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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know if this is a self selecting group on HN but I’d think a disproportionate amount of us read it growing up.

Even the sections that talked about cool (and futuristic) stuff were great.

This and Popular Mechanics, I’m not sure how we got them in our house in India growing up but I fondly remember both of them.

Have we lost something? Where will future hackers get their inspiration from? Maybe a million different YouTube channels and proliferation of cheap ways to learn and tinker are fueling the next generation. Let’s hope so.

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I loved Pop Sci growing up, but in hindsight I felt like the content was already on the decline by the early 2000s. That, or it was never that great and I was just getting more aware as I got older.

I remember that most of the things I read about never even came close to reality, and that was pretty disappointing. It seemed like they were more interested in writing speculative sci-fi than reporting on the current state of scientific research. It just wasn't interesting. The only thing that really caught my attention was coverage of the X Prize and Spaceship One. That stuff was cool because it existed in real life, it wasn't just a bunch of artist renderings about what the year 2030 might look like.

Can't speak for Popular Mechanics. I probably should have been reading that all along.

I remember excitedly reading their early articles on e-ink, but that only materialized in a very niche way decades later.

> I loved Pop Sci growing up, but in hindsight I felt like the content was already on the decline by the early 2000s. That, or it was never that great and I was just getting more aware as I got older.

I remember realizing it was mostly bull and weak articles when I was about 13…around 1977. Didn’t stop me from reading it but I felt it was more SF speculation from some current science news rather than actual science. That was OK.

Turns out sci-fi speculation is more marketable than sci-reality.

I still remember thinking how cool it would be if the Lockheed Venturestar came to fruition. Like, Wow! Would that have been cool or what?

Maybe it's ok that it's a lot of speculative stuff after all? Maybe there's something to be said for reading about the wild-ass ventures that are high-risk and high reward. Incremental progress gets you a long ways, but the occasional moonshot can really move the needle. Watching the two Falcon Heavy boosters land simultaneously was the kind of thing you feel like you'd have read about 10 years previously in Popular Science

I seem to remember most all the articles about how airships are on the verge of becoming practical again -- in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s... Don't get me wrong, I think airships are neat, it's just after seeing this promise unfulfilled so many times, I just doubt that it will happen.

> just after seeing this promise unfulfilled so many times, I just doubt that it will happen.

Well buckle up:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/worlds-largest-a...

Neat. Hopefully they won't go bust right away like all the rest. This sort of article was exactly what was printed decade after decade -- company X has an airship prototype and will test it shortly but either they never get one aloft, or it gets damaged in a storm and they run out of funding to build another.

I bought some from the 30s, 40s and 50s. Each magazine was 300 pages of Radio or TV repairman training courses, and a dozen pages with some fluff about the 'future' or advertisement article about a new tool.

My wife worked there for a bit in the mid 2000s and I did and still do read just about anything I can get my hands on, but I found it really hard to get through an issue of pop sci. It was mostly optimistic fluff with the lightest of technical detail. And tbh if I wasn't reading it, I can't imagine who was- I imagine it was mostly subscribed to by dentists offices.

Popular Science, Popular Mechanics — even just the covers of the magazines exuded a kind of optimism. It was going to be a brave new future ... you can learn to do this yourself ... you can understand it ... you can make this in your garage...

Unfortunately the future kind of caught up with it.

Or maybe as an adult when I became an engineer some of the mystique of tech evaporated when it became my job five days a week?

But in the 70's and 80's when I was perhaps of a more impressionable age (or when maybe the future itself was more measurable) it fueled my curiosity and did impart a kind of optimism that will be missed.

I got the impression that the quality was on a long slow decline from initially nearly professional science quality articles to something not quite as bad as the modern discovery channel.

Surely the mystique evaporates for “popular” publications targeted at people with less experience, but that just means you need to level up what you consume. Physics Today is something to look into today.

The media i want to consume is mostly of the “this was written for people on the level of graduate students, but ones in a different field”. I can’t find a lot of it

This has been true for a lot of publications I used to like to read. Wired, Time, Sports Illustrated all are much, much worse today than I remember them being 20 years ago. I don’t know if that’s me or a genuine change in their quality.

This is quite in line with what I remember as well (and have verified by looking through many old editions recently). I think this is just the outcome of modern business practices in the US. It's a race to the bottom of quality, while making that bottom line top out.

Everyone takes the short term safe course, make a thing a little bit worse to make a little bit more money, don’t take risks with things that might be high quality that maybe only a few will appreciate.

The result is a long slow decline which is profitable until you’re dying and can’t climb back out. This is, I am sure, an explicit strategy of some. The whole business model of taking something good and lowering quality while relying on the good will from the past until it’s all out and you’re bankrupt… except you’ve been doing whatever you could to extract profit from the whole process and just leaving the business bankrupt.

There are a few magazines by (I think?) the publishing arm of Raspberry Pi: Hackspace and MagPi... they are a little pricey and mostly cover small electronics and programming-related projects, but they're in a similar vein.

I wish there were still some decent magazines like these I remember reading through in my youth, but one big challenge for the publishers is the "maker" / "mechanic" these days is much more limited to hobbyists.

In my Dad's generation, you kinda had to have a certain level of mechanical ability if you ever wanted to own a house and car/bike and not live in squalor.

Nowadays, if you even have the money for a home, it seems like 99% of things are made to be replaced, and for anything that needs fixing, it's impossible to fix it yourself without some pretty strong technical abilities (and a lot of time/patience).

There's also a lot more emphasis on practicality, and less on sci-fi-type aspirational content in general.

I can recommend BBC Science Focus as a half way decent replacement for Popular Science.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/magazine

watch for it on sale at https://www.discountmags.com/magazine/bbc-focus

it’s also free with an Apple News or Bundle subscription. https://apple.news/TUNNn0U24SRC5LF2bxqxDNA

> Have we lost something? Where will future hackers get their inspiration from? Maybe a million different YouTube channels and proliferation of cheap ways to learn and tinker are fueling the next generation. Let’s hope so.

I can watch rocket launches live streamed on a handheld device, then consume expert or very well informed layman analysis shortly afterwards. There’s probably 10 substacks for every scientific and engineering specialization written by experts. I can look up primary sources, even preprints, and aggregate a range of expert opinions on them. I can watch a million impeccably animated explainer videos on any topic. It’s harder to choose sources due to the plethora of choices, and the printed medium is tactile and nice, but in practically every other way now is vastly better!

> It’s harder to choose sources due to the plethora of choices

That's sort of why print magazines are/were helpful and approachable - they're an easy entry point with curation, discoverability, and an editorial staff. They're also somewhat self-contained rather than being an endless rabbit hole of attention-grabbing links (those generally being limited to the cover.)

Arguably the best thing about HN and good aggregation blogs is that they provide curation and discoverability as well as some degree of editorial commentary. And hopefully they're not managed by attention-maximizing algorithms.

The abundance of options and content - even if you were to limit yourself to a specific category, such as peer-reviewed articles in a particular field, or a particular medium, such as youtube videos - from online ources can be completely overwhelming.

More people are reading more things more often than ever before.

Indie hackers (as well as anyone else) can now cheaply publish their own magazines to the globe.

I don’t think we lost something other than paper and postage.

Pretty soon (in the scheme of things) they’ll stop printing books and paper money too.

(I say this as a vinyl and book collector. It’s just facts. Our great grandchildren will not use physical books.)

I don't think it will disappear entirely. Just like vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CDs, some people deliberately choose to buy dead tree media for one reason or another. Maybe print magazines will go first, and maybe print newspapers at some point in the future, but actual books will probably never go away.

Yes. Books might go the same way the horse has gone. No longer dominant, but still occupying niches.

Vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CDs will also be unused in 100 years. Cassettes and VHS will by then be unreadable, just as most floppies are now. Hell, in 100 years, there won’t even be the mp3 codec anymore.

You don’t need to tell me that people deliberately choose dead trees; I am one of them: I collect books and have more than most collectors. Same goes for vinyl.

The writing is on the wall, however. In 100 years it won’t be a thing, just as fountain pens and wax seals aren’t today.

Yes, they will still exist, and yes, people into whatever type of historical reenactment that is will still have them, but there will be no industry around them like there is now.

Yeah I understand your point, but vinyl is kinda sacred.

I mean, of all the things you mentioned, it's by far the most likely to still be usable in the future. Even in a post-apocalyptic world people might figure out how to play vinyl. MP3s? Not a chance.

Full disclosure: I never liked cassettes. Oh, and I made the mistake of choosing Beta over VHS....

> Cassettes and VHS will by then be unreadable, just as most floppies are now.

And yet, the longevity of a humble cassette tape far exceeds that of the average website. Websites ("digital products" if we must) change, they delete old/offtopic articles for SEO reasons, they change designs to fit in more ads, their owner ship changes hands, the image links break...the list is endless.

There are Gizmodo articles from < 10yrs filled with blank blocks with an "image not found" message in them. At least the cassette's changes are due to physical degradation only.

> I don’t think we lost something other than paper and postage.

Popular Science was nostalgic. It was a callback to an earlier time, and it tracked within its pages the series of changes led to today. It's like losing a species to extinction, albeit not quite as drastic or irrecoverable.

I remember the magazine fondly. Once I got into my later teens, it felt a little too general audience for my taste. But it always made me wonder about the possibilities of science and engineering. Jetpack futures, cloud cities, and millennium ships.

> Indie hackers (as well as anyone else) can now cheaply publish their own magazines to the globe.

It won't be long and even blogs and news websites will see the margin set to zero. LLMs will ingest and rephrase (with accuracy) all kinds of content. There will be no money in running CNN or the New York Times.

> Our great grandchildren will not use physical books.

It's sad to think that the libraries will get garbage collected, but the books they store will be little more than anachronisms. Perhaps they can be turned into public internet cafes.

I had an argument with my wife about funding our public libraries. (We live in NYC which I believe supports 3 out of the top 10 public library systems in the country. Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan maintain separate library systems.)

I am happy for my tax dollars to support the system, but the bottom line is that branch libraries exist as a free, under-resourced Internet cafe for the indigent. That might be a good use for the public fisc, but the librarians and books are completely ignored.

We have three children the youngest of whom just finished high school and we were forced to admit none of us has been in our neighborhood branch in more than 8 years.

At the same time I haves seen two exhibits at the main reading room in the past 18 months.

> Pretty soon (in the scheme of things) they’ll stop printing books and paper money too.

That seems unlikely to me. E-books have really terrible UX. Paper books aren't going anywhere until that is fixed.

I can't carry a library of 1000 physical books in my pocket and pull them out while on the toilet. I think you have it backward.

That's not exactly useful. The ability to read a book without any electrical charge, however, is.

Being able to pull out any book, anywhere, any time, is not useful? What happens at night in your electricityless world, are you reading by candlelight? Or you can just light the page you just read on fire, that way your book is also your fuel.

As someone who reads quickly a lot on planes (and sees a lot of others doing the same) the ability to have multiple books on a Kindle is much more important than lack of access to electricity for a few days.

(I also have a large physical book library.)

e-readers can go for days to weeks on a full charge depending on how often you use them. Definitely much longer than the average smartphone.

But that's not really how books work though. I don't ever really need to read more than 1 book at a time. I'm all for e-readers, have a couple and use them, but it's a cost saving measure. I would vastly prefer physical books for the interface.

Wow, a lot of people taking me very literally. Most people take their phones everywhere, giving them instant access to just about every book ever created. You don’t need a light to read. You just need that thing you already have in your pocket.

That's nice and all, and in a pinch maybe convinent, but most of the time im not looking to read in random places.

I appreciate that might not be true for everyone, use cases vary. For me its essentially being better at a feature i dont use.

Reading books on a phone is even worse than an e-reader though. The difference is usability. It's kind of like saying "Why bother bringing a chair, you have an ass you can sit on anywhere?"

My library is across the hall from my toilet, so I can simply get one of my couple thousand physical books on the way to the toilet.

You only poop at home?

Actually, since my employer switched to work from home about 5 years ago I don't think I've pooped elsewhere.

You only read when you poop?

I have 3 kids.

Have you considered you might just not be the target audience for books?

E-readers being a better interface for people who dont have time to read is not exactly a steller endorsement.

Even in college I didn't need to read more than 5 books at a time. The iPod thousand-songs-in-your-pocket analogy doesn't apply to reading material.

Or until the book publishers condition the market enough to accept expensive DRM-filled ebooks with no physical copies, due to better margins and no secondary market as an alternative. Similar to the video game industry, which used to provide physical copies that you had full control over and now is moving more and more of the user base into digital stores for their “convenience”.

Hackers and pirates will be around one way or another.

What don't you like about the e-book UX? I used to think this but after using them for a few years I now prefer all aspects except two:

* Can't flick between two points in non-fiction books easily

* Can't show them off on a bookshelf

Phones give eyestrain after long use. E-ink is much better but not as good as paper.

In a way i can't really explain, paper books are more relaxing to read.

I actually prefer e-ink to paper because I can adjust the type size and layout.

I have mixed feelings about tablets. I do like that I can have a nightmode colorscheme for night reading. I don't think reading on a phone is a great experience generally.

I am reading The Shallows, and I am not so sure. Having replaced my paper books with iPad Kindle versions years ago, I am seriously thinking of going back to paper.

https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...

I read books off of an SD card inserted into an e-ink device that has never had the wifi turned on.

The problems with internet overuse are orthogonal.

I longed for the days of snipping programs from magazines, or reading how deep internals were implemented in some computer or technology. My whole life I felt like I was born to late to be part of a hacker movement.

Now I have GPT-4 and finally my curiosity can be satisfied quickly. The world got so small again. I feel like I can _build_ again.

This sums up my optimism about AI.

I finally have a patient, infallible teacher without a direct agenda to game SEO to sell ads or a product.

It feels like the earliest days of the web when I consumed every page of howstuffworks.com and surfed webrings out of curiosity.

> I don’t know if this is a self selecting group on HN but I’d think a disproportionate amount of us read it growing up.

I am a member of that group. This was one of my favorite magazines growing up. And I do have to say I felt a twinge of sadness to see this article on HN just now.

Count me here. I received a subscription to them and Popular Mechanics in 2010 for my birthday. I’m still subscribed to PopMech but the writing is on the wall with the bimonthly releases.

I remember reading over breakfast cereal in the morning, and I won a quiz bowl competition because I had read about buckminster fullerene (buckyball form of carbon).

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