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

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401–410 of 472 posts

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

#401

Weather Underground.... classic Up until 2015 Weather Underground was the top weather website, had huge amounts of information density, easy to navigate... fast I'm not sure what the current incarnation of Weather Underground is, but it is nothing like it's former self. Wunderground was sold off to... IBM? and then later... The Weather Channel? At some point the "classic" website was finally turned off for good. It w…

I used to like uswx.com but eventually it became run down and unmaintained. Today there is a tombstone page.

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

#402
I noticed Rotten.com died a few years ago; I enjoyed the snark as a kid, so I found a mirror on Github and rehosted (and have been cleaning up all its internal broken links and other problems ever since...) it at https://www.gwern.net/docs/rotten.com/library/index.html

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

#403
Dejanews, with all the search functionality that google groups did not keep.

Google video, mainly because there was a bunch of content that never got transferred to YouTube and seems lost now (I'm thinking here of various CS panel discussions and tech talks).

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

#404
post #214

I was going to say I missed http://zombo.com/ (because at some point I had checked, and it no longer worked). But I just tried it, and it's working again. Hurray! -- "you can do anything at zombo com!" :-D

html5zombo.com if your device doesn’t support Flash

Is this supposed to be a joke? The spinners spinning to no avail and zombocom funny message keeps on repeating. That is it, right?

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

#406

The old slashdot.org The old digg.com Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them? My ealiest memories were pre-net, on Prodigy and AOL, long before they were 'net connected and could email each other. I learned what connectivity was at 2400 baud. I didn't discover BBS's until much later, around 1993-4,and was at 14.4k at that point. I never really understood fidonet…

The old Slashdot was orders of magnitude better than HN -I am not going to even mention Reddit-. For all its lame jokes it was filled with people who actually loved technology and science and the moderation system was very solid.

[deleted]

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

#407

Old school runescape. I played it as a kid and have never otherwise had such a wonderful and memorable experience playing a video game. Im quite young (23) so when I was playing it back in 2006-2008, I learned a LOT about life. Trading and bartering, getting scammed, talking to people to get help moving forward in the game, etc. Most of my friends who used to play agree. You can still play, they brought it back a few…

Your comment is vely insightful. I first played runescape in 2001 I think (and then I came back later), and I had never thought about it the way you describe it. I too learned a lot of life skills: scamming, bartering, arbitrage, and quite a few social interaction skills despite being online. My best friend had some weird pubescent (text-based) sexual things with weirdos claiming to also be 13, or whatever we were at…

Maybe. Although I think it really takes a multiplayer open world (possibly an RPG?) to even get close. I wonder if people who use to play WOW back in the hayday of its popularity feel this sort of nostalgia too

Also, hahahaha, nothing better than walking about and seeing the text “selling GF 10k” wave around in raindbow text

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

#408
post #336

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.

> Linux powering Android..

With a lot of closed components on every device.

> Bsd powering macos and ios.

There is BSD code in XNU just like there was BSD code in NeXTstep in the 80s but the link and resemblance is pretty tenuous. And it would be a huge stretch to call Darwin an open source project. There were efforts to build free distros out of it, long abandoned. And that is ignoring the vast amounts of closed components.

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

#409

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…

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…

There are famous stories of Bill Gates being a collosal jerk, circulating both inside and outside of Microsoft. (Disclaimer: My comment could be perceived as anti MS, but even I sold out and worked for MS for a few years.) I believe those stories are true.

I have also seen commentary over the years that his non-profit is arrogant and sometimes harms when it is trying to help. I am less able to assess those stories to know if I agree or disagree. But I do know it is not always universally praised.

I do know that MS company culture was pretty aggressive in the time I was there. Some of that has got to be rooted in his famous personal aggressiveness, setting a poor example for others. Some form of that aggressiveness stayed with the company long after he left it.

But I do think Gates himself has had a personal transformation or re-consideration of his old self. And it is a credit to him that he's done that. His commentary on the coronavirus shows it, for example. Probably his retirement from software, having more money than any one person could know what to do with, his famous friendship with philanthropy-minded Warren Buffet, has given him some perspective about what he can do with the next phase of his life, without the need for profit motive or egotistical drive for competition.

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

#410
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: gopher is still alive! It's not the same as back in the early 90s, but the protocol and some servers are alive and kicking.

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.

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