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See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

bemmu.github.io

237 pointsbemmu99 comments

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  				var 時 = new Date(人.created * 1e3);
  				var YYYYMMDDhhmmss = 時.toISOString().slice(0,19).replace(/[-T:]/g,"");
  				var ꜛ = "https://web.archive.org/web/".concat(YYYYMMDDhhmmss, "/", ໆ);
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Wow, non-latin characters for variable names.

And if you'd like to learn some Chinese, here is the definition of all Chinese characters appeared above.

    火 = fire
    誤 = error / mistake
    時 = time
    結果 = result (a term / expression with figurative meaning)
    果 = fruit
    人 = human / person

---

My pick: 'HNSearch – old HN search engine – will be shut down later today'.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7404972

Native english speaker, math major.

This seems really awesome! I feel like descriptive, long variable names have both an advantage and a disadvantage: advantage, obviously, that they're clear, but disadvantage that simply having all that filler text everywhere begins to make the code harder to follow in a serious way. So there's always this tug-of-war between short variable names that make flow easy to follow but require a lot of context or guessing to decipher and long variable names that obscure flow.

Math (and languages like APL, K) are extreme examples of this: as an aid to thinking really hard, they go to extremes of dense notation requiring lots of context/previous to even begin to understand what's going on.

Using Chinese characters in normal code seems like it could fairly painlessly (once you knew Chinese!) get you a lot of the advantages of small-space characters while still encoding a lot more helpful context than a single latin letter.

I read Japanese (I think this is Japanese in this case - it just happens to use a subset that is also Chinese - maybe).

This code is definitely easier to parse visually for me. It's really satisfying. As a character set, it is much more information dense, it just requires a lot of upfront study making it less efficient in the short to medium term (~10 years or so).

However, I would hate to work on a codebase like this. It is a key press to switch between input methods (languages), or a key combination on different keyboards.

When combining this with vim I find it incredibly frustrating to type. You have to mentally keep track of which language you are in, as well as which vim mode you are in, 4 options instead of 2. Plus you have to be in English language mode for vim commands to work correctly.

Although it is true that you spend more time reading code than writing code, it would obviously exclude those that don't read Japanese.

It would be a nice-to-have to be able to have Japanese variables only for the reading phase of a project when you are getting up to speed. Then swapping them out for English words when editing. Can't see how it would work in practice and a really limited market too.

But yeah, it's satisfying to look at.

Well, as an emacs user, I guess I could make the jump to two modes to get the benefits... ;)

But in all seriousness, thanks for a very interesting perspective.

I use long variable names all the time and it's never actually made the code harder to follow. You generally parse a whole word as a shape rather than one letter at a time anyway once you know the word, so effectively the only difference is a bit more horizontal space. If someone grew up using whole words as variables in math I doubt they'd find single characters easier to work with.

For programming, using characters not available on a standard QWERTY keyboard is bad international code shareability.

I'll just say this definitely doesn't agree with my experience, though it's certainly the kind of thing that might differ from person to person, brain to brain.

Here's one thought experiment: imagine variables get longer and longer and longer. Clearly, at some point, they become so long that they're much more unwieldy to work with. Now it's just a question of, as they get shorter, when do the gains start to become insignificant?

(Re QWERTY: Ease of input is certainly a consideration, but hardly an insurmountable problem. We should not forever restrict ourselves to basic latin because that's what happens to be printed on many physical keyboards at this moment.)

In the kinds of jobs I've gotten, I spend more time reading code than writing code. As such long variable names are very helpful as I have less information I need to commit into my mental working memory.

Even when reading code you wrote yourself, long variable names can be immensely helpful.

I was working on some code today which I wrote a couple of months ago and came across some fields in a struct I had made, two of the fields were named like something_d_foo and something_d_bar (with something, foo and bar being strings which I've replaced in this comment). These names describe a relationship of something to foo and bar. When I read the name I had given it, I thought these were the somethings DISCONNECTED from their foos and bars but a comment I had written beside each of them informed me that they were the DEFAULT somethings of the foos and bars. I promptly renamed the fields as something_default_foo and something_default_bar.

It's definitely a trade-off, that's why the idea of ideographic variables is so interesting.

I doubt anyone can really parse grails.plugin.searchable.internal.compass.mapping.SearchableGrailsDomainClassCompassClassMapperFactory [1] as a shape.

[1] https://github.com/gpc/searchable/blob/master/src/java/grail...

It does say a lot about what it is

This is obviously code that solves a very real problem.

😱

I think long names are relative. Jokes like these[1] don't come from a vacuum. I've seen serious code with sentence-long variable names before, and it does make it hard for me to read at a glance.

[1] https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

I bet it'd be fun to just choose characters at random, with reckless disregard for inadvertent meanings downstream.

Somewhere down the line, watching someone read a blog peppered with snippets of your code inducing incongruously deep belly laughs across the gulf of a langage barrier would be fulfilling in its own weird way.

結果 = result (a term / expression with figurative meaning)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B5%90%E6%9E%9C

It looks like those characters literally mean "to bear fruit" - and in English, fruit is also used figuratively to mean a result, e.g. "fruits of labour", so I wonder if either English or Chinese was inspired by the other, or if they independently came up with the concept relating fruit and result.

My bet is independently. Spanish also has the same expression and I bet lots of other languages do too.

The Spanish and English dual meaning both comes from latin, so the similarity in other languages with influence from latin does not provide any evidence in support of this idea developing independently (nor does it provide evidence against it).

Looking up the Chinese etymology seems to imply both the Latin and Chinese probably came to have the dual use for the same reason (agriculture leading to equating labour with resulting in fruit/produce), without any obvious direct connection.

Who knows... It does seem a quite logical step for new agricultural societies to make that connection.

Large crop yields = good thing. Seems like a reasonable connection.

Neato! Given that Bemmu live in Japan, I think he intended using the Kanji characters as Japanese characters, although they were originally derived from traditional Chinese (still used in Taiwan).

> I think he intended using the Kanji characters as Japanese characters, although they were originally derived from traditional Chinese (still used in Taiwan).

And in Hong Kong where I live.

I can't read Japanese, so the characters above just happened to retain its meaning after being imported to the Japanese language. I know that many don't.

ໆ = Lao repetition indicator, named 'ko la' (probably pronounced more like 'koh-laa' than 'cola', but quaint anyway. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%BB%86

I heard about http://recursivecharacters.com last week at a lisp meetup. Just an art project, doesn't actually have an evaluator, but the author went to some detail to describe how an evaluator might work.

The entire library in the name of the library? Crazy! How would you input that on the computer when you wanted to reference it, though?

Heh, that's cool :) However, it makes my Firefox crash about a second after the page loads :( I feel a bug report coming on, after checking the latest nightly build...

Latest nightly doesn't show the problem. Go firefox!

8 years! It was still called "Startup News" back then. The front page when I joined looks very much like it does today -- a few articles about Google (6!), some startup-y articles, some politics, some business-y articles, some pure programming articles, etc. A good mix, but things are still pretty good today.

I remember exactly why I joined, incidentally. With increasing regularity, /r/programming was making me very mad. I would post a detailed correct answer to someone's question, only for some troll to immediately reply with some insult and "proof" that I was totally wrong, even though the proof was totally wrong. It happens once, fine. It happens every single time I comment, I'm out. I have not been back in 8 years.

I will admit this happens from time to time on HN, which is unfortunate because I like to comment and really only know what I'm talking about when it's programming-related. But it hasn't made me mad enough to leave, only to nostalgically think back to the good-old days.

(I did start using Reddit again, too, but I only read unpopular subreddits. I can handle /r/AskReddit for some time killing, but things like /r/flying and /r/amateurradio are very pleasant communities with enough activity to be interesting a couple times a week. /r/anime is infuriatingly stupid, /r/awwnime is much more tolerable.)

6 years for me -- the mix of articles is indeed similar, though the titles show how the vibe of the community has changed. Back then it really felt like a gathering of plucky upstarts and misfits. We were into a lot of things which are mainstream now, but niche and weird at the time.

"Paul Graham and Y Combinator are on the cover of June's Inc Magazine" - this was exciting news back then! YC was a really speculative effort, even in the tech world. I wish I'd applied in the early days!

"Chrome Now Available for Mac or Linux : Hackers Only" - goes to show how many established products were back then only used by the nerdy early adopters

"20 Developers to follow on Twitter" - again, back then I only knew a few people outside of tech circles who used Twitter, and a lot of people hadn't even heard of it

"How I Got A Job From A Blog Comment" - this also wouldn't be news today

"Google Wave “is anti-Web”" - one speculative product that didn't make it

It's interesting looking back. I discovered this place as a first year CS student, and startups as a career path were not on the radar for 95% of my classmates at the time.

Rails was still fairly unknown, IE6 was a big problem for web developers, jQuery was the exciting new Javascript framework. All this meant that the standards for web apps were lower and it was easier to ship an interesting hack and get people to check it out.

> /r/anime is infuriatingly stupid, /r/awwnime is much more tolerable.

Well that's not too surprising when the latter has almost no comments. You could try r/trueanime - it's smaller and smarter, though it does tend to attract long-winded people.

What anime community do you use now? r/anime was always terrible. I've "outgrown" 4chan, but /a/ is still the best community I know of. I mostly just do my own thing and talk to my few friends who also watch.

I use a (private) G+ community now.

Ha! This is really cool. A few interesting things on mine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110716015547/http://news.ycomb...

"Code.Google.com now supports git"

Google code got the axe earlier this year.

"Michael Arrington reportedly to launch “CrunchFund” to invest in startups"

The rumours turned out to be true.

"Court OKs Airport Body Scanners, Rejects Constitutional Challenge"

They're everywhere now!

"Italy and the euro: On the edge"

Good guess, but turns out Greece is a bigger problem.

I joined on April 1, apparently, so none of my rumors turned out to be true. Oh well.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090401065245/http://news.ycomb...

It only approximates the date you first joined. It uses https://archive.org/ (the Internet Archive) to load the archived page nearest to (or nearest before?) the date you joined. Since the Internet Archive does not mirror HN every day, the page it will show you may differ by a few days from your exact signup date. It so happens that I joined on March 11, 2009 but I was shown the page for March 10, 2009 instead. You can use http://www.waybackhn.com/ to get a list of the top stories on the exact date you joined HN.

I joined 8 years ago, and the topic selection is not markedly different in nature, which I find remarkable. Then again, there's a reason I'm still here and not e.g. Slashdot, which I started following even earlier.

That's one of the things that struck me. Of the headlines that came up for me for March 2010, there were only a couple that would seem out of place today. (One related to Flash on an iPhone and one to the network at PyCon 2010.)

Yeah, same here. Except for a couple of stories, the front page from when I joined in 2008 easily could've been the front page today.

"The reason I chose today to drop out was because of a conversation I had with pg last week. He said bluntly that Octopart's chances of getting funding were worse if I stayed in grad school."

Classic. Top story the day I started, "I Dropped Out of Grad School Today" @sam (octopart) [0],[1]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070223035643/http://octopart.c...

You started Feb 22, technically that's a different date. :)

The Archive.org page nearest my join date leads with the "Show HN" post for Dropbox, though I actually joined a month earlier in March 2007.

Another top story from that day asks if people realized the up and down arrows were clickable and used for voting purposes.

"You started Feb 22, technically that's a different date. :)"

correct @vlad, though the Archive.org capture isn't hi-rez enough, I'm only reading what the app shows. Great idea.

Clever idea. Top item on mine:

My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive (getdropbox.com)

https://web.archive.org/web/20070405032412/http://news.ycomb...

Edit: Look at the stats! 27 points kept it at the top after 8 hours. How things have changed.

Doesn't work for me:

Sorry, your username was not found. Maybe you have never submitted or commented anything.

  user: edw519 
  created: 3070 days ago 
  karma: 72254  
  about: Free ebook, "The Best of edw519": hn.my/edw519
  twitter: @edw519 http://twitter.com/edw519
                           e d w 5 1 9
                               a t
                            g m a i l

  https://hn.algolia.com/?query=edw519&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment
  5,008 results

Besides what DanBC suggested, it doesn't work (gives username not found error) if you're blocking JS.

It worked when I tried it: https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb...

It's case specific. Did you try Edw519 or edw519?

Apparently I joined the day PG and Jessica got married:

https://twitter.com/kn0thing/statuses/824631187

I wasn't at the wedding! ;-)

I think a cool derivative work would be to see today's HN but filtered to only see activity of people who joined before you.

Cool, top story for me was "Experiment: No Comment Scores"

https://web.archive.org/web/20090929084547/http://news.ycomb...

ah, I remember that - that's when I more or less stopped commenting. I still think it was a really bad move.

"ah, I remember that - that's when I more or less stopped commenting. I still think it was a really bad move."

Why would that cause you to stop posting?

This is great! Reminds one of just how fast time flies. Melancholy aside, this[0] was #1 on the day I finally created an account.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4220353

Plus ça change.

This was top story for me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211630

Awesome. One of the first posts was "Google Removes http:// from Chrome". I remember that!

Wow. I knew it's been a long time, I didn't realize I joined so near the beginning. Mine has "Why we made this site" submitted by pg.

Also the day I joined. I think it was the day PG posted it on reddit.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080610175916/http://news.ycomb...

Some interesting things on mine:

Does Apple's Steve Jobs have cancer again? (alleyinsider.com)

https://web.archive.org/web/20080610175916/http://www.alleyi...

Toyota Announces New 516-Mile Range Fuel-Cell/Electric Hybrid

https://web.archive.org/web/20080611123133/http://gas2.org/2...

Interesting to note how HN has grown since then. Much more people on, though content has stayed similar.

In retrospect Jobs did still have cancer, and the Toyota hybrid was not much of a game changer.

This is neat. Good job.

I'm a pretty big fan of one that got posted here about a month ago, waybackhn. It chooses random day/months/years and shows the front page for either. I've spent a lot of time reading through old stories and comments from years before I got into this field. It's opened up my mind a bit to see what people were talking about years back.

Interesting! Meteor.js, which I've been using on my latest project, was debuted the same day I joined :-)

Oddly enough on my first day the OP of this post (bemmu) first posted (I assume) about his Candy Japan business (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2745694). Funny how that works out.

One of the links from my page:

"MySpace v. Facebook: It's Not a Decision. It's an IQ Test"

Yeah, I joined a while ago.

Wow, I guess I showed up pretty early. I still remember going to Startup School in 2007 and being so excited and inspired that I quit my job a few months later.

Note: I probably should have stopped following startup news after the first year or so, I don't think anything I've read after that has been that beneficial, it's just an addiction at this point. I went to Startup School for a second time in 2008 and realized that I didn't need to be there, I was trying to recapture a feeling -- but after the initial inspiration I just needed to get busy.

Why we made this site

34 points by pg 5 hours ago | 7 comments

Odeo up for sale (so they could focus on this Twitter thing)

17 points by beau 11 hours ago | discuss

Web 2.0 is a bubble for 3 reasons

12 points by xyzzy 16 hours ago | discuss

Startup School 2007: 3/24 at Stanford

26 points by phyllis 1 day ago | discuss

Why we made this site 117 points by pg 5 days ago | 46 comments Startup School 2007: 3/24 at Stanford 32 points by phyllis 6 days ago | discuss

I'm amused that a top post when I joined was "How long did it take you to figure out that the up/down arrows next to the links are for voting?"

FYI this was 8.3 years ago, which was about 200 days in, but very close to the public launch I think.

These throwbacks have a way of being very topical. 12th item on Hacker News that day for me is "The Next SourceForge": "SourceForge has been rethought, reimplemented, and rejuvenated."

Four front page stories about why the lucky stiff's abrupt reclusion.

Startup News new | comments | jobs | leaders | submit login

Your bank has a REST API now (wesabe.com) 14 points by dawie 5 hours ago | 3 comments

Facebook: $6 Billion? Nah. [John Battelle] (battellemedia.com) 10 points by aston 4 hours ago | 5 comments

Turns out this enduringly useful text was on the front page when I joined: http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/be-consultant.html

Bonus, also interesting: http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2011/migration.html

I just get "Unknown" with this name. Are they mis-formatting the request or something?

https://web.archive.org/web/20090314171151/http://news.ycomb...

ETA: Nevermind, archive.org just has a bad snapshot or something for that day.

Nice one. Seems the day I joined was just 4 days after the big Tohoku Earthquake. Things were quite strange in Tokyo those days..

First link of mine seemed interesting at the time, but I guess it was one of those YC duds: https://web.archive.org/web/20070405032412/http://news.ycomb...

11. What Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined Behavior #2/3 (llvm.org)

LOL, some things change, some things stay the same

Bitcoin hit $4!

Story with most votes for me was about terrible Google customer service in 2009. Some good discussion that's relevant today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=790800

December 1, 2011. The frontpage was filled with the Carrier IQ thing unfolding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_IQ#Rootkit_discovery_a...

Wow..."AWS Startup challenge!"

https://web.archive.org/web/20081222024222/http://aws.amazon...

Nice. But you need to sanitize the username case-sensitivity.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/16u7pjmpno685u0/Screenshot%202015-...

See what Github looked like on the day you joined http://djyde.github.io/github-cakeday

Funny how the day that I joined so many years ago, people were debating whether or not Google would buy Twitter, and today that debate has been resurrected again so recently.

"Tesla Says It Is Now Profitable, Ships 109 Roadsters In July"

Heh.

Show HN: thefacebook.com

Just joking :)

What a day. Highlights:

- what happened to pownce

- Amazon Dynamo white paper announced

- justin tv got funded

- Microsoft to open source .net framework

Thanks for making this. It appears the search is case sensitive, might be worth fixing.

Neat, exactly the same :P

It's wrong by one day. The page with my first comment didn't exist until the next day and I registered to write that comment.

Timezone issue perhaps?

So I haven't commented or submitted anything

Huh, I joined the day MegaUpload went down. I don't remember, but I expect that those are probably related.

A lot of SOPA stuff was going on which explains why I made the Stop SOPA awareness banner browser plugins!

The day I did join I was stupid and did use my memory for the password.

Latter I did create another account, yes.

Apparently I joined (after lurking for ages!) on or close to the day Steve Jobs passed away.

Thanks for this!

The quality of the front page was either much better back then or that was just a lucky day!

I joined the day Stripe launched. I was a lurker for a long time, though.

This is cool and simple. :)

Obligatory "I joined on the first day" comment, w00t

"browser stats: IE8 passes IE7 (arstechnica.com)"

shudders

This is very nice!

I haven't commented on anything :( :D

"Google reader is dead"

On my front page was: "Is Google Reader next on the chopping block?". Also, JQuery 1.3 was released.

Does anyone else get a 404?

NEIL ARMSTRONG DIED!?

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