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Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#31

Post by bell-cot »

The older you get, the more you realize that all the shiny new stuff, and exciting news, and ways the world is changing...they are really not all that new. Pretty-similar stuff happened decades, centuries, and millennia ago.

And getting worked up about all the "new and exciting!" is an outlook best suited to being a simple consumer of entertainment. Vs. if you're no longer a kid, in a world that has some rather dire social and sustainability problems...then whether you're trying to understand the big picture in order to do something useful about the problems, or just to lose yourself in nostalgia for a bit, the past gets considerably more important.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#32

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

sundvor wrote: post #22
starbugs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Speaking as someone who started working in the mid 90s, we're definitely well past The Internet's "Golden Hour". These days we can see first hand just how much societal degeneracy it has helped facilitate. All the latest Culture Wars, malice, scams, cancellations, filter bubbles, misinformation madness etc would not be possible without the Internet. This easily helps explain the point of looking backwards to when the…

> All the latest Culture Wars, malice, scams, cancellations, filter bubbles, misinformation madness etc would not be possible without the Internet.

The latest, sure, by definition.

But nah, people were plenty good at getting worked up much earlier than the internet.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#33

Post by zokier »

CJefferson wrote: post #20
nologic01 wrote: post #4

Its 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.

Its not just the people who are missing ("young hacksters" as you put it), but also the people who are here; the HN populace is gradually approaching general populace, there are lots of people commenting here who have no connection to the cutting edge tech scene that HN originates from (even if HN never was particularly exclusive club). And to clarify, I'm one of those people, so I'm not saying this to be elitist or anything.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#34

Post by aikinai »

CJefferson wrote: post #20
nologic01 wrote: post #4

Its 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.

Where do you see that? Just curious.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#36

Post by scioto »

In the early days of computers it was a struggle. A struggle to get time on a machine, whether it be by punched card, paper tape, standing in line to submit your job, getting on a timeshare terminal, or connecting to the mainframe via 300-baud modem. The modem speaker spoke of the struggle when connecting.

You then got ahold of a $3K Apple ][ computer with 32K of memory and integer basic, and the only way to get performance was 6502 assembly programming. A struggle.

Then PCs came along, where nobody ever needed more than 640K memory, so it was a struggle to partition your work to fit it all in, but at least you didn't have to do assembler anymore since there was FORTRAN or Pascal.

And then the barriers lowered even further with GUIs and more memory, but you still had to worry about true multitasking not really being implemented correctly, and your poorly-written program could still hog the cycles. A slightly lower struggle.

And now there is more memory than you know what to do with, unless you are a rocket or climate scientist. And you infrequently have to worry about performance. Code efficiency? Bah!

It's all about the struggle.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#37

Post by dicknuckle »

taubek wrote: post #2

Nostalgia. It is hard to follow all of the new trends. I feel like I'm becoming obsolete. And now with all of the AI hype, who knows what tomorrow brings. With past, you know what it was, you have a romanticized image about it. At least I do.

Exactly, we're all getting older. At the far end of the age spectrum, memory is all you have. I'd be interested to see a plot of HN users ages.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#39

Post by nologic01 »

Otek wrote: post #24
nologic01 wrote: post #4

Its 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) Do anyone knows where that would be, or you know specific Discord servers? I would very much like to see how younger generation talk about tech, programming, entrepreneurship

it is a more decentralized pattern as each server has specific focus but they tend to have also "general discussion" / "off topic" kind of channels. people compose their own collection of servers they frequent

slightly different decentralization patterns on matrix and discourse

so the tech/programming discussion is very much alive, but the entrepreneurship angle quite a bit less so...

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#40

Post by tormeh »

CJefferson wrote: post #20
nologic01 wrote: post #4

Its 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.

HN is quite money-oriented and economically liberal, although nothing beats Blind in this regard. Many FOSS developers don't like this. I think it has less to do with age.
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