Setting User-Agent Field? (1996) | Hacker News Reader

Setting User-Agent Field? (1996)

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127 pointslaszlolm64 comments

Something about looking at that... strange feeling ... realizing that I too was programming for the Internet in 1996, and I could have asked the same type of question, in the same year, etc.

But in the intervening years Larry Page became a billionaire and is actually my employer, while I'm an aging pudgy programmer posting on hackernews.

Y'know what I'm saying? The passage of time is weird.

Ok, finishing my coffee now.

I think what I'm hearing is that I just found Lawrence Page's HN account

I get the feeling. I too, feel I "could've" done things differently. Here is my question to you: Did you also go to Stanford and have an influential circle of friends? Just asking to see if you two were actually in similar boats.

I'm not discounting what Larry Page has done. I'm saying he had the tools to build Google. So many others had and didn't but not every programmer in 1996 had.

Yeah I'm not suffering under the illusion I could have been him. In 1996 I was a drop-out philosophy student who got web-programming jobs through a friend who saw my potential and I moved out to Toronto to try to make a go of it, got caught up in rave culture, etc instead of focusing well on my career. My programming interest was in the MUDs/MOOs and the potential for that kind of synchronoius multiuser environment; not the web (which I was only into because that's where the $$ was and it kind of sucked then.) Then as now I didn't/don't have the personality type to be an entrepreneur or manager of that kind of stuff.

It's just interesting to look back at those early days and think of how green field it all was, and how there was at least the semblance of opportunity.

But as you point out, it wasn't really a level playing field either.

We still love you.

>realizing that I too was programming for the Internet in 1996, and I could have asked the same type of question, in the same year, etc.

Let me offer another way of framing it so it doesn't seem like comparing your programming-trajectory to Larry Page's programming-trajectory.

The way to look at people like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Elon Musk is to see them as businessmen who happen to know how to do some programming.

I'm not trivializing Larry as a "script kiddie" because he did know advanced programming concepts since he pursued comp sci PhD at Stanford but the programming itself wasn't his main interest. Yes, Larry asked a Java question but the real interest was solving an intellectual puzzle: since the impact (e.g. h-index[1]) of academic papers can be approximated by citations, can that same idea be applied to webpages by analyzing the pages' href links??? This is the idea that's bigger than Java which preoccupied his mind.

After he codes his proof-of-concept crawler in Java, one of his later employees at Google Inc rewrites it in C++ for performance. Larry Page doesn't waste time arguing on internet forums that "C++ gives you so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot". Instead, he concentrates on the expanding his idea to organize all the world's information.

That's what a lot of us on HN are trying to do... find a big idea that just lets us use our programming skills to implement it. The programming is only a transition state to something else. Personally, I do like programming but that's not my end goal of self-actualization.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index

Also better to look at them as people who were enormously lucky, by being in the right place at the right time with the right idea.

For example I worked at a company which built a social network, starting out in schools, generously funded by VC money. Unfortunately that was back in 1999 before a bunch of stuff had come together to turn that into a multi-billion dollar idea (such as widely available always-on flat-fee internet, and cheap digital cameras).

Which company was that? Genuinely curious to learn from the graveyard

The URL itself is some kind of spam link site, but here's the site from back in the day:

https://web.archive.org/web/20000303100223/schoolmaster.net/

It's a bit hard to get an idea what the site was about now because everything was behind a login (hey, like Facebook!) so the Internet Archive didn't scrape very much.

Also, he understood linear algebra's eigenvalues and eigenvectors well enough to apply them to that problem for pagerank. So it's then second year math/engineering students who should be comparing themselves...

[ Counterpoint: some argue that pagerank wasn't as important as google's ad-free front-page (not a "portal"), and superfast results (thanks to Sergey) - but even if so, "The Algorithm" impressed Stanford, Sun co-founder investor, talented employees and early nerd users. ]

BTW as for programming, it seems Scott Hassan "wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine." https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

I used Google in 1997 and set it as my home page, etc. and it was almost certainly the fast response and ad-free page that got me, more than the results. The results were good, but not uncanny or mind blowing. Also had a great vibe of "geekiness," kind of still old-school Internet in a time when the web was going in another direction very quickly.

> kind of still old-school Internet in a time when the web was going in another direction very quickly

Oh, they had great marketing. Some of it was even true.

Too bad they became that other direction.

> Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Elon Musk

Arguably Steve Jobs is more deserving to be in this list than Musk who's never run a profitable company.

My yawning aside, Tesla turned a profit last year; hence its inclusion in the S&P500. It wasn't waiting to be big, it was waiting to profit, at which point it joined at #6.

Enron was also highly ranked. Apple is a bigger success story, profitable from day one.

Musk promises self driving year after year, and now even Waymo is moving away from that term in order to distinguish themselves from misnamed driver-assist technology like Tesla's [1].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/6/22216848/waymo-change-self...

Sure. But it's just some commenter's list of successful people, not Forbes' Top 5 Businessmen Ever or something.

No sweat. We're all in the same boat here

> Apple is a bigger success story, profitable from day one.

Except they'd be gone without the Microsoft investment. Profitable companies don't end up on the verge of failure.

That just makes Jobs all the more impressive since he was the one who patched things up with Microsoft. Both Gates and Jobs are on record saying to each other that the other's company made their own company better.

"Musk who's never run a profitable company."

Isn't the profit of a private corp. like SpaceX an unknown variable? They do not have to publish any financials and they don't.

Right, so we cannot assume it's profitable. It may or may not be.

It may be that Musk uses a string of companies to shuttle money between, who knows. He did manage to convince shareholders to buy his cousins'/brother's company which ended up being a huge liability. It seems to have saved him from the public seeing one of his family's companies fail.

> Right, so we cannot assume it's profitable. It may or may not be.

That makes sense, but can you assume it's not profitable?

The inverse doesn't work. Musk has not yet demonstrated he runs a profitable company. That's the bar which Jobs, Gates, and many other CEO's have shown which Musk has not yet shown.

You said he hasn't run a profitable company, not that he "hasn't demonstrated he's run a profitable company".

He's definitely a different kind of CEO.

He's a liar. Promises self driving every year. Not even close

Oh, you're talking about promising stuff that's not delivered? Maybe not so different from the likes of Gates and Jobs.

Of course, sometimes they did manage to deliver some of the things the promised also, like Musk.

The inflated value of Tesla as a company is mostly based on full self driving whose status Musk has continually lied about for years. Gates/Jobs did nothing of the sort.

> The inflated value of Tesla as a company is mostly based on full self driving

I find this hard to believe. In fact I don't.

Net expenses exceed net revenue, their cash comes from selling stock, and profits only come from selling regulatory credits given by governments.

what a great comment, thank you. I'll add that the devil is in the details. a great idea and a great POC can be squashed by bad hiring. and good hiring can be squashed by bad culture. there are many slices in the pie chart of building a company and you have to hit every one out of the park for success.

It's not "bigger than Java". Java's a pretty big deal. It's (a) pursuing opportunities (obviously after having opportunities arise) not interests, (b) clawing for power and not being content as a team power, and (c) maximizing ROI and getting other people to do the less glamorous statusful work while getting outsize share of credit for it, and of course being the luckiest of the 100 other brilliant people who tried something similar.

If Larry had posted that to the Hacker News of 1996 (probably a BBS or AOL forum) I would have told him he has no chance of displacing Lycos or Alta Vista then spilled soda on my copy of Webmaster in a Nutshell or Learning Perl.

You're wording is oblique but the sentiment bears out. It reads like someone who really doesn't know what they are doing technically ("Perhaps it is stored as a unicode string?" makes no sense.)

It shows that being willing to be wrong in public (and not waste time thanking people who help you) is a more effective way to learn and grow than only speaking up when correct.

Were you doing research sponsored by CIA by any chance back then? Did NSA jointly with CIA (Office of Research and Devepment & Community Management Staff) provide seed capital for your company under MDDS program?

Read up on Highlands Forum, DLI, OSD, ONA, CMS, ORD, MDDS. And no, its not a conspiracy.

Related: Amazon's first job posting by Jeff Bezos http://www.ngrblog.com/amazon-usenet-post/

"and you should be able to do so in one-third the time that most competent people think possible"

Wow...

that signature quote... wow

> Your compensation will include meaningful equity ownership

quite an understatement there

I think Joe Millar deserves a few Google shares

Pet project. It'll amount to nothing.

Why would I use google when I can just wget | grep from the command line?

Before Google we used Altavista :)

It will never be big and professional like GNU.

Is Google a good net citizen now?

I guess he never read the reply to the question he posted

Today, Google even crawls, renders and indexes URLs sent from Chrome browsers via dial-up IPs using regular browser User-agents, so... no. Other than that, Googlebot seems to obey most of the time.

I don't blame them. Cloaking couldn't be detected otherwise.

I think i read somewhere that Google crawlers sometimes pretend to be real browsers to prevent you from displaying a different page the crawler. So, no.

Google no longer just "crawls" in the sort of general way that crawlers work to populate its search index, but also "scrapes", - that is to say they seek out specific information from some websites in order to display their data in the Google answer box, instead of directing you to their website to get that information.

While not illegal, I think it is unethical and breaks the symbiosis that their search engine had with the web.

I don't think it could be solved globally; local jurisdictions like the EU will need to deal with this issue sooner or later. I think American companies can try to lobby against it too, because Google abuses its enormous power to eliminate competition in various markets (product price comparison etc.). There are many American companies operating in this space. Google's strategy is to steal it slowly piece by piece and it looks like they're getting more and more bold.

Previous discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8587697

While the re-titling of this repost (leaving out Larry Page's name) is in accordance with HN's norms, I suspect it will lead to it being skipped by many who would otherwise find it interesting.

Looking at the replies it looks like it brought value to the people with Larry's name in the title, this way even if you knew what you were looking for it'd be difficult to find why this post exists here from 1996

The weirdest thing for me is Java 1.0 beta. I suppose this might have been something not for general consumption (but it was already been used in academic settings?)

In 1997 I was taking a first year intro to comp-sci in an Israeli university and Java was the language we did the assignments. It was pretty solid and wide spread back then, version 1 I guess. My high school was still teaching Pascal and Cobol...

That's so neat! I'd sometimes wonder if founders of Google etc. knew how their software worked during early years. Thanks for posting, seriously!

EDIT: The email checks out too, page@cs.stanford.edu so it's likely him

To anyone coming here, it's not verified if he's the same Larry Page, but the date and name + topic checks out

It's him.

Now I'm convinced! Thanks.

I just wanted to reassure the OP. This was posted a zillion times all over the Internet.

Wonder how that would fare on stack overflow today.

Not exactly the same question but similar questions on the same topic:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2533236/setting-user-age...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2529682/setting-user-age...

In my experience, if you ask a straightforward question that doesn't require answers in the form of opinion/debate, you'll get answers.

In my experience, you would get tagged as duplicate with a tangentially related question in 2 seconds.

So what’s the answer?

Is Larry Page still writing programs in Java?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com