Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity? - <AUTHOR> If so, what in particular? <comment><USER2> Let me answer your question with another question. How old are you?

Because I'm in my 40s, which means I was in my 20s during the 1990s. And from my perspective, it was not a notably simpler time back then than it is today. It was not some pastoral idyll, it was just a time a lot like now, except it was a little harder to get a hold of people.

But I do notice that when I talk to people in their 20s and 30s, they often talk about the '90s as some kind of dramatically simpler time. But that's not because of anything about the '90s; it's because _they were children during the '90s_, and people of _all_ ages look back on their childhood as a simpler time. This is true even of people who grew up in objectively much more difficult times, like the 1930s and '40s. It's not that the world children grow up in isn't complicated, it's that they don't comprehend all the complications. You don't start to appreciate that stuff until you reach adulthood. So to everybody, childhood is like a lost paradise.

This is part of why nostalgia is such a seductive trap. It's so easy to look back on the past and think that it was something it wasn't. So if you try to make it your mission to restore that lost paradise, to restore something that never really existed in the first place, all you end up doing is chasing shadows.

<comment><USER3> > except it was a little harder to get a hold of people

Hmm. Really? Few call centres or queuing systems around yet. My bank had a local number that was answered in 3 rings - often by the same person. So did the phone and electric companies, and the tax office. They might _actually_ remember you.

I probably couldn't ping a friend if they were out with the dog, or on holiday, and definitely not in the car - few had mobiles yet, though by the end of the 90s they were getting common enough.

A lot of things were indeed simpler as we've added needless complexity to loads of things. Adding complexity layers seems to be how we solve everything. Even politics was simpler - note I don't say _better._

Then again a lot of things were fairly crap - VHS recorders, CRT TV, cassettes.

Computing was _much_ more fun - far many more platforms - SunOS, Amiga, ST, PC, Apple, BeOS, etc, and it was still feasible to know all of the thing. Now it's more likely to be a small part of a much more complex whole, too big for an individual. That speaks of maturing, but also of over-complexity.

Swings and roundabouts really.

<comment><USER4> Cassettes? We had CDs before the 1990s, thankyouverymuch.

<comment><USER3> Course we did, but a CD in the car? I think that had to wait until about the millennium. Tapes were still hugely popular through the 90s, even pre- recorded. Never did understand that as pre-recorded tapes had abysmal quality compared to home taping. :)

<comment><USER5> CD players in cars were extremely common by the mid 90s.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I had a factory CD player in my 1994 Mustang GT, and IIRC it was standard starting the year before that.

<comment><USER6> I had a CD player in my 1994 Nissan Sentra.

<comment><USER7> I insisted on the richer, warmer sound of in-car vinyl.

<comment><USER6> You laugh, but:

[https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/04/record- play...](https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/04/record-players-were- the-infotainment-systems-of-the-1950s-and-60s/index.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes. The thing I miss the most is the sense that I, and everyone around me, used to be mentally in the same place they were physically.

Obviously people were distracted or preoccupied from time to time, perhaps they had a sick far away relative, say, that dominated their thoughts.

But those kind of situations were the exceptions. Now literally every single person you interact with is mentally in the middle of several conversations with people who aren't there over text, is halfway through an article or blog post, and is in the midst of judging their own success in gaining attention for the photo they just posted.

You can be in a room with 10 people, but only 10% of each of them is actually present and engaged in the room they are in.

I count myself in this group too of course. In fact right now I'm having a conversation on HN instead of being engaged in the real world.

It kind of sucks.

<comment><USER9> Truth. In the 90's, if you went to a party and sat in a corner reading a book, it was usually....odd. The idea was that you were supposed to at least try to be interacting with others. Some of us were geeks, some of us found social interaction difficult, but since there wasn't a real substitute for it, we had to stick it out and learn how to be with people. And then we got the benefits of being with people.

Now there's always something else you can do at any moment. I feel like some younger folks I know (in their 20's) don't have the same capacity for understanding their place in the social universe. Social media / phones etc. give a simulacrum of social experience so you never have to really stretch yourself and grow these new skill sets.

<comment><USER10> Usenet. Fandom. CW. I was born in 1991, and there has always been a technical subculture ever since Edison.

<comment><USER11> That doesn't mean it has always been as prevalent, accessible, dominant, acceptable, and so on...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I miss 90s complexity!

Sparc, MIPS, and Alpha were still alive. Assembly was a thing.

 _Mobile_ telephones for mortals were a marvel and technological breakthrough that could let you communicate everywhere.

3D graphics could run in software, and Abrash' Black Book was a black book, and even more, wizards had managed to capture things _in hardware for the PC_ with some sort of voodoo.

Now we have 1.5 dominant boring architecture where performance is bumped by "Meh, just double the cores and crank it to 11" and no one cares because everything is ecmascript anyway, mobile telephones, or "telephones", are devices that mildly entertain you as you wait for death, and graphics are a matter of dumping the right shaders through the right libraries.

The future just looked a little more interesting. The 90s for me is where the great tragedy of simplification began.

The present is still pretty okay though, I just would have liked it a little "rougher" computing wise :)

<comment><USER13> I think we are headed back that direction.

Custom hardware is coming again. It's coming because we've hit walls on sequential compute. Multi-core parallel and concurrent models are building nicely, but software lags behind, and those problems are hard.

Some problems do not benefit from either of those things too.

Enter custom silicon.

The combination of software and well realized custom silicon to enhance performance, and that's peak performance.

Always is.

<comment><USER14> Also specialization into specific niches, with cool accessories, like the SBCs are doing. It's pretty exciting. I mean, Python on a chip is pretty amazing.

<comment><USER13> Totally. Smaller scale computing is a lot of fun right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [a deleted post said]

 _I miss the trajectory. Many things were exciting in the '90s, but many things didn't turn out so well._

This is pretty much the same way I feel. I'm not sure exactly when things changed, but there is definitely a sense that we went off the rails somewhere along the way. Some time ago there was excitement, optimism, and a sense of boundless opportunity, associated with the Internet and tech in general. Now... well... there's still _some_ of that, but a lot of it has been replaced by negativity, fear, pessimism, doubt, and suchlike. The overall zeitgeist is definitely less pleasant these days, IMO.

<comment><USER16> I think 9/11/2001 was that turning point. Then the crash almost exactly 7 years later made things even worse.

I can't speak for other countries, but both of these events were like a one- two punch to the gut socially, politically, and economically here in America, and we're still reeling.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I'm pretty sure 9/11 was a contributing factor. Not sure it was _the_ thing, but then again, there probably wasn't just one "thing" that caused all this. It seems like more of a sequence of things, some big, some little, spread out over time, and gradually skewing the zeitgeist to a more negative, pessimistic, unpleasant outlook.

In regards to tech and the Internet in particular, I think the Snowden revelations and the PRISM stuff was a key moment, in terms of changing the perception of the Internet. After broad public awareness of ubiquitous online surveillance became a thing, the Internet lost some of it luster and became more threatening and less welcoming.

More recently, the Cambridge Analytica stuff, along with all the major data breaches over the past few years, probably contributed to that sensation as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> News websites [https://web.archive.org/web/19990128201038/http://dnes.sezna...](https://web.archive.org/web/19990128201038/http://dnes.seznam.cz/)

no spying, popups, animations, autoplaying videos, clickbait thumbnails... just a simple website with information

now I have to use three addons just to get back this clean look

<comment><USER18> Seriously you dont remember the gifs, the flash , the unblocked popups/popunders/popovers/hijackers etc? It was far worse back then but the signal to noise was better. The reason: lack of social media which is 99.999999% absolute informational garbage.

<comment><USER19> >lack of social media which is 99.999999% absolute informational garbage.

The purpose of social media isn't to provide "information," but to facilitate communication between people. Making jokes or discussing trivial matters which don't interest you personally, or not doing so in a way that maximizes information density, does not make it garbage.

<comment><USER20> What makes social media garbage is it takes every human cognitive bias and multiplies it by infinity, and offers very little virtue by way of compensation.

It is psychic damage entirely driven by the id.

It replaces expert advice and ombudsmen with popularity contests and groupthink.

It is a neverending reinforcement loop of your filter bubble.

It mainstreams every fringe movement - because social media uses attention as a key metric, it rewards controversy, outrage, and conspiracy.

It's a 24/7, infinite scale, effectively anonymous and entirely asymmetrical amalgam of the Stanford Prison Experiment, Kitty Genovese, Jonestown, Alfred Dreyfus, Jack Chick, Charles Mackay, the Hillsborough crush, 2 minute hate, the banality of evil, "a lie flies around the world before truth gets its boots on", cargo cults, suicide bombers, the Inquisition, Leon Festinger, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure that just ain't so", and 1000 other human failings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In 1995 I was making $6.75/hour as a line cook, and my combined rent, utilities, phone, and cable TV was $180/month, renting a large old house downtown with 6 other friends.

Dial-up Unix shell/internet access was free through the university. I picked up an original 128k Mac and Mac Plus with 40 MB SCSI HD at a local thrift shop for $40, both of which I still own.

A CD cost $25, a pack of cigarettes was $5, and pitchers of beer were $8.

Ten short years later I would be walking around with an always-connected Blackberry in my pocket wondering how I ever survived without Google Maps, push email, and IM.

<comment><USER22> 180/6.75 = 26.6 hours

I wonder how many hours are required in 2019?

</comment></comment><comment> jon-wood The thing I miss about development in the 90s is that building a web application (such as they were) didn't involve knowing at least two tech stacks. The backend just queried a database and then spewed out some HTML. In many ways the way we do it now is far superior, and there's a swathe of things you simply couldn't do in a web browser back then, but at least it was simple.

Outside of tech? Life was not simple. These days I can arrange more or less anything with a few taps on the supercomputer I carry around in my pocket, with an internet connection that would have put anything but a large institution to shame in the 90s.

Want to listen to some obscure 70s album? In the 90s that's weeks of scouring record stores.

Order some food? First I have to rummage around for the menu, then call them up and place the order, and finally hope they can find your place because if not your food's arriving cold after they get back to the restaurant and call you for directions.

Watch a recently released film? You'll have to drive into town and hope the video store has it in stock.

Go to a wedding in a town you don't know? Lots of planning, and hope you don't get lost along the way. I sometimes joke that I couldn't make it to the end of my road without GPS now.

<comment><USER18> > didn't involve knowing at least two tech stacks. The backend just queried a > database and then spewed out some HTML

Actually this hasn't changed, you can still work the exact same way with a LAMP stack. The perceptions have changed, for some reason needless complexity has become the norm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> One of the things I miss about the 1990s is the degree that Microsoft, Apple, and other vendors of desktop operating systems such as NeXT and Be invested in refining the desktop computing experience. I personally believe that the Windows 95 interface is the most usable and most well-designed Windows user interface, with further refinements made in Windows 98 and 2000. For many years I would use Classic Mode in newer versions of Windows such as XP and 7; I wish Windows 10 had a classic mode. And while I love Mac OS X's Aqua interface, I love the Platinum theme that was developed for Copland and was introduced in Mac OS 8.

While there was still an effort in the first half of the 2000s to continue refining the desktop user experience (e.g., Aqua, GNOME 2 [which is personally my favorite Linux desktop], KDE 3), once mobile computing and Web 2.0 technology took off a little over a decade ago, I feel that emphasis has shifted away from refining the desktop experience. Moreover, there has been an emphasis on trying to make the desktop computer experience more mobile-like, leading to products such as Windows 8 and GNOME 3 that, in my opinion, are worse than their predecessors. Even Windows 10 still has mobile-like influences such as its penchant for large title bars and ribbons that take up a lot of vertical space (ever since Windows XP's Luna theme, Microsoft has had an obsession with using a lot of vertical space for bars). In my opinion, Mac OS X peaked in the Snow Leopard era, and while I still prefer Mac OS X to Windows 10, I feel that certain parts of the Mac experience have downgraded over the past decade (some pain points include the transition from iPhoto to Photos.app as well as the differences in font rendering in macOS Mojave that affect users who don't have 4K or higher resolution displays). I'm also very concerned about the implications of Marzipan on future versions of Mac OS X, but I guess we'll find out very soon when WWDC 2019 takes place.

I would like to see more investments being made in desktop computing. Despite some pundits prematurely proclaiming that desktop computing is dying, the fact is many people rely on desktops and laptops to do their work, and tablets and smartphones cannot replace all tasks that we use our desktops for. I still believe that the personal computing revolution is far from over; there is still a lot of room for improvement, refinement, and innovation.

</comment><comment><USER24> On the other hand, traveling was not so simple - you couldn't just carry your mobile phone and pull up Google Maps once you got there - you had to know where you were going and either buy the maps or print out maps beforehand. Meeting up with someone also involved a lot of planning and sometimes you go to the meeting point and then go home having missed each other because you misunderstood the exact location.

<comment><USER25> At least people learned the importance of giving good descriptions the first time in real life.

Too much these days feels like people just leave a message prompt and expect you to return contact and fill in all of their blanks.

E.g. my telephone messages will specify who I am, why I'm calling, what I'm looking for, when to contact me and my phone number (always twice!).

Dunno if others were any better in the past, or if I'm bitter about forums that cater to less advanced users that chronically leave out critical details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> i really do, i mainly miss:

* people not being able to contact me 24/7

* not knowing what is going on in the world all the time (this i miss the most)

* things being local

* way less crap people used to own

<comment><USER27> _people not being able to contact me 24 /7_

You can still have that! I have it. Literally cannot remember the last time I answered the phone :)

<comment><USER28> Yeah, that's at least partially a social problem or how you relate to people and tech, not a tech problem per se. You have to manage your relationships to both people and tech.

<comment><USER29> The aspect 'zulgan is probably missing is that back then, you didn't have to manage this at all, as it was not a possibility. A problem not existing in the first place beats being good at dealing with it.

<comment><USER28> That line of thinking implicitly assumes no upside to being capable of connecting at will, 24/7.

I live in a small town with a surprising amount of 24 hour service. I'm not obligated to run off to the store every night at 2am just because I can, but I sure as hell appreciate being able to do so when I need to or want to.

There are upsides to our current ability to connect. Acting like "simply not having that _problem_ is better" amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Development was more approachable for the newcomer, because there were fewer choices and tooling was less mature. Obviously professionals are better off now, but as a newbie in the 90s it was pretty amazing to develop a website on Notepad and be one of the only people you knew who had a web presence. That and all the BASIC platforms (QBASIC, Commodore, etc) allowed you to build simple text-based games at a time when text-based games weren't uncommon. It felt like with just a little bit of practice you could run with the pros; not necessarily true, but it was really encouraging.

I feel pity for people entering development now. The industry must seem like this colossal, endlessly complex, ever-changing mess filled with experts who know 1000x more than you ever will. There's an overwhelming amount of information, and there's so many partially overlapping disciplines that it's easy to feel lost.

</comment><comment><USER30> In 1981, Electric Light Orchestra wrote about remembering the good old 1980's.... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXBiPY8wDT0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXBiPY8wDT0)

Here's the lyrics:

Remember the good old 1980's

When things were so uncomplicated

I wish I could go back there again

And everything could be the same

[https://www.google.com/search?q=lyrics+ticket+to+the+moon&oq...](https://www.google.com/search?q=lyrics+ticket+to+the+moon&oq=lyrics+ticket+to+the+moon)

<comment><USER31> It's a refrain as old as time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yes and no.

I do miss how web development/software engineering was simpler in the 90s, since it felt like it was a lot more accessible when you didn't have all these JavaScript frameworks to learn, CSS tricks to master, and programming languages to mess around with. Also felt like standards were a lot lower in general online back then, so non designers could create comparatively decent looking sites/apps and people weren't so fussy about UX design/usability in general.

And I definitely enjoyed the simplicity of your typical video game back then too. No DLC, no pay to win, no microtransactions, no lootboxes, you just bought a game, and everything on the disc/cart was yours to play. Yeah game design wasn't quite as polished back then, but there were plenty of great games to enjoy none the less, and when they were good, they just worked.

Additionally, I guess the world felt simpler in its optimism too. The Soviet Union had just fell, the internet was new and exciting and the War on Terror hadn't started. Everyone felt like things were getting better, and in Western countries, people's rights were arguably at their most respected. It wasn't perfect by any means, and some rights still needed to be fought for, but it felt peaceful.

Still, I don't miss all of it. Today's tech is better. Science has obviously advanced and moved on. Many sporting achievements happened between the 90s and today. Thousands or even millions of great works of fiction got released, and many things considered impossible happened too.

So it depends really.

<comment><USER25> Probably for the reasons you mentioned, I have a tradition of playing SimCity2000 every time I'm on a flight, and never anytime else.

It'll be the same experience, every time, and it'll never break.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Only thing I really miss, memorizing phone numbers and just somehow always knowing where all my friends were no matter what. We could always find each other in town because we just... knew. Now if I go with friends to a store, I have to text them to find out where they are. And I miss having such a good memory on something practical, at the time, as phone numbers. You had everyone's number in your head, pizza, most of their work numbers, etc.

</comment><comment> GuB-42 No.

And I was a teenager in the 90s, peak nostalgia, but the answer is still no.

The 90s weren't that simpler, we just had different problems. In fact, I have a bit of trouble finding things that really were simpler from a personal perspective.

The one thing I can think of is security. We didn't have security checks everywhere, kids could do plenty of "dangerous" things, we didn't see pedophiles everywhere etc... And I kind of miss it. But it may just be the result of living in a safer society: human lives are becoming incredibly valuable, resulting in over-protection.

Other than that, think about how simpler internet made things. Want to buy something unusual: buy it online with a few clicks. Access to knowledge is almost limitless. I don't miss going to the bookstore at the other side of the town, noticing that the book I wanted isn't available, take an order, and come back 2 weeks later to pick it up. All these forgotten details were really annoying thinking back.

Another example: cars. Cars used to be mechanically simpler, which was great for the DIY types. But modern cars are so much more reliable. Smoking cars on the curb were a much more common sight back them. So maybe cars were simpler to repair, but not having to repair make life much simpler.

Now about computers. Sure computers were simpler under the hood. Understanding a CPU and assembly was comparatively easy back then. But nowadays, we have abstraction layers that make computers more accessible at every level. We just shifted a few layers up. Truth is, even oldschool computers hid a lot of complexity regarding the electronics inside it that we, as kids, didn't realize and older people did.

<comment><USER25> The cars are more complicated, but if you drive something common, you can always find a video for the common failure modes.

The manufacturers have sure done what they can to eliminate any empty spaces though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think culture used to be more united. There were significant limitations in the channels for producing and consuming culture.

Used to be, to get people to read your writing, you had to go through either the effort of printing and distribution, or you had to submit to some editorial selection and review. Then the only channel people had to consume it was to get a physical print of it.

Now anyone can write anything and anyone can read it. The channels of culture have exploded to infinity. This has caused culture to be fractured.

Used to be that most people watched what was on tv, read what's in the paper, and listened to what's in the radio. This formed a foundation of shared cultural experience. It's more varied and accessible compared to centuries of only oral tradition and limited printing, but compared to today, pretty much everyone experienced the same culture.

Today it feels like culture has fractured. Even members of the same household might not watch, read, or listen to the same things. The physical proximity no longer guarantees any shared culture.

Now if you want to enjoy culture in a group, you must either find it online, or you must be a cultural advocate for whatever your views or media are and build a community around you.

Game of Thrones has been one of the most popular TV shows at all time, yet almost no one has found it just by flicking through the TV in that time slot. Game of Thrones was advocated for by superfans.

Although there are certainly advantages to access any type of culture we want, it's definitely more complex. I can't just talk to someone about sports, the show last night, or the new hit song. Because even though I might live or work with someone, first I have to figure our the cultural choice they've been making.

<comment><USER20> To be fair, the monoculture was almost exclusively white, Western, Judeo- Christian approved media. It created a giant tidal wave of conformity on which progress rose, but it drowned out a lot of other voices.

Always tradeoffs.

<comment><USER34> Perhaps where you lived. I experienced this fracturing of culture in a non- white, non-western, non-Christian country. I think it is a global effect.

I agree that the centralization of culture allowed the people in power to suppress diversity and control the cultural narrative. But now there is no longer a cultural narrative at all. It is too fractures to make any holistic sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Not so much the simplicity as the idea that if someone wanted to spy on me, they actually had to _work_ at it.

</comment><comment><USER36> One big academia/industry thing about the early '90s is that CS students and business students were very different.

Not that either category were bad people, but they thought and acted differently, and I'd say that diversity turned out to be more important than I realized at the time.

</comment><comment><USER37> It seems rare to me that software is carefully engineered and thought out in advance anymore. There's a "move fast and break things" and "worse is better" attitude where designing things carefully is largely seen as a waste of time. Why bother when there's a hundred "good enough" solutions that you can glue together and hardware is so powerful you figure that it won't matter.

What I'm saying is that there's an emergent complexity from bolting together a ton of things together in ways that work "well enough." Things that are working well out of the scope in which they were originally engineered... or things that just carry a ton of baggage with them. This creates complexity.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm not yet in my 40s but can postulate that the 90s was not simpler from a tech perspective let me explain.

1\. Today we have google in the 90s we had mailing lists . It is much easier to use google than it is to construct a well thought out question.

2\. At the start of the 90s we had very little access to mobile phones. We had no uber. Imagine landing at an airport and having to use a pay phone- or calling collect. This is much more complex and difficult then what you can do today with a smart phone.

3\. Say you wanted to build a website. There was no simple answer or Ruby on Rails to make give you a right way to approach it. You had to figure it out without google. For reference lookup corba. Software engineering was definitely not simpler

</comment><comment><USER39> Yes, including analog television. The new television system is stupid and is no good.

Now we have many bad thing such as: the mess being made of WWW (they try to put everything in there, even though many things are better without), complicated computer design with anti-features and other stupid stuff, blu-ray movies, DMCA, USB, etc. Much of that stuff they did not have so much in the nineties.

Of course, we do have good stuff now too, not only the bad stuff. Many improvements are made, but stuff is also made worse stuff too.

</comment><comment><USER40> I miss the Internet. Like the culture of forums, geocities, all that. It does feel like we're getting lamer. I even miss the blink tag, even though I hated it at the time.

</comment><comment><USER41> Yes, very much (I'm 41). The running joke with my friends is that my tag line should be "I miss the 90s".

Some things were much better then than today, for example:

* Children and adolescents had freedom that seems to have been lost today. However, I think that a young person's virtual self extends far out into the aether compared to Gen X.

* The lack of cynicism today concerns me. There are so many very.bad.things happening in the world that I find blind optimism offensive. I just read that 40% of the world's species have gone extinct in 40 years. It doesn't matter if that's precisely true - what matters is that the order of magnitude is likely accurate, and that humans only have about one more generation before Earth's wildlife can only be seen in museums.

* Politics was better. Everything since 9/11 has been a blind alley on the fractal of possibilities. Young people maybe aren't aware that the world wasn't always this... dystopic.

* One thing was worse - weed was illegal everywhere except like, Amsterdam.

* Video games were better. But the quality was partially due to suspension of disbelief and using one's imagination.

* Grunge/alternative was a revelation that can't be expressed in words or replicated. But, around 2013 I noticed a similar cultural revolution, the rise/return of the Burning Man sentiment and a reconnection with creation via psychedelic drugs which seems to be changing the world like a mix between 60s hedonism and cyperpunk. YOLO might be the only thing Gen X truly envies about today hahah.

* Basement parties, raves, skate and punk culture, underground internet geekdom. Vans. Airwalks. Corduroy jeans. All better, but somewhat make-believe.

* Web metaphors were better (declarative and data-driven programming, UNIX theology). Programming languages like C++ and platforms like Windows set us back at least 10, maybe 20 years. But they were FUN.

I knew a guy from my parents' generation when I was growing up who wore Hawaiian shirts everywhere and would never leave the year 1985. Now I am him, forever trapped between the years 1992-1999 like a character in The Matrix. So while I could go on forever, I'll stop here.

Edit: somehow I left out music. Listen to Green Day or Stone Temple Pilots or Alice in Chains chronologically and you _might_ if you're _lucky_ get the slightest glimpse into what it was like to watch Beavis and Butthead in your friend's trailer home before going out to ride BMX in the gravel pits and then coming home and playing Nintendo until 4 in the morning, staying up all night and then going to a party the next night and getting a ride home with random girls like on Dazed and Confused. I assume all that is even better today (what with your Uber and Tinder), but the shear bleakness and transcendental euphoria that the future was arriving before your eyes and nobody older than 30 knows it yet has perhaps diminished.

<comment><USER42> _The lack of cynicism today concerns me_

Interesting. I'm 6 years your junior and quite vividly remember the optimism of the 90's but I find myself equally...erm...annoyed with the volume of cynicism now and kind of wish for a more optimistic vox politic.

And that statement alone comes with all sorts of caveats and qualifiers that would end up with this post being several volumes long just to point out "I recognize the challenges of both eras; today and yesterday but I'm sticking by the argument as delivered because reasons".

In fact I had a quite literal shower though this afternoon after a jog through my neighborhood "I wonder if it's possible to plot out the empowerment/cynicism index across generations and what that system of measurement would look like"

It's fun to ponder.

Until it isn't.

That's not a value judgement. That just an opinionated observation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I don't think the 90s were any simpler, but I do miss some things.

Popular music was IMHO objectively better even in a pure composition sense and was much more interesting.

I also miss 90s cyberculture. There was a more genuine ethos of inventing and exploring and people would never have tolerated today's lockdown and surveillance stuff. I'm amazed at how the mobile revolution boiled that frog.

<comment><USER44> > IMHO objectively

I don't think that's legal, my guy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's so weird to me that more than half the answers here focus primarily on computing and programming. I mean, this is a tech-oriented community, but surely our experiences of the 90s and of the present day weren't limited to tech.

</comment><comment><USER46> Things we have now that I would never want to be without:

\- Amazing browser debugging tools \- Source Maps \- Typescript \- VSCode w/ Liveshare \- Mostly standardized CSS \- Automated build tools

These are solutions to problems we had in the past.

<comment><USER10> Make has been around far longer then you think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Yes. Simplicity, getting piercings, tribal tattoos, singing about saving the planet and forming bands.

[https://youtu.be/U4hShMEk1Ew?t=23](https://youtu.be/U4hShMEk1Ew?t=23)

</comment><comment><USER48> Usable bicyles at reasonable price points with longer lasting parts. Nowadays it seems like almost exclusively fashion driven, with parts wearing out fast, even if they are expensive. CONSUME MORE!

</comment><comment><USER49> Can I suggest that "90s simplicity" is an oxymoron?

I was alive back then, and I've always been under the impression that the nineties were extremely fast paced and increasingly complicated.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm not sure what you mean by simplicity. Detecting whether your browser's JavaScript uses document.layers vs document.all?

</comment><comment><USER51> For the first part of the 90s we still had Commodore. Now they've been airbrushed from history by those left.

<comment><USER52> No one has airbrushed Commodore from history. The company went away. Many of us learned on the C64 and moved on. You make it sound like there's some conspiracy against them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> 90s? I miss the late 70s / early 80s. The world before personal computers was better in many ways.

</comment><comment><USER54> You mean when computers ran at MHz speed as opposed to GHz?

It took a lot more work to get a decent user experience.

<comment><USER55> But did it? Perceived speed has remained steady, using a computer in the 80s was not that different from today, only a lot less powerful. The UI for software like Photoshop is essentially the same 30 years later. VisiCalc and Lotus 123 were not that much slower than GDocs today. And we still have a hard time beating input latency from an Apple II: [https://danluu.com/input- lag/](https://danluu.com/input-lag/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The 80s were even better

</comment><comment><USER30> I miss not worrying about the earth dying.

<comment><USER28> If it helps any, the earth is probably not dying. There have been mass extinctions, climate change, etc before.

After we cut our own throat as a species, Mother Nature will deal herself a new hand and continue her game of solitaire without us.

<comment><USER30> I have no doubt it's not the end of life on earth - the earth will recover and life will continue for another 3 or 4 billion years, probably.

I'm more concerned about the short term - i.e. what will happen to us and our children and future generations.

<comment><USER28> I'm sorry this weighs on you.

FWIW: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19838229#19843507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19838229#19843507)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> simplicity of what? getting any kind of information was ecruciatingly hard until broadband became available. There were wars, politics, same or worse than today's (yugoslav wars, gulf wars, palestine). You can have a roadtrip nowadays easily (simplicity), try that in the 90s. I think you have it backwards, today is simpler. I mean just catching up with the music genres of the 90s was an arduous task!

</comment><comment><USER57> Yes. This is something I have given a lot of thought to. I mean, A LOT.

Before about, 1996-- (I'm estimating)-- before network connectivity was the norm-- I understood how every processor in every system I dealt with worked. Two things happened in the mid to late 90s.

First-- an explosion of silicon. The days of understanding how the system worked, in its entirety, were over. I had a copy of "80386 systems designers guide", and I can't remember the name- but the Michael Abrash's guide to VGA video cards and a PC Interrupts were all that were needed to _master_ computer architecture. If you were super fancy you understood the Pentium math extensions (whose names I cannot recall), that let you do a crossbar in a few cycles, and you understood how common chips like the 16550 worked, which is an addendum to PC Interrupts if I recall.

Second, and this is the key thing, technology started working AGAINST us. As complexity exploded, so did network connectivity. We had this era in which Operating Systems complexity exploded (win95), silicon complexity exploded, and connectivity exploded. The thing about connectivity is this-- that's when our computers went from isolated things to these things that are always online-- they started working against us. They could now talk to other computers, other people, and that changed computing fundamentally.

Computers went from these things that were our helpmates to our masters. This is what I lament the most. I don't miss bit-banging, assembly programming (well, a little). I fudging love Ruby/Python, as opposed to C++ being considered "High Level." I love that I can buy a computer for 35$ (RPI) that is fantastic. RPi's are so cheap I employ half a dozen just to run my 3d printers (yes I have a problem). But I do so much not miss being scared of my computer. Miss being scared of the ne5work. I miss the sense of wonder at what a computer could be or do. You have to understand technology as it exists now, is beyond my wildest dreams. I watched Star Trek TNG as a child and the devices we have now, legitimately have exceeded my wildest dreams. The simplest cell phone now has as much computational power as every computer combined at the time I graduated high school.

But, I do miss simplicity. So much so, I've been considering writing an NES or Sega game; I'm precisely 40 years old, and I've finally come to understand that art and constraints are intimately connected. That they press on each other, and neither is possible without each other.

I have so few restraints on modern systems that I... am constrained. I miss the constraints of my earlier years that were, in fact, my freedom. I miss software that shipped and worked on the first day. I, like everyone, miss my childhood. Because the universe is an explosion of complexity-- and when we look back, we will always feel like things were simpler-- because they god damned actually were.

</comment><comment><USER58> Like when the 'off' button meant 'off'? Yeah, I do.

<comment><USER59> The switch that completely isolated power from your pc. Luckily that still exists at the wall .... for now.

Phones are another story.

<comment><USER60> Not if your PC is a laptop, and has a battery. You can tell it to go to sleep, and, sometime later, Windows 10 will wake it up and sneak up an update on you (with a complimentary restart included).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Recently I built a tube stereo amplifier kit and speakers. Bought an old fashioned CD player for it. Just put in a CD and push play. No screwing around with apps, streaming, etc.

As a teenager in the late 80's, you knew where your friends were on the weekends, but we didn't have cell phones. You could find a party in a remote part of the county, but no one had a GPS.

Computing was also fun, in the days of BBS and pre-WWW Internet.

</comment><comment><USER62> A world dominated by effen Windoze? How could I miss that? I sure as heck miss the simplicity of my Amiga, if we are talking the 90s, but that's about it in terms of simplicity.

All other aspects of "90s simplicity" sucked.

Table based web layouts? Without the "complication" of CSS? I sure miss that. Calling the family landline and hoping her "complicated" father doesn't answer the phone? Fuck yeah, I miss that. Having to play cool with the artsy-fartsy kids to get the CD with the new fonts? Sure, I miss that as well. The simplicity of "obtaining" Emacs for the Mac in the 90s! Hell yes! I miss that simplicity. And last but not least, pixel pr0n, animated GIFs. Yeah, I miss the simplicity of the 90s. Fuck Micro$oft, remember that one? Oh do I miss that. And the "web crawlers" don't forget thet simplicity to submit your site to more than 100 search engines!

The AOL CD, simply flip it away! Enviromentalism was still a European thing, or so, thought the European Gen X. Kurt Cobain didn't comit suicide and fuck Atari.

Short answer: "No."

<comment><USER63> My SEO consultancy can handle that. We'll submit your site to hundreds of the top search engines and web directories.

<comment><USER62> Cool, but how did you find out my email address?</comment></comment></comment>


Nemu – Modern Hypervisor for the Cloud by Intel - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/intel/nemu <comment><USER2> So a fork of Qemu that makes no promises to keep AMD support, and uses words like "leverages".

Its not clear why this needs to exist, as opposed to working with upstream to produce a single tree that can be built with a slimline profile enabled

<comment><USER3> The NEMU folks did a talk at KVM Forum last year -- the impression I got was that their intent was to use NEMU as a testbed and demo platform of what you could do to produce a slimmed-down version of QEMU, and then as they established workable approaches to then propose/submit them upstream to QEMU piecemeal.

On the upstream end, one of the features that landed in 4.0 was a 'Kconfig' system that hopefully will make it easier to build slimline versions of QEMU which don't compile in the kitchen sink.

<comment><USER4> If you want slimed down qemu on x86 only we already have temu.

<comment><USER5> Can you provide a link to it? Google found [http://bitblaze.cs.berkeley.edu/temu.html](http://bitblaze.cs.berkeley.edu/temu.html) which seems like the wrong thing (it's stuff _added to_ qemu, and it's from 2008).

Maybe [https://bellard.org/tinyemu/](https://bellard.org/tinyemu/) ? Seems like the right thing but it's not based on qemu I think. Anyone tried it with production workloads? It does seem like it should work - it does KVM and has virtio devices. Although at first glance I don't see either multiple CPU support or live migration support - not having multiple CPU support would basically rule it out for real workloads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tangentially related, but with even less features: AWS's Firecracker, a hypervisor with even less features for running containers as VMs: [https://github.com/firecracker- microvm/firecracker/blob/mast...](https://github.com/firecracker- microvm/firecracker/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><USER7> There's also Google's Gvisor, for also running containers as VMs: [https://github.com/google/gvisor](https://github.com/google/gvisor)

(Handily it works with standard Docker, just put in an extra line in your /etc/docker/daemon.json)

<comment><USER8> gvisor is a fundamentally different thing from Firecracker (or the role QEMU or NEMU play when used with KVM). There's a pretty good summary here: [https://gvisor.dev/docs/architecture_guide/](https://gvisor.dev/docs/architecture_guide/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Calling this "hypervisor for the cloud" is a bit disingenuous. There is no way it would compete with the existing commercial solutions out there by VMWare/Pivotal, Joyent, and Red Hat. Where is the HA capability? No way to monitor cluster health. No k8s support either. This is just a fork of Qemu.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can someone teach me what is needed for "cloud" based workloads?

<comment><USER5> I think the backstory for this project is that QEMU is a full-featured virtualization project, capable of emulating many machines including _actually_ emulating them (i.e., not using hardware virtualization features, just interpreting machine code), doing userspace virtualization (running a binary for a different CPU in the same kernel, instead of emulating an entire machine), supporting all sorts of hardware, supporting features needed for debugging OS development, etc. Most of that isn't useful in the cloud - in the cloud you've got hardware virtualization, almost always on x86-64 but occasionally on ARM64 and virtualizing the same platform as the host. In the cloud you're typically running an OS that can have custom drivers for your virtualization platform, you're not running old/historic OS images that need to run faithfully. In the cloud you generally _want_ custom drivers for your virtualization platform because they're higher-performance, and you wouldn't want to emulate certain models of real-world network cards/disks/etc. in the first place - and in QEMU, those turn out to be huge attack surfaces. In the cloud you generally do not need a local graphical display and often do not need a graphics driver at all, since you're logging into machines over SSH (and if you need early boot debug output, you can do that over a virtualized serial port). In the cloud you don't need a floppy disk or a parallel port. In the cloud you probably don't need the standard PC bootup process where it starts in 16-bit mode for compatibility with old bootloaders, which themselves switch to 32-bit and then to 64-bit: you can have the hypervisor directly start EFI in 64-bit mode.

NEMU only does hardware virtualization on x86-64 machines and only exposes an emulated "machine" type that has the various virtualization-optimized devices and no emulation of real-world devices.

Maybe "production workloads" would be a better descriptor here than "cloud."

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the thoughtful and thorough explanation!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Will JavaScript take over front-end? - <AUTHOR> I am seeing unbelievable amount of blog posts, releases, upgrades about Javascript frameworks and libraries during the last 12 months. I personally only used AngularJS 1.x for one of our projects, but did not have time to try React, or AngularJS 2.x.<p>My conclusion for Angular is that it takes 40% more development time to finish a project with AngularJS than without using it. We gained some speed for sure, but I think we could do better in the same amount of time with back-end optimisations.<p>- How was your experience with React or any other?<p>- Should I invest more time to keep me updated with one of them?<p>- I still think, front-end should just present the information, not the whole application logic. Am I missing anything? (I just discovered polymer-project and loving it so far!) <comment><USER2> > Will JavaScript take over front-end?

Has it not? A more appropriate question would be "When will it step down?"

> it takes 40% more development time to finish a project with AngularJS than > without using it.

And by "without using it", does it mean you write in vanilla JS? I believe you jumped into conclusions way too early. Working with any technology will take long. It's not the actual writing of code that will take long, it's the learning (if you're a total noob), setting up (if you don't have scaffolding tools), and debugging (if you don't have tools). The actual work is just a fraction of what you're actually doing.

> How was your experience with React or any other

If you mean React alone, then it's like Angular with directives... alone. You'll have to debate on your router, your data flow library, your server- communication layer, your build tooling, your process. It's all the same thing under the guise of a different syntax.

> Should I invest more time to keep me updated with one of them?

Get to know all the libraries, but never try to use them all. Choose one and get things done.

> I still think, front-end should just present the information, not the whole > application logic.

It's like saying JS should have stayed on the browser, but wait! There's Node.js (server), Espruino (hardware), FirefoxOS (OS), PhoneGap (mobile), NW.js (desktop). If everyone was thinking the way you do, these would have never been invented.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback, and I partly agree with you.

> It's like saying JS should have stayed on the browser

What I meant was, we don't need to re-implement the application logic in browser. Take an example of translation strings. You store them in your back- office and download the key-values to your browser and store them again so that you can parse it with Angular.

I am not against JavaScript, in fact I love that we can use it on server level, build mobile applications and etc. Maybe I could be more accurate on the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > I still think, front-end should just present the information, not the whole > application logic.

I think you are absolutely right! Progressive enhancement is a foreign concept to some developers. They've forgotten that hyperlinks are the engine of application state.

I just disabled Javascript in my browser. We'll see how things go.

</comment><comment><USER4> Loading an application and hydrating with data seems like the ideal architecture. Especially when your single application can run on the web, mobile, or a desktop. A choice between thin and thick clients seems a little mainframe versus PC. The web started as a page-based text-focused entity, but I don't understand why it needs to stay there or why thin clients are the ideal pattern. Certainly first load & SEO can present challenges, but both these problems are going away with React/Angular2 server side rendering and Google's progress with indexing web apps.

Maybe I'm missing something, but SPAs seem like the future (perhaps compile to JS or whatever, but still thick clients). The backend should be concerned with clean APIs to data and not with rendering the view. If people want to turn off JavaScript for a text only web, well some people still use flip phones and everything depends upon what you are building and for who and how quickly you can move in either paradigm. I'd suggest studying either the Angular or React ecosystem, but don't expect SPAs to go away.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's cliche but I think or hope JS will become the bytecode of the web and compiling to JS from your favourite paradigm be it OO, Functional or just JS with compile time type.

The resistance to this is most code is made for $ and the people with $ tend to prefer fungibility. JS devs are easier and cheaper to replace than Purescript ones. From the lens of developers as a list of buzzwords you can to grep this makes sense.

Frameworks get trendy but new languages have a hard time even though the learning curve may be no different.

I just hope somehow better languages than JS will win.

</comment><comment><USER6> \- In my experience, React is much better and faster and easier to use than Angular, but there are things better than React out there (Cycle, for example).

\- I don't know.

\- It depends on what is your application logic, but I think you are right for the majority of cases. However, presenting the data in a good way is probably more than 50% of any application (if it wasn't, everybody would be writing just CLI apps), that's why Javascript matters.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree that presenting the data is really important, but you don't really need a fullstack front-end framework with services, routing, and translation APIs to achieve that right?

<comment><USER6> No, that's why I said I think you're right. Perhaps routing is needed sometimes, but that is a simple thing, despite the pompous names these Javascript people tend to use. "Services" is just another pompous name for "doing HTTP requests".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since used React 3 years ago (and specially Reagent/ClojureScript) can't ever look back, the only possible better way is Elm mainly because of compile time checks (but right now ClojureScript is too much superior)

This is just a personal story ! I don't want to offend anyones believes :)</comment>


Olark (YC S09) launches Shopping Cart Saver - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/27/olark/

<comment><USER2> Shopping cart optimization is one of the most often ignored area for small-to- mid sized ecommerce businesses.

This is a brilliant, simple solution - there are several "AI" cart abandon programs such as Upsellit.com, and other live-chat solutions, but Olark's inclusion of user data, cart value, and simple IM integration will make a big difference.

I'm 100% going to test this, and will report back about conversion results vs. other live chat or AI tools.

<comment><USER3> I worked on a team that developed one of the automated chat bot retention systems. Thanks for quoting "AI", as ours was really crude, but at the same level of other offerings. If memory serves, we cycled through basic pattern matches on normalized words to spit out canned replies and coupon codes to catch people leaving a landing page.

This is another one of those things that you'd figure people would hate and be annoyed by, but actually ends up being really effective. A company like ThinkGeek probably couldn't leverage it, but someone running a CPA weight loss offer definitely could. In a large way.

<comment><USER4> You could plug your bot into Olark, it speaks XMPP, I'd be pretty interested to see how well it does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most shopping carts are abandoned because the buyer just wanted to see how much a purchase _actually_ costs. Factoring in shipping, taxes, and possibly shadily hidden fees.

      "All set to go with your purchase Mr. Smith?"
      "Nah, I was just testing ... =) [close tab]"

<comment><USER3> The fact they went through that exercise demonstrates that there is some interest, however. With retention systems, you have the opportunity to save a sale with a time-limited coupon code, for those that may be bouncing because of the price or because they wish to return later (which likely won't happen). For certain types of products, this is really effective.</comment></comment>


Curl Cookbook - <AUTHOR> https://catonmat.net/cookbooks/curl <comment><USER2> A bit out of topic but curl can as well gives you timing details in case you want to know how long each step of a request takes, here is a nice post about it: [https://blog.josephscott.org/2011/10/14/timing-details- with-...](https://blog.josephscott.org/2011/10/14/timing-details-with-curl/)

<comment><USER3> I saw a similar curl post last week and was inspired to add this to my ~/.bashrc for basic timing and headers info:

      wwwinfo()
      {
      printf "##\n# PAGE INFO\n##\n"
      curl \
      --silent \
      --output /dev/null \
      --user-agent 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/76.0.3809.100 Safari/537.36' \
      --write-out \
      "    Remote IP: %{remote_ip}
               Port: %{remote_port}
        Name Lookup: %{time_namelookup}s
       Connect Time: %{time_connect}s
      TLS Handshake: %{time_appconnect}s
         Total Time: %{time_total}s
         Down Speed: %{speed_download}B/s\n" \
      "$1" &&\
      printf "##\n# HEADERS\n##\n"
      curl --head "$1"
      }

(It spoofs Chrome latest + Windows 10 user-agent, but this is optional.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My favourite curl snippet is probably generating C code to be used in other projects

curl [http://example.com](http://example.com) \--libcurl example.c

</comment><comment><USER5> Would be nice to see some good non-HTTP uses. The manpage says:

> curl is a tool to transfer data from or to a server, using one of the > supported protocols (DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, > IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, > SMTPS, TELNET and TFTP).

<comment><USER6> I do wonder what the point of using curl for SCP would be instead of using the scp tool itself.

<comment><USER7> FWIW, scp is deprecated (but I believe that's the entire protocol, not just the tool, though the tool _is_ ludicrously slow and awkward).

<comment><USER5> Where you hear that? Deprecated in favor of what other tool? As far as I know, there's no other tool that lets you specify files with arbitrary server-side code, like the following example:

      scp -T server:'$(ls -t * | head -1)' .

<comment><USER7> In the OpenSSH 8.0 release notes they state that "The scp protocol is outdated, inflexible and not readily fixed. We recommend the use of more modern protocols like sftp and rsync for file transfer instead.", which has been widely reported (so if you just searched Google for "scp deprecated" instead of trying to undermine the statement with nothing but a statement of doubt, it would have come up immediately) as an informal deprecation; afaik the only thing stopping them from _formally_ deprecating it is a lack of a direct replacement (such as giving sftp a few more affordances).

<comment><USER5> > so if you just searched Google for "scp deprecated" instead of trying to > undermine the statement with nothing but a statement of doubt, it would have > come up immediately

I had looked it up with precisely those keywords[1] and nothing that seemed like scp was deprecated came up. However, I admit I didn't use Google.

Also, it wasn't a statement of doubt as much as it was a request for information and an expression of frustration in case it was true. Thank you for answering, by the way.

[1] [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=scp+deprecated&t=ffab&ia=web](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=scp+deprecated&t=ffab&ia=web)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The 'dump response headers only' section made me chuckle. I thought I had been doing things the hard way instinctively, but nope. It's a good old 'curl -D - -o /dev/null [http://example.com'](http://example.com') Though the author uses -s, which I don't because if I'm just dumping the headers I'm probably looking for errors.

Also the '-d <param> -G' combo to do query strings surprised me. I've always just submitted the full url, maybe with a quick grumble when I forget to single quote it all. I actually don't see much of an advantage here, since you still need to quote the parameters, and it keeps the same format.

</comment><comment><USER9> There's also --resolve and --connect-to, which have some neat uses.

For example, direct a request to a specific server in a cluster. Or send to localhost SSL without -k, so you can still test certificate verification works ( localhost can be useful, because some dumb firewalls block 'external' non-443 SSL).

<comment><USER10> or having to work with SNI

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Since 7.49.0 -H supports passing in a text file (@filename), so you can cut&paste and edit headers from devtools.

</comment><comment><USER12> This might actually be off topic but is there a way to curl into telnet for a websocket endpoint?</comment>


Ask HN: Best LinkedIn Profile/Resume service? - <AUTHOR> I have used LinkedIn Makeover before at a cost of $500 but I was not impressed. It amounted to basically having someone perform the labor of cleaning up my profile...which is not what I am looking for. Most of the services you find online feature a process where a profile writer collaborates with you and sends a draft a week later for you to review. They expect you to provide feedback. What I want is someone who knows the tech industry inside out and can build an amazing LinkedIn profile and resume that creates a coherent brand. I can't provide any feedback that influences the final product because I don't know what I'm doing. That's why I need a service. Willing to drop some major coin if the service is clearly top notch. Help! <comment><USER2> Talk to Dave at [https://resumeraiders.com/](https://resumeraiders.com/) I had him help with my resume and linkedin profile and recommend his work.</comment>


Flynn Effect: Average IQ  increasing about 3 points per decade - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

<comment><USER2> If the average was increasing three points per decade then there would be no noticeable increase since the test is supposed to be calibrated so average is 100.

Which would mean, there would be no increase in average IQ if average intelligence was increasing...

<comment><USER3> What's happening is that the norm is rising: the same performance that scores IQ 100 now would have scored 130 100 years ago. [Read Flynn's book and original research for more]</comment></comment>


I don't get Facebook, explain please! - <AUTHOR>

seriously it is not very intuitive, you cant really do much. no forum, no chat.
on myspace at least people have big profiles and can post stuff, on Facebook you first have to become friends.
i really dont get why this got so big!?
problem is it makes me feel trapped. like i cant find or do anything, it makes me want to get out of their.
and how do you find all the applications?
how the hell can some application on facebook be valued to 500K$/month whih i read somewhere. <comment><USER2> I know what you mean. When I use the interwebs I want to post links and click on really tiny triangles. Sometimes I like typing how I feel about links into boxes. I can't figure out why people would use Facebook. I mean, I guess you can post links and type comments into boxes. All those photos and friends make it really confusing! I also don't see any tiny triangles to click on when I am on Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER3> Facebook is an older crowd of mostly college graduates. Thus higher income and more desirable to marketers. They do a good job of helping you find friends of a friend and reconnect with high school and college friends. Games like scrabolous give the bored office workers something to do.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's fun when all your friends are there.

</comment><comment><USER5> Vanity</comment>


How the Textbook Industry Tries to Hook Professors - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/05/textbook-industry-tries-hook-prof/ <comment><USER2> This fails to mentions some of the best "hooks" they've got: tools to reduce lecture prep time, assignment prep, and grading.

I've seen textbooks whose online content for instructors include a full deck of (extremely uninspired) powerpoint slides. And I've seen lazy profs use them.

Web-based assignments with automated grading are also powerful hooks. Like the prepared slides, they discourage instructors from engaging with the material, providing any unique insights from their own experience, or actually working with students to achieve understanding.

<comment><USER3> if you are paid an adjunct salary and have basically no time to prep for classes because you have to teach several just to put bread on the table, you might not have a choice but to use these "uninspired" slides.

I would be wary of calling a teacher "lazy" in these post-tenure days. Not saying lazy teachers don't exist but these days I would definitely give them more the benefit of the doubt.

<comment><USER2> I've done the adjunct thing, and I'm sympathetic to your point. The current state of post-tenure higher ed is just not sustainable. What exactly is the point of having an overworked person (pulling 60 hours weeks at below minimum wage, as some adjuncts I know do) stand up in front of a group of students and read slides to them that just summarize the textbook chapter that they've all supposedly just read? Luckily for the administrators who've created this situation, most students care so little about actually getting an education that they fail to notice how badly they're being ripped off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I once asked a professor - why you don't tell the students that they can get older version of the text book that's 90% cheaper, and the content is essentially the same - to which he replied, he isn't allowed to say it in the class because of the deal their school has with the university book store and the publisher.

But he also said, he drops hints about it in the first class. On the syllabus it says 'X book or other versions'. It's up-to the student to figure our what it means.

It's especially heartbreaking when you find someone struggling to buy $200 book just to get the online access code, or he will fail the course. He didn't even pay that much to sign up for the class.

That's why initiatives like openstax(by Bill and Melinda gates foundation) and wiki books makes me so happy.

<comment><USER5> I actually told my bookstore that students this fall could use either the 2nd or 3rd edition of a book (Sipser, which for the record is _breathtakingly_ expensive, but the 3rd edition is nearly identical to the 2nd, right down to the typesetting), not really expecting them to follow through. To my surprise, they did---the bookstore website lists both editions and says either is acceptable.

...but if you buy or rent them at the college bookstore, they cost about the same. D'oh. On the open market, used copies of the 2nd edition go for less than a third the price of used copies of the 3rd.

(So I sent my students an email apprising them of the situation and suggesting they get their orders in before the thousands of other CS students buying their fall textbooks. :)

<comment><USER4> Thank you Sir. You are my hero.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this touches on a core problem. When you add a middleman between the product and the consumer you get a painful market. The consumer doesn't get to choose his product thus the product gets to market to the middleman and gradually increase it's cost to the consumer because the middleman won't notice a dollar here and a dollar there, whereas the consumer absolutely would.

</comment><comment><USER7> Our startup is working to fix the mainstream textbook problem. Specifically, I think the biggest ripoffs are the textbooks for first-year students; they're totally full of bullshit, so our mission is to replace them with more concise, and more affordable books.

So far we have two titles: one on precalc+mech+calc (3 in 1 for the win), and a second on linear algebra (see my profile for links). We're currently looking for authors to write the _No bullshit guide to biology_ , and _No bullshit guide to chemistry_. If you have teaching or tutoring experience with these subjects, please get in touch.

Between the excellent OER books that available, and independent publishers like us, I think we can fix the textbook cartels. I give them 2-3 more years, then they're history.

</comment><comment><USER8> I had a really good survey of automata professor tell us that we could buy the textbook if we wanted, but if we read the slides and/or reviewed taped lectures, the textbook would be completely optional.

I think the sign of a good educator is when the teacher provides materials that are decoupled from the textbook. I like the idea of making the textbook optional. Of course, this means more work for the instructor (need to develop homework, lectures, supplemental reading/slides). And a lot of instructors in university didn't care to do this work.</comment>


Krugman: It's America That Has China Over A Barrel, Let's Take Advantage Of it - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/opinion/15krugman.html <comment><USER2> So, they pressure China to revalue its currency. And what does that do to the prices of the all of the goods manufactured over there and imported here? I don't think an iPad, to take a prominent example, would go down in price after that. Price hikes like that would be a bigger drag on the world economy than the present situation.</comment>


Ask HN: User choice subscription rates - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering if there was a service that allowed the subscriber to choose the price of their subscription to a website? For example, if you wanted to pay $5 for pro membership per month you can do that or if you only wanted to pay $1 you could do that.<p>I'm not sure I will go along with this plan, but the idea has me intrigued enough to see if it's possible. Thanks in advance HN. <comment><USER2> It is possible with PayPal. You can set it up so they input whatever price they want (or select from a dropdown of set prices) and then get a notification once they paid.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, I'll have to look into that. Thank you.</comment></comment>


Blender 2.81 - <AUTHOR> https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-81/ <comment><USER2> > _New File Browser_

> _Opens as floating window with more standard layout._

Finally!

I like the changes and improvements. For years I've mostly used blender for cleaning up models made elsewhere, rigging, and unwrapping, but it's become easier to try out other things. The keybinds are still quite impossible to remember but luckily the menus are packed with a lot of functionality. It's become more enjoyable.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's direct download link: [https://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.81/](https://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.81/)</comment>


AT&T Introduces Roll Over Data - <AUTHOR> https://att.com/rollitover

<comment><USER2> Competition rocks. Thanks T-mobile for forcing AT&T's hand.</comment>


Consciousness Isn't Self-Centered - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/82/panpsychism/consciousness-isnt-self_centered <comment><USER2> Consciousness is made of primordial cheese, formed by an interaction of a lactic field permeating the universe with spontaneously occuring quantum fermeons - if Nautilus is interested in this idea I'll be happy to elaborate on it in long form, complete with references to David Chalmers as well as James McIntyre.

</comment><comment><USER3> If anyone is interested in a framework that tries to put rigor into this otherwise very open-ended problem of defining consciousness, the integrated information theory ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory)) is one approach. Problem with a "traditional" philosophical approach to consciousness is that it's hard to prove and equally hard to disprove. And although integrated information theory starts with the assumption that "consciousness exists", and builds on top of that assumption, at least it's a step in a direction where the problem of consciousness is turned into a measurable property. After all, even the most rigorous of natural sciences rest on some axioms. And I am not claiming that integrated information theory is in any way correct (although it may be). But theorizing about consciousness without a tangible logical framework always feels like it's not going anywhere, so I welcome the pursuit for scientific advancement in said theory

</comment><comment><USER4> This ties quite well with what Alan Watts says about the universal consciousness, its manifestations and the role of ego in all of this. Sometimes its quite believable that two consciousnesses coming in close contact for a moment give rise to something quite new and bigger than the parts.

</comment><comment><USER5> My argument against panpsychism (the principled form of animism, which is ancient) is that to perceive something you have to have a representation of it in memory. Ergo if you don't have a memory system you can't be conscious of anything. Rocks don't have RAM.

<comment><USER6> You could quite reasonably consider an excited electron to be a 1-bit memory of experiencing a photon recently. My understanding of panpsychism is that it doesn't require everything to have an equally sophisticated consciousness/experience as ours, just some. And sure, an excited electron decays, but so do your memory and bits in RAM.

<comment><USER5> Well I suspect a memory system, together with stable input/output hardware, are necessary but not sufficient. To be a conscious agent, said agent's memory must include a representation of itself. Otherwise it can't truthfully say, "I see a pebble."

Edit: it can't truthfully _think_ , "I see a pebble."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Consciousness is just an emergent phenomenon caused by checksum errors in the filesystem/object store/younameit of the quantum foam storage of the akashic records.

There...

</comment><comment><USER8> Found some interesting reading:

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-indian- buddhism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-indian-buddhism/)

Perhaps someone well versed in this can tell us how this article's theory relates to the non-self that Buddhists have been talking about for 2,000 years.

<comment><USER9> The theory is pretty much standard Buddhism. Hinduism too for that matter (no pun intended.) "Atman is Paramatman"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Is it possible that alongside the conscious experience of "me," there is a > much dimmer experience of each individual neuron?

No.

<comment><USER11> Show your work.

<comment><USER10> If everything that exists is conscious, then consciousness ceases to be a useful concept and becomes nothing more than a synonym for existence. The concept of consciousness is only useful to distinguish things that are conscious from things that are not. Humans and apes are conscious. Rocks and individual neurons are not. One can have a legitimate debate about the status of computers, great apes, dogs, rats, perhaps even fruit flies, but not rocks, transistors, or individual neurons.

<comment><USER6> You're assuming consciousness is a single bit, when that's not even true in humans. How "conscious" are you when slowly waking up? It varies by circumstance, too, e.g. I'd say I'm certainly less explicitly self-aware when I'm walking a familiar route and not thinking about much than when pondering my place in the universe. It's easy to imagine a mind that only had the first kind of experience. We don't even need to consider easy cases of variable consciousness like sleep (maybe with lucid dreams), sedation, coma, etc.

Consciousness is a matter of degree, and there's no hard evidence about how low the scale goes.

<comment><USER10> > You're assuming consciousness is a single bit

No, I'm not. Consciousness is a continuum, not a dichotomy. There are nonetheless systems whose degree of consciousness is indistinguishable from zero.

> there's no hard evidence about how low the scale goes.

Of course there is. It goes down to zero. Rocks are not conscious. Dead people are not conscious. Even humans under general anesthesia are not conscious.

<comment><USER12> Is anyone but you conscious? If so, how can you be certain?

<comment><USER10> > Is anyone but you conscious?

Yes.

> If so, how can you be certain?

I can't be absolutely certain of that nor of anything else. The philosophical- zombie hypothesis cannot be ruled out by evidence. But I observe others producing complex I/O behavior that is qualitatively similar to that which _I_ produce and that I attribute to my own consciousness. I also see evidence that my consciousness supervenes on the operation of my brain, and I observe that other people have brains. The most parsimonious explanation for all that is that other humans are also conscious.

<comment><USER12> Do you have any sense of what the simplest conscious system looks like? Can we construct one from legos in an aircraft hangar?

<comment><USER10> > Do you have any sense of what the simplest conscious system looks like?

Nope.

> Can we construct one from legos in an aircraft hangar?

Almost certainly not. We can't even construct one on a silicon chip (yet).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "But, as Deepak Chopra taught us, quantum physics means anything can happen at any time for no reason."

\- Professor Hubert Farnsworth

</comment><comment><USER14> When it comes to consciousness, I really like the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter [0]. This article feels like a step backwards from that.

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

</comment><comment><USER15> "Rather than consciousness arising when non-conscious matter behaves a particular way, is it possible that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter—that it was there all along?"

Umm, really?

Sounds nice and touchy-feely new agey, but, I'm saying no.

More likely you just haven't tried to define consciousness clearly and non- circularly, and when you do, it just kind of goes away as a concept. If you can tell me, in any sort of scientific terms, why a self driving car isn't conscious but a human is, maybe we can get somewhere.

<comment><USER16> How is this circular? Physics has the notion of an observer, which is inherent to all matter. This is just saying observer effects happen everywhere all the time and your skull is just concentrating it.

<comment><USER17> "Observer" notion from physics (does not matter if we are talking about neutonian or QM or whatever) have nothing to do with consciousness. "Observer" in physics is just a description of a certain point of view within the system. The connection of that to consciousness is usually done by popular quasi- philosophy books loosely based on physics and using some of the same terms, they do not come from the physics itself.

<comment><USER16> Saying there is no connection is an unfalsifiable claim, so you've departed the realm of science with that one.

<comment><USER17> What I mean is, physics makes no claims about any such connection. I could have been more clear. People are free to explore any connection or lack thereof, but there isn't any claims to that coming from mainstream physics.

<comment><USER16> Have you done a literature review? Have you searched for quantum effects and cognition in the literature?

<comment><USER17> Well yeah, hence my statement. The word "observer" when used in physics usually refers to the instrumental measurement process, not to perception by a consciousness/human. There are of course outliers, scientists that will make the draw, but they are in a miniscule minority. There are also thought experiments that are common that will talk about this, but they almost always used in order to actually demonstrate the non-fitness of this line of reasoning for physical sciences.

The people who make these claims are usually woo-woo writers who make money by writing popular culture books related to a subset of quantum mechanics phenomena and to a limited understanding thereof.

This shouldn't be too hard to see either when you understand that consciousness is not well-defined yet by mainstream science, and so why would it study it using the well-defined methods like physics? That if anything would lead to unfalsifiable hypotheses, and mainstream physics luckily doesn't indulge in that so often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was thinking just this morning that I should write a book: Metaphysics for Computer Nerds & Computers for Metaphysicians. I am lonely in the intersection between mysticism and hard mathematical science.

> And the fact that the hard problem has persisted for so many decades, > despite the advances in neuroscience, has caused some scientists to wonder > if we've been thinking about the problem backward. Rather than consciousness > arising when non-conscious matter behaves a particular way, is it possible > that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter—that it was there all > along?

Why do folks present this idea like it's new and radical? It's literally thousands of years old.

Aldous Huxley wrote "The Perennial Philosophy" in 1945. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perennial_Philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perennial_Philosophy)

> However, it seems to me that the obstacle one faces here isn't a combination > problem but the confusion of consciousness with the concept of a self. ... > And this concept of the self is an illusion.

Recapitulate the basic finding of Buddhism, This has been known for thousands of years.

> it may be more accurate to instead talk about the content and quality of > conscious experience at any given location in spacetime, determined by the > matter present there.

Now we're gwtting somewhere...

> would two brains wired together produce a new, integrated mind?

In a word, yes. You don't even need to connect them with a _corpus callosum_ , the bandwidth and latency of our built-in hardware is sufficient:

"Psychedelic experiences associated with a novel hypnotic procedure, mutual hypnosis." [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106)

\- - - -

Gurdjieff presents a world system wherein (I am paraphrasing and condensing wildly and inaccurately here) the human isn't born with a soul but must construct one during it's mortal lifetime or "die like a dog" leaving nothing behind.

There are (in this world model) three kinds of matter: terrestrial matter (of the Earth), stellar matter (of the Sun and solar system) and interstellar matter (which is stable outside the Sun's heliopause.)

The process of constructing a soul proceeds in two stages. First one "coats" the physical body through and through with a stellar matter to make the "second being-body", and then again with interstellar matter to make the "third being-body" or _soul_. This third body is stable beyond the solar system and, importantly, beyond the death of the original physical body. The second being-body is not stable on it's own without the first or third bodies.

I bring this up because it's a fascinating (IMO) third concept besides "humans do not have souls" and "humans do have souls": "humans are born w/o souls and must make them themselves before death".

It also makes a kind of sense that, in order for your human consciousness to survive the death of the body, the material matrix within which and through which your human experience carries on, you need another nearly-identical body _made out of more durable stuff._

</comment><comment><USER18> maybe it's a wave between avatarial representations of other before us

</comment><comment><USER19> Nautilus articles seem to frontpage on average once a weekend. The weird thing is the articles have _very_ low engagement on HN in terms of comments. Given the weekly cadence and low engagement on every article this may mean Nautilus is running an internal upvote campaign.

<comment><USER9> 31 pts 26 comments now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's things like these:

[https://twitter.com/rmartinledo/status/1233388613490139136](https://twitter.com/rmartinledo/status/1233388613490139136)

That make you wonder how vast consciousness really is.

And how self centered we are still as species. Eating other animals for 'pleasure'. It's sad.

<comment><USER17> Could you explain why that particular video makes you think about that? I mean, do you consider the creatures on the picture as having a consciousness? Those look far from being conscious to me, they are just small creatures with a couple of functions like moving, finding food and eating...

<comment><USER20> I would argue humans are like this too, biologically speaking.</comment></comment></comment>


CardFlight, The Stripe For Real-World Payments, Has Raised $1.6 Million - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/02/cardflight-1-6-million/

<comment><USER2> I'm a bit confused about what these guys do even after reading that article. Could someone clarify?

<comment><USER3> Say you are a small retail chain that accepts credit card payments at the cash register, and you want to make things more efficient (Apple-store style) by also accepting payments via portable devices that your employees carry around.

You have a couple of options: a. Invest in proprietary portable payment devices (what Apple does) b. Sign up for a service like Square and invest in iPods or iPhones

Primary problems with (a) are cost and possibly an outdated interface. Problem with (b) is the payments are not tied into your existing infrastructure, and you have to live with Square's 2.75% fee, which may be higher than what you've already negotiated with your card providers.

With CardFlight, you get a card reader like Square's, but you can use their SDKs to collect and send payments into your existing card infrastructure. Square is ideal for independent coffee shops and the like, but if you're a small business with a few locations, something like this is probably the better solution.

<comment><USER2> tyvm, exactly the explanation I was looking for. So, to be clear, the responsibility would still be on you to use their SDK to create a custom app that would interface with the CardFlight card reader, correct?

<comment><USER3> Correct, or use their SDK to enhance your existing app with the ability to accept payments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _While other companies like Square and PayPal have provided businesses with > the ability to collect payments with mobile credit card readers, businesses > are reliant on the provider's apps to process those payments. CardFlight > provides its clients with card readers, and also gives them an SDK to build > payment processing into their own branded apps._

Does Square have any future intent to allow this?

<comment><USER5> All signs point to no. Square wants to be a prominent brand in the eyes of SMBs and consumers (e.g. Square Register, Square Wallet.) They don't seem interested in offering APIs or other white-label tools that help app developers feature their own brands and experiences. Seems like Cardflight clients can integrate payments into their own app experience, rather than having to push CardFlight's, Square's or anyone else's brand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a friend who runs Zuldi Co has probably spent month and months (and thousands of dollars) looking for a solution like this. He sells point of sale ordering systems so waiters and waitresses can take orders and accept payment at bars/restaurants/casinos etc.

<comment><USER6> Why not just use Square in this scenario?

<comment><USER7> Most likely Zuldi probably wants to keep their own user experience, inventory, CRM etc. Using Square doesn't allow them to keep control of their brand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, What's CardFlight's revenue model? Looks like a useful service.

<comment><USER9> [Disclosure: I work for CardFlight]

We're still experimenting with different pricing models to figure out what makes the most sense for our clients. We typically pass the hardware expense through at cost and charge an all-inclusive monthly or annual fee per deployed device for the SDK, payment gateway, unlimited transactions, unlimited support, etc.

One upside of using CardFlight is that clients can shop around and pick whichever processor they want for the lowest rates, easiest integration, best service, or whatever reason they wish, while using the CardFlight SDK for an easy technical integration. Our clients/developers can even work with multiple processors in parallel, or switch processors down the track without having to rebuild their back end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not really germane to the topic, but I really dislike people that pitch their company as, "<existing company> for <demographic>." I get it lets you easily convey what you do since it's really just an improve version of an existing thing. Let your product stand on it's own. Sell what it does and why it's better. Not, "Like this existing thing, but fit into this subset?"

</comment><comment><USER11> Congrats from ff, Tim! We're all looking forward to helping CardFlight grow.

</comment><comment><USER12> been following these guys for a while - wish we had this in the early days of our app when we did more on-the-ground sales to customers within our app.</comment>


Checkbox Captcha Wins - <AUTHOR> http://uxmovement.com/forms/captchas-vs-spambots-why-the-checkbox-captcha-wins?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+uxmovement+%28UXMovement%29

<comment><USER2> what does prevent bots to actually executed javascript and simulate a click? For example using <http://www.phantomjs.org/> ?</comment>


I created a new Vim theme called Underwater. Let me know what you think. - <AUTHOR> http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2977

<comment><AUTHOR> I've posted this on reddit/r/vim already but thought you guys might like it too.</comment>


Facebook Immune System checks 25 billion actions every day - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-immune-system-checks-25-billion-actions-every-day/4895 <comment><USER2> Pretty easy to be immune to spam when most of the interactions are between known people.

I don't know why FB and other sites doesn't adopt a 'secret handshake' code for friend requests. It would eliminate all of the unwanted requests if someone only accepts the secret handshake.</comment>


Is Gmail down - <AUTHOR> http://mail.google.com in Turkey
502. That's an error. <comment><USER2> Just use [http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/mail.google.com](http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/mail.google.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> no</comment>