived there from reading pg’s essays, which linked to it. So it’s possible pg’s essays really were that popular back then.
If there is anything to learn for me it is that those who had the guts to think big never went big enough.
In the end everything is politics. Programmers [like many other fields] like to live in denial there so the closest thing to a constructive effort was the pirate party which did nothing. We gave the world corporate monstrosities that lobby out of self interest.
Who cares if your brain falls out.
But I'm not sure how you went from "a bit of client-side scripting" and "Lightweight scripting" to "letters and images is unviewable without some modifiying logic" here in this thread? Sounds like you just want people to hear how much distaste you have for the dependence on JS for showing content?
i also want you to adopt and spread the pov, but yea.
https://techcrunch.com/2007/02/16/google-to-buy-adscape-for-...
Slashdot, though the peak days were behind it
Digg, which would be fun for a while still
Blogs like the old new thing, and Joel Spolsky
Del.icio.us and Stumbleupon and (I’ll admit it) Fark
I still have a Slashdot account, but I can't remember the last time I logged in there. Peak Slashdot was really 1998 for me, when I was working in my first IT job and would check it as much as 5x a day. By 2011, it had declined greatly in readership because of the combined effects of Twitter, Reddit, and HN.
reference: https://hnhd.io/