From what I know so far;

- First day is still alive on Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-19

- Last day as Startup news https://web.archive.org/web/20070713212949/http://news.ycomb...

- First day as Hacker News https://web.archive.org/web/20070830111558/http://news.ycomb...

"Odeo up for sale"

Became (or spun out) Twitter, by the way.

https://dailyfly.com/on-this-day-in-2006-twitter-launches/

Potential game - click a random date and decide if the content is from 2024 or not. I really like "Web 2.0 is a bubble for 3 reasons" from OP's link. I feel like there was a time when that same post applied to Web 3.0 showed up every week on HN.

Also add location based on https://hn.wilsonl.in/s/ (Not working for me ATM for some reason) and make it like https://timeguessr.com/ (geoguesser of a photo + date)

I think I started around 2009 and before that in slashdot, mostly lurking around. Then, using alt accounts, the internet back in the day taught you to never post real info about yourself, so it was lurking through RSS feeds.

I hosted an official 10th anniversary slashdot party in 2006 where they shipped me tshirts to give attendees. I got so many extra shirts over the number of attendees it became a staple of my wardrobe for years to rock one of those shirts… I miss old slashdot…

I still think it's wild that we went from having a dozen alt accounts and pseudonyms and never sharing anything private or identifiable publicly on the internet to just putting our entire lives on the internet tied to our name (and by extension our friends, family, where we live and work), complete with exhaustive image and video documentation.

I still live like I did in the late 90s and early 00s when I started using the internet though. I guess old habits do die hard.

So much easy historical irony- Yahoo Pipes (the BBC article about the web is about it too… so much for remix/mashup culture), the time before YouTube became the videos site, Adobe bringing Flash to phones.

But the biggest loss imo is the link at the bottom- we really could’ve used an ongoing Idiot Startup site/blog a la The Daily WTF for all these years.

Edit: breathless hype for Pipes:

> While Google concentrates on challenging Microsoft Office with its online word processors and spreadsheets, Yahoo! has looked much more deeply into the way the net works and given us the building blocks for a brand new way of dealing with online content.

> This isn't user-generated content, it's user-controlled content. And unlike personalised pages or simple feed subscriptions it really does put control into the hands of the user.

> But Yahoo! has given us a glimpse of the networked future, where the world's information is not only at our fingertips, but available to be mixed, mashed and filtered on demand, giving us what we want, when we want it - and from wherever we can get it. There will be no going back.

> You can tell a lot about the users of a site like this from the the links they post and their comments in discussions. There are a number of Reddit users that I know only by their usernames, but I know must be smart from the things they've written. We're counting on the same phenomenon to help us decide who to fund.

- pg

If you post things that pg doesn't like then you don't get funding.

I would be shocked if, looking back, there has been reliable correlation between people who look smart on HN (or Reddit), and people who have delivered outsized returns to Ycombinator. Has pg or anyone else at YC ever provided a report or update on this idea?

My guess is that being a prolific enough poster to be recognized on a web forum / message board is more likely to be a negative correlation with startup success. It’s not like startup founders have tons of free time… how often should they be spending it on Internet pontificating?

I often wonder why Ycombinator bothers to keep the HN lights on. I guess maybe their startups can still get a little bump with launch or hiring posts? It seems like the pain to reward ratio is way worse now. PG abandoned it long ago. There are a bunch of folks on the top karma list who have not (or only barely) posted here in years.

Lots of news about balls on day one.

Gotta love me some balls.

does anyone still remember the day HN was all Erlang articles?

The 'Web 2.0 is a bubble for 3 reasons' article is interesting.

Dagres missed network effects as the moat.

take me back to the good old days - i miss when startups were about cool ideas, not just making money.

I'm afraid that is a matter of perspective. This snapshot is from 2007 and the "dot com bubble" burst somewhere around the year 2000.

I still see a lot of cool ideas (healthcare, robots, thought organizers) and a lot of ideas that are definitely not going to make any money :)

There have always been both. But it has definitely changed. In ye olden days, the general vibe I felt and heard was, "I want to build something new and exciting and maybe it will become big." I still hear that today, but I hear a lot more of, : "I want a big exit, so I need to build something big, so I need to come up with an idea."

Nostalgia, no links about AI!