Offtopic: I grew up in a tiny post-soviet third world country. Aside from the usual daily struggles, one lesser known aspect of that life is that we did not have access to primary sources of information or the people who invented the things we were using.
We only had a book in my native language on Pascal. I had heard of C from a magazine that had a CD with a C compiler on it, and I walked into a library wanting to learn C but all they had was a dusty book on COBOL in Russian. Later I bought a book on x86 assembly, also in Russian, because that's all I could find, and it just felt like I'm living inside a leaky bucket whereas I was hungry for the firehose of knowledge.
When we got dial-up Internet, I did not sleep for days. The floodgates were open. I had access to tons of information online, in original English, from primary sources. People I've only had heard about, like Torvalds, would just share information directly on the Internet, like it's another Tuesday. To me it felt like I went to Disneyland and I was meeting all my heroes. You can just... learn about any topic and see the people who invented those topics. You could even send them messages.
25 years later, I still feel like that kid sometimes. I'm thankful for HN. Alan Kay replied to me once, and it made my year! Alan M-Fing Kay. I met rms once in the flesh and could not believe my eyes. I regularly see messages from Walter Bright on HN like he's a real human being and I have to remind myself that yes, he's alive, real and I exist in the same world as him and can actually interact.
I and kids around the world these days are lucky to not be stuck in a world where you cannot learn more than they let you.
I don't mind the offtopic if it's a nice story like that.
I really hope we'll find a way to give the Internet back at least a part of this magic. It makes me sad to see that young people today only know the net as the nightmarish distortion of what it was once promised to be.
We only had a book in my native language on Pascal. I had heard of C from a magazine that had a CD with a C compiler on it, and I walked into a library wanting to learn C but all they had was a dusty book on COBOL in Russian. Later I bought a book on x86 assembly, also in Russian, because that's all I could find, and it just felt like I'm living inside a leaky bucket whereas I was hungry for the firehose of knowledge.
When we got dial-up Internet, I did not sleep for days. The floodgates were open. I had access to tons of information online, in original English, from primary sources. People I've only had heard about, like Torvalds, would just share information directly on the Internet, like it's another Tuesday. To me it felt like I went to Disneyland and I was meeting all my heroes. You can just... learn about any topic and see the people who invented those topics. You could even send them messages.
25 years later, I still feel like that kid sometimes. I'm thankful for HN. Alan Kay replied to me once, and it made my year! Alan M-Fing Kay. I met rms once in the flesh and could not believe my eyes. I regularly see messages from Walter Bright on HN like he's a real human being and I have to remind myself that yes, he's alive, real and I exist in the same world as him and can actually interact.
I and kids around the world these days are lucky to not be stuck in a world where you cannot learn more than they let you.