20 Years of YC / HN | Hacker News Reader

20 Years of YC / HN

vickiboykis.com

175 pointsmooreds42 comments

I remember HN back when it was called “Startup News”. I wrote about it 18 years ago: https://paulstamatiou.com/why-i-enjoy-startup-news

Hey Paul, thanks for your writings. I enjoy reading your blog. You were one first blogs I started following with an RSS reader (after Vicki :)).

Thanks for following along!

Unrelated. But what does the string "0x74BD9fe33990d1b49B196C416493186F5BB68c53" mentioned in your profile mean?

Eth address. It was needed at some point to verify YC alumni crypto wallets, I think as part of OrangeDAO

Stammy! In an odd coincidence, you came to mind the other day as I was putting on deodorant.

Many years ago you wrote a post where you called a deodorant company to ask how many "shoups" to use (where a shoup is one swipe of deodorant).

I don't seem to be finding the post now.

Was that you, or do I have you mixed up with someone else?

I’m now weirdly keen to hear the answer to this. Telenovella level tension on HN.

Stammy! What are you doing here?!?!? Get your deodorant back on the 405 to Ventura!

Haha, unfortunately I don't think that was me. At least I don't recall anything about deodorant.

Giant related thread last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43332658

I keeep forgetting there's a front page to this site... it's my Slashdot replacement. Imagine if Commander Taco had been funding Myspace, what a world that would have been :)

I was reading Reddit and saw a link to hardware.slashdot.org. I learnt that slashdot still existed. And with the relaunch of Digg, I thought I was having a flashback to 1999.

Can't believe I've been with HN for about a quarter of its lifetime already! And it's certainly been the most enriching corner of the Internet in this time for me personally. Grateful for that— Shoutout to dang for keeping this place tidy!

The site design hardly looks a day over 19! (=

What a relief, what a sanctuary for sore eyes!

Thanks for sharing this post!

I've only been on HN for a little over a year now and I feel like I've already tremendously benefited from it, much in the same ways that you have. HN is a really inspiring place and it definitely makes me feel less alone in my work knowing that there are others out there like me.

Happy birthday to us! I joined 9 years ago but I definitely would have joined earlier if I knew HN exists.

It's a never ending pleasure to discover new things, old things I didn't knew and learn interesting viewpoints and valuable bits of information trough comments.

It's great that HN isn't restricting articles on one topic and everybody has the chance to find something interesting. I am mainly interested in software but I've read interesting stuff about economy, psychology, history, art, literature, science.

I've got into the habit of appending news.ycombinator.com to Google search terms if I research something. Because if something is mentioned here is usually relevant for my interests.

Vicki's blog alone was my motivation in paying for an RSS reader.

You can use minifeed.net

Here's to another 20! As long as there are startup companies, and programmers congregate to share their projects and advice, and fresh CS grads don't immediately disappear into the endless cubicle farms of Fortune 500 companies, there will be a need for Hacker News.

The only feature that would make Hacker News complete for me would be the ability to embed images or screenshots in posts. Otherwise I love it and it's the best place on the internet today.

No, please no. Hyperlinks exist, and they work just fine. HN is one of the last few sites that doesn't glamorize the UX (nothing wrong with that). I'd rather read a thousand words than a picture.

They actually glamorize UX in their own way

I used to think this way about Reddit, but they added embedded images to posts and it works great. There are many times on this website where people talk about seeing something cool but cannot attach or embed images describing what they are talking about.

I just upload an image to my CDN or a video to YouTube (I know, I could do better) and add a link to it. I don’t mind that. Adding image support makes me worry people would use it to meme too much.

I have been able to benchmark the quality of a subreddit inversely with the number of images that are present in its threads.

This benchmark has not failed me yet. But I use reddit for basically the same thing I use HN for, which is mostly for reading about nerdy techy stuff.

I think this is true for images on posts, which I don't want to see. I was specifically referring to posts in the sense of comments. I want the ability to embed images in a comment.

There a lot of popular old reddit where the attached image's link is dead since it was hosted on a 3rd party site. So I think it would be nice to have image support in HN

20 years of YouTube this year as well. (In a sense…this past Valentine’s Day was their domain registration anniversary.)

The launch of YC predates the launch of YouTube.

I was checking when I created my account, it is March 21, 2014 -- hitting my 11-year anniversary in two days!

> Ironically, the biggest multiples it’s generated for the industry have been from a low-dazzle text forum written in Arc Lisp.

Wholeheartedly concur. I'm yet another datapoint for this statement. I picked up programming, picked up a tech stack, found jobs, and launched profitable sideprojects, all with the help of this site.

Was YC always right wing, or did a shift occur?

I see articles like [0] claiming that there was a backlash for aligning with Trump back in 2016. Does that mean that YC founders were speaking out against Trump more back then, than they are now?

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/17/project-i...

Yes. It's in the name of what they are and do: venture capitalists.

If you look at Paul Graham's famous essays you'll find they are quite preoccupied with hierarchies.

It's one of those places where each side thinks it skews to the other side. Depending on the time of day and who knows what other variables, you can get downvoted for posting right-wing or left-wing political thought on here. I actually think it's relatively balanced, overall.

> Joined 16 years ago

Thanks for all the knowledge HN!

well put!

ty pg, dang et al here who made && make this place what it is

It's amazing how you can still register to this place without Javascript, *even though* it uses Recaptcha. Because Recaptcha still has a fallback mode to a (ostensibly) less secure captcha that just requires ticking 3 boxes and is much more usable than the version I get if I enabled Javascript. It would sure be a shame if someone Abused (TM) that. Github too was one of the last websites to support human beings until Microsoft got all nazi (read: schizo) mode with their "it's all for your security" shit locking you out of your account because your mom didn't walk her dog that day which triggered a Microsoft (R) Entra (TM) Advanced Risk Model Analysis (read: regex) [patent pending] alert from reading her GPS data from an advertising provider (Microsoft records your mouse movements like Cloudflare so I wouldn't put it past them).

tl;dr Congratulations for being one of the last real websites alive!!!

why is your username green, out of curiosity?

Comments by newly registered users show the user name in green. It goes away after the account has been registered for a few days. For example, here's the thread where I made my first comment on the site in 2016. You can see that my name is green there:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12535347

TIL the "new user" status stays with the post, even after it disappears from new posts by the user.

That’s actually a new feature.

It denotes 1337 users.

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