Ask HN: Comment here about whatever you're passionate about at the moment

Because of this I decided to start tracking the prices of Disney World hotels, tickets and flights. I wanted to see how the prices rise with inflation and how they differ at different times of the year.

So I built a website which scrapes prices from the Disney websites (and Google Flights): https://mousetrack.co.uk.

There is already a lot of functionality there, including a Google Flights-like search as well as min/max prices of each hotel plus graphs showing how prices change. Both have helped me find some interesting deals and hacks to get low hotel prices, for example it's possible to save many thousands by creating separate hotel bookings (the disadvantage is that you will need to move rooms, but for some that might be a perk, though I don't know yet how Disney will take this).

Here are some things I might include if I was writing such a guide:

All-time top stories on reddit in 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20060415194256/http://reddit.com...

reddit was originally a bit of a niche site for a tech audience, kinda like Hacker News. However, techies used over-represented on the internet anyways. "The internet used to be a lot more like HN" is generally a pretty decent first approximation.

This is the reddit story which best captures the curiosity and wonder of its early days for me: https://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html

Aaron Swartz's blog would be another thing I would include: https://old.reddit.com/domain/aaronsw.com/top/?sort=top&t=al...

A few decades ago there was a strain of progressive techno-optimism which has all but died out by this point. "Information wants to be free", Creative Commons, excitement about Wikipedia, Clay Shirky, One Laptop Per Child, Obama hope & change. I think of Aaron as being the poster child for that -- both a hacker and a progressive activist, advancing internet technology because he felt like it would help us advance as a society.

Another thing I'd point to is Eric S Raymond's stuff. He was one of the major pioneers of the open source movement:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/

If you want a book to read, I've recently been reading a book "Because Internet" which includes a linguistic history of the internet, going back to the earliest days.

This morning I wrote a post for the company blog about the work we're doing on a project that was Kickstarted in 2013 but never fulfilled (SGG closed its doors in 2019, but we resurrected it a few weeks ago), and another related project.

I'm determined to fulfill that Kickstarter, even if it ends up being a decade late.

And what was really nice for me was this comment about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33344110

Yes, someone, somewhere, enjoyed using it :-)