skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm few years older than you but I had a similar experience. However, I'm not sure the "old internet" is gone so much as it's moved a few doors down.

There still are communities: Some on Facebook groups, more on Twitter or Tumblr, but increasingly found on Discord. Find a Discord related to some topic (a game, a fandom, a hobby, a city), and you'll find that casual chatting, meeting new people, people arranging to meet up, etc.

"Where do these people hang out these days? If they just want to have a nice chat, unrelated to work, about the stuff that interests them?"

Discord, a Facebook group, maybe a Twitter group chat. Seriously. There's more people doing what you miss today than at any time in the past, but they're not doing it in the same places.

That being said...keep in mind it's much easier to make friends in your teens and early 20s than in later life. I struggle a lot to make connections, not because the opportunity isn't available, but just because I'm a lot more closed off than I used to be. Some of your nostalgia is for the internet of yesteryear, but some of it is for the you of yesteryear, and that's not going to be recoverable by installing a new chat client.
I'm in the same boat as you my friend. Mid thirties guy, hit adolescence right as the net was blowing up mid 90s. I still remember the first mp3 I found on a computer in the library at school and it blew my freakin mind how small it was (I had experimented with ripping CDs before resulting in huge, huge wav files...)

I think it's natural that any time things get as absolutely crazy as they are right now, there's a natural yearning for "simpler times".. I'm sure when the technological revolutions came around in previous generations (and centuries) there was the same yearning for more pastoral times.. I think what we're both feeling is that same kind of yearning.. This doesn't make what we're feeling any less relevant or important.

In my opinion, the real murderer of the internet was the iPhone and then soon after facebook. Suddenly every single person has an internet machine in their pocket and the flood of normies began. Even early 2000s, most people online were there for learning or fun (actual fun) as opposed to just social validation (FB/IG/TW) or pure media consumption (netflix, YT). Broadband/ADSL probably contributed as well, as it was no longer "I'm going on the internet", just "I'm always on the internet"... To me, somehow there's a psychological difference to that.

I have vivid and pleasant memories of scouring geocities sites in the 90s for new X-File JPGs that I didn't have in my collection yet, episode summaries, or FAQs about my favourite bands. I got chatting with Blink 182's web master at one point when I had some suggestions for their site. Now all of that is pretty much just done through the grinding gears of facebook and with far less charm or enjoyment.

I met and chatted with randoms on ICQ, I played C&C over Westwood chat. I did 33.6k dial up games of Duke 3D with my friends, I learnt to program QBasic, I was blown away when I discovered Nesticle, I collected lists of cheats for games I'd probably never end up playing, and the list goes on.

I miss the basic charm of "personal websites" too, I guess. It's all just on facebook now. In the vein of geocities sites; simple designs, simple technology (no fucking React or Angular or whatever's popular these days); just a bit of HTML and some styling and some pages about your interests. Buy a domain name, dump it on an S3 (cheap/free) and just keep updating when you feel like it. (I still feel like with how bad google's search has gotten you'll never be discovered, but maybe: who cares..) Maybe it's one of those "create the future you want to see" type things. Small, but if everyone got off facebook and did something like this, maybe it wouldn't be so bad.
Yeah, and it's very much a moving target. It's a tough thing.
With old consoles you get to see a full set of platform design decisions from hardware to software to licensing, and you get to see how it worked out.
Small world, bud - I'm from Regina!

I don't work with Cobol, can't think of anyone who does and so I can't give you any specific help in regards to finding a job. About the best I could suggest would be to find one of the companies that do tons of consulting for the government of sask, find someone with as much or more grey hair than me, and send them a message on LinkedIn. There may be parts of the GOS that do Cobol work, though I have no idea if that would be central services, whatever the fuck they call the ITO now, or if they're deep in a department.

But, if you wrote this exact same post about a language I use all the time, I'd likely suggest that you find a busy open source project in that language and start trying to contribute. On Github, you can look up trending Cobol projects - maybe you'll find one that you're interested in. The joy of open source is that you'll often get to work with some amazing developers who can help you level up your skills. The other joy of open source is that if you prove yourself, most maintainers are excellent help during a job hunt!!
This times a thousand. The problems we're seeing with social media sites and trolling, spam, harassment, low quality content, fake reviews, etc is because they're operating at a scale where human moderators are too expensive to use and stuck trying to use algorithms to solve human problems.

But that doesn't work. Until we have true human level AI (and honestly maybe not even then), decent curation has to be done by humans rather than machines. That's why forums tend to be less 'toxic' than Twitter or Facebook, because the moderators can view content and use their personal disgression while figuring out whether something breaks the rules and then act accordingly. It's why (somewhat surprisingly), the likes of SMW Central and MFGG have better quality control standards than Steam, the App store or other such services; because the moderators physically play through every game submitted and determine whether they're good enough to be accepted. It's why Amazon has an issue with counterfeit products nowadays, and why Google search has spam and blackhat SEO.

And it's not just humans that are needed for good moderation or curation either. It's humans with knowledge/experience in the field in question, and with enough interest to go all in on their work to make the community better. Those 'moderation sweatshops' some social media services use (the ones that check for illegal content and what not by getting a bunch of low wage workers to scan through content en mass) are as flawed an idea as the algorithms; they don't know what's acceptable beyond the very minimum.

But I guess that's the issue with many businesses and services and startups now. Everyone's trying to solve human problems with only code, and realising it (at least for the time being) just often doesn't work that well.
I do really have kids, one 3, one 6, only had to resort to electronic pacifiers on long haul flights, but ymmv, I just don't understand it.

The reason I said go for a walk was that's exactly what I did last time we took the kids to get their haircut - asked them how long it would be, they said 15 minutes, so we went for a walk for 10 minutes
Your concerns are themselves ironic. I'm so confused.
I think you're spot-on. The web didn't die, there's just more people on it now. And if you go where all the people are (Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc), places that didn't exist in the old web, of course you're going to get a different experience than you had back then. Even the difference between Hacker News vs lobste.rs is night and day. What you want may actually just be "fewer people on my web".

I still feel the old web/Internet a lot. BBS still exists, and it's not popular but shit there weren't a lot of people on the web back then anyway. phpBB still exists and plenty of the sites are still active. Logging into Guild Wars 2 feels a lot like logging into GW1 or DAoC or my favorite UO shard. Playing Quake is still playing Quake. There's nothing stopping you from having a UT2004 LAN party other than you not wanting to have a LAN party. Hell, MUDs are still a thing, and they're just as popular as ever.

Perhaps it's not the web that's changed... perhaps it's us? As they say, you can't go home again. Stopping by my parents house is still the same home I grew up in, but Doug and Rocko's Modern Life aren't playing on the TV anymore, and there aren't any freezie-pops in the freezer. Not because they can't be, but because I don't really want it to be like that anymore.

Every experience you loved, you can find again. If it seems like you can't, then you probably don't actually want that experience. You're looking for something far less tangible than an MSN chatroom.
Hmm, it is an isekai, but I think it's above average from many other that I've read. I'm sorry if my post mislead you into believing it'd be a specific kind of story, that wasn't my intent.
> drive to the video store to get it

… only to find that all the copies are rented for the weekend.
>inexplicably performs very poorly on even some very new Android devices

That's the unfortunate toll you have to pay when you add another layer of abstraction like this.

It is sad .. a crosplatform solution that performs horribly on one of its two targets is not a great one :/
Not surprised. Amazon has their "free shipping" program which puts enormous downward pressure on shipping pricing all the way back to the carriers.

Non-Amazon traffic, for example, business to business traffic, might not be growing as fast, but Fedex/UPS can charge $50+ or even $200+ for a single shipment - that's more than probably the average lifetime shipping profit made from a single Amazon prime user - in one single business-to-business shipment!

A regular North American business would probably have anywhere from 10 to 100 packages a day sent out via courier/UPS/Fedex.

No problem seeing where the profits come from.

Volume does not mean profit, especially when the volume is trying to push for eliminating UPS and FedEx's profits (via offering free shipping)
It exists, look up Glennyballs on Barstool Sports.
Still vestiges of this today:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5850053/Undercover-w...
Champ he really, really doesn’t.
Anybody using this in production? What particular problem were you solving with actordb?
No it doesn't. This article is specifically about how you can use the Swift type system to prevent that from happening. You get a compile time guarantee that the result will either be data or error.
I'm a member of at least half a dozen phpBB forums right now. They do still exist. Even if Reddit is more popular, remember that forums in 1998 didn't have millions of members either.
Ask HN: Chrome Extensions for Mobile?
I understand there were genuine technical challenges preventing Chrome mobile having Extensions years back.

But as processing power and battery life has improved, and Chrome for mobile has matured. I can't think of many other reasons we don't have Chrome Mobile extensions. Browsing on my mobile I often stop to think how useful xxx extension would be right now. Yes, there's room for extensions to be abused and possible smaller UI technical hurdles, but that aside. Can anyone else think of other reasons Extensions are not available on Chrome mobile yet?

An older discussion 12 months back, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14596515. Maybe not a conspiracy, Ad blocking could be genuine fear for Google, I don't think it's an influence though.

Firefox Mobile has extensions, why doesn't Google Chrome?
I don't understand what you're saying but would like to. What did you identify as my concerns and in what way are they ironic?
It has little to do with that. The exposure is what counts. Put a picture of a nice hotel and say it's name. Now you have an ad that went out to 100k people. The person is mostly irrelevant, a hotel just wants people to know it exists.
I came of age in the AOL days, and fondly remember meeting random people in chat rooms and message forums. Some of the people I met back in the 90s I'm friends with on Facebook today. That came from frequenting the same N64 forum for like 4 years. We talked about everything including our personal lives and in some ways I feel closer to them than the people I actually went to high school with.

I have noticed, however, that despite the internet working better than ever in many ways (in terms of speed and capabilities), that it seems harder to make friends or meet random people. Let's take HN for example, I love this site, but maybe because the community is so big, it seems like I'm just an anonymous figure on here. I'm one of tens (hundreds?) of thousands that visit this site regularly. Do I learn a lot from HN? Of course! Do I enjoy the conversations and comments? Absolutely! Is the platform conducive to casual conversation among strangers in a way that facilitates getting to know someone else and how they think and view the world? No.

For that matter, neither is Reddit.

If I had to guess, it's the news feed mechanic that has killed real social interaction on the net. The news feed mechanic works, it generates clicks, it's constantly feeding you interesting and stimulating information and updates, but it's surface level deep. So much of making friends is being in a group that's small enough to promote shared intimacy and repeated interactions with the same people.
This man was a slave in the US in the 20th century. Amazing story.

https://www.amazon.com/Emancipation-Robert-Powerful-Twentiet...
Find a mentor. Sometime with more experience often can give you insights that are valuable and helpful.

Or your thoughts will just keep running around in circles and you won't get any further.
But saying "what happened, happened" isn't teaching us anything, it's just a tautology.

Also, random is just random. It's not "too many parameters for me to keep track of and account for". That's a very important distinction. Many people believe "chance" is a word used to cover our ignorance. But that's not what it means.
I think you misunderstand the situation. Influencers are offering ad space, not reviews. There's no promise of impartiality.

Also, those "reputable magazines" still sell ads to the companies they cover. There's zero difference here.

> Those so-called "influencers" aren't really about serving their audience

They're about serving their customers, ie, the brands. Some do a great job; others do not. And others, as discussed in the article, aren't even trying to provide marketing services and are just trying to scam a free hotel stay. Similarly, some ad networks aren't even trying to provide value to clients and are just trying to soak up advertising dollars, but that doesn't mean all advertising is a scam.
Εύκολη αποστολή για Βέλγιο και Αγγλία
Never thought I'd be searching 'cobol jobs', but even a quick look reveals dozens (in Toronto). If you search for any other major city, I'm sure you'll fine a few others. Banks and other major slow moving big co.'s are probably the best bet.
Me too. There's a lot more content to consume now. However, it doesn't feel like a community... it feels more like watching reruns on TBS. Just never ending, mind numbing consuming of mediocre content.

I remember making actual friends on message boards. Friends I eventually met in the real world. I don't think relationships like that are really formed online anymore. Most of social media now is a broadcast, not a conversation. People (myself included) want upvotes, retweets and more followers. And now, real identities are involved, so they have to be professional.

Our communities are no longer ours... we're now talking on the servers of billion-dollar companies. Sure, back in the day AOL was a big company, and now we have stuff like Discord servers. But it feels different now. Most of the conversation has been sucked into FB, Twitter, Slack, Reddit, etc. Even this forum, which I do still like, is backed by a multi-billion dollar company.

Back when I started using the internet, there were no "celebrities". At most, there were community leaders, and their "reach" was within the same order of magnitude of the rest of the community. And to be one of those leaders, you needed to learn HTML and build a community the hard way. Nobody was trying to get famous, get more likes, etc. They just talked and made stuff and shared content and learned.

Sure, maybe it is just an age thing, and nothing has really changed. But I don't know... I feel like the Internet used to be something special, and now it doesn't.

(You should read this article: http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-waste-...)
Not necessarily. The way that the enumerated type is declared, the associated types of the success and failure values are declared to be normal (not optional). This restricts nil from being passed in as the data or the error.
> It’s not about “scarcity”.

Renting for physical goods has scarcity involved. To make a new item, you have constant expenses, thus when you rent it, avoiding that expense allows lower price.

With digital goods, you have fixed expense, which after it's paid off has no constant expense involved. So the above renting logic isn't applicable. The remaining reason for renting to be cheaper is artificial, i.e. its limited nature, that prevents you from making backups and etc. That crippling of the product makes it cheaper, but the whole crippling is artificial to begin with.

> How much would you be willing to pay for all the content you can get on Netflix, Hulu, etc.

Depending on the film, may be different prices. Definitely more for something I'd watch more than once.
This is a silly notion, and almost every "Show HN" submission proves that. Anyone can stand up any website they want for free or for a very low cost and say/do anything they want.

Facebook and Google are not the Internet, they're just websites same as any other.
Frontend Developers at Google (and probably the other letters in FAANG) are SWEs.
This guy is a genius and also freakin hilarious, I knew I recognised his voice from somewhere; watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGI-GqAK9c
This could work; whitelisting is a far better and easier approach to trying to weed out "bad" stuff.

By far the best idea I've ever heard was the creation of a .kids TLD that would be essentially what you described. I believe there was a proposal for that that went nowhere.
Babylon 5? Okay. It's a classic, though mostly I think because so much of the SF competition has been garbage. How do you feel about Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Completely agree. Fragmented communities run by mods meant that reputations were built on time and trust rather than #s of followers. Influence in that sense was built by long-term commitment to a group organized around a specific topic. That dynamic disincentived bad behavior and diminished its effects in ways that mimic real human relationships. The same isn’t true on social media.
An oddity of the current day and age is that people let children on a service like YT without supervision.

As a child, my parents vetted anything I watched that was not a broadcast children's TV show. Adult themes and violence were filtered until an age that was considered safe.

This was also a time when the TV schedule could be known in advance. There was no on-demand anything - pre-VCR. I can't imagine handing a child the loaded gun of the internet and letting them point it at their developing heads.
Every generation has its own "I miss the old XXX". You're just getting old.
A large number of companies use Google services for many obvious reasons, and you’re not going to understand why if you dismiss it as “ignorance”.
I would pick a different hill to die on than Seymour Hersh's story about the killing of bin Ladin, there is as far as I can tell one unnamed primary source for Hersh's reporting versus the official story - almost everyone that is not in US intelligence went on the record and all those people and the US intelligence sources would have to be in on one big conspiracy.

Big conspiracies require more proof. This is not Watergate level where there was corroborating evidence behind the FBI assistant director's reveal to the Washington Post.

Seymour Hersh thinks US special forces members are like the bad guys from that Da Vinci Code book and are actually working for Opus Dei, and this why they would be so good at keeping the Hersh conspiracy hidden. Hersh did good with My Lai but that doesn't mean he can coast on his laurels forever.
Actually, it puts the responsibility higher in the stack. The first error effectively terminates the computation, so subcomputations can ignore them and the caller can decide what to do with them.

One good thing about this is not having to push down anything to do with logging or reporting into subcomputations.
Interesting, I will have to give it a try then. Thanks!
Diablo 1 and 2 are still playable online today, so those who really want to play them already are. D1 and D2 are also harder to monetize than WoW, where there's the expectation of paying a monthly subscription instead of making a one-time purchase
It's awesome. Watched it on cable TV together with Charmed. But Buffy was always the better one. Still sad Angel got cancelled though.
Does that mean every single software as a service company business model is invalid?
I've had practice for this test- had this android game recommended to me a couple months ago. It's not bad.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zutgames.i...
Opening Up About Depression and Suicide Could Help Someone Else on the Brink
> from hardware to software to licensing

and price positioning. However it's very important to know the context in which each console was launched - otherwise it is very difficult to draw any kind of conclusion as to why they failed.
And it comes at the cost of having to process all of those pixels. I think I'd rather have a cooler laptop with longer battery life than a very marginal visual improvement to my screen.

That said, I'm all for progress and cramming that many pixels into such a small space is impressive, so kudos to BOE for that. This would be useful for VR.
Obviously you wouldn't or you would have done this already.
What's the point of planting non-GMO corn? What impact do GMOs allegedly have on the final product?
It doesn't have to be going backwards from the present, right? In your example, the person could work backwards from classical music. You could work backwards from The Who, or classic rock.

Going backwards from a natural point of interest sounds like it would be the best method to learn history.
Tried all kind of solutions to block or monitor my kids access, there is no one good solution which deals with content, overall time on screens, money spending and all the other things you would want to prevent your kids from doing. Seems to me like companies are encouraging this mayhem instead of setting one standard to manage the whole thing.
But parents likely ask too. The previous article on this topic asked.

Asking doesn't appear, per se, to be the explanation.
"Influencers" are everything that is wrong with the modern world.
I suspect that if you're studying the History of Physics, as opposed to just physics, you've already got a special interest in the subject. And if you're not, you're not replying to what the earlier post said, which referred all kinds of _history_.

The original post, I think, was broadly about trying to engage people in the history of something they're not already interested in. For that, the device seems reasonable.

At least it does to me. But maybe that's because I actually did work backward from Led Zeppelin, to the Stones, to Muddy and Wolf, to Robert Johnson and learned to love them all. But if you started me on Johnson, or worse, Charlie Patton with those horrid recordings, you'd have lost me immediately.
Ohhh...that sounds like a nice feature! I'll research this thank you.