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Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

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Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#431

Post by asveikau »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #299
aikinai wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies aren’t people though, and the people embracing it now might have very little overlap with the old stranglers.

It would make me feel a lot better if Gates didn't buddy with Epstein even after his first conviction for trafficking teenagers. I think MS, if it wants to have some respect, should basically disown him unless he has a legit and contrite apology. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-... It engrages and disgusts me it isn't a bigger deal.

It's certainly very disappointing.

On the other hand, Bill Gates is not law enforcement, is not the criminal justice system. Speaking abstractly, if someone is convicted of a crime, goes to prison, and is let out... At what point does a prominent individual need to say they'll never talk to that person under any circumstances? In some cases that would be too extreme and in the abstract, repentant ex-convicts may deserve forgiveness.

In hindsight it's easy to say Epstein wasn't that. But we don't know how he may have misrepresented himself to Gates and others. We know from the press that there was some sketchy business involved in his relatively short prison stay, which I presume Gates did not know. My guess is it's not always an easy call to make, whether or not to show forgiveness to an ex-con, whether or not you can trust them as reformed, etc. The article you cite says he regrets making the wrong call.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#432

Post by mech422 »

ajtjp wrote: post #354
mech422 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah? I haven't looked in years... Though I think I've probably lost some of the feeling of wonder exploring those servers 20 years ago engendered. For a young coder, from a small town with basically zero tech resources - they seemed like the library of Alexandria :-)

It's still there! I'd recommend gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/ as a starting page these days, it has links to SDF, Veronica 2, and a lot of other Gopher resources. It's pretty easy to spin up your own Gopher hole with pygopherd these days as well - I re-hosted mine a few weeks ago and could't have been happier with the ease of setting it up. There are are lot of defunct Gopher holes, but a couple times a year I still…

oh? I'll have to take another look - there was SOOO much good technical content!

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#433

Post by mech422 »

taborj wrote: post #410
mech422 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah? I haven't looked in years... Though I think I've probably lost some of the feeling of wonder exploring those servers 20 years ago engendered. For a young coder, from a small town with basically zero tech resources - they seemed like the library of Alexandria :-)

I also just discovered that there's an HN gopher hole! hngopher.com/1/ I loaded up the open source app Pocket Gopher (available on F-Droid), and while the formatting of ASCII graphics doesn't translate well to portrait mode, everything works.

Ohh..Something like that could be nice on my tablet. Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#434

Post by mech422 »

vardump wrote: post #397
mech422 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do... being able to craft a query that returned _just_ what you wanted and not having to wade thru 10 pages of results because 'page rank' put all the really good stuff on page 5+....

Seconded. With increasing frequency Google returns pages and pages of totally irrelevant results. It's as if they don't care about search result quality as much anymore.

I think its half 'dumbing down' search, and half greed to push as many ads as possible...

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#435

Post by efreak »

cambalache wrote: post #147
starpilot wrote: post #111

You don't miss the websites, you miss being young.

I dont buy that. I dont miss 9600 Bauds modems, Windows 95 or monochromatic monitors. But some things were better before. Not every current thing is better, give me the Godfather 1,2 and Silence of the Lambs versus all movies made in the last 10 years. Compare the kind of discussions you could have in Usenet (cranks included) or the first blogs to the things you see in Twitter or -shudders- Facebook.No contest there.

I personally miss Windows 98. I'm aware of bugs and the boot time it took being longer than current boot times on decent machines. I miss the responsiveness of well-behaved applications. I miss having native applications. I miss having themes and fine control over colors and fonts that allowed me to change the look of almost every application installed due to everything being built with the same toolkit and inheriting the same settings. I miss being able to make pixel art in paintbrush (why did MS have to add antialiasing to paint?). I miss WEP games (Chip's Challenge is on steam, but I've never found a good Jezzball clone).

Also, I miss ZoneAlarm firewall. Windows firewall is sufficient for my needs, but I really wish there was a way to make windows pop up a prompt the first time an application tried to go online, and white/blacklist specific destinations from the prompt.

I miss browsing with less styling and images and such nonsense.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#436

Post by VoxelBoy »

pottertheotter wrote: post #411
VoxelBoy wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case you're interested, I've recently ported Ultima Online to mobile via Unity+ClassicUO: https://github.com/voxelboy/mobileuo . I'll be publishing a blog post about it soon.

Thanks for sharing! I've not heard of ClassicUO. Is it the original UO and people are running their own shards?

It's an open-source private client written for UO but it's meant for playing on private servers instead of the original servers.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#437

Post by smnthermes »

j45 wrote: post #336
asveikau wrote: post #239

Earlier 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…

In a way OSS did become the future.. Linux powering Android.. Bsd powering macos and ios. Ubuntu 20.04 also looks to be an extremely usable desktop that just works.

"Embrace, extend, extinguish".

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#439

Post by dnh44 »

nemo1618 wrote: post #127
pchander wrote: post #102

http://bash.org

Oh shit, I totally forgot about bash.org. hunter2, DISREGARD THAT, "I put on my robe and wizard hat"... a lotta old memes came from IRC.

I’m not sure which BBS system had this, I think it was Wildcat or WWIV, but if you typed something like %pw in a post other users would see their own password leading to a situation like hunter2.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#440

Post by j45 »

asveikau wrote: post #428
j45 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There definitely are closed components. They're built on a foundation of a linux/bsd, no? I'm speaking to the lineage of what linux has been able to impact. It's not likely that closed components could have existed without a foundation of linux/bsd.

I don't think you get that I'm citing specifically the culture of free software activism . A device that is hardwired to only load Linux kernels crytopgraphically signed by corporate entities doesn't fit the bill, nor is it great to have a bunch of proprietary stuff on top. > It's not likely that closed components could have existed without a foundation of linux/bsd. This is false and I think pretty naive. On the App…

I completely understand you're referring to FSF culture. I'm not referring to that. I've followed Richard Stallman for over 20 years.

Linux/BSD source code were part of a lineage that many of today's operating systems, whether you want to package that up as Mach, UMX, whatever.

1. Mac OS X includes oss code in it's foundation.

"Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs once tried to hire Linus Torvalds, the irrepressible Finnish coder who created Linux and gave the thing its name.

But Torvalds said "No," and not long after that, Apple hired Jordan Hubbard, the creator of FreeBSD, a lesser known, but still thriving, open source operating system based on UNIX. It was a better fit: Mac OS X shares conceptual roots with Linux, but it shares honest-to-goodness code with FreeBSD." [1]

"The code at the heart of Mac OS X was born in the mid-1980s at NeXt Computer, the company Steve Jobs founded after his first stint at Apple. NeXt built a operating system based on two existing UNIX projects: Mach, from Carnegie Melon University, and BSD, created at the University of California at Berkeley. But on this base, they added their own, private code – such as the Cocoa programming framework and a graphical user interface – hoping to provide the sort of slick software environment pioneered by the Apple Macintosh." [1]

"Darwin, the core of Mac OS X, was open source and included quite a bit of code from FreeBSD." [1]

2. Android

"The Linux kernel is an extremely important part of the software on nearly every Android device. This section describes Linux kernel development and release models (below), stable and long-term supported (LTS) kernels (including why all Android devices should use stable releases instead of cherry picking patches), kernel configuration and hardening, requirements for interfaces and the modular kernels (introduced in Android O), kernel debugging and network testing, and SquashFS." [2]

"Android's history dates to 2003, when a team of California entrepreneurs launched Android, Inc. Their initial goal was to develop software for digital cameras. In 2005 Google acquired the company and put the team of Android, Inc. developers to work building an operating system for phones that was based on the Linux kernel and adaptations of some other open source utilities." [3]

I appreciate you feel the need to feel better about yourself at the expense of others by calling others names, but there's really no need, nor does it add to advancing any kind of understanding about the topic, except perhaps shining a light on jumping to myopic reactions and judgements of others.

I will not be replying to further messages from you on this thread for the above reason.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/08/jordan-hubbard/

[2] https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/kernel

[3] https://www.channelfutures.com/open-source/open-source-and-a...

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