I like it. I'm getting older. Get the people here you want. If you don't shout out to my past, I'll find somewhere else that does it. Not "my" issue. Not "your" issue.
Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
11–20 of 157 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#12There is nothing wrong with a healthy appreciation for the past.
It's a modern phenomena to disregard everything that has gone before as "outdated". The tech industry has had a good long run of not looking back, but we are far enough along that a lot of good ideas that have been abandoned or left fallow are sitting around waiting to be re-implemented or reinterpreted.
Two examples I'm involved in:
- https://htmx.org is building on the idea of hypermedia and has a distinct 90s flavor to it
- https://hyperscript.org is a re-imagination of HyperTalk, the scripting language from HyperCard, for the web
I like the idea of building organically on the ideas of the past. Lots of people way smarter than me just happened to be born at a different time in the arc of the computer revolution. Why wouldn't I look back at what they did, play with it and maybe think about how it might apply to today?
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#13Its likely a combination of many factors. i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever. ii) The fact that the past keeps growing . The body of interesting developments keeps growing and while some stuff is obsolete / nostalgic, other stuff is totally not. In fact revisiting the mindset and vision of past decades is many times very inspiring and educational. iii) T…
> iii) The fact that the present is shrill, exhaustively hyped, manipulated and in a sense damaged. Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available.
I agree with this sentiment to some extent. Yet, I am struggling to identify if it's "just me getting old" or if there is more to it.
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#14Welp I've read 4 or 5 comments that give plausible yet different explanations. So I won't add my own but just ask: do you think it's a positive or negative thing? I prefer to not have the old stuff in the headlines. It's more interesting when someone references an old article in the comments.
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#15We're haunted by the spectre of futures past. Dreams, promised futures, possibilities, lost never to be.
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#16Back in the day, we'd never talk so much about the past.
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#17Extreme lack of innovation in tech. Everything “new” is bland, corporate, rehashed, locked down, drivel. There’s still great stuff happening but it’s not universally interesting like things tended to be years ago.
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#18It's high time we do so and we actually take the time to look back before jumping all-in on new ventures. Many fancy new projects that claimed, for example, to be so much faster/better than "oldschool" SQL databases learned the hard way what ACID means (or rather, their users did).
Soooo much in hipster tech is reinventing the wheel all over again.
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#19Right now, we are in a period of upheaval. Everyone knows that everything is about to change, but we don't know exactly how. Transformers are going to create huge shifts in how businesses work on a fundamental level. The stable diffusion and LLMs could collectively eliminate huge numbers of jobs. The past doesn't have the same worries, and this tech revolution is not looking good for many.
Everyone knows that everything is about to change for the worse.
Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
#20Its likely a combination of many factors. i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever. ii) The fact that the past keeps growing . The body of interesting developments keeps growing and while some stuff is obsolete / nostalgic, other stuff is totally not. In fact revisiting the mindset and vision of past decades is many times very inspiring and educational. iii) T…
(i) definitely applies. I often see younger hackers talking about “the orange website”, never in positive tones. HN is seen as older, richer, and with various negative tendencies.