> it took almost 20 years for the underlying infrastructure to get mature enough to get mass consumer adoption.
I don't know if you were on the Internet in 1998. I was. The Web was useful, mature, and had tens of millions of paying customers in 1998. In contrast, all the people I have known to use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies only do it for speculation.
You bring up PayPal and list eBay as a "defunct also-ran." The only reason people started using PayPal was to shop on eBay, and the only way PayPal got anyone to start using them for payments was to bribe people with $20 referral bonuses, which they could only do due to their VC firehose of money, and a huge spambot campaign where they pestered eBay merchants with messages along the lines of "I'd like to bid, but I can only do PayPal." (see The PayPal Wars)
PayPal is a great historical lesson in explaining why BitCoin and other libertarian hash chain schemes will fail as a currency, because PayPal was founded on the same deluded libertarian fantasy:
"“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before,” Thiel predicted. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means because if they try the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”"
Bitcoin is for speculation. That's its use-case: it's fundamentally a financial system. It's made a few million people rich and several more million people poor, and started several thousand businesses. That's not a bad track record for something 9 years old; it beats out YCombinator (whose use-case is also "making people rich"), which is almost 14.
I've been on the web since 1994. I certainly found it useful in 1998, but the things it was useful for included:
1.) Looking up Geocities pages for my favorite bands.
2.) Reading rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan.
3.) Playing DragonRealms, an early MMORPG.
4.) Instant-messaging my friends.
5.) Earning money through AllAdvantage.com. Think I made about $40 from them off referral fees.
6.) Looking up information for school papers.
7.) Amusing myself with the HampsterDance.
Streaming video existed but was far too slow and glitchy to be worth watching. Amazon.com existed, but my parents refused to buy anything online. My sister was an avid user of Kozmo.com when she went to college, but then they went bankrupt a year later. MapQuest existed, but took too long to load and still required that you print out directions, since you couldn't exactly bring a computer in the car.
By contrast, I've spent over $5K at about 2 dozen different AirBnBs in the last 5 years (and stayed at a hotel...erm, twice, maybe?). I just booked a haircut online, after reading the Yelp reviews and looking up the location on Google Maps. I spent 15 minutes typing up this comment on Hacker News, which I guess is the spiritual successor to Usenet. I don't own a TV, but I watch a bunch of YouTube and my wife's an avid Netflix user. We get almost all our packages delivered via Amazon.
In terms of how much the Internet changed behavior, a lot more happened in the 10 years between 1999-2009 than the 10 years between 1989-1999, and arguably even more happened between 2009-2018 than 1999-2009.
> Xerox parc did in fact release nothing to the general public iirc.
Right, just because you haven't bothered to look it up, it doesn't exist. Here are just the Xerox PARC work that was commercialized by Xerox I can think of off the top of my head: Ethernet, XNS, Interpress, the Star and D-series workstations, Mesa, Smalltalk, Cedar.
I would strongly disagree on the Bill Gates part. The early Microsoft compilers (yes, Microsoft started out as a compiler company) were by all accounts not that great. The really successful and technically impressive Microsoft projects have always been acquisitions. The technically best (or the only decent, depending on who you talk to) Microsoft product is SQL Server, which started out as a Sybase fork.
As I understand it, Microsoft's success is largely because they poached an operating system contract. Basically the CEO of their competition was on a two-week vacation and there was no way to get in contact with him. So the contract went to Microsoft by default. Then Microsoft purchased an existing operating system and hacked it for their client. And the rest is history.
Original interpreter Gates wrote was pretty hard. Imagine flipping switches to enter a program to do entire BASIC interpreter. You are literally entering machine code, not even Assembly. In those days doing any compiler or interpreter was a monumental amount of work and there was a reason Gates was able to sale his work to establish fairly profitable company standing on just one product: BASIC interpreter. He is not in this list for his later successes as businessman or leader but the fact he was able to code this almost single handedly.
He wrote his interpreter on a larger machine (PDP-11 I think), and tested it on an emulator they wrote. When they got to MITS to show off their code that was the first time it ever ran on real hardware.
It was a PDP-10 at Harvard, and it was not just Gates, it was Gates and Paul Allen working on it together. Another interesting thing is that the PDP-10 was being paid for by Department of Defense grants, and when an auditor discovered how much computer time Gates and Allen (who was not even affiliated with Harvard) had used up, there was a disciplinary hearing, after which Gates left Harvard.[1] In his "Open Letter to Hobbyists"[2] Gates claims they used $40,000 worth of computer time. So basically Microsoft started with $40,000 stolen from the government.
BillG claims Paul did most of the emulator work and he worked on the interpreter core. With the floating point routines by Monte Davidoff who they hired. It was a team effort of course, but BillG was adamant to take credit for the interpreter specifically.
From the source code itself:
PAUL ALLEN WROTE THE NON-RUNTIME STUFF.
BILL GATES WROTE THE RUNTIME STUFF.
MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE.
People took his code and re-distributed en-mass. BASIC paid the Microsoft bills for almost 4 years. Are you saying people stole and/or paid for unusable code?
Buggy, lame code still let you do something with your shiny new computing device. Early adopters will put up with anything. Which Gates understood very well. It was about timing, not quality.
> After 4 or 5 years of doing this you'll maybe know enough about how "everthing works" and what books says how to do what, or what company did what in what way, or the "state of the art", at that time you can start doing original contributions in order to not fall back.
For me personally, 5 years was the point at which you start to gain confidence, but still don't realize how much you really don't know. I see that in a lot of people too. Getting my CS degree, I was told I knew a lot more than my peers (and apparently more than some of the grad students...), and did better than most, but it wasn't really until a decade into my career that I would say I really started to "get it." That is after reading dozens and dozens of books, many hundreds of research papers, meetups, conferences (and later watching/listening through whole playlists of conference talks). You are always going to be an impostor somewhere, because there are always things you don't know. The best thing you can do is stop pretending that you know more than you do.
It really depends on the person. Also working on the exact same field and industry for 5 years is way different to getting a degree. Also note I said you could start making original contributions, not that they'll be meaningful or groundbreaking...
You are being disingenuously pedantic by making a distinction between synonymous words. From the linked document:
"Уже с конца сентября ЦК партии большевиков решил мобилизовать все силы партии для организации успешного восстания. В этих целях ЦК решил организовать Военно-революционный комитет в Питере"
Which translates to:
"From the end of September, the central committee of the bolshevik party decided to mobilize all party forces for the organization of a successful uprising. To these ends, the central committee decided to organize a Military-revolutionary committee in St. Petersburg"
Also note the reference to the counter-revolutionary plot. For Stalin, the October coup was clearly the continuation of the February revolution.
No, I don't. You need to understand that whole process, started in February 1917, was named "Russian revolution", while October episode was just part of it. They were separated in to two "revolutions" much later.
Did you even bother to read the article you linked to? The citations make it quite clear that the terms were synonymous, and it was multiple groups (not just the Bolsheviks) who referred to the October Bolshevik takeover as a revolution.
I have three laptops, two run OpenBSD, the other one Debian stable. Not sure how well battery utilization compares (don't need battery for more than an hour usually). Both work fine, and from a user-space perspective are very similar (esp. if you automate configuration and dotfiles). OpenBSD is about a magnitude less work to configure, especially if you have a non-trivial network setup (and some things, like IPv6 LLA aliases in /etc/hosts, Debian stable does not even support). If you are reliant on garbage like NetworkManager and Gnome/KDE auto-mounting the story is probably different, but that is just a good opportunity to learn better ways of working on Unix.
There is also GNU Shepherd[1] on GuixSD[2], a declarative init system, without systemd's million-plus lines of shitty code[3] and massive scope creep into everything that you can (but probably don't need or want to) do on a computer.
> I admit it's very counterintuitive or almost subversive these days to suggest that internet points be kept secret.
Media popularity rankings are toxic for everyone but distribution middlemen and advertisers. They turn what should be heterogeneous markets for content producers and their audiences in many different niches (geographic area, interests, subcultures, etc), into a global winner-take-all popularity race in a single market (owned by the distribution middlemen, like iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, etc). The kind of market where every seller is ranked by a single metric and only the top few are rewarded makes sense for things like professional sports, but very little else.
Which of the two groups of people are benefitting from Hacker News showing metrics? Stories show points and total number of comments. Anyone can see anyone’s total karma. And you personally can see your comment karma.
YouTube and and other social media would still get advertising and such without public metrics since you could give private access to them when trying to make deals.
So overall I don’t see how either groups of people mentioned are benefitting much from HN showing metrics.
> Which of the two groups of people are benefitting from Hacker News showing metrics?
That is a bit of a nonsense question. Neither benefit, because there is no advertising on HN, and HN is not a media distribution business. HN is an online forum, and the original point of post ratings on forums was crowdsourced moderation. The point of online forum moderation is to remove spam, trolling, kooks, and other things that waste your reading time. So moderation is a strictly negative system. Using post ratings for online reputation is what turns it into a positive system.
IMO online reputation based on upvotes is a game with no winners, only losers. Problems include gamification and addiction, groupthink, privacy risks (it is very easy to correlate bits of information to deanonymize pseudonyms, the persistent use of which the point system encourages). What's the benefit? It is much more valuable to focus on the moderation aspects. The problem with online communities today is keeping out spam, trolls, kooks, idiots, and other bad actors. Modding down inane and ignorant postings so that they don't waste people's time is much more valuable in keeping forums interesting and relevant than another 10 upvotes. "Harmless" but useless and time-wasting posts will drive participants away and erode the community. That is the one of the lessons of Eternal September.
I don't know if you were on the Internet in 1998. I was. The Web was useful, mature, and had tens of millions of paying customers in 1998. In contrast, all the people I have known to use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies only do it for speculation.
You bring up PayPal and list eBay as a "defunct also-ran." The only reason people started using PayPal was to shop on eBay, and the only way PayPal got anyone to start using them for payments was to bribe people with $20 referral bonuses, which they could only do due to their VC firehose of money, and a huge spambot campaign where they pestered eBay merchants with messages along the lines of "I'd like to bid, but I can only do PayPal." (see The PayPal Wars)
PayPal is a great historical lesson in explaining why BitCoin and other libertarian hash chain schemes will fail as a currency, because PayPal was founded on the same deluded libertarian fantasy:
"“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before,” Thiel predicted. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means because if they try the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”"
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/who-killed-payp...
The real value of PayPal turned out to be fraud prevention and consumer protection, something that hash chain schemes lack by design.