fendmark

There were a number of smaller rental shops in the Chicago area that carried them. Family Video comes to mind. I don't believe the Blockbusters by us ever had them.

I still have my laserdisc player, they are becoming a harder to find item for reasonable prices for sure.

I started collecting Laserdiscs a few years ago after having grown up with them as a kid in the 90s (we only rented them, because new laserdiscs were expensive!) - With the inflated cost of used Vinyl these days, it's been fun collecting Laserdiscs of my favorite movies for their artwork and form factor to display alongside my record collection at a fraction of the cost of Vinyl. Also it's a weird hobby that I find hilarious to tell people and see their reaction. Most people don't even know or remember what a laserdisc is/was. Anyone else love Seinfeld's Laserdisc joke on the last episode of Curb? Who says Laserdiscs aren't cool?

When I saw Foursquare transition from a B2C to a B2B focused company that is when I finally deleted the Swarm and Fourquare Apps. I still don't fully understand their decision to split Foursquare into 2 apps, but what I did/do understand is that there is alot of money to be made in location data. You just hope that the people in these businesses are ethical people.

It would be amazing to be able to see what Grocery delivery service has the earliest delivery times open in your area, if it is even possible

We had a health scare that led us to accelerate our timeline (we had always planned to have kids). My wife and I had our first kid at 30, second at 33. The trend these days is definitely to wait till much later, but I can say that I look forward to having the kids fully grown and on their own when I am in my early 50's as opposed to my 60's.

That said as my Dad always said, there is no convenient time to have kids, which couldn't be more true.

Having kids is an amazing journey, but not for everyone. I totally respect people who choose not to have kids. With kids, at different times you will think it is the best and worst decision you've ever made. Lots of highs and lows. But ultimately it is very gratifying and helps you to better see the world beyond yourself.

Tripod pre-Lycos was an amazing learning space for me in the mid nineties. Domains and hosting were significantly more expensive than they are now (especially for a freshman in high school) and Tripod was an amazing lifeline. Little did I know that my time spent building fan sites for punk rock bands more than 20 years ago would end up having such a significant impact on my career even today.

That said, I'm ashamed of all the sites that I built with Image Maps and Frames and glorious tables!

It really is sad that the rise of the social media has meant that so many people will not have the opportunity to have this type of experience in learning front end development from the ground up.

I have a TiVo HD with a lifetime subscription as well and they are going to have to pry it from my cold dead hands. There is nothing better I've found out there for skipping commercials. That said TiVo really needs to evolve their business, I'd love to see them to shift to a cloud based DVR that works with FireTV, Chromecast etc.. I highly doubt I'll ever buy another TiVo DVR as they currently are. Every year we use it less as streaming becomes a better option.

Police Quest was huge for me. As a kid it was just risque and free form enough to capture my imagination. I always loved knocking over the motorcycles out in front of the biker bar. I re-bought the Police Quest series a few years back and this genre of games definitely didn't age very well, but still holds a place in my heart. Last time Sierra came up on HN, someone recommended the Sierra chapter in Steven Levy's "Hackers", definitely worth the read. All Sierra Games had a unique aesthetic and you could just tell that the people behind the games loved what they did for a living and had an amazing combination of tech and design skills.

Not to be overly contrarian but it does seem that we are getting close to the peak for the craft beer industry.

Smuttynose Brewery going up for auction is a great example of this. https://www.pressherald.com/2018/01/18/smuttynose-brewing-in...

Many areas are getting over-saturated with microbreweries and there eventually won't be enough demand to sustain them.

In retail, $10+ average price for a six pack, the even more offensive 4 pack of beer for the same price or more.

It's great to see this growth engine for jobs, and I personally love the amount of variety and innovation we are seeing in craft beer, I just wonder how long it will last until people are onto the next trend or until the industry gets so greedy that they kill the golden goose.

Publishers are buying traffic that is too good to be true from dubious networks and then it is being laundered through the programmatic ad tech machine at scale.

Brands looking to build awareness are buying access to this fraudulent traffic.

Advertising agencies, ad tech companies, and publishers more times than not are incentivized to look the other way and not investigate what is going on too closely as long as it is profitable.

Digital display advertising has long been considered a channel of questionable effectiveness. But the current state of programmatic advertising has made things much worse and will ultimately lead to Advertisers pulling billions of dollars out of this space unless there are significant improvements in getting more transparency into their advertising investments.

This is absolutely part of the story as well. Anyone subscribe to a Usenet newsgroup lately?

RSS was strategically killed by Google, Facebook, and Twitter and the rest of the web followed. RSS was basically the open source TiVo of content distribution.

Content not wrapped in ads, isn't good for business. Period.

The creativity unleashed by hackers with unfettered access to Twitter's RSS payload was legendary.

I loved RSS. I still do. I still use Shaun Inman's Fever RSS every day. It is really unfortunate that he has discontinued it, the guy is an artist at the highest level, but I get it.

RSS would be all but dead today if it wasn't for Wordpress's universal support of it. Major props to Matt Mullenweg and everything he stands for.

It should have become the backbone of the web and Dave Winer and Aaron Swartz more celebrated for it.

Instead it is just a footnote. A story of a time before everything digital was wrapped in glorious, money making ads and companies discovered charging for API calls as a business model.

Loved Levy's book on Google, I'll definitely be picking this one up. Thanks for the reco

Such a great article. I absolutely loved all the original Sierra games. There was something magical about them and this is the best explanation of this that I've ever seen. I was 8-9 when I started playing the first Police Quest, such a great game. I went back and bought the remake on Gog a few years back and it just didn't have the same play ability and uniqueness. I remember I always loved knocking over all the motorcycles outside the bar.

Agreed. It will be very interesting to see if this deal actually happens. Only time will tell whether the leak was very clever or completely idiotic. The whole world now knows what Beats is "worth" and that Apple is interested in them. I would love to know how much Beats sunk into the development of their flailing music streaming product that they are now trying to unload. If anyone can make it work it is Apple, but regardless something smells fishy. It seems like leaks like this happen when deals are on the rocks, to try to find a lifeboat in the form of another offer, only time will tell

The most interesting assertion in this video is that the facebook algorithm sends out user updates to a sample of their fans/subscribers and that the engagement performance within that sample is a key determining factor as to whether an update is shared more broadly in news feeds.

If that is in fact the case and purchasing facebook ads indirectly increases the amount of fake/automated likes included within that sample (thereby negatively impacting the overall engagement metrics on your posts) then the purchase of facebook advertising has the side effect of diminishing your ability to organically drive traffic and engagement.

To put it another way. This would be like if buying Google Adwords advertising not only got you fake/automated traffic, but also simultaneously decreased your organic, unpaid search rankings.

Interesting

Yeah, Facebook's robots.txt file white-lists specific search engines and offer an option to get whitelisted ,then there is a wildcard disallow for everyone else.

Of course nefarious scrapers can ignore the robots.txt file or even spoof google or bingbot, but it least it sets a precedent and a policy that they can take further action on if needed.

Frank Lloyd Wright is definitely a fascinating figure. I live in Oak Park, IL just a few blocks away from his home and studio; highly recommend checking it out if you are ever in Chicago.

I also vouch for Fever. Someone on HN recommended Fever to me when Bloglines initially bit the dust a couple years ago and it meets every need I've wanted from an RSS reader and more. The genius of it's design is that Fever gets more useful the more RSS feeds you subscribe to, which initially seems counter-intuitive, but is brilliant.

I am a Cheddar user with a free account and have to say that it really is a well designed, intuitive app.

Personally, while I really like Cheddar I do not feel that it is a service that I would ever pay a recurring fee for.

I am a pinboard, fever rss, and instapaper user and feel that all of these nominal one time investments were more than worth supporting these projects.

I could see paying a one time $30-$50 fee for Cheddar

It will definitely be interesting to see what happens.

All good points, iamben.

I think the most obnoxious thing about this post (and I saw a Wikimedia employee point this out in the comments as well) is that it completely ignores the fact that Wikipedia is built on the MediaWiki platform and doesn't even attempt to address how their proposal could be realistically implemented from a development standpoint in coordination with the Wikimedia Engineering team and the community's ongoing product roadmap.

Maybe this is being a tad catty, and standing in the way of innovation in some respects but design led initiatives that don't take a close look at the world from other discipline's perspectives are usually doomed.

Having all of these mirrors of their domain indexed certainly isn't helping W3schools from an SEO perspective.

It is highly unlikely that this was done intentionally, just wildcard subdomains set as many have already said.

Read the last few comments on the actual post for good laugh.

Payment Processing.

Sad to hear this. Would have liked to see them continue the show without the Digg moniker and maybe change the format a bit. Diggnation was basically Wayne's World for the tech set and I will definitely miss it. Any suggestions on similar shows that are as good or better that I should watch instead?

I am also a big fan of Fever. I actually use the Sparks feature a lot. It has completely changed how I use RSS, from attempting to read all my feeds to just reading what is "hot." The key is finding RSS feeds of sites that are link aggregators on topics of interest to you. The Hacker News RSS feed is actually a classic example of a great site to add as a spark in Fever.

Saying that you're a victim of "SEO" is about as accurate as saying you are a victim of "Web Development."

I agree with skorgu, jfb and bengross. Personally I have used free bookmarking tools, RSS readers, blogging tools & "free hosting" for years, only to see them go belly up or the founders leave and the product is left to decay or suffer years of unnecessary feature additions.

It gets really old (and time consuming for those who don't have time to burn)

I recently bought Fever for my RSS reader and Pinboard for bookmarking both which I love (and are worth every cent)

Personally I plan on avoiding free SaaS based services in favor of paid or open source self hosted solutions whenever possible.

Thanks for this recommendation. As a Bloglines user for years who has tried and failed a few times to like Google Reader, Fever seems to be exactly what I am looking for. It took some time to get everything up and running on my server and configured, but is a solid application and agree it is more than worth a one time $30 fee.

Particularly interesting is its concept of Sparks (a.k.a. RSS feeds with a high volume of posts that you wouldn't subscribe to normally.) Fever uses them to help "feed the fire" and surface the most relevant/interesting content from the publications you do subscribe to.

Also works very well on the iphone. These are just first impressions but so far I'm pretty impressed.