161–170 of 273 posts
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I've thought about building personal site, but the opportunity cost is just too high. The time I spend making a site has to come from somewhere and there just isn't anything I do that I want to take time from.
One hour with Hugo (and netlify) and you have a site, come on...
Start by bringing back Stumble. It was a very good discovery service, with plenty of variety. https://web.archive.org/web/20060902030402fw_/http://www.stu...
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I find shit all the time. Google still works fine for me. I don't know what people on Hacker News are doing that they can never seem to find a single useful result on any search engine, ever.
Because they remember the past far more fondly than it was and converge the utility they get from the current day with the ideals of back then. The reality is there is far more creative and well produced content on the web and closed platforms today than there ever was in any other point in time. And if you can't find it fast enough, AI can generate direct, customized answers.
Related to this is the dumbing down of query input. Like, in many cases, even using double quotes around search terms doesn't guarantee that the page that will be shown in search results actually contains the quoted word anywhere. I've had one case where Google would helpfully find articles talking only about Linux given a query like '"freebsd" foo bar' (and where it showed the snippets for them, highlighting the phrase it treated as a match, it would say 'linux foo bar', so you could tell right away what exactly was substituted).
It used to be a power tool that had well-defined knobs and buttons that you could master to find exactly what you want. Now it's a magic wand that tends to do something inscrutable every time you wave it, and you "master" it by flailing around until it kinda sorta does what you want.
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Then it isn't around. It's walled off. And it will disappear.
I’m somewhere in the middle on this. These communities are real, and the value of the content shared by users is real. On the one hand, I prefer the old open web. On the other, I can’t deny the existence and value of these walled gardens. The wall doesn’t erase the value, even if I strongly prefer there wasn’t a wall to begin with. To your point, discord comes with downsides, and does raise questions about the longev…
This is always multiply determined, but part of the answer is that Discord and these other walled gardens are subsidized by VC funding with the expectation that at some point they'll turn on the garbage compactor and squeeze out the juicy value.
More people should be tending their "digital gardens" just to have something to curate and share. Bring back the weird, the odd, the deep-dives into topics you never imagined having such detail, bring back the strange animated GIFS, the websites always "under construction", give me your weird, give me your odd, this should be everyone's place to be free.
More people should be tending their "digital gardens" just to have something to curate and share. Bring back the weird, the odd, the deep-dives into topics you never imagined having such detail, bring back the strange animated GIFS, the websites always "under construction", give me your weird, give me your odd, this should be everyone's place to be free.
I remember when they were on the agenda path to eliminate gifs. You'd see posts on hacker news written by Giffy, a company seeking to make its existence justified by getting rid of gifs, all over hacker news. When I would say: This is a terrible idea, they just want to control and own the content. a gif you own, a gif you can download and so what ever you wanted, etc. boy was I down voted into oblivion. One of the re…
obligatory https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
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Sometimes. I stumbled across somebody’s 20+-year-old collection of deep musical analyses of early Chicago songs. That same material on Twitter/Facebook/Discord/whatever is going to be inaccessible.
I'd be interested in a link. Live At Carnegie Hall was my paper-writing music in college. I discovered later that I don't much care for it when I don't have anything else occupying my mind. I'm unsure if it's because there isn't really that much to the songs of if I'm missing some nuance and complexity that makes them worth another listen.
https://www.paulmorellimusic.com/notes-on-chicago-transit-au...
More people should be tending their "digital gardens" just to have something to curate and share. Bring back the weird, the odd, the deep-dives into topics you never imagined having such detail, bring back the strange animated GIFS, the websites always "under construction", give me your weird, give me your odd, this should be everyone's place to be free.
I was just thinking today that I should just start posting my stuff on a personal site. Photos, blogs, life updates, etc. It gives me that control that I want, and I don't have to worry about Meta, etc trying to monetize it. Plus I get to unplug from those "n liked your post" dopamine hits.
It's surprising* that rolling your own on the web has gotten harder, not easier, in the last 20 years. But it has.
*Surprising in the narrow sense that technology usually improves. I know all too well why lone sites don't do well on the web.
It does not need to "return" to FTP because FTP is still in use. Periodically I am submitting examples of FTP servers to HN that are still operated today that are often critical to software developers and so-called "tech" companies.