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by harrystone 4419 days ago
Are people really serious when they talk about the fabled Hacker News of old? What could it possibly have been like? I'm imagining something like zombo.com, only with lower contrast text.
4 comments

The way I remember it, it was like this site but more frequently updated and focused mostly on Haskell:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

If you read a few rows down on that page, you'll see this:

"For the debate about MS being evil, you can head directly to HN where you'll also find an explanation of what bootstrapping a compiler means."

And that about sums it up. For a while I didn't even create an account because I didn't think I could add anything without sounding stupid compared to everyone else. Now I try to refrain from commenting for...different reasons.

> And that about sums it up. For a while I didn't even create an account because I didn't think I could add anything without sounding stupid compared to everyone else. Now I try to refrain from commenting for...different reasons.

Same here. Though I refrain less.

At some point, I'd like to go and find my first comment on here just to see what got me to make an account.

That is the most disappointing thing I have seen all day. Oh well.
People keep saying how much better HN was, but I'm just not seeing it: https://web.archive.org/web/20071115044647/http://news.ycomb...
Good catch, articles are saved as well.

I don't notice a shift in tenor from the crowd of old and the one we have now.

See for yourself.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
Often the content on the main page is quite different.
That's biased by the fact that many people who were upvoting back then have since left the site. If you want to see for yourself, the Wayback Machine is a better sample: https://web.archive.org/web/20071115044647/http://news.ycomb...
Is there an explanation of what's going on for that page somewhere?
Articles voted up by old timers.
is there a definition of "old timers" ? N years old account? signed up before year X?
To my recollection, it was pretty similar, but with a lot fewer general news stories and a lot more stories about specific YC companies.
Slashdot was fun back in the day (Id 64578), so most sites do that progression. I think HN has changed in that general social stories show up more. I do think the weekends are a bit weirder now.