I Don't Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-waste-time-on-the-internet-anymore.html <comment><USER3> I think a lot of people here are missing the point. Yeah, there's a lot more content to consume now. However, it doesn't feel like a community... it feels more like watching reruns on TBS.

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

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

Sure, maybe it is just an age thing, and nothing has really changed. But I don't know... I feel like the Internet used to be something special, and now it feels like flipping through TV channels in your office break room.

<comment><USER4> This is pretty much how I felt as a long-time TF2 player super excited for Overwatch to come out, and then very sad once I realized what kind of game it was. You grab your friends and play Overwatch, while you play TF2 and meet your friends.

And also a parallel, TF2 obviously still exists, but all of the servers I used to play on are gone now.

Haven't found anything else quite yet. FFXIV actually was super enjoyable from a community perspective, but I'm not super into MMOs.

<comment><USER5> This is a thing that's bugged me for a long time: the death of dedicated game servers. Game servers had to be run by communities, and they were gateways and feeding grounds _for_ those communities.

However, games don't typically use dedicated servers anymore; they use matchmaking. You're right -- matchmaking means you gather your friends first. More insidiously, it means you probably won't see the same players again, and even if you did, there's nowhere to find them again later. There's no community to join.

<comment><USER6> > More insidiously, it means you probably won't see the same players again, > and even if you did, there's nowhere to find them again later. There's no > community to join.

This actually reflects a change I remember WoW making and finding really hard to accept. They changed the rules for "find a dungeon" such that you didn't match people on your own server. Which seems great - because now there's no need to wait 10 mins for a group to accumulate! No spamming in regional chats to see if anyone is interested. Brilliant non?

Except when you made groups with people on your own server, you bumped into them again. You were probably a similar level/gear. You might add them as a friend and then ping them for instances because they were competent (especially if tank/healer). Heck, if they're in a guild maybe you think it'd be a cool group of people to play with or vice versa you might try and add them to your guild.

When every person you meet in game is a "single serving friend" there's no point making an effort. People will treat those they play with as essentially NPCs helping towards a quest because why wouldn't you?

I refuse to believe that it made people more engaged (considering the friends I made were a good chunk of the motivation to keep playing)

<comment><USER7> I quit WOW at about that time, I played from release, the golden days were TBC && WoTLK, but the rot set in when 40 mans were retired. Doing a 40 man and getting the gear from a 40 man was a defining ambition of guilds, not many guilds managed to set themselves up to do regular 40 man runs and you had to ladder up the 40 man content when you did - molten core and on and up. This pressure and ambition drove really strong social behaviour; act up and you'd be kicked, and that's your chance of the end game gone. Tolerate idiots in the guild and risk a split or a leak of defectors. The problem was that the spreadsheets at Blizzard showed that only about 5% of the players were getting to experience the end game. So... they went to 25 man, then they opened 25 man to pickup queues and the drivers for pve guilds faded.

<comment><USER8> I readily agree that old school WoW was much more social and fun, but personally, most of the enjoyment of the game for me was only possible because I was a 20-something with no spouse, no kids, and no real responsibilities outside of showing up to work during the day.

Now that I'm a practicing Adult®, I still kinda dream of WoW Classic being what we all remember the original game being, but I also know that if I got that involved in planning and running raids now, people who rely on me to be responsible would suffer. I'm content with being part of the 95% that don't have that kind of free time to commit to planning before actually playing a game.

<comment><USER7> Yes - there's no going back, life changes! It's like Rugby.

I used to enjoy Rugby, but I was 17, if I played Rugby now I would enjoy it. But I am glad it's available for 17 year olds who want a go.

One thought though, my guild has actually re-awoken in the last few months. I'm still on the mail list - as apparently was everyone else, and now people are talking about doing instances and so on. I couldn't have done it until recently, because I had small children - so as everybody knows, fugetaboutit. But, if WOW was in TBC state with some interesting new content I'm pretty sure I would jump in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have been saying I've "reached the end of the internet" for awhile now. I am 44 and have been working on the web since mid 90s. I remember so much cool stuff from then. Trying to get a 56k modem to work, dealing with the fact that you couldn't always get online or if you did you could get kicked off at any time. I remember streaming the Tibetan Freedom Concert with realplayer back in '98\. The first mp3 i got, napster, rotten.com, the excitement of ordering from amazon, searching for cracked passwords for photoshop and dreamweaver... in general just figuring shit out. The internet was a mess back then and even though it was frustrating as hell, it was exciting.

Now it just seems like every website online is trying to steal and sell your data. I feel like I have to have a heightened sense of awareness around anything I do. The internet used to be just barely within reach and now it's just crammed down your throat all day long. Nothing seems to work and all for the wrong reasons. Nothing worked back then but that was part of the experience.... now it's just... blah.

I have fallen into a terrible habit of looking at reddit since I don't use any social media. I read crap on r/politics before bed and end up being so frustrated that I have a hard time falling asleep.

Recently I decided to check out a book from the library (House of Leaves, very interesting so far!) and have been reading before bed and not looking at my phone at all. I have been able to fall asleep much easier and I actually have crazy dreams and wake up refreshed. For the first time in years I look forward to going to bed.

Not sure what to make of all of it. Fortunately I have found lately that I'm desiring more analog activities (reading, woodworking, hiking) than I have in a long time. It is nice to be able to use the internet as more of a tool to augment my activities rather than being THE activity.

<comment><USER10> _" Now it just seems like every website online is trying to steal and sell your data."_

I remember the days before the Morris Worm, the days before we were all drowning in malware, before you had to worry about your bank account being hacked in to, before your personal data stood a good chance of being leaked, stolen, or held for ransom, before the corporate/government gold rush for profit, spying, and control. Spam and the occasional troll seemed to be about the worst one could encounter back then.

Maybe I'm just remembering the past through rose-colored nostalgia glasses, but it seemed back in those days the internet was a mostly positive place -- or at least not a hostile one where you had to constantly watch your back and pretend to be who you weren't lest records of your past come back to haunt you.

Overnight popularity was the best thing and the worst thing to happen the internet. Perhaps if its growth wasn't so explosive, maybe we could have had time to deal with all the crap.

Back in those days we used to laugh at how clueless the corporations and governments were about the net, about how they'd never be able to control it. Well, now they've got us all by the balls.

Who's laughing now?

<comment><USER11> Nice comment. I'm thinking that some technologies, if handled carelessly —— and we have been nothing if not careless —— merely recapitulate existing power structures.

<comment><USER12> Or that existing power structures figure out how to co-opt technology. Seems to take about 20 years (telegraphs, telephones, radio, television, cars, computers ... )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the internet is less fun now -- I can't decide if its from maturation of technology or maturation of people though. (Has anyone else felt like things became less fun as they got older?)

I felt a greater sense of community 10 years ago when I mostly used IRC and PHP BBs. The communities were smaller, and it was fun even if you disliked people. Flame wars and trolling were mostly for the audience's amusement, because even if you really disliked each other you had nowhere else to go aside from quitting entirely. Nowadays there are so many options that people don't really commit to communities anymore.

I'm glad this thread was posted. It'll be interesting to read people's thoughts.

<comment><USER14> I've actually been thinking about this recently, as I was also a heavy forum user back in the day.

Why don't we just start a forum for the HN crowd? Not a new interpretation of the forum model or anything like that, literally any instance of vbulletin or phpbb or something comparable and "traditional".

If people are genuinely interested in this, I would be up for spinning something up over the weekend.

<comment><USER14> Update: Spent the evening researching software options for the "old school" style forums, and it seems like Xenforo is a solid choice in terms of active development, lots of addons/themes, and not crazy expensive. So I think I'll snag a license and put it on a droplet later this week when my wife is out for the evening :)

Also think I found a good domain for it that I'll snag tonight as well.

<comment><USER15> What's wrong with Discourse? It seems to be a popular choice.

Here are some more ideas: [https://github.com/Kickball/awesome- selfhosted#social-networ...](https://github.com/Kickball/awesome- selfhosted#social-networks-and-forums)

Flarum looks like a worthwhile option: [http://flarum.org/](http://flarum.org/)

<comment><USER16> I like Discourse too. (better than all the others mentioned so far)

There's also Talkyard. It's a bit like Discourse, and has Slack chat features (maybe nice with informal chat channels?) and StackOverflow like Q&A topics. I'm developing it. Open source & beta. [https://www.talkyard.io/forum/](https://www.talkyard.io/forum/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> He's just old. Go to Tumblr, Facebook groups, Instagram. There's thousands of places to waste your time with vapid, unyielding streams of barely entertaining content. I recently spent hours going through bad geography memes. Geography. Memes.

Or you could go old-school. Fark.com is still around, as is SomethingAwful. Reddit has tons of content. And if you're not at work and looking for a horrifying thrill ride, 4chan. IRC is just kind of depressing after you've been away from it for a while... like, a decade later, these same people are still sitting on these channels every day, all day? Then again, I'm still on _this_ waste-of-time news feed...

<comment><USER18> "Go to Tumblr, Facebook groups, Instagram... Reddit... 4chan" All of those have one thing in common to me, which is that they're not meant for holding conversations on. Facebook pretends to be but if you post more than a couple of replies they get collapsed up. All those sites are "here's a picture/video, make a kneejerk response, move on." Ok sure that's optimised for timewasting - I just want to see content, I don't want to have to dig through text to get it - but it's boring, non-interactive, repetitive timewasting. I think we lost some magic when you stopped being forced to deal with individuals in chatrooms/forums/their own personal sites in order to see stuff, even though it was also really inconvenient.

<comment><USER19> 4chan is nothing but conversations. They can span 7 minutes or 7 months depending on the board and the topic, but they otherwise work exactly like forums where the order is determined by post bumping. Try hanging out around a slower board like /lit/ and you'll notice they are essentially forums.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm getting weary reading the constant lament of the "internet" as a massive entity. These articles take the same form:

\- "ugh social media is terrible, remember forums"

\- "aren't rss feeds great"

\- "remember when sites were HTML based"

\- "back in my day the internet was just me and a few cool people"

The internet is not a monolith. What people are complaining about is the corporate internet; the parts of the internet that are owned by billion dollar companies.

Here's the reality:

\- there are more interesting independent blogs now than there were pre- Facebook/Twitter. Maybe less "per-capita" of total online usage, but there's still a higher volume

\- every single person is capable of making an online community using cheap tech, and using corporate social media to promote it; way easier than it was in the past

\- developers are still "allowed" to make sites in plain HTML/CSS that look great and load fast

Blockbuster movies are always bad, so people made indie films. Network TV sitcoms are bad, so people made online series. Pop music is bad, so people make great music and play in local bars and small venues. If you're tired of the "internet being bad", its time to put the work in to find (or make!) what you like, because it's all out there.

<comment><USER21> Independent does not work at all because random websites are no longer discoverable. In the old days of the internet discoverability was via word of mouth, portals/aggregators or old "topic rings". You had bulletin boards as well.

The original reason for e.g. Reddit to exist was to be an aggregator and recommendation service. However it started handling discussions which it is not equipped to deal with at all and then went downhill.

A similar aggregator is HN. Again, it is not equipped for discussion. Both are curated by users which further lowers signal to noise ratio and causes popularity contest plus short lifespan of valuable content.

Both are essentially RSS feeds with HTML/JS interface, comment and vote functions.

Forum software is equipped for discussion but requires manual curation to serve as an aggregator limiting volume. Likewise newer chat software.

Facebook and Twitter are inferior compared to forum software in almost all cases. They are broadcast media with major limitations that are user curated.

Facebook main reason of existence is remembering and tracking people not matchmaking or contact - it is not equipped for that well if at all - the chat handles maybe a few people at most, comments under posts are a total mess.

Nobody really cares about volume. (Unless they sell ads.) Quality is what matters and it really went down with user curated sites.

For social talk and matchmaking, you need a platform that allows discussion in the long term. Neither Facebook nor Twitter help with it as a profile or a post is not a topic.

The old chat survives alongside some bigger forims still, both IRC and newer platforms like Slack, Discord, Twitch etc. These have a problem with discoverability because they're rarely indexed.

The major differentiator is again "user curated" vs moderated; broadcast vs chat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nothing I've found on the internet has yet replaced the sublime excitement I felt when dialing into a local BBS in a small town in California when I was a kid.

There were maybe 4-5 people on at a time, but I still remember the total thrill of chatting with them and imagining who they might be, where in town they lived, what they looked like. Oh, and how much money I could make in Tradewars that day.

My biggest question about this feeling of a long-lost treasure has always been, am I just getting older? Is it just nostalgia for those first experiences of connection through a network? Because if I liked local BBSes so much, you'd think I'd like Facebook or Nextdoor ... but no, I strongly don't. I can't even explain why I don't like them, but it certainly has something to do with anonymity and imagination. In dial-up BBSes, MUDs, IRC, AIM, ICQ, and Livejournal, I was always anonymous. I could be whoever I wanted to be, express myself freely, make friends, and only then choose to reveal my identity — to individuals. Today, so much of the internet is predicated on establishing my identity as quickly as possible, and then profiling me -- tracking my behavior, building a chronology of my behavior, showing my timeline, revealing what I liked or disliked, compiling that data, repackaging it into a derivative, mining the derivative for value. It's so far beyond fun that it's exhausting even to describe.

The one thing I am pretty sure about is that this feeling of "I used to do X, it was so simple and fun, what happened?" can be more than just nostalgia. That is, I felt this way about something else several years ago -- tabletop role-playing games. I kept thinking, damn, the guys and I used to have so much fun playing those games: face to face, low-tech, up all night with our D&D sheets, laughing and drawing, etc. It seemed like simple nostalgia for childhood, until I got together some grown-ups and ran some D&D games. And you know what? Three years later, I've made some great friends, deepened existing friendships, and had a blast.

So I wonder if, for me, what's missing in my internet is that feeling of a small community — and local, maybe? — with anonymity at its core. I'm not really sure and more thought is needed.

<comment><USER23> When Google did that 180 and went from recommending that people use anonymous user names to attempting to require that they use real world identities, that's when I knew a sea change was happening on the internet, for the worse.

Anyone who isn't using an anonymous handle on a regular basis somewhere is missing out on an essential life experience. It's one of the few channels in the world where we are all intrinsically equal - aside from text skills - <USER2> can bypass surface judgments or historical baggage to just say what we're actually thinking (or a lot closer to it). I think this is a healthy and even necessary outlet for a lot of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I miss GeoCities/Tripod, and the time where search engines would always return new, quirky pages for whatever you searched for - no big media publishers or professional bloggers. Lots of fan-built pages, or just people showcasing their hobbies.

These days I find myself stuck in a loop of HN, BBC, Reddit, eventually designernews or YouTube. The latter makes me feel trapped but is still mostly valuable content, whereas reddit just feels like a massive time sink in the worst sense.

<comment><USER25> >I miss GeoCities/Tripod, and the time where search engines would always return new, quirky pages for whatever you searched for - no big media publishers or professional bloggers. Lots of fan-built pages, or just people showcasing their hobbies.

Thank Google and SEO for ruining that.

A lot of that old-school and personal content is still out there, (obviously not on Geocities) though... but the process of discovering content on the web has been ruthlessly optimized to favor content aggregators and corporate sites, and as a result, a lot of communities have either moved to those platforms or just go dark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Has no one, the author or the comments, thought to ask their teenage kids how to waste time on the internet? My younger brother seems to be able to do so all day. I'm also stuck in the reddit/facebook/youtube loop but I have no idea how to do snapchat/instagram, what youtube celebs are popular, or other things I'm not even aware of. I remember learning about vine.co after it closed and apparently that was a huge thing.

<comment><USER27> > snapchat/instagram

Well first you look hot (or at least think you do), then you take cute/hot/slutty pictures of you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This entire thread makes me realize that what people are missing isn't the internet but their own childhood.

<comment><USER29> Agreed; I guess many of us will have a blind spot when it comes to recognizing our own minds aging, and our memories accreting into a golden history.

Seems to be a part of the human condition.

Time's arrow moves in one direction, the past cannot be reclaimed. The challenge is to not become bitter about it.

<comment><USER30> It's a known cognitive bias

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Looking back over the last twenty years (yes I'm old, like a lot of the you in this thread), user growth has been responsible for both the Internet's success and its demise.

I like to to separate content from community, because they have different end results. There's so much music, video, comics, games, ebooks, etc being generated now that we are spoilt for choice. That's great for consumers and not so much for creators, but that's another very large topic for a different conversation. Let's just say that there's so much great stuff out there, and the barriers to getting it are very low.

But that low barrier to entry is also what I think has made communities less fun for me. Not for _everyone_ , but definitely for people who are a little bit outcast, or who like to challenge the status quo. Kinda like the people who are drawn to HN. Because online communities are so easy for anyone to enter, conversations tend to congeal into "popular" points of view. Even when those points of view are extremes epitomized by types like SJWs or alt-right, they're still large collections of groupthink. And I find those conversations boring. This has been well documented as the Eternal September phenomenon and it has been happening long before I got onto the net in 1995.

The best fun I had in an online community in recent times was the forums and then the slack channel that came out of the Starfighter CTP games from 'patio11 'tptacek & 'elptacek. It was announced here on HN, so the initial exposure (in the scheme of the world) was low, and because everyone involved had to have a common interest of hacking market order books and/or AVR emulators, it turned out that I had quite a bit in common with the average participant. Moreso that standard comment threads here, where it's very likely I'll be arguing with some HN rando who is just looking to score karma so they can shill their upcoming React e-book.

Good communities are still out there; what makes them good is that they are hard to get into. We shouldn't give up on the Internet and consider it "done". We should be casting wider nets to connect with people that we find interesting.

</comment><comment><USER32> I too have experienced cyber-ennui, mindlessly half entering website addresses into my navbar. Cn-enter. Ha-enter. Fa-enter. Eng-enter. What am I even reading, I don't really care about the latest drone or how to optimize my website using Lambda and API gateway, and yet, despite keeping my IDE open so "there is no excuse", I just can't help but succumb to the mindless ether...

I've thought about this a bit and I feel like anything worth doing requires hours of my concentration, which I don't usually have. Bite sized chunks of knowledge 'productivity' feels like an accomplishment, or, at least serves as a facsimile. The internet is, in some ways, like an artificial sweetener -- it tastes sweet but never actually satisfies you.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is exactly how I've felt for the past few years. Besides Facebook, I think a large part of it is not being quite as young and open to new things.

E.g. I'm under 30 but I never got into Youtube, I don't even know how to find good content on it.

<comment><USER34> There is an _astonishing_ amount of good content on youtube. In the last 3 or so years it has blossomed into something of a renaissance and begun to grow into what I always kind of hoped "citizen content" could be. To my mind it is the most obviously beneficial of all of those "web 2.0" companies.

Do you like jet engines? Prepare to lose the rest of your day watching AgentJayZ talking about his job repairing jet engines in such detail I'm surprised his channel isn't a national security violation. Like teardowns of tools and sardonic commentary? AvE. Electrical engineering discussions? EEVBlog. Planes landing? Cargospotter. Interesting shit? Wendover/half as interesting. Analysis of famous Roman battles? Historia Civilis. 2 hour long videos of japanese train rides from the cabin? ato5kgyasetaito. I could go on.. and on.. and on.

I suppose I am letting my tastes show a little here but to me the issue isn't finding the content, it's knowing when to stop!

<comment><USER35> Love seeing another agentjayz fan here!

Want to spend hours watching somebody repair marine props and shafts on machine tools? Keith Fenner does excellent, detailed repairs.

Regular car reviews makes incredible car reviews of mostly normal cars (this _detailed_ review of the PT cruiser is amazing. Watch the WHOLE thing: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoxqtnI4I4c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoxqtnI4I4c))

Ben Krasnow (on applied science) is an intellectual and engineering treasure. Watch anything he makes.

Youtube has for sure become one of my favorite websites. There is SO much good content there.

<comment><USER34> > Love seeing another agentjayz fan here!

Honestly his stuff just comes first to mind as "outstanding, fascinating videos I would _never_ have seen without this platform." Say what you want about Youtube but they sure have enabled an amazing flourishing of creativity and sharing.

Will check out your others! RcR though... there really should be a warning. That is some advanced cynicism. Don't get me wrong, I love them. But your link is, how should I say, "the deep end"

<comment><USER34> If you have 2 minutes to spare it will not be better used than by watching this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIz3klPET3o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIz3klPET3o)

And if you can't find time in your life for 2 minutes of art.. I don't wanna be ya

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> An attempt to summarize everything I'm reading in these comments:

The Internet used to be an escape from the real world. Now the Internet is the real world.

</comment><comment><USER37> I feel like this problem wouldn't be limited to a person's use of the internet but would be an indicator of a person's lack of curiosity in general. The internet, at its most fundamental level, is just information. Saying you don't know how to "waste time" on the internet is like saying nothing interests you anymore.

<comment><USER38> >I feel like this problem wouldn't be limited to a person's use of the internet but would be an indicator of a person's lack of curiosity in general

I don't agree with that idea. When people say "The internet isn't fun anymore", I don't think this generally is a change in the person so much as fundamental changes in how the modern internet is experienced.

By analogy, if content on the internet is like a liquid flowing into a container, then it's predictable that the liquid will ultimately match the shape of its container. If you change the shape of that container, the liquid's ultimate shape (and thus the way it is experienced) changes in a predictable manner.

When people say the internet isn't fun anymore, this isn't a comment about what's being poured, but the structure in which it's received and presented.

Say what you will about streams of "information": I believe if you switch a man's wine glass with a dog dish, only a wino would say nothing has changed.

<comment><USER39> >I don't think this generally is a change in the person so much as fundamental changes in how the modern internet is experienced.

It's not a change in the person, it's a shift in perspective due to boredom. There was a podcast about boredom from freakonomics I believe, and a lot of people (largely those 40+) simply don't view themselves as bored when all signs paint a different picture. This is what is happening to a lot of people (ITT), they are unaware of their boredom which feeds into a lack of curiosity, and so they keep doing the same routines and feel somewhat claustrophobic.

They could very much break out of that routine, could look for new places to visit, new sites to sink their fangs into, but they won't because routines are very comfortable, and heck most of the top 100 alexa sites fulfill nearly every desire.

When people say the internet isn't fun, it's not about presentation at all. Yes, Google has a lot of power in where people go, but there are so many alternative search engines and variety of leads that it really just takes one good afternoon being the excited curious cat you were as a teen.

<comment><USER40> It's also amusing to portray the internet as being some small entity. It's basically infinite at this point and it supports a million different interests, way more than it did in the 90's. Back then the whole internet population was in the millions and it was mostly geeks. Now it's in the _b_ illions and it covers everyone. So there's a ton of normies, but if you don't like what they're going, there's still at least the same amount of geeks available, probably more.

As you said, you just have to go looking for the weird and interesting places :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Great! We're all old here it seems (I'm 42), a few of us joined back in the 90s...

It started as a great human experiment, such fun. It became co-opted by commercial enterprise. The two largest gateways into the experience are now Google and Facebook. Really, what did we expect would happen? Probably best to take it back now.

<comment><USER25> > Probably best to take it back now.

Why? The internet isn't for us, it shouldn't be a quirky clique only for the technorati, it should to be for _everyone._

"Normal" using the internet for mainstream, banal and commercial content that doesn't appeal to us is more or less the culmination of the dream. The world has been liberated (at least in part) and connected.

Let's please at least take a moment to appreciate what's been gained for humanity as a whole as we mourn the loss of our own cultural relevance in the greater scheme.

<comment><USER42> > Let's please at least take a moment to appreciate what's been gained for > humanity as a whole

The ability to interact faster? It's a big wash: positive and negative.

It's hard to see the internet as objectively good for humanity.

<comment><USER43> > It's hard to see the internet as objectively good for humanity.

You could say the same about the automobile.

<comment><USER42> Definitely agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think we're missing out on the weird and the unique. Reddit/Twitter does have massive streams of content, but they're all pretty homogenous, and both sites have their own pretty homogenous etiquette rules. Back then every site was an amateur attempt with a bizarre design and a community of obsessive weirdos because only obsessive weirdos were posting online, and posting without learning the unspoken rules and celebrities of the community would get you destroyed. Messing with the rules and winding up the 'big name posters' could be hilarious, because it actually affected the community.

Now 'content' is pretty much just memes. Memes are 'weird' but they're homogenised, structured weird. They (well, image macros - we didn't have the word meme then) were mostly banned on SA because they encouraged such crappy low effort repetitive content. Now the timewasting internet is 99% that.

SA used to be amazing but over time they've banned or devalued more and more of what I thought was worthwhile about the site (effortposts, obsessive stalkers who would dig up incredible things about other posters, the absolutely crap but bigname fiction posters, anyone who doesn't talk like they're posting on Twitter) and now GBS is literally just discussing Reddit content.

<comment><USER43> > Reddit/Twitter does have massive streams of content, but they're all pretty > homogenous

Reddit is anything but homogenous. It has many a dark and quirky corner. Twitter on the other hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This has been happening to me and I was just about to post an Ask HN about it.

I'm sure part of it has to do with me just being older but I'm going to the same few sites over and over and there really is no magic to the internet anymore. The 90s felt like you were part of a wild west frontier.

<comment><USER45> What if the novelty of the internet just wore off for you?

Just like the novelty of flying in the sky in a metal cage propelled by giant jet engines to far away lands has probably worn off.

Everything is magical, but even magic becomes mundane after a while.

Relevant: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8LaT5Iiwo4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8LaT5Iiwo4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I've often wondered what happened to those hours spent trawling for interesting stuff on the web. I spend more time than is probably healthy on YouTube now, but that's just a second TV via iPad while the wife watches shows on Netflix. I think that it was the newness of the experience back then. Nascent technology is always more fun, as are novel experiences. Now, the net permeates our lives. We work on it, we play on it, we order things for our lives on it, we book our entertainment on it, and we carry it around in our pockets. You're no longer part of a community of people learning things and sharing newness. You're part of a collective engine of "doing things" that everyone is plugged into 24/7, where broadcast is fully enabled and the simple joy of just figuring what you're doing and where you're going on the Internet is gone.

Also, at 39, my opinion on on the state of the Internet is irrelevant. Damn kids. Back in our day, things were much better ;)

Edited to mention MUDs. I can't seem to find many these days. Still a thing?

<comment><USER47> I got the impression that MUDs evolved into MMORPGs. But I have thought for a while that a text-based MUD with a lot of modern polish might be a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I used to have a plethora of offline materials on my pc to delve into, if the internet was down or someone had to use the phone line; nowadays internet's been shoved down our throats in many aspects that once there's a network outage, the offline laptop seems useless, unfortunately for the wrong reasons...

PS: I think we're all trying to relive bulletin boards days here in the comment section of HN.

</comment><comment><USER49> 21 year old here, I also do not enjoy the internet these days as much as I used to 5+ years ago. Everything seems dumbed down, which is a common trend with just about everything these days.

I do not use social media, I browse one car related forum, and a Chan site. I mostly lurk these sites and rarely have input, but that's more of a 'me' issue.

The community feeling just isn't there anymore. We've done a complete 180 from a few years back, my first online friends were from Xbox Live and I met these people in Halo 3 lobbies. When I played WoW during Wrath I played on a very low population server which annoyed me back in the day but I realise now that the memories I have are because of the small community, same goes for the private servers I played. All the friends I have now I have known for years or met them through other friends.

Maybe I'm just barking up the wrong tree and I need to develop new skills, hobbies, and find new friends.

</comment><comment><USER50> There's definitely something about forums that can't be found in social networks. I don't know what that is, but I know it's very unlikely that I'll have as much fun as in those days.

Not sure if it's because I was a teenager back then and perceived the internet differently, but nowadays everything looks way too "serious".

<comment><USER51> Forums are pseudonymous. You could be yourself, or express a part of your identity, without it following around the rest of you on the internet. They're also more homogenous and focused in terms of their users than a big social network with their giant node graph.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> So summing up the distinct ideas on this topic: \- lacking of community feel is a good point \- people being older and less excitable another great point \- the late stage of S curve and early adopters being overwhelmed by the scumbags is also good point \- the change to identity-first internet is also interesting

Did I miss something? I also feel some structural misalignment of perception vs. reality. The old adage is You can't trust anything on the internet but I notice that even if I still conform to that, I somehow end up trusting the internet as a whole - that together with the hive mind I would be able to arrive at a conclusion. It's just not true anymore. I know it's false to categorize internet as a singular entity, but I think that's what hapened on the emotional-euristic-type-1 level of decisions and it needs to go. This may be a derivative of earlier points, but may also be a whole separate point.

</comment><comment><USER53> _worse, the fun things they had supplanted were never coming back. Forums were depopulated; blogs were shut down._

I get what he's saying. In the beginning the net opened the doors to self- expression. Lots of people had fun playing around, exploring, lots of new toys. Then conventions and concentrations arrived, and it BLEW UP. There's still a lot of personal, fun stuff out there, but it's harder to find.

As of 2015, PER DAY: 50,000 new -Wordpress- websites; ~ 3 million new posts. Good luck digging through THAT slush pile. [https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/wordpress- statistics...](https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/wordpress-statistics/)

I find new, interesting websites by pouring through aggregators and topical forums (still out there). Takes time.

</comment><comment><USER54> I waste time on IRC. The old internet didn't exactly leave so much as it retreated to its primordial media.

Fark, SA, and friends are still around. Slashdot is gutted.

</comment><comment><USER55> I don't have this problem. My problem is that I'm so good at finding interesting live internet drama and stories that I get extremely bored with most fictional forms. The only fictional books and movies I have any desire to consume are the books and movies I wish I had read or watched when I was much younger.

</comment><comment><USER56> I think media is moving from Movies and later TV Series (none are good since 1 year back) to now become MMOs. Just the MMOs we have are really bad still. Follow the lineage of WoW, then PUBG; and extrapolate.

The internet will become MMOs; hell, life will become MMOs. MMOs are virtual reality more than VR itself could be if it tried real hard (yes, I'm looking at you Nevell).

Edit: Maybe streaming of MMOs is where the mass audience kicks in, though in the long run everyone will jack in.

</comment><comment><USER57> The author hasn't come across the decentralized web (ie scuttlebutt or dat). That's where I've found all the personalized interesting content.

<comment><USER58> pls help me get online, nerd

Seriouspost: Agree with all that's been said. Corporations have turned the web into an unpalatable wasteland. The prospect of someone finding out my name and job has taken all the joy out of calling someone a fuckhead online. I want to find it again.

I will start searching, but the good communities I've found have been invite only.

<comment><USER59> Did your joy of calling someone else something bad remove the joy for everyone else?

<comment><USER58> In a small enough community, the Boy Who Cried Wolf remains a pertinent tale.

If you had the reputation as a decent and polite poster, the sudden use of a vile cuss, judiciously applied, yielded far greater aggregate results than someone who used them all the time. At the very least, you would save it for someone who really did deserve it.

Perhaps the sanding off of the web's edges is simply a product of its size. Maybe we should go back to Usenet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I feel you brought out the critical point very well. There is the internet sucks the vacuum from our lives like FB, Twitter or blogs, News...while there is a whole lot of utilitarian needs fulfilled on the other side...And, yes, I have felt the same, the fun part has diminished except following News and occasionally some brilliant links..

</comment><comment><USER61> I think it's the age factor. No one makes friends in their 30s and no one is excited to find new things as they get older. If you ask younger people, they can tell you a 1000 ways to waste time on internet, be it instagram, snapchat or other such apps which grown-ups don't even know about.

You are just getting older.

<comment><USER62> While we all love the same things that excited us earlier in our life we also know what will disappoint us again. Even after 5 minutes I can tell a lot of things that I won't like in a relationship. The other person is not a blank white board anymore, because the other person is not so different from all the other people I met before. The new stuff is also often just a reiteration of something that has already been there, which means it's not new and not exciting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> This guy seems to have not spent any time on Youtube, Reddit, wikipedia etc. It's easier than ever before to get trapped in curiosity vortexes of various kinds.

<comment><USER64> Yeah, it probably has been counter productive for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I'd like for millennials to comment on this.

<comment><USER66> Mid 90s here, to me there's something to it. To me the shift became noticeable around 2008, with it at least feeling like a good portion of my time online is spent on a smaller number of less exciting sites. Perhaps I simply burnt out early though.

On forums getting to know the groups members and it's in-jokes has the advantage of giving interactions a sense of scale or place, in that you roughly know who the people you're talking to are and have a degree of rapport or common interests, while still being pseudonymous and the freedom that brings is I think part of what made them appealing and special. Forums can also become somewhat clique-ey and insular if new blood isn't rotated through, or can die out if the topic is too narrow to keep them active.

More content stream based social media (Instagram, Facebook, Reddit for the most part) has less of a focus around specific topics and discussing them and more presenting content and reacting to it. This results in people both tailoring what they make to generate hits, and interactions with other users being rather fleeting if you're not already connected to them, as the pool of people you're interacting with is often too large and unfocused to see those people again.

I'd say there are some exceptions though, such as subreddits that stay in a sweet spot of user numbers or Discord channels and Twitch channels for example. Additionally 4Chan is somewhat of a blend of the content stream and a forum system.

Part of the reason it's going this way is that the content stream approach is better-suited to advertisement and appealing to larger audiences. In school a surprising number of people would browse through the front page of Reddit never going into subreddits or commenting for example. I would guess Lurkers like that make up a good portion of users now, and I think advertisers and site builders will tailor to them.

In general a slight shift from the internet being a space for collaboration between people to a place for companies to sell things seems to have happened. A small example is game maps, servers and skins going from being things people made and shared with each other to something companies sell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I think the internet is much better than what it was before. Discord and Telegram are just so much better than what we had when I was in high school. 4chan, reddit, Digg etc suck.

</comment><comment><USER68> In the recent 5 years, there has been a renaissance of "cyberspace" as in the early science fiction, the cyberpunk culture, and aesthetics and a nostalgia of 1980s in general, as shown in vaporwave [0] arts and independent/DIY music. In many works, the imagery of cyberspace was used heavily, and themes included Usenet the Eternal September, Sci-Fi themed hacking and cracking, early BBS and imageboard subculture, lots of memes, etc. And recently there is also an upsurge of cyberpunk-related fictions, games (e.g. VA-11 HALL-A [1]), TV series, etc.

The reason sure includes the economic recession and political failures of the present days, but the death of the early Internet culture and the promises of "cyberspace" being a cutting-edge, cool and fun place has failed in a future that never comes, is definitely an important cause.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-11_HALL-A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-11_HALL-A)

</comment><comment><USER69> If the internet were a bar that got boring, then you'd find a new bar.

Too bad there isn't a new internet, separate from the old, to explore and rebuild freely.

</comment><comment><USER70> As a 42 year old, I read that article and think "thirtysomething old man yells at cloud!" \- there are _tons_ of diversions out there of all sorts.

OTOH, I live out near Santa Barbara, and downtown SB is nowhere _near_ as good as what it was before 2006 or so. It had Borders+B&N, good thrift stores, some random shops, etc. Pretty much all of that's gone now.

</comment><comment><USER71> I also find myself lacking ideas for places to explore. I usually wastes time like this:

\- Do I know of a youtube channel I like and want to watch: mps-youtube [1]

\- Do I want to get youtube content randomly/reddit-recommended: reddytt [2]

\- Do I just want some images and gifs, not whole videos: redditp [3]

\- Do I want to explore twitch, but do not know of a streamer I like: ryck [4]

[2] and [4] are my own tools for a more optimised time-wasting (I apologise if self-plugging is considered bad behaviour).

[1] [https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube](https://github.com/mps- youtube/mps-youtube)

[2] [https://github.com/johanbluecreek/reddytt](https://github.com/johanbluecreek/reddytt)

[3] [https://github.com/ubershmekel/redditp](https://github.com/ubershmekel/redditp)

[4] (early stages of development) [https://github.com/johanbluecreek/ryck](https://github.com/johanbluecreek/ryck)

</comment><comment><USER72> Ironically, I think at least part of it is due to less amateur content, in turn due to the dominance of mobile phones, that enable you to easily interact casually and superficially with content, but create a myriad of minor, subtle cues not to create content, just to consume it.

In a PC, in the "olden internet days" that the article misses, you _had_ to be in front of the PC. It was an activity on itself. But creating content was easier. You had a bigger screen, a slower connection, you saved funny memes in a folder in the Desktop. When bored, in was mentally and physically easier to alt-tab into amateurish internet than to get up to do something else. So lots of people ended up losing time interactively, in front of a hundred keys asking to be pressed.

Whereas today, most of the users interact through a mobile phone with one thumb, on 5 minute intervals, in a micropause throughout the day (and possibly even during a conversation). Small screen real estate, maxed out app, no hint to alt-tab, painful to create content (you have to tap in onscreen keyboard that eats up half of your screen, you have to add the second thumb and lean over the minuscule screen, you have to go to another app to navigate a folder to upload a meme, etc). Everything takes more effort, needs to be more conscious. And when the user mostly consumes, the whole UX evolves towards that, making it easier to consume and more difficult to create, in a viscious cicle.

(I'm typing this on my mobile and it is a pain. I only see about 20 typed words, even moving the cursor back to noher word is a minor pain, etc. I just want to get it done, and I have already thought a couple of times whether it makes more sense to kill the comment mid-redaction and keep on browsing HN)

Edit: and of course people keep using laptops an pcs, but the existence of mobile phone users change the dynamics of every content community a lot.

</comment><comment><USER73> Kids can see the f __*in cosmos on their phones these days. hookup with 20+ chicks with tinder before their 20th birthday. I tell ya, by the time the next generation is 50 years old they wont want to live, the suicide rates will be high, nothing to live for... seen it all done it all lol.

<comment><USER74> Hookups and stargazing apps are not the sum total of human existence. It makes me deeply sad that anyone could even fathom having nothing to live for after such a shallow facsimile of experiencing life. There are so many amazing experiences in the world that even someone with no commitments and scads of money could barely scratch the surface of they lived a hundred years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Let me help you with that: [http://www.theuselessweb.com](http://www.theuselessweb.com)

If you ever find yourself staring at a blinking cursor, then lean back, close your eyes and imagine something. Just something you enjoy doing.

Type it into Google, DDG or [https://neocities.org/browse](https://neocities.org/browse)

Profit... well not exactly, but hours can easily fly by.

I'm more like this guy ( [http://littlefun.org/posts/Why_I_am_reading_about_advanced_n...](http://littlefun.org/posts/Why_I_am_reading_about_advanced_nuclear_theory) ), I guess we all have our problems :)

</comment><comment><USER76> Maybe it is time to explore deep/dark web. It is more like nineties on the Internet.

<comment><USER18> Funnily enough I recently watched a YouTube video of a guy exploring the "deep web". Went on for ages about how you need to use a VM and proxy and Tor browser for your safety! ...and when he finally started, he was just going to sites we would have considered the bog standard of shock sites in the 00s, more tame than goatse. He even started from an aggregator site that listed all of them conveniently for him. Deep!

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I remember when I'd read genuinely thoughtful posts on Livejournal. There would be no stupid memes, no instagram style selfies, no ad spam, just people in my city or from across the world, reflecting on their life.

</comment><comment><USER78> I can really identify with the author of the article. I used to be able to successfully distract myself from 'real work' a lot years ago, but lately, most of the internet is just plain boring to me, or even extremely hostile.

I used to hang around several guitar forums which took up a TON of time, but I closed my account on all of them years ago when hostility and snarkiness accelerated to dizzying highs. It just stopped being a fun hangout. Twitter and most social media is now just a cesspool of antagonism. Most interesting news articles are now behind paywalls or layered under a ton of ads.

The only thing that takes up some of my online time now is watching chess game analytics on Youtube - but I NEVER scroll down to the comments on Youtube any more because I value my sanity.

Other than that, I find that I spend those minutes between long downloads/uploads or compile time actually turning around in my home office and picking up a real guitar and playing for a few minutes. I am starting to enjoy the offline tools around me nowadays far more than online distractions.

<comment><USER64> THWAP

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> A friend sent this thread my way. Our team's spent the past two and a half years designing a new breed of social media that is reintroducing authenticity and genuine relationships back into how we communicate online. Our goal is to transcend the unhealthy norms of existing platforms through intentional design, distributed technology and a nonprofit approach. Feel free to check us out here and hope to see you on the waitlist :) www.junto.love

</comment><comment><USER80> >What happened is that the internet stopped being something you went to in order to separate from the real world — from your job and your work and your obligations and responsibilities.

It seems we (or many of us) spend all our time on the internet, it no longer feels like a place to escape reality. Even when you are away from your desk, you are still connected to the internet through your phone. It doesn't have the same wonder it used to.

</comment><comment><USER81> Had a like experience and got a premium subscription to a manga service and haven't looked back, every week I start a few new ones. These are often surprisingly well written (of the last dozen or so, 4 of the authors had at least a degree in some field and the knowledge showed in the writing). Might not be everyone's thing but getting something interesting to read was the solution for me.

</comment><comment><USER82> I'm struggling to find genuinely fun content since the death of Flash. I truly miss sites like z0r.de.

In general, I completely agree with the article.

</comment><comment><USER83> God i miss bash.org

<comment><USER84> It's still around, and lately there's actually new stuff on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> >And then, one day, I think in 2013, Twitter and Facebook were not really very fun anymore.

For me, the internet stopped being fun after the Snowden revelations. Not only did it stop being fun, it became subconsciously repulsive I think. This was around that time.

</comment><comment><USER86> Internet is now TV.

</comment><comment><USER87> My guilty pleasure is 9gag. It's blocked in the office (thankfully), so I spend way too much time on it when I'm not at work. I used to read a lot of webcomics (XKCD, Joy of Tech, Pon and Zi, QuestionableContent, Poorly Drawn Lines, The Brads) and user-generated art (DeviantArt). 9gag lowered the barriers to entry and made it easy for images to become viral. It's also now transitioned into auto-playing videos instead of static pictures, which is killing comics :(.

My boss asked me to watch the CS231n lectures and learn TensorFlow, but he didn't give me a dataset. So I downloaded the history of the 9gag hot page, over 60k images. I'm also interested in learning languages, and I find that comics with dialogues are a great way to learn how to talk to people. I then wrote my own image viewer to let me tag pictures as a comic/not comic.

So now I'm still wasting time looking at memes, but I can pass it off as "productive" work, training a machine learning model to find dialogues for language learning.

<comment><USER88> That sounds awesome and now I want to know how it performs. Is the dialogue like 2 teenagers communicating purely with memes? Also I'd love to get my hands on those 60k images.

<comment><USER87> Right now I'm still just sorting out the comics (with dialogue) from memes (without). If I transcribe them, I could build a chatbot like you describe. I'd rather just hand them over to friends who could translate them.

HowardInterprets has translated some comics from Chinese to English, and when one of those reached 9gag, I got my inspiration to use this with my tutor for weekly Mandarin class.

[https://www.facebook.com/pg/Howardinterprets/photos](https://www.facebook.com/pg/Howardinterprets/photos)

Do you have a server that can receive 7.12 GB? I like Mega.nz but it makes free users wait 5 hours after 2 GB. Make contact if you need the data; you should be find my email address without much difficulty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> "printed guitar tabs that would turn out to be wildly incorrect"

These still exist. Plus now you can load them into Tux Guitar to figure out how incorrect they are without even bothering to learn them.

</comment><comment><USER90> The internet used to be a place to communicate, now it's just a place to mine attention for ads through click bait, poorly written articles.

</comment><comment><USER91> I think I might actually now know how rural folk perceive the big city...

</comment><comment><USER92> twitter, facebook, instagram and whatsapp are destroying the good internet, long life to sources with rss support!

</comment><comment><USER93> try this :)

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

</comment><comment><USER94> Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is still around and that's one of the few places on the Internet where I still see tightly knit communities with old Internet buddies from the early 2000s. I am quite happy that IRC is less popular than the world wide web. As a consequence of it being less popular, it has not become riddled with ads, political influence, and addictive content popping up every few minutes, like the web has become. Some IRC channels can be unusually quiet with nothing more than phatic expressions exchanged occasionally for days before any engaging conversation comes up. Yet these channels maintain a tight sense of community.

Among some of the active channels I have found due to my interests, I find the Freenode ##python and ##math to be very good quality channels. There is a #not-math channel which is good fun. Then there is #not-not-math too. I have been an operator of the ##algorithms channel for over 10 years now, and although I participate rarely in this channel these days, the channel continues to have good quality discussions by other operators and members of the channel. By the way, my nick is "spal" on Freenode.

These days, there are web gateways to IRC, that make it easy to connect to IRC networks without having to install a new client. For example, there is [https://webchat.freenode.net/](https://webchat.freenode.net/) which is a bland but decent interface to connect to the Freenode IRC network. Note that the "unaffiliated" cloaks are not honoured while connecting via the web gateway. Using a proper IRC client like WeeChat or HexChat provides a better experience than the web gateway. Pidgin supports IRC too.

<comment><USER95> I've had this idea once or twice of developing an always-active IRC web client to help the newer generation of users join networks and channels that they'd most identify with. Mostly in an effort to get more people in these said channels and keeping discussions flowing.

Given what a more accessible Internet has done in general, I'm not sure if the IRC idea would be better or worse…</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Tips for a programmer learning design? - paul-woolcock

I am a computer science student getting ready for my last 2 semesters. I do mostly C && Python, and have noticed that most Python jobs I see posted are for Django developers. Unfortunately, I'm not much of a designer, and am interested to hear from a programmer who "learned" design, as opposed to most of the designers I know, who seem to have been "born with it". <comment><AUTHOR> Learning by example worked for me. Took several years but I think I am now getting pretty good at it [0].

PatternTap [1] and website design galleries like SiteInspire [2] are invaluable resources for realizing what it is that you like and trying make sense of the design patterns and elements. Dribbble [3] is a great resource too, but you can be easily overwhelmed by it.

So basically just sit down and start looking at other people's work. Analyze why _this_ subjectively looks better that _that_ and you will see the patterns emerge, e.g. generous spacing works really well, and so does contrast, slight texturing goes a long way in certain cases, etc. This will lay a groundwork for general feeling of the design.

Some time after start learning tools (like InkScape, PS or Illustrator) and start reproducing other people's work. This will develop motor design skills. Accenting, nuancing, coloring, pixel-level effects, etc.

I find learning by example a far better approach than going to the classes where you are presented with an already digested version of information; and not shown how best practices compare to not so best practices. _Some_ formal design tutoring is certainly helpful, and it can be done with books and reference materials on as needed basis. This is especially true for composition and typography.

[0] <http://dribbble.com/apankrat> [1] <http://patterntap.com> [2] <http://siteinspire.net> [3] <http://dribbble.com>

(edit) And no designer is "born with it". They just don't show you their early (crappy) designs, that's all :)

<comment><USER2> That's a great progression you've outlined there (and looking at your work, it has clearly worked well). I think the whole process will go more smoothly if there is a framework within which to make those observations. Understanding the philosophies behind design principles, typography, geometric relationships, use of white space, composition, and color theory will make it easier to understand what you're observing.

So, I also suggest my own book, which comes out in September, and will hopefully provide such a framework for programmers learning to design: <http://designforhackers.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd suggest David Kadavy's Design for Hackers when it comes out: <http://www.designforhackers.com/>

<comment><USER2> Thanks! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _"I am a computer science student"_

Take a studio art course. It will require a high level of commitment which is the only way to learn design.

[edit] It also has the potential to make your resume stand out among a stack of recent CS grads.

</comment><comment><USER5> I learned a lot from and like <http://24ways.org>. Highly recommend scanning through their articles for things that interest you, especially ones on prototyping without Photoshop.

</comment><comment><USER6> Lots of online video tutorials, various photoshop books, and the need to want to design something. Not to mention endless use of le best friend Google to look for stuff. It's the only way to go.

<comment><USER7> But what about the high-level stuff? When is a design "good", what colors should you use, etc. Such information is very hard to find on Google.

Learning programs such as Photoshop and Inkscape, IMO, is the easy part. There are so many tutorials about how to do specific effects. But not about when to apply which design principle and such.

<comment><USER6> In my honest opinion, you won't find any such useful information. I've seen horribly design sites convert extremely well and visually appealing sites convert extremely well. Design principles can be broken down into so many broad tangents beyond visual looks that it gets ridiculous. While there are some books that touch on various stuff, in my honest opinion, the best way to learn UX is to really just try various stuff until you understand the basic underlying principles that meet your specific site needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not a good designer by any means, but I've learned a lot by finding sites I like and just poring over their CSS to find out why they did what they did.</comment>


Mobi Lens, a universal clip-on fisheye, and macro lens - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mobi-lens/mobi-lens?ref=live

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my good friend's project...please help if you can.

Thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: How to fix ubuntu automatic screen rotation problem permanently? - <AUTHOR> I have already tried systemctl stop/disable iio-sensor-proxy. It works only for one logged in season and then again when i restart the same problem arises. <comment><AUTHOR> That's the reason i hate linux. It involves unnecessary bugs and you can't get it's solution. LOL</comment>


Microsoft's copyright bots - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/microsofts-copyright-bots-ask-google-to-hide-microsoft-com-links/

<comment><AUTHOR> Is it actually legal to let a bot randomly send DMCA notices like this? Seems incredible that it's not even required to check the website before asking to take it down.</comment>


Bounter: A Python counter that uses limited memory regardless of data size - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RaRe-Technologies/bounter <comment><USER2> The introduction is misleading about what tradeoffs it makes

      >>> from bounter import bounter
      >>> bounts = bounter(size_mb=1)
      >>> bounts.update(str(i) for i in xrange(1000000))
      >>> bounts['100']
      0L

should give 1. The description should be more upfront that you are getting inaccurate answers.

> Bounter implements approximative algorithms using optimized low-level C > structures, to avoid the overhead of Python objects.

"approximative algorithms" isn't a commonly used phrase (at least according to Google) and this sentence doesn't say anything about what the actual trade-off is (loss of accuracy in the counts). A possible alternative would be writing to hard disk so what trade-off is made isn't obvious.

I also don't know what the precision and recall percentages in the example table mean.

<comment><USER3> The tradeoffs themselves I think are fine. If I have an issue it's that the three different use cases outlined have _completely_ different tradeoffs using completely different data structures, but are presented behind one API differing only in boolean flags.

I don't know about you, but a boolean flag completely changing the behavior of a collection definitely violates least surprise to me. They should be different classes with descriptive names, IMO.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there, thanks for the constructive comments!

They actually are completely different classes internally. The 'bounter' function is just a convenience wrapper (factory). For power users, the internal classes offer more control and parameters.

If you have any suggestions / concerns, please raise an issue on github. It's a new library, we're looking for feedback!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks useful! I like the way this library is documented, very well explained.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is this a variant of Space Saving or Frequent algorithm?

Space Saving: [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.94....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.94.8360&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

Frequent: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3260653/algorithm-to- fin...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3260653/algorithm-to-find- top-10-search-terms/3260905#3260905)

And there is a variant with a Sketch function, known as "Filtered Space Saving". I cannot find a working link to the paper, but here is a Golang implementation of it:

[https://godoc.org/github.com/dgryski/go- topk](https://godoc.org/github.com/dgryski/go-topk)

</comment><comment><USER6> It would be useful to have load/save (mmap for faster loads).

</comment><comment><USER7> So like an hyperloglog ?

</comment><comment><USER8> It is good that someone wrote this. It is embarrassing how bad Python's native performance is.

<comment><USER9> This isn't a replacement for any native Python data structures. It's a collection of three different approximate data structures for dealing with large data sets where you're ok trading off accuracy for reduced memory usage.</comment></comment>


A Popcorn Primer To Business [video] - <AUTHOR> http://howtosplitanatom.com/news/a-popcorn-primer-to-business/

<comment><USER2> OP, please mark title as video. Save a click for people at work without headphones.</comment>