Why we are not leaving the cloud - happy-go-lucky https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/02/why-we-are-not-leaving-the-cloud/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting that the first half of the explanation is largely quotes from a prior HN post's responses.

Does anyone else feel a bit weird seeing off hand comments getting quoted in the explanation for a business decision? I guess we should all get more accustomed to our public input carrying weight in the zeitgeist.

Gitlab's "develop in the open" nature really shows through here. I am not saying that's bad, it's just so different than most startups and established businesses.

<comment><USER2> I don't think they were using this as justification or explanation in their eventual reversal. I think they provided these quotes as interesting tidbits. Kind of like pull-out quotes on an article. You can ignore them entirely and still get the gist of the post.

On a more general note: It's got to be incredibly hard to do what GitLab does with their extreme transparency. I feel like we have to be careful about reading too deeply into things and nitpicking their culture or process. HN is full of "expert" advice, much of it being terrible. They weighed their options, invited feedback, then made a decision.

I appreciate what GitLab does in being so transparent. None of us are owed explanations or insight into how they operate, yet they go out of their way to provide it. Kudos to syste and his team!

<comment><USER3> Thanks. The most useful advice was shared in private. People coming to our office to share war stories of regretting moving to bare metal. I also received dozens of people sending direct messages via twitter because they couldn't share their stories publicly. Some of the best advice are things that we can't share publicly. For example a major company going bare-metal and then spending a lot of time to set up an authorization system that you get for free with AWS IAM.

<comment><USER4> Did you have to sign a NDA? Because if people send you random advice via email after reading a blog post then this sounds to me very much like "publicly sharing" their experience...

<comment><USER5> I disagree. It's a private email. Gitlab can ask permission to post, but it would be impolite and perhaps unethical to assume a private email is now "public". If they wanted it public, they could have chosen to provide a comment on HN, Twitter, etc.

<comment><USER3> Exactly, everything is private unless it was posted in public by the author or explicit permission was given. We have a transparency value, but we understand that other organizations are different. And even we assume that our private communication will stay private.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As much as I like gitlab, that decision seems weird. I'd expect a business to come up with numbers for different scenarios, not just quotes (even if those weren't the only deciding factor).

What I mean is, instead of writing about 8TB disks vs 2TB disks, get hard numbers for those and calculate costs for different versions to the costs in the cloud.

Instead of saying that engineers are expensive, look at market data to determine how much you have to pay to hire these people.

Instead of writing about the potential of full cabinets, get quotes from data center providers of what they can provide and how they would deal with this. I'm sure Equinix has solutions for that kind of problem.

And in addition to that, it seems that managed dedicated wasn't considered at all. Why hire someone to swap disks for you? Why not just renting capacity for servers and have the data center provider taking care of hardware issues? They operate at bigger scale and can do this with little overhead costs. You're still much cheaper than the cloud but don't need to drive somewhere to swap a server (you just switch to a spare one until the data center fixed the problem). With Gitlab's scale, it shouldn't be too hard to get a decent bespoke quote from companies like OVH.

<comment><USER7> They also miss out on the dog fooding aspect. They target enterprise customers who run probably run gitlab on bare metal. By doing the same, you experience what your customers do and have much closer feedback loops on any issues that might especially affect bare metal.

Regarding managed dedicated.. I had very bad experience with rackspace in that regard, which is why we moved AWS. At another job we had our own DC suite but had some company taking care of initial cabling as well as remote hands from the datacenter. If I ever do bare metal again, that's why I would do.

<comment><USER3> I agree that dogfooding is important. Our users and customers run GitLab both on bare-metal and in the cloud. GitLab runs better on bare-metal because it tends to have better IO performance. So by running it in the cloud we are optimizing where it is needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why was hybrid not considered? With providers like megaport providing really inexpensive direct connect, this is almost a no brainer.

This may seem harsh, but relying on random commenters shows a huge flaw in how you guys went about this.

Physical environments DO work well, but they do require experience to run them. I have used AWS for as long as its been around, but nothing beats physical environments for "known workloads", as long as you run them EXACTLY like you would run a cloud environment. This is why the hybrid approach is such a great thing. Run what you know well in physical and reap great savings, run what you dont know well cloud ( as well as take advantage of the analytics products), and reap the speed ;)

\- This means thinking of physical servers are individual units. \- This means redundancy at every level. \- This means architecting for failure ( servers and switches do gie ). \- This means no shared storage for performance critical parts ( shared storage as below the OS level ). \- This means objects stores/sharding/etc as your storage layer. \- This means real engineering \- And this means exactly the same whether you're physical or not.

I've managed environments of 50 vm's and environments of 50000 physical servers. The methodology is always the same.

and yes, this means you can save some monthly cost, and apply it to staff, that can do a lot more than just maintain this infrastructure.

PS: for those that think that showing up to a datacenter is required, you're doing it wrong. Pretty much any datacenter has hot-hands service, and with the right redundancy, hardware replacement is something you can do at a slower pace.

PPS: im sure someone will nitpick some of my points. The reality is, there is real money savings here. For example, Snapchat spends MORE in cloud infrastructure in 2016/2017 per year, than ALL OF GOOGLE did in 2012... think about that for a second... even netflix runs openconnect to push bits..

<comment><USER9> > _This may seem harsh, but relying on random commenters shows a huge flaw in > how you guys went about this._

Your other points and experience are well taken, but this is definitely too harsh. Think about the nature of GitLab as an open company building dev tools and paying below-market salaries. They have a huge amount of developer mindshare relative to their internal head count. They are not very competitive for hiring people with your particular skillset.

Given these facts, I think an open decision making process serves them better than trying to make decisions behind closed doors. It may come off a little ham-fisted, but in actuality I think it's far _less_ ham-fisted than a huge number (maybe even majority?) of engineering decisions made every day in companies that just don't have the expertise to make the right decision and often don't even realize they are getting burned by what they don't know they don't know.

<comment><USER10> > _They are not very competitive for hiring people with your particular > skillset._

There is plenty of ops talent willing to work at a high-profile startup. I have experience building and running PB-scale Ceph clusters, private and public clouds, HA infrastructure covering everything from DB failover to BGP, and interviewed at Gitlab when they announced going on-prem. I asked for _half_ the market rate (because I was more interested in solving the scaling problem than money), but did not get it.

The HR person at the first (non-technical!) interview asked a bunch of programming related questions from a script which caught me completely off guard. One question went along the lines of "tell me about a difficult problem that you had a particularily elegant solution for". I think they've learned by now that ops problems usually can't be solved by a simple algorithm.

In retrospect I'm glad I didn't get it, but they seem to be having issues with more than infrastructure.

As a side note, if there are other startups wanting to move to own hardware but struggling to find the right people, I would love to know where to find you. Non-AWS ops jobs are far and few between these days.

<comment><USER11> It has definitely become less common to see companies build much outside of cloud environments. And the talent has dried up to an extent as a result. Expertise and interest in building outside of cloudland is important to find, but there's also a challenge in finding the right operational mindset as well.

It seems more common with more mature "startups" that have done the cost / benefit analysis and realized that the only way to achieve economies of scale for their business is to exit AWS. Dropbox, GitHub, Uber and so forth. Or businesses that simply must operate their own hardware, like CDNs.

There are some smaller places that see value in building a low-cloud service from the beginning. One of those companies is where I work, e-mail in profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Gitlab is hosted on Azure and like many startups received six figures worth of free credits to be in the cloud.

As the credits run out the architecture reverts to the natural state - architectures tend to be the derivative of organizational structure, code base, and processes of a company.

Through this lens these decisions start making more sense. It is a reactionary process. Sometimes when you start small you bounce around like that and are lucky enough to grow for years and years until you hit a wall.

</comment><comment><USER13> A bit disappointed in the article, as the bulk of it is simply quoting various viewpoints, some of which disagree with each other. I'd be much more interested in the thought process that occurred for them to reach the conclusion they did. What internal doubts did they raise? What possible solutions to those doubts did they consider? Things like that.

<comment><USER14> The reasoning behind their decision is linked near the top of the article, under "Sid and the team decided": [https://gitlab.com/gitlab- com/infrastructure/issues/727#note...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab- com/infrastructure/issues/727#note_20044060)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm a little shocked at this decision. The issues faced are all solved problems from PB storage to HA on server clusters even across Data centers. Good solutions do have upfront costs but the math that cloud hosting is 5-10X more than co-location company owned/leased is still in the ball park. It sounds like they may need an architect with enterprise experience to help them out rather than random comments on HN.

<comment><USER16> Yea, every growing company I've been at has been in the process of moving off of hosted solutions and onto their own hardware to cut costs.

Two such companies made the mistake of doing that with OpenStack, which is terrible and should die in a fire.

But one later switched to DC/OS and containers and it has worked really well. They've been migrating apps running on EC2 instances into docker containers than can run on marathon in our local data center and the savings is pretty substantial (even adding in the cost of the teams needed to maintain our own platforms).

Managed solutions are great for startups. There is a lot of value in not having to setup, maintain and manager your own hardware .. but that does reach a limit and companies need to be prepared for that transition and avoid lockins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I love all the comments trying to explain that managing your own hardware, storage, network and backup cannot take that much of your time.

Not only it does take a huge amount of time, but it takes so much time that it require multiple dedicated highly-skilled people.

Last but not least, the last article about Gitlab was about a major outage where they had as much as 6 out of 6 backups unusable! The fact that they still exist today is to the sheer luck that there was an unexpected copy made manually before the disaster.

That speaks at length on how that 100 people company is struggling to have the resources and the qualifications it needs to execute (what startup isn't?). Let's not send them on a suicide mission to manage their own hardware on top of everything they already have to achieve. ;)

<comment><USER18> Why do you think that if you don't use a cloud service you have to own hardware? You don't have to do it.

Dedicated server providers will manage your hardware, that's it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What about managed dedicated servers? You don't need to go all in full metal, and be responsible for networking and swapping disks and all that.

I know it's more than a handful of deployment recipes, but it's not like they don't manage their cloud instances either...

This article is a false dichotomy with a seemingly rushed decision.

<comment><USER6> I was wondering the same. Why not manage servers without managing the hardware? There are several hosting providers that offer enough capacity and data centers to provide enough capacity.

You'll still need people managing servers, but no one has to live close to a datacenter and you can emulate at least some cloud-like features (e.g. spinning up a new server if one server fails and dealing with the failing server later).

The only companies where that doesn't work is when you need physical security for your data (locked cabinets that no one from another company can enter), but that's no concern if you already had your data in the cloud before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Where is the original thought? There were few hard numbers. There was way too much quoted material and no Gitlab thoughts on it. It looks like they made the post based on feelings instead of a metric like time or dollars.

<comment><USER21> Point well taken on the blogpost leaving some important info out — sorry about that. Having been involved in the conversation, I can guarantee you that we came to this conclusion primarily through an analysis of the numbers (both cost & effort). I'll see what we can do about publishing them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Buried towards the bottom is the interesting decision to dump CephFS and go with NFS instead.

<comment><USER23> I wonder if Amazon's new managed EFS service would make sense? It's exposed as a NFS mount to the OS. The claims are:

\- Up to thousands of Amazon EC2 instances, from multiple AZs, can connect concurrently to a file system.

\- Data is stored redundantly across multiple AZs.

\- Low, consistent latency.

\- Multiple GBs per second.

<comment><USER3> EFS is pretty great. But for our use case there are a few drawbacks:

1\. It doesn't scale to the size we need for all repositories, so we still need sharding.

2\. It is expensive, $300/TB-month

3\. You're still sending all traffic over the network, we prefer the latency of local storage we can achieve by developing Gitaly [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly)

<comment><USER24> Why develop Gitaly instead of using consensus (etcd, zookeeper, etc.) for writes to fast storage like ssds and the normal git binary? As far as I can tell it's adding a lot of complexity by caching high level RPC calls but still doesn't really address multi-master read after write consistency or coordination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So, GitLab based a crucial part of their company on some random comments that were just quoted and could be said the other way around as well? Were is your own thinking and your own decision making?

Bare metal doesn't mean colocation. It also doesn't mean going bare metal only, you could go with a hybrid approach and save the base costs while maintaining the cloud scalability.

<comment><USER21> See my comment clarifying how we came to this decision [0].

And for what it's worth we considered colocation and hybrid models as well before coming to this conclusion.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13776735](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13776735)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Use your bare metal for your low-water mark and "scale over" to the cloud.

Setting up a hybrid cloud like this is not overly complicated and AWS and other providers will offer you a direct connect network connection in many carrier neutral colocation datacenters so you can sit on your cloud vpc with a physical connection in your datacenter of choice.

Get the best of both worlds. Providers like ovh can get very close to the cost of buying your own metal with a tco break-even at over 18 months, not counting network and power equipment costs. Using ec2 or GCE for a large number of persistent vms without a heavy discount seems... Wasteful.

</comment><comment><USER27> Hmm. Nearly all the commenters seem to be "extreme", i.e. either full-cloud or full-bare-metal.

Why not go hybrid? Do your baseline load with bare-metal and your spike load with AWS, GCE or Azure Cloud.

<comment><USER28> Cloudbursting either a database server or their git file storage doesn't sound all that viable, and I'd expect that to be the things that matter/are the bottleneck for Gitlab?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm really glad you guys decided to listen to the experienced commenters' advice and change your mind, rather than obstinately plowing on with what seems to be a bad decision.

</comment><comment><USER30> As a potential Gitlab customer (I would be running an instance in the cloud if I moved off of their hosted offering), this removes the main concern I had with migrating to their platform.

Fundamentally the performance problems they had could be solved by either software or hardware, and I have more faith in the team's ability to learn the distributed computing / caching techniques required than to learn how to run their own metal.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why didn't they chose to split it? You always have your bare-metal infrastructure and if you need a terrible growth and need more IT infra, you can use public cloud to handle to load until you find plan a good solution bare metal.

Sure it's some work, the setup is sometimes not ideal, but it's a huge gain imho.

In addition, many people bring the argument that infrastructure is not their core skill. It is true, but do they need to get to the level of public clouds to run their own infrastructure ? I mean, even with sub-optimal choices on hardware but smart choice on how you handle your architecture, you still can have huge savings and not so many risks by doing it in-house.

</comment><comment><USER32> Nitpick for the author, you put twaleson for my quote, should be jtwaleson.

<comment><USER33> Whoops, sorry. Opened a merge request to fix that.

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/merge_requests/...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/merge_requests/5175)

<comment><USER3> And it's merged and deployed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Couldn't they have easily just drawn the opposite conclusion? I don't see a strong connection between the article's contents and its conclusion.

<comment><USER23> I read it as: commenters raised a bazillion legit questions that we had not necessarily considered (unknown unknowns), and now the whole endeavor seems more risky and the TCO questionable. Let's instead gradually re-architect our application, so it fits better in the cloud, which also happens to align with what most of our enterprise customers are going to need anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This commit really does tell the story of the disproportionate influence HN comments had on this decision:

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/commit/8f7d618d...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/commit/8f7d618d14b91c338e9d4bfca96f86c3c6e5766b)

</comment><comment><USER36> HN is great way to get opinion about a decision. Although sometimes the criticism is way more than the positivism and support.

Post about "We use X and is great" will usually attract lots of "X is bad, use Y" comments.

I really hope that GitLab took a well informed decision based on arguments and counter-arguments.

</comment><comment><USER37> In my observing-from-a-distance experience, going bare metal makes sense once you are a certain size and have predictable baseline load to maintain. Many companies that have their own data centers still use cloud services to auto scale and deal with spikes.

</comment><comment><USER38> As long as you prove yourselves incapable of handling things without the aid of third parties, I will never be using your services. Sorry, I'm just picky like that and demand true competence.

</comment><comment><USER39> TL:DR = people cost more than servers = stay in cloud

</comment><comment><USER40> So everyone says the cloud is the future. I get it. But is this the truth, or what all the tech giants want people to believe? Don your foil hats for a moment and listen to me.

All the original internet companies run their own hardware. They rent out excess production capacity to us peons in the form of cloud services.

These companies that all run their own hardware exclusively are telling everyone that it's stupid to run your own hardware... Why are we listening?

Look to the newer tech giants as a prequel of what's to come. Netflix for example, is completely at the mercy of Amazon. They might as well be "Netflix brought to you by Amazon". Their edge is in software alone, nothing that causes a huge barrier to entry like custom hardware. This makes them much easier to dethrone. Hilariously, they rent all their hardware from a direct competitor who has access to all their software secrets. Does anyone else see something wrong with this?

The cloud as a money saving venture is and always has been a damn lie.

It's the same tactic as when automotive companies paid off local governments to destroy Americas public transport many years ago. All the big tech companies have their hands in the cookie jar besides Facebook, who remains mostly silent but runs their own hardware as well.

The major tech companies have every incentive to make you think running your own servers is nigh impossible. Don't drink the fucking koolaid. If the industry continues to consolidate rapidly AmaGooSoft will be the ONLY places you can have web servers in ten years

<comment><USER41> The cloud isn't a money-saving tactic. It enables you to test demand for a service for a very low absolute cost. Spin up a tiny machine for $60/year? And you can pay for it by the month, or the hour? That's great. You can find out if anybody is going to buy your thing at all. You can probably get to ramen- profitable.

As soon as you can confidently predict sufficient demand, the economically rational decision is to hire a good ops team and run real hardware. But to do so, you need to either have money or get money - and the costs of cloud service are zooming up, potentially leaving you without the margin to invest.

The question is what that level of sufficient demand is.

<comment><USER42> > Hire a good ops team

I feel this is one of those "easier said than done" statements...

<comment><USER43> I'd argue that's only easier said than done if you insist on doing a roll- your-own open-source science project. If you default to established enterprise vendors, finding ops people isn't _THAT_ difficult.

<comment><USER44> But then the cloud might be cheaper again.

<comment><USER43> It isn't, and it's not even close. Unless you're running at less than 40% efficiency the cloud is more expensive for infrastructure running 24/7\. If you're a shop with 1 server and no IT guy? Sure, probably makes sense to use the cloud - although I'd argue you'd be better off with managed hosting so you actually have a number to call if something breaks.

An organization of even medium size? Not a chance.

<comment><USER45> > Unless you're running at less than 40% efficiency the cloud is more > expensive for infrastructure running 24/7.

Sure, paying extra for a dynamically scalable service is inefficient if your resource needs are flat 24/7/365, but is that realistically the case?

(OTOH, one must not forget that there is a cost to engineer systems to take advantage of dynamic scaling to minimize costs while meeting requirements.)

<comment><USER46> >Sure, paying extra for a dynamically scalable service is inefficient if your resource needs are flat 24/7/365, but is that realistically the case?

Yes, the vast majority of apps are not 12 factor architectures designed for scaling so nodes can't be brought online and killed at the flip of a switch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Every time I see a post from Gitlab, I worry for them. I haven't used gitlab but have checked it out a few times. On the other hand I use github regularly. But this isn't about github vs gitlab.

Instead this is about gitlab's definition or rather level of transparency and something they seem to be proud of and are even being appreciated very often here at HN. I feel that gitlab have taken the transparency thing to an extreme, to the extent that they even named the engineer that caused a recent downtime. I don't think it matters that the engineer didnt object to it. Then there are posts about why they are choosing some UI framework and why they are moving away from cloud and now this. It's fine to be transparent but in a professional world it's also important to be private about certain things. Trying to please people by being transparent for the sake of it will take a toll on the team eventually. It's much more effective to just get things done instead of constantly being transparent to the external crowd, about every single detail</comment>


JFK Documents 54637 - <AUTHOR> Give me your E-Mail adress <comment><USER2> firstname.lastname@example.com, thank you</comment>


Zaarly swaps anonymity for identity in refreshed mobile marketplace - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/08/zaarly-2/ <comment><USER3> I don't see Zaarly really competing with TaskRabbit until they go the full mile and screen the folks who are performing this work, as TR does with its rabbits. I wouldn't trust someone to move my furniture or walk my dog without knowing someone had checked them out.

<comment><USER4> Hey bproper -

We're really excited about the new steps we've taken towards bringing trust and reputation to Zaarly. Commerce, identity, and trust simply go together - and we've brought them to the forefront in Zaarly 2.0.

We learned a lot from other marketplaces like eBay where reputation is the key behind all transactions and relationships. Our supply side is "open" - <USER2> that's great, because you are never limited. If I request a Spanish Tutor, I want to make sure that anyone can help me, not just a small group.

We're also focused on much more than tasks. For example, in the past week, I've used Zaarly to get a new Mac Charger and new furniture for a new place I just moved into. For me, I love being able to just go to one place and get anything I need :)

Really focused on reputation and trust in our new experience. Let me know anything we can do to make it better.

-Danny at Zaarly

<comment><USER5> Still not addressing the chicken or egg problem. I won't use your service until you properly vet workers. Reputation screening requires a lot of transactions.

Task Rabbit has sacrificed short term growth (most likely) to install an incredibly rigorous screening process for their workers.</comment></comment></comment>


The internet is multilingual but you need to learn Mandarin - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dantin1/the-internet-is-multilingual-but-you-need-to-learn-mandarin-558c15ab5158 <comment><USER2> Is this a serious article? I know Intelligent people who have studied Mandarin for 10 years actively making an effort and are still unable to read a newspaper. So it's extremely unlikely that mandarin will become a dominant text based language, possibly might become more popular for verbal communication in Africa and places like that.

<comment><USER3> the assertion being made here is not that Mandarin will become a dominant text-based language; it already is one. rather, the argument is that the ascendancy of China, abetted by its economic strategy in the developing world, will force Mandarin into a more central position on the Internet, like it or not.

<comment><USER4> >will force Mandarin into a more central position on the Internet, like it or not.

Not really, compare it to Spanish. China will also have to understand that the World is bigger then China, the rest of the World accepted English as THE technical language of "choice". Chinese have to learn English, like it or not.

<comment><USER5> The difference between Spanish and Mandarin is that Mandarin is much more information dense. In fact, it's the only widely spoken language more information dense than English.

Aside from that, english is just such a meh language. Asian kids get higher math scores in part because mandarin's numbering system actually makes sense ('eleven, twelve, thirteen' don't include the words one, two, or three, while the numerical representations include 1, 2, 3). You can consistently memorize a phone number in mandarin, but you can't in english because the syllables are too long. Thinking about money in mandarin biases people towards long term saving, while thinking about money in English biases people towards short term spending.

Basically, it's like a less drastic version of the movie 'Arrival'. I think not long after the idea that language can actively be designed to our benefit becomes more popular, we might be speaking an entirely language altogether. Language design is unlike city design or technology design in that there are no technological or budgetary constraints, no 'real world' tradeoffs to make. You can theoretically invent the perfect language tomorrow and it wouldn't cost you anything except time. One of the only things that can improve humans for basically free.

<comment><USER6> > Aside from that, english is just such a meh language. Asian kids get higher > math scores in part because mandarin's numbering system actually makes sense > ('eleven, twelve, thirteen' don't include the words one, two, or three, > while the numerical representations include 1, 2, 3).

This doesn't represent a fact of any sort of linguistic truth whatsoever.

<comment><USER5> These are research findings, not my own ideas: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-language-for- math-1410...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-language-for- math-1410304008)

<comment><USER7> This idea has been floating around for decades (wouldn't surprise me some researchers decided to test it), but its exact claims are only around ease of counting and arithmetic (the very basic levels), not mathematics as a whole.

Ease of counting numerals doesn't necessarily translate to overall mathematical ability. French and Russian have fairly complicated numerals, but many of the world's best mathematicians also happen to be French and Russian speaking... and of course, English speaking.

At the higher levels of mathematics, abstract thinking becomes more important than arithmetic. It's not obvious to me that facility at arithmetic is necessarily advantageous then. In fact, I wonder if highly inflected languages (Latin-derived) or those with complex grammars (Hungarian, Slavic) train the brain to work with symbols more efficiently.

<comment><USER5> You may be right about the abstract thinking, but if we're talking strictly in terms of PISA test scores, Russia and France performed only slightly above average in a fairly recent year. However, I acknowledge that measuring mathematical proficiency with test scores alone is flawed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm from Belgium. In the past, you needed to speak French in Belgium, even if the majority is Dutch-speaking. The people with money or power spoke French, if you wanted to have a voice, you spoke French. So people gave their companies French names, spoke French, read French newspapers,... Now,because of a variety of reasons, French lost a lot of its power. And in Flanders, younger generations and companies mostly stopped using French as second language.

Now, starting at world war 2, English received the status of international default language because of economic and political reasons. Hollywood and the internet amplified it. It is hard in younger western generations to find someone not speaking English. Even local bakeries choose an English name. Doesn't make much sense, but thats what you do today.

We're seeing now the economic and political rise of China, combined with a loss of power from the USA. It makes sense that the international default language will shift again.

Arguments like 'too hard', 'complucated', 'inefficient', 'people already made the choice'? These wont matter. We've seen these in the past.

Reality is simple: You adapt to the current power or you get marginalized. The only relevant question is wether China can reach the status of most powerful country or not.

This is also the kind of advancement that happens a funeral at the time. We mostly wont spend the effort to change our second language. But the next generation?

<comment><USER7> English has another advantage: it's the language of "cool", i.e. a kind of soft power. It's the language of hip-hop, of Hollywood, of tech and of finance. English is a prestige language is many parts of the world not only due to its incumbency, but because new pop culture is being created in it every day.

People learn languages for all kinds of practical reasons, but ultimately for a language to really take off, it has to endow personal prestige in some way and provide a window into a culture that is interesting or aspirational. People learn French and Italian due to the aspirational qualities of those languages. In contrast, relatively few people are learning Indonesian (outside of Indonesia) even though Indonesia is the 4th largest country in the world (yes!) by population, potentially a huge emerging market, plus Indonesian is a super simple language.

It seems to me the Chinese language does not currently have much currency in the soft power domain, partly because soft power requires the export of desirable cultural goods, which in turn requires a society that endows the creators of cultural products with freedom of expression. This freedom currently exists in Taiwan but Taiwan struggles with scale. This used to exist in HK, but the HK cultural industry has been on a decline since 1997 (and HK exports its cultural products in Cantonese).

Japanese is arguably a harder language than Chinese, yet the Internet is full of foreigners trying to learn it because they're into anime etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "You _Need_ to Learn Mandarin" is needlessly inflammatory, but yes, I would like to learn Mandarin, actually.

English is not my first language, but having learned it allows me to consume content from the English-speaking world and SOME content from non-english speakers who choose English (and rightfully so) as their net language.

I'd love to learn other languages to be able to interact with more people and ideas. Imagine speaking English, Mandarin, Spanish and Arabic. Being able to communicate with over 3 billion people in their own terms. Engage in the discussions that they're having about their lives, in their words. That would be great.

<comment><USER10> Weren't it for the really un-pragmatic script, I'd considering it learning it as well, even if just for the "it's frustrating there's something outside of our reach". Because, well, it is.

<comment><USER5> You're right about the script, it's not optimal for computer input.

<comment><USER5> I'm wrong actually, apparently pinyin is really fast

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> English wasn't the default due to a head start with the internet.

It was dominant due to a British Empire that stretched across the world for CENTURIES. English is still the predominant language for all international shipping, aviation, and financial transactions.

This same type of talk occurred in the 80's when folks were encouraged to learn Japanese as it would soon be the new lingua Franca.

In the grand scheme of things, it obvious and not fairly deniable that pictographic languages are incompatible with a computer-based culture. While the spoken Chinese language will survive, the written form will be an unused relic in a century or two.

<comment><USER5> English is indeed better suited for a conventional computer keyboard, coding, and reading left to right. However, to me it's still unclear how much of this advantage is due to the fact that computers were specifically designed for english speakers.

<comment><USER12> It's not just that computers were specifically designed for english speakers. It's that, even trying to specifically design for chinese speakers, it winds up clumsy to use. It doesn't matter the input method - big 4, pinyin, bopomofo - they're considerably clumsier than just typing out english or spanish or icelandish on a keyboard.

You may say that the problem is the small keyboard. But if you make the keyboard big enough, it takes three people to operate. (Literally - I have seen such a keyboard, for Kanji. It was huge. One person couldn't run it, because some of the shift keys were not within arm's reach of the keys they shifted.) So that's not an answer for most people.

Ideograph-based languages are clumsier to type than alphabet-based languages. They just are, and there is no great solution. The very information density that you keep harping on works against them in this respect.

<comment><USER5> Hmm I seem to be misinformed. I totally forgot to think about pinyin. Apparently it's as fast or faster than english. For example, hitting "jtkqwrhyz" on your keyboard will give you "Jin-tian kong-qi wu-ran hen yan- zhong" which translates to "The air pollution is pretty severe today". I don't type in pinyin though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Written simplified Chinese already mostly replaced the traditional Chinese way of writing - mainly Taiwan still keeps traditional Chinese alive.

A few decades in the future written Chinese will probably be unused or extremly further simplified, or more converge with English in some way. Traditional writing you can study in school as elective.

<comment><USER14> >> _Written simplified Chinese already mostly replaced the traditional Chinese way of writing - mainly Taiwan still keeps traditional Chinese alive._

Hong Kong and Macau does too, although it seems a transition is underway to shift to simplified writing.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters#Hong_Kong_and_Macau)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does this mean the spoken language Mandarin, or written Chinese, which I didn't think was called Mandarin?

I've been thinking learning to read Simplified Chinese writing, alone, might be useful, for someone who doesn't want to go to China.

Looking at the Wikipedia page on Kangxi radicals made the task seem relatively much more feasible:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radical)

<comment><USER16> If you just want to learn the characters, then these books provide a good system: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji_and_Re...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji_and_Remembering_the_Hanzi)

I'm 1000 characters in after 4 months of 1 hour a day study, but some people report quicker progress, so YMMV.

You'll still need to learn a bunch of words though, since most words in Mandarin are two characters long.

Written Chinese is still called Mandarin. There's Literary Chinese, which is different, but you don't want to learn that.

There's no standard way to write other Chinese languages, like Cantonese, in characters. People still do but there's no standard for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For what so that my content get censored behind the great firewall of ccp china

<comment><USER5> Explain to me what language has to do with the great firewall. Are you implying that if I switch my iPhone keyboard to Mandarin, my speech will automatically get censored by the firewall?

<comment><USER17> > Explain to me what language has to do with the great firewall.

This is too obvious to explain. The language is spoken by 1.5 billion people who are behind the firewall and why would i have to create a content in that language when i have the option to create the content in English which most democratic country population is literate of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Really google translate needs to learn mandarin. Multilingualism for humans is going the way of memorizing books, into history.</comment>


Muslim ninth grader arrested for bringing an electronics project to school - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2015/9/16/9335793/ahmed-mohamed-irving-bomb-not <comment><USER2> So STEM is only okay when you're not in Dallas?</comment>


Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning - <AUTHOR> http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-complexity/img0.html?

<comment><USER2> Or as a pdf on the same site: [http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/travel- complexity-notes...](http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/travel-complexity- notes.pdf)</comment>


QuickFuse - <AUTHOR> http://quickfuseapps.com/app/edit?x

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, I was the creator and lead developer of this project, and we've been rolling it out for launch over the last few weeks.

The homepage is: <http://quickfuseapps.com/>

We think it's really neat stuff--it basically takes the web mashup power of Yahoo Pipes and applies it to telephone calls. The technology behind it is also pretty impressive. If you have any questions, please send them to me here, and I'll do my best to answer them!

<comment><USER2> This is absolutely tremendous, and I am already having a blast. Thank you!

Only one point of frustration: There should be an obvious way to get variables from the call row. You can _update_ the call row with the "Update Call Row" module in the "Outbound Campaigns" section, but there should be a "Reserve Variable From Call Row" module, too. Otherwise, it seems the only way to do it is to "Reserve Variable" for every one you want to use, and manually set them as pre-filled every single time you create a campaign, which is a hassle.

Also, $0.05 cents per minute feels kind of steep. You have a very novel and wonderful service, though, so maybe it isn't such a big problem. It was so easy and intuitive to make a demo app, assign it to a number after I registered and watch things coming together. You guys are Doing It Right. Kudos, kudos!

One more thing... it'd be nice if there was an easy way to filter outbound calls on whether the person has already been called, according to whether the "outbound_result" field in their row is populated. There's a filter option "is..." that lets you select between "present" and "not present," but it's not clear whether that means "empty" or "is not even a hash key for that row," or if those two things are even different.

Oh, and for God's sake, make sure you block requests on your site that have "4chan" as a referrer... ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> These are all great points.

Re: filtering, this needs to be better documented, agreed. "present"==="field exists for row, with any value". There's a distinction between empty grey and empty white cells that we tried to make but it may not be apparent to non- programmers.

Re: price, we are only a couple cents/min higher than what other barebones API providers are charging. But we are obviously much more than an API service. Hosting all apps in their entirety, along with slick web-based tools to build them, is the extra value we are hoping to provide.

<comment><USER3> A "couple of cents" up to 5 cents implies charging 66% more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hah, thanks for the link! I just wrote a quick app to flirt with my girlfriend. Multiple choice questions with no wrong answers are hilarious. Punched in her phone number and waited for a callback.

Ok, maybe that's sad, but hey.

<comment><USER2> I created an outbound calling campaign to ask all of my friends if they want to hang out tonight, record their results in the database, and call them losers if they say no. It took me less than 20 minutes to do. This is Awesome, with a capital "A."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Making an app was trivially easy and aside from the intro text (due to it being a demo) it was nice to see there weren't extra instructions a la "please select from the following options." Of course in testing this I made the old "orange you glad I didn't say banana?" knock knock joke that switches paths on the third time.

I'm not sure if this will work for everyone else since I didn't create an account, but I guess you can try here if you'd like: <http://quickfuseapps.com/app/edit?x#a=5WNw04UUdu0,r=1go>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, sharing links to your apps should work. If you make an app without creating an account, it is publicly shareable for about 1 day. Whoever creates an account to save it will take ownership, and then it becomes private.

</comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 This is pretty impressive - especially the part where it highlights which nodes are currently being played when you are on the phone testing the application out.

</comment><comment><USER6> gotta mention OpenVBX for drag-and-drop voice apps <http://www.openvbx.org>

<comment><USER7> OpenVBX seems pretty limited in terms of features. The drag-and-drop functionality only extends to simple call routing functionality like a phone system/PBX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Will this let me invoke a URL on a remote third party server, and use the result of that URL call in my dialog?

<comment><USER9> Looks like it has integration for DB Queries, as well as SOAP requests.

<comment><AUTHOR> It actually includes a simplified integrated database that is built on top of Amazon's SimpleDB. (Try going to Configure and then the Data tab.) SOAP is currently our best option for external data integration. We are also contemplating the best way to do modules for RESTful services and MySQL/PGSQL. Current concerns include data format/protocol discovery for the former and proper security for the latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, what a cool tool! No need to be an expert developer here, someone who has used a Visio like program in the past can quickly and easily build an interactive voice app. I tested it to invite my family to a reunion and collected all responses real time...the Amazon simpleDB is awesome!

</comment><comment><USER11> On the subject of the 'cool' factor, Yahoo Pipes has been around for years: <http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.edit>

<comment><USER12> Are there specific JavaScript frameworks for creating these node-based interfaces in the browser?

I notice that it's a mish-mash of div and canvas tags.

<comment><AUTHOR> We used jQuery UI as a framework, but built a _lot_ of custom widgets for the wires, modules, nodes, receptors, etc. Yahoo Pipes was certainly an inspiration for our design, but we rethought the concepts behind using wires (using them as a control flow mechanism, not a data flow mechanism; e.g., there are no wires for variables, we use them in sort of the way MIT's Scratch does).

We don't know of any framework for this sort of interface, and we did not want to use Flash, so we just rolled up our sleeves and made it ourselves. jQuery and jQuery UI, however, were instrumental; for this sort of new-ish UI, it was useful to have the ability to progressively layer functionality onto HTML elements. We also made extensive use of the $.Widget framework to construct our widgets in the same fashion as jQuery UI's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The great thing about QuickFuse is that the application does not require users to have programming experience. Similar services typically require programming knowledge, but with QuickFuse, it's sort of a you dream it, and the program will easily allow you to build it type of application. The program is user- friendly for everyone, from those with extensive programming knowledge, to those with just an application idea!

</comment><comment><USER14> I tried to look at it with my iPad and was unable to keep screen focus on a part of the window content (i.e. Center). Every second, the top left corner of the screen is moved to the top left corner of the image. Has this function any use ? Please, consider removing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working on compatibility with the iPad, when we began working on this the only iOS devices were small screened and we had no hope of ever making this useful there... now that the iPad is out, well that changes things, and we hope to support it soon.

Thankfully because the interface doesn't use Flash, that shouldn't be too difficult. We'd have to rework some of the event handlers, but that should be it.

FYI, the reason we periodically reset the scroll position is because the main <body> on normal windowed browsers is meant to never scroll in this editor interface. Even if you disable scrolling in CSS, some browsers like to scroll when you do things like (accidentally) highlight text near the window border, and we needed a way to make sure the interface stayed within the browser window.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I created a simple survey with dynamic questions based on responses using the database. Very impressive considering it only took me minutes. Love the feature that lets you see the call progress to each node as the call progresses. Great Job!

</comment><comment><USER16> That's neat, but the voice world has been doing visual IVR for at least 20 years now. That it is easy to get started and accessible is nice, though.

<comment><USER17> Why the down votes? Its true. I've worked for a SaaS Call Center company before and worked on applications like this. Of course, it was an installed application though. This is actually a pretty neat service. I had always wondered what a web-based one would look like. Perhaps I'll send the link to my old company and rub it in that a startup pulled this off. They'll be jealous :)

<comment><USER16> The rule of thumb for telephony visual designers: every time a new switch or service gets built, a new visual designer gets built too :). Not sure why the down votes, shrug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Fantastic work.

Out of curiosity, how long did it take to develop & launch? How many people were responsible for the product?

<comment><AUTHOR> We used a very small team of developers. I wrote the majority of the code; there were a few other auxiliary programmers and a couple testers. It started as a "20% time" concept piece and took about a year to develop into a product.

We wouldn't have been able to develop as fast as we did without the foundation provided by great projects such as Kohana (we used 2.3) <http://kohanaframework.org> , jQuery, and jQuery UI. For us, these frameworks turned out to be a superb combination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Finally, a way for me to automatically prank call my friends and record their bewildered responses in a database!</comment>


Does anyone remember websites? - <AUTHOR> http://tttthis.com/rememberwebsites.php/ <comment><USER2> Check out the search engine at [http://wiby.me](http://wiby.me)

From their about page:

 _Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn 't great at finding those gems, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well. But finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.

The wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet._

<comment><USER3> My favorite website: [http://www.otherhand.org/](http://www.otherhand.org/)

And my favorite article on it: [http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and- rescue/the-hun...](http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the- hunt-for-the-death-valley-germans/)

(No association)

<comment><USER4> That article was a fascinating read. Thank you.

<comment><USER5> Ah yes, I remember stumbling into this page when looking for cold-case/solved mystery stories. I got through all 13 pages in one afternoon! Excellent story and writing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I do remember those websites. For me, the difference is that now the Web is much more useful, but back then it was a lot more fun. True, you could sometimes waste hours following random links hoping to find something good, but the thrill of discovery when you stumbled across a gold mine of information was a huge part of the appeal.

Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. That makes the Web on the whole much more useful, but the thrill of the hunt is gone -- that's what Jakob Nielsen was referring to all those years ago when he talked about "information scent".

[https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information- scent/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information-scent/)

<comment><USER7> _Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds._

Almost anything popular and rather insipid, yes. Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter. I don't think that's a good thing at all.

To add insult to injury, if you do try very hard to seek the latter by carefully repeating similar search queries with slight word tweaks, quotes, and trying to dig through all the pages of results to see if you've found what you're looking for, Google will quickly decide that you're a bot and either give you a CAPTCHA or just ban you for a little while entirely.

<comment><USER8> Google is not great for finding stuff. I've complained at length about how bad it is for doing research, but recently I've also found it's totally useless for finding things like reviews of products (unless it's something like the new iPhone). It's like legitimate reviews are a casualty in the war between Google and clickbait SEO crap.

<comment><USER9> This is true. The only way I can find product buying advice is:

1\. To find a community of enthusiasts and see what they have to say about products in that space. This works pretty well for products that actually have enthusiasts.

2\. Go to Amazon and read a product's _bad_ reviews. The good reviews are nearly useless. But, with bad reviews, you have to weigh the number of bad reviews against the product's popularity. If something has twelve negative reviews, that means _very_ different things for a product that sells 10 units a month versus a product that sells 50K units a month.

3\. Read the tiny handful of reliable product recommendation sites. Cool Tools, Wirecutter, annnnnnnd.... I'll let you know when I find another one.

<comment><USER10> I bought a subscription to Consumer Reports and have been happy with the two purchases I made on their recommendation (headphones in the $100 range, and a new food processor). Do you consider them compromised? It's actually just about time to renew my subscription and i've been wondering whether I should.

I've also used your strategy of reading the bad reviews on Amazon!

<comment><USER11> The appliances I bought using their advice has been hit/miss - ranges are decent but the fridges and dishwasher I bought are noisy and required service barely outside warranty period. These are big name brands too.

I don't necessarily fault CR but I with the hundreds of models released all slightly similar but different (I hear partly to prevent price-matching across stores) it must be as impossible to review for CR as it is for consumers to keep track of.

<comment><USER12> I wouldn't count the appliance reliability against CR as this great article shows appliance industry is doing it on purpose:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13909365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13909365)

Typical cartel-like, profit-boosting activity of oligopolies which appliance market seems to be with a handful of companies owning most brands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > This article can be discussed on r/TTTThis.

Oh the irony.

The web has changed: in some ways for the worse, and in others for the better. I remember websites being like a lottery: sometimes you'd hit jackpot but most of them were "Under construction" GIFs over ugly tiled backgrounds.

There is still ton of content and much more than what I would've dreamt on the 90s. Platforms like Reddit allow _everyone_ , whether they know HTML or not, to publish their own content and even comment on others'.

Yes, Facebook and Twitter suck, but that's mostly it. I'm very, very grateful for everything else on modern internet.

This smells like 'memberberries.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't put discussion on the page in order to keep it as code-light as possible. Reddit is a good option for discussion (at the time of writing), especially considering I didn't want to clutter HN up with a discussion page for each article (no problem on a subreddit).

I agree with you on the value of reddit and platforms (and I actually value Facebook-type platforms as well, with the obvious qualifications), but the old html sites I write about here have a different type of construction, material, and value.

(- The author)

<comment><USER13> > the old html sites I write about here have a different type of construction, > material, and value.

These still exist. They are prettier and more content packed than the 90s ones you're reminiscing about, and there are many, many more than there used to. I honestly think you're seeing the early web with rose-tinted nostalgia glasses.

Unless you liked the DIY amateurish hacker feel of it (which I agree has its value on its own) I think they've changed mostly for the better.

Just to be on the same page: what's exactly that type of construction, material and value you miss? What did you like of it?

EDIT: After re-reading your original post I think I get your point. It's just... #RememberWebsites, _of course_ it's nostalgia-fueled! And that was the point of the post, right? Celebrating it (which I completely misunderstood as a celebration of websites themselves).

There are still many. Here's one that might fulfill your oldschool needs: [https://www.justinguitar.com/](https://www.justinguitar.com/)

<comment><USER14> Mobile changed websites into displaying less content. Are we better off? Scrolling forever vs clicking next page / last page. I think scrolling is worse if you ever want to find that piece of content again.

<comment><USER15> For developers, information breadth and quality was excellent when I first onlined in '98, and has improved by leaps and bounds year by year.

For other stuff, I agree with that OP article, that was a uniquely rich caleidoscope that got "blandened" (now lost/gone/fully-transitioned) as the types of folks who'd craft such little labour-of-love sites mostly did so for lack of easier / more-convenient options that soon popped up first with prefab forums and prefab Wordpress / Blogger, then Tumblr/Medium/social-media.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is pretty harsh critique. I first got on the web in 1992 and what we have now is a paradise compared to what we had then. Sure, you may have to look with intent for what you want, but freely coasting around the web has always carried liabilities. It used to be "you'll find lots of junk" and the junk has simply diversified since then.

I also noticed the author doesn't even use a single hyperlink in his own article. Be the change you want to see.

I was just checking out Project Rho. Before that I was building a link page of my own because I'm getting into ham radio. The old web we love is still here and it'll always be around in some form.

<comment><USER17> > what we have now is a paradise compared to what we had then

Here's how I recall it:

Back in the day, you'd search for subject {$foo} and you would find mostly websites written by some cranky bearded weirdo who is obsessed with {$foo}, who has devoted weeks of his time to personally collating his every thought about {$foo} into one ghastly-looking site.

Nowadays, you search for {$foo} and find mostly beautifully template-designed pages of text written by indifferent fiverr freelancers who had about 20 minutes to stuff in as many keywords into as many column inches wrapped around as many ad slots as possible before moving on to the next subject.

I know which one I prefer.

(I may exaggerate. But only slightly.)

<comment><USER18> > Nowadays, you search for {$foo} and find mostly beautifully template- > designed pages of text written by indifferent fiverr freelancers who had > about 20 minutes to stuff in as many keywords into as many column inches > wrapped around as many ad slots as possible before moving on to the next > subject.

Yeesh, does anyone else have this opinion?

I sure don't. It's never been more trivial to find good, enriching content.

How many of these posts are just HNers getting more crotchety in their old age? Sometimes it just seems like a pissing contest for who can be most cynical. ;)

<comment><USER17> > more crotchety in their old age

I will willingly cop to this. But seriously, genuinely yes, the internet is full of a lot more content-free clickbait than it used to be. Because clickbait didn't used to be a thing that existed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've never been particularly nostalgic for websites.

I'm _slightly_ nostalgic for shared Windows folders on LANs at college dorms. I remember seeing the first South Park short from such a folder as it was going viral.

I'm _extremely_ nostalgic for the original Napster. I don't ever remember searching for a piece of music and coming up short. And I remember it being a very sudden shift-- one month you're making a mental note to search for a CD you misplaced somewhere back home, the next month you're getting on Napster to check if the theme to Ghostbuster's 2 has lyrics that recount the plot of the movie. It does.

A few weeks ago I typed "Battlestar Galactica" into Netflix, and guess what? It showed me lots and lots of results, _none of which were Battlestar Galactica_. And this isn't your run of the mill entitlement of a fool addicted to his Iphone apps. That is entitlement of a person yearning for modern functionality to match a shitty piece of software that saw its last stable release _15 years ago_.

I'm having a hard time finding any numbers for the actual amount of music that was available on the original Napster at the time. Can anyone put some hard data to my rose colored glasses?

<comment><USER20> Check out Soulseek, it is very similar to how I remember the original Napster. Lots of obscure rarities on there music-wise, I've not tried it for anything else.

The one P2P thing I am nostalgic for is Audio Galaxy - it had an awesome system where it they indexed everyone's content on their website, so you could see every file that had ever been on the network and add it to your "want list", then when that person came online, it would start downloading. To be fair "wish list searches" in Soulseek serve a similar purpose, but I loved that ability to browse every file that had ever been online!

<comment><USER21> Soulseek is incredible, discovered all sorts of smaller-time musicians that never wouldve been sold at the Best Buy in the suburban wasteland of my youth.

I can't believe it's under active maintenance after all these years!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 10 years from now, we'll be waxing nostalgia about entrepreneurs who made a living off Instagram, Amazon, WordPress, and other platforms. 'There was a kid who used to "rate dogs" and he was hilarious! And he did it for free without any corporate backing! Made a killing on T-Shirts and stuff as well!'

</comment><comment><USER23> Last night I ended up, for some weird nostalgic reason, installing a Gopher client, just to see if there was anything still around. Amazingly, there's a bunch of blogs (called phlogs in Gopherspace) that people are updating regularly! Pretty amazing!

<comment><USER24> How did you find these Gopher sites? Is there a Gopher search engine, or is it just a hand-updated list?

<comment><USER2> Gopher is a great protocol. I never really used it back in its heyday; I'm not sure I knew it existed at the time (I didn't really get "real" Internet access until 1995 or so). I recently discovered it after having similar sentiments as the author of this article concerning the state of the WWW.

After you get your Gopher client set up (lynx in the terminal works great), a good starting point is gopher://sdf.org

There are many active "phlogs" published on SDF.org; there is also an aggregator that tracks some 20-odd phlogs at: gopher://i-logout.cz/1/en/bongusta (though it seems to be down at the time of this posting).

The "Gopherspace" is a refreshing wormhole -- with a surprising amount of present-day activity -- into the Internet of yesteryear. I highly recommend checking it out and perhaps publishing your own content on Gopher if you're tired of the dumpster fire that is the WWW.

<comment><USER25> On gopher://sdf.org:

"Many people think the http protocol deprecated gopher, but that just isn't true. Where do you think gophers live? underground"

Edit: more gold

"After dumping linux and x86 in favour of return to real computers, we have not had any major security issues"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Most websites were written with html, so they were all unique.

Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible.

I don't see why I should feel nostalgia for an Internet plagued by `<marquee>`s, poorly-laid out flashing gifs and bright yellow text on a white background.

<comment><USER27> I saw a lot of people trying to avoid HTML in their websites in the past.

The flash ones are the obvious example, but I once had the pleasure of an entire site that looked like any other, except it took forever to load and links worked weirdly.

That was because the entire site was an image map over a giant .bmp for each page.

<comment><USER26> Oh yes, totally forgot about flash and `<map>`s – but one could argue even those were originally designed to solve the problems of 'vanilla' HTML. They of course failed and HTML kind of prevailed, but only by being coupled with a massive set of APIs on the Web Platform. If it wasn't for those JS APIs, we might be stuck with Flash forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> They are still out there. Probably even more than ever. You just don't find them because the SEO-sites drain away all traffic.

I believe my own site would qualify? [http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/](http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/)

<comment><USER29> That would be interesting - a search engine that was resistant to most SEO techniques and allowed one to find these types of sites. Would be a great alternative to Google sometimes.

<comment><USER30> The only search engine that is resistant to SEO is one that doesn't have enough traffic for any SEO to matter. If it's popular, it will be gamed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> See also the analysis (from 2015) of an Iranian blogger who got arrested in 2008 and got free in 2015 - he did not recognize the new web. (Ironically also posted on Medium...) According to him, hyperlinks turned into a social media stream.

[https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to- save-2eb1fe15a4...](https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to- save-2eb1fe15a426)

<comment><USER32> After blocking all the JavaScript and hiding the position=fixed garbage, that was an interesting article.

> So I tried to post a link to one of my stories on Facebook. Turns out > Facebook didn't care much. It ended up looking like a boring classified ad. > No description. No image. Nothing. It got three likes. Three! That was it.

I write a blog, and publish links to posts on Facebook because doing so costs me nothing. It also gets me next to nothing. People click on those links about as often as Facebook asks me for my credit card to "boost" them.

<comment><USER33> > hiding the position=fixed garbage

Oh wow, I literally never want this behavior! Do you have a generic trick? "Inspect element" is tedious.

<comment><USER34> I have a "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet to do that job, as the first thing on my bookmarks toolbar. I'm clicking that thing all the time, it works great. So long stupid sliding navbars, enter-your-email popups, fixed video autoplayers, etc. I think I got it from here: [https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky- headers/](https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Another thing is people often just go to Wikipedia, Wikipedia replaced the need for many fan sites. I had things copied from my sites and put on Wikipedia and tired to get a link back or a source mentioned and it was removed each time. So I lost motivation to even update fan sites, since whatever I type is going to get pasted onto Wikipedia with no link back.

<comment><USER36> And wikia. That replaced much of the need for fictional fan sites. I visit memory alpha weekly.

<comment><USER37> Unfortunately, Wikia looks like it's in the process of becoming a cautionary tale, with its recent move to start injecting its own video content into certain high-traffic wikis and a general decline in customizability and independence.

<comment><USER38> Wikia seems to be gradually being replaced by self hosted wikis, at least where larger fandoms are concerned. The Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance (Mario Wiki, Zelda Wiki, Bulbapedia, etc) are one example, the Square Enix Wiki Alliance are another, and I'm sure the likes of the Simpsons Wiki have moved away from the service as well.

<comment><USER39> Zelda Wiki is hosted on Gamepedia. It's like Wikia but specifically for Video Games and less obstrusive.

<comment><USER38> Well it used to be self hosted. Not sure I like the move much, feels like they're betraying the organisation they're supposedly part of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "it was largely a collection of websites made by people who were interested in some subject enough to write about it and put it online. "

Oh,you mean like blogs?

Seriously, this sounds like being nostalgic for it's own sake. I fail to see how using dreamweaver and ftp is somehow better then using Wordpress and the cloud, writing your own html as a prerequisite to having a website was never a good idea - now everyone can have their own website.

I really don't miss the "glorious 90's" type of websites - with the thousand of animated images, weird background images and marquee everywhere. Sure it made every site unique - every site was terrible to the eyes in it's own special way.

Also the idea that all sites now look the same is quite preposterous - sure a lot of sites are cookiecutter websites - especially marketing websites, but there are tons of unique designs - especially for blogs and personal websites.

<comment><USER41> > Oh,you mean like blogs?

Yes, but before they all looked the same and were hosted on the same platform.

I miss the days where you would encounter a blog filled with great content and with a unique look and feel. It's as if it almost burned in in my memory. I still remember how the website looked of some great articles that resonated with me.

That's one of the reasons I dislike Medium et al.

<comment><USER40> I don't think it matters where they are hosted, but I think it's disingenuous to say that all blogs look the same.

Sure everything on medium looks the same, but there are many many blogs not on medium.

Here, just after a simple search, a list of personal websites/blogs that look nothing alike:

[https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-35-best-personal- websites...](https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-35-best-personal-websites- weve-ever-seen)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > Does anyone remember when you they stumbled on a new website written by some > guy and read his first article, then clicked back to his homepage and saw he > had a list of similar articles that looked like they'd be just as > interesting.

Or, more likely, you clicked "back" on the "navigation bar" and it would 404 because the author messed up the links, since it was all hand crafted HTML.

Funny stuff aside, there are still loads of "websites" out there. If I understand the criteria here, we are looking for mostly hand crafted pages maintained by individuals (or small groups) that have interesting content. Something, should I say, very "web 1.0"?

Here's a good one. Make sure to check the GUI Gallery section:

[http://toastytech.com](http://toastytech.com)

User Friendly is always hilarious (unfortunately, updates stopped ages ago, but going through the archive is sill fun):

[http://www.userfriendly.org/](http://www.userfriendly.org/)

And here's something random, the best page in the universe:

[http://maddox.xmission.com/](http://maddox.xmission.com/)

Like I said, there are TONS of these out there. You just have to, you know, look for them.

<comment><USER43> We need a good search index of these and all the other sites likes them. Something that deliberately doesn't include pages from bigger sites or sites full of cruft.

<comment><USER44> It could probably be easily accomplished by filtering out sites that use JS libraries like jquery, etc.

<comment><USER45> "best viewed with" followed by your query (ex: "best viewed with" dragons) gets you lots of great old results in a regular search engine. It will grab any sites that said "best viewed with truetype fonts", "best viewed with Netscape" et cetera from the internet's heyday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It's clever of the author to use "website" in this more specific sense. Technically a "website" roughly means anything served as HTML over HTTP. But all us fogeys know what his title meant anyway.

But I still think he protests too much. The style subject-oriented websites which the author is referring to evolved slightly and got the new name "blogs". The blogosphere might not be as popular as social networking, but it is still huger than the web of the '90s.

<comment><USER47> Eh, I don't think blogs are really that equivalent to old school websites. Blog, being short for "web log" implies a temporal-based feed of posts. Old school sites were often much more varied, webs of pages broken up by subject or topic with links scattered everywhere to the rest of the web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is why I really love initiatives such as [https://neocities.org/](https://neocities.org/) :). I don't have a use for it myself as I have my own servers, but I'm glad this kind of service exists!

</comment><comment><USER49> > Does anyone remember websites? These might be unfamiliar to anyone unexposed > to the internet before 2005 or so [...] it was largely a collection of > websites made by people who were interested in some subject enough to write > about it and put it online.

Does the author mean web rings? I do remember these :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't exactly talking about webrings, but now I'd like to see one. Can you link me to one please?

(- the author)

<comment><USER50> [http://www.homebrewcpu.com/](http://www.homebrewcpu.com/)

Bottom of the page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I understand the sarcasm, but really, there are a lot of "real" websites, directly controlled by individuals who post what they want. I point you to my own website, [https://www.dwheeler.com](https://www.dwheeler.com) .... it's not the latest in CSS, no Megabytes of JavaScript, and no cross-site tracking either.

</comment><comment><USER52> I've found amateur ham radio stations are a good thread to tug on to find that older weird-internet.

\- Look for the sites with 4-5 letter callsigns on them

\- Go to their links page

\- Keep going down the rabbit hole.

EG. here's a few I just found googling:

[http://www.qsl.net/kp4md/](http://www.qsl.net/kp4md/)

[https://k7nv.com/](https://k7nv.com/)

[http://www.w8ji.com/](http://www.w8ji.com/)

</comment><comment><USER53> I thought about this a few weeks ago. I remember the late 90's actually searching around the web. Now there are so many walled gardens that individual creation is limited to posting a Medium blog or Facebook post. Today, I only visit a handful of sites and developer documentation.

</comment><comment><USER54> I was a part of the Geocities team in 1998. Part of the reason a large part of the early web no longer exists is that many of these web pages were hosted for free by Geocities. Tragically when they were purchased by Yahoo, Yahoo decided to simply shred the early web, they decided it was not worth it to keep supporting the service and simply hit delete on a huge chunk of the content of the early web.

<comment><USER55> In fairness, Yahoo ran geocities for an entire decade before shutting it down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I do, which is why many years ago I told myself I was going to make my websites as js free as possible. Pure, simple, readable html5+css is my long term goal.

The thing is, this part of the web still exists, it's actually just simply harder to find due to the control on the filter big corps have these days. You just have to search. I am regularly adding hackers blogs to my bookmarks. Sometimes they stopped updating in 2012, but their writing still looks worthwhile. The real democratization of knowledge the internet offers to us is there for the taking if people would break free from their self-forged filter- bubble shackles.

<comment><USER57> > I am regularly adding hackers blogs to my bookmarks. Sometimes they stopped > updating in 2012, but their writing still looks worthwhile.

Can we start sharing these somewhere? I have several I'd like to contribute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I remember the NCSA Web Site of the Day, circa 1993. It was a page that listed new web sites that had appeared on the web, with a brief summary and link to each one.

Many days there wasn't a new web site. Some days there were _two_.

</comment><comment><USER59> Unfortunately, a large part of the reason the web used to be fun is that there didn't used to be anything like it. The only way we can get that again is by inventing the next world-changing communications technology, not by trying to dig up the old web. It pains me as much as anyone else to say this since I got started on the web back in 1994 and experienced its early magic first-hand.

</comment><comment><USER60> _Another thing was that there was no dross, because everything had to be written and uploaded by a person._

Some rose-tinted glasses right there!

<comment><USER61> Yeah, I've been on the web since NCSA Mosaic, and there was a lot of dross.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> As the operator of a website old enough to still have a "webmaster" email address, it can be hard to remain relevant in the age of Google's search monopoly. Their algorithm has become the de facto gatekeeper to the entire Internet, and it happens to favor newer content over old. Consequently it favors those crappy flip-shop[1] sites where "writers" find quality content, perform a mild thesaurus modification, and re-post it. The original source, where the actual research and writing occurred, is stomped into insignificance.

Yes, perhaps I'm slightly bitter, why do you ask?

Between that and the "Wikipedia wall," boutique websites have been an endangered species for some time.

[1] [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=flip%20shop](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=flip%20shop)

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm "old" and I remember websites, and Bulletin Board Systems too, for that matter. But technology changes, and you gotta keep up, man. Don't let the kids bother you--they're just running through your yard to the next house over. It's a cool house, maybe check it out someone.

</comment><comment><USER64> No. Even basic documentation sites now has to be a fricken enriched browser experience

</comment><comment><USER65> Couldn't agree with you more!

Now sites seem to be spread out across the behemoth sites like Medium and of course all the social media platforms. A lot of the fun and sense of adventure that was present in the early days of the web is gone. Now it's "just business" \- that blows! When did everyone get so obsessed with boosting their "online presence" in order to make a quick buck?

I will also give a big thumbs up to Neocities. It's brilliant. There's a great retro feel to many of the sites there. People are having fun creating sites with HTML and a dash of CSS - for free.

</comment><comment><USER66> One of the few websites I can still lose hours on: [https://waitbutwhy.com/](https://waitbutwhy.com/)

</comment><comment><USER67> As the former perpetrator of several hand-coded sites and blogs full of text organized by 52-card-pickup principles, going back to '80s BBS's, online services, USENET, and then Gopher and WWW on a University shared network…

Switching to Wordpress (obLink: [https://mdhughes.tech/](https://mdhughes.tech/) ) and slowly reposting the stuff I want visible in an organized, searchable format with a consistent style and a nice CMS is the best possible improvement.

My latest change is a "Starred posts" category, so I can surface the longer, more thought-out pieces and still have ephemeral content like semi-daily music links and status updates.

Manton Reece's [http://micro.blog/](http://micro.blog/) is putting Twitter- like interaction under a blog framework, hosted on m.b or on your own site.

Discovery of these things is still hard, and Google's ad-searching site unsurprisingly only surfaces ads, but [http://duck.go](http://duck.go) and social media (like HN) can point you at content you want to see. [ed: sp]

</comment><comment><USER68> Shameless plug but what he describes was partly my inspiration for building [https://nogradient.com/](https://nogradient.com/). It is very stripped down and minimal. Would love some feedback on it.

</comment><comment><USER69> That's just Capitalism.

Once Capitalism takes over a system, everything is optimized for profit. Some diehard _hobbyists_ might remain but most convert. I'm still keeping 2 niche blogs.. let's see till when.

</comment><comment> Chiba-City Early business Web was Decision Support and not ad distraction based. There were cool "calculators" that would match relocation zip codes in Tulsa most like my favorite DC zip code or pick optimum breed/age/weight dog food.

Product Selection Engines (PSE's) were a different value proposition than product or brand promotion. They are fun to write for engineers because they correct purchase errors with IT good deeds like Consumer Reports but with user variables on priorities or constraints.

The Consumer Web threw out a great deal of baby with the .com era bathwater.

</comment><comment><USER70> For me the web is more alive than ever... Just look at the way static websites are taking over..

However JS is the real threat to websites, react and its ilk are not amenable to being stored long term.. Too many things break.

</comment><comment><USER71> Does [http://3564020356.org](http://3564020356.org) count? It does appear to use Alexa for tracking now, but otherwise it looks pretty "home-grown".

</comment><comment><USER72> I wrote a little program that does the "follow links and see if I find anything interesting" thing. It takes seed links, pulls all links that don't go back to the same domain, and then chooses 50 and repeats. Then there's another program to find the uncommon sites from everything gathered. Check it out at [https://github.com/riley- martine/water_skimmer](https://github.com/riley-martine/water_skimmer)

</comment><comment><USER73> Can't say I miss Geocities inundating the search engines.

Still though, it was pretty fun when there were more than 5 or so websites to go to, like a lot of people tend to only do these days.

</comment><comment><USER74> [http://neoticies.org](http://neoticies.org) Welcome back :) I am currently doing a minimal OpenBSD site in Spanish :D

</comment><comment><USER75> I have been thinking on this idea lately and trying to build a tool to filter out the crap. What I have found is operators help, but the only things I have found to work are EDU sites, pre-2010 operator, and intext: welcome to my site. Beyond that, nothing seems to work to find complex content. I also thought about maybe making a tool to filter out content from the top million sites or so, but for now I am going to just use operators.

</comment><comment><USER76> The site I remember feeling that way about was the Robot Wisdom Homepage, now preserved only on the WayBack Machine: [https://web.archive.org/web/20130409045156/http://www.robotw...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130409045156/http://www.robotwisdom.com/home.html)

</comment><comment><USER77> Ian Milligan has done some interesting work [1] on the history of GeoCities, including some archives I think

[1] [http://www.ieee- tcdl.org/Bulletin/v11n2/papers/milligan.pdf](http://www.ieee- tcdl.org/Bulletin/v11n2/papers/milligan.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER78> I started my career as a web designer back in the 1998-2000 which was fun then. People wanted gifs like crazy.

</comment><comment><USER79> This is what I wrote years ago in this blog [http://productionjava.blogspot.sg/2014/07/the-broken- web.htm...](http://productionjava.blogspot.sg/2014/07/the-broken-web.html) and I have been working since then to fix it.

</comment><comment><USER80> Steve den Beste's original website, USS Clueless, was a perfect example of early website/blog.

</comment><comment><USER81> I would like to add photo.net and particularly Philip Greenspun's "Travel with Samantha".

</comment><comment><USER82> Joseph Wood Krutch: "bad roads act as filters... bad roads bring good people, good roads bring bad people".

[http://www.escapist.com/baja/books.htm](http://www.escapist.com/baja/books.htm)

</comment><comment><USER83> Wait, we don't call websites "websites" anymore? What do we call them now?

<comment><USER61> This is a variation of the "RSS is dead (but everything provides RSS feeds)" thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> How about this for a website: [https://beakerbrowser.com/](https://beakerbrowser.com/)

The Beaker Browser! P2P browser, bringing back (the web and) websites since 2017

</comment><comment><USER85> I remember that spending time on a web was actually interesting back then.

Interesting like discovering and learning something new not like browsing shopping sites and FB, Instagram because there is nothing else to do...

</comment><comment><USER86> Yes I think I know how you feel. You might like reading books haha.

</comment><comment><USER87> Something close today, Go to:

[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/randomitem.php?p=1](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/randomitem.php?p=1)

</comment><comment><USER88> The Internet has become a carrier signal for advertising.

</comment><comment><USER89> A very fine example of such site [http://www.jeffbridges.com/](http://www.jeffbridges.com/).

</comment><comment><USER90> [http://fusionanomaly.net/nodebase.html](http://fusionanomaly.net/nodebase.html)

</comment><comment><USER91> I have so many websites but never got much traffic on any one of them, so i forgot all domain name of the website i created long back.

</comment><comment><USER92> Remember when the Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" button was interesting and took you to one of these random sites?

</comment><comment><USER93> The hit counter is what makes this website.

</comment><comment><USER94> My website still uses tables

[http://albeebe.com/](http://albeebe.com/)

<comment><USER95> Here is my '90s vintage still alive and kicking (we were one of the first UK ISPs):

[http://www.exnet.com/](http://www.exnet.com/)

and a new old site also built with hand-crafted HTML but CSS rather than tables!

[http://m.earth.org.uk/](http://m.earth.org.uk/)

It's nonsense to say that such things no longer exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> The web of the 90s is alive on .onion.

</comment><comment><USER97> I think Ward's Federated Wiki approach could help bring some personality back to the web.

</comment><comment><USER98> The most ironic part to me is that the page is PHP, not static HTML.

Although this type of style isn't common with the online web these days, it's still visible in offline caches of popular websites (e.g. offline Wikipedia). Pages load so fast, and the total file size is much smaller because of the lack of JS/jQuery/React/etc bloat.

</comment><comment><USER99> Sure. If it's really worth visiting. You remember them somehow and never forget

</comment><comment><USER100> It even has got a broken hit counter and all... 000020083 at time of reading :)

</comment><comment><USER101> resonnates with my previous comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586839](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586839)

</comment><comment><USER101> recent re-found [http://www.photomemorabilia.co.uk/](http://www.photomemorabilia.co.uk/)

great example of dense cool passion driven site

</comment><comment><USER102> Things change, nostalgia happens. Nothing to see here.

</comment><comment><USER103> I remember websites, and I remember that some were made by women, too. The author seems to have only read websites made by men.

</comment><comment><USER104> I have to bookmark everything.

</comment><comment><USER105> I remember all those websites.

</comment><comment><USER106> They are called home pages.

</comment><comment><USER107> i remember a website letmewatch.ch have any one heard it.

</comment><comment><USER108> Member websites??

</comment><comment> tek-cyb-org is that a new app?

</comment><comment><USER109> MySpace, Tripod, GeoCities, LiveJournal, and similar free hosted/services had a lot of interesting, weird, etc pages. It was easy and friction free to create a new site. Everyone had a copy of Frontpage/Dreamweaver/GoLive/HomeSite/iWeb/Composer on his PC and uploading worked with a browser form, one file at a time.

</comment><comment><USER110> I miss them, they were a great example of how creative everyone can be, now doing "awesome" things on the internet is so cookie cuttered.

<comment><USER55> And "welcome to my website it is still under construction please sign my guestbook" isn't cookie cutter?

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds.

<comment><USER112> That's simply not true:

Case in point: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15634089](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15634089)

(Unless, of course, you mean by "almost anything" everything of your personal interest.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> The problem is the advertising model for content monetization. This is the same reason TV is mostly crap.

</comment><comment><USER114> It really is interesting how incredibly niche everything was once upon a time.

</comment><comment><USER115> very interesting website, and easy time pass

</comment><comment><USER115> easy identify methode</comment>


Startup Visa approved in Lithuania - <AUTHOR> http://150sec.com/lithuanian-government-approves-startup-visa/ <comment><USER2> Should be clarified that the Cabinet approved the visa but it still requires Parliament's approval.</comment>