Not a website, but I miss a weekly email newsletter called NTK (Need to Know). I'm not sure how many HN readers were NTK readers, but I bet all NTK readers are now HN readers.
Yes! The archive still lives at ntk.net if you're craving nostalgia.
Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
371–380 of 472 posts
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#372Flash-based websites. There were some really good ones. I think to this day the fluidity of Flash-based sites can’t be matched. I’m still not sure why the security of Flash couldn’t be addressed. It was a conspiracy to destroy Flash and the HTML-only camp succeeded.
It annoys me even more that Mozilla ended development on Shumway, their browser extension with the javascript flash runtime. Sure, it would never be perfect, but it'd be so nice to be able to play simple games and animations.
In the same vein, IIRC there's at least one incomplete Java VM written in javascript, but I never managed to get it working for javagameplay.com.
On the other hand, the death of browser plugins means it's that much harder to escape the browser now; it was quite simple for any Java or flash applet to browse the local filesystem (I bypassed the local library's restrictions with a Java file manager in order to save files to my flash drive)
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
I miss the free software activism bent of old slashdot. There was so much optimism at Linux and others being the way of the future, and beating Microsoft at the desktop. I feel like the Unix enthusiast's shift to the Mac kind of killed some of that. If people think a desktop ui is a "solved problem" (by Apple), there end up fewer people interested in those kind of projects. Now it's pretty common for a free software…
It's nuts to me how much peole despised MS at the time. I remember getting a hacked/modded version of Halo 2 (2004) and it came with a picture of Gates with a bullet hole in his head. Which is sick and not appropriate, but people despised him. They've done a really good job of rehabilitating their image. Having grown up at the time, it's hard for me to see Gates and them as different than that. It does make me somewh…
Sadly some of the re-evaluation of Gates is due to the bar getting lower and lower, when it comes to corporate governance in the tech space. MCI/Worldcom, Bezos’s ruthless Amazon, Zuckerberg and googlers despising their own users, Jobs squeezing money out of everyone, Larry Ellison being Larry Ellison, and Ballmer being even more of a bully than Gates was...
Yes, the hate for Gates does look a bit naive now. To be fair, at the time there was a huge amount of admiration for him in the mainstream (I still meet people convinced he “invented” this or that software alone in a garage), so the hate was really niche. Hi
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
I miss the free software activism bent of old slashdot. There was so much optimism at Linux and others being the way of the future, and beating Microsoft at the desktop. I feel like the Unix enthusiast's shift to the Mac kind of killed some of that. If people think a desktop ui is a "solved problem" (by Apple), there end up fewer people interested in those kind of projects. Now it's pretty common for a free software…
What killed the "is this the year of desktop Linux" question was the smartphone. The Desktop/Laptop segment peaked in 2011.
By 2011 the Linux desktop was already the butt of jokes. That dream died about 5 years earlier, when Ubuntu spread like wildfire in the geek community and then... failed to make any serious inroad anywhere else.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#375Kuro5hin[1] was great. The blog “A coder in courier land” [2] led me to become a bike messenger for a few years during the housing market crisis (or be laid off).
It put life in perspective and eventually made me a better developer (after returning) by virtue of realizing the more work you put in, the more reward you receive.
I wish I could thank that guy for writing.
1 -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin
2 -https://web.archive.org/web/20150417064721/http://www.kuro5h...
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#376Slashdot did not sensure like YC these days. Sad YC. You just follow YouTube and Google agenda. Nothing new.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#377Not necessarily early, but about 10 years back, there was a site called stereomood that introduced me to a ton new artists and genres.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#378Get top darknet news from dark web link
https://darkweblink.com/
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#379Simple purple website: purple.com // Now it's unfortunately taken by mattress company
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#380practically missing deep dot web finally got an alternative
https://darkweblink.com/