Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
4people
2013–2024years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- George Gilder: When Bandwidth Is Free -- Lead to my idea of the BitGrid
https://web.archive.org/web/20000620164302/https://www.wired...
Alaskan Alpine Club -- Offbeat, but interesting. (I can't find the reference, CURSE YOU GOOGLE! but somewhere in this rabbit hole, I found a profound essay that talked about human conversation as an error correcting mechanism, and it changed how I talk with others forever)
https://billstclair.com/doug/alaskanalpineclub.com/index.htm...
Travels with Samantha by Philip Greenspun - showed me storytelling on the web in a way I had never seen it before
- Something that captivated my imagination back in 1993 was the blog -- before there was a word for it -- called Travels with Samantha by Philip Greenspun.
The site is still online, with the original content from the 1990s: https://philip.greenspun.com/samantha/
This "travel photography" journal of one man changed my life in several ways.[1] It inspired me to purchase a camera. To go travel. To not just take photos, but to try and thread them into a story of some sort. Even if it's just a paragraph per image, have some text to describe the experience. Not just for the benefit of other people, but also to reflect on what I had seen.
It's really hard to put into words how amazing this photography site was for me. I was a teenager in 1993, and that was an era where photography online was basically nonexistent. This guy scanned his negatives in at a stupid high resolution (at the time), a level of quality I had never seen coming out of a PC monitor before, and not for some years afterwards either.
But it had a story too! A simple story of going on a trip, meeting people, and describing their life. I realised that travel wasn't about some mythical "adventure" like on a book, but just about going elsewhere and getting to immerse oneself in the place and its people.
Since then I've made an effort to strike up conversations with random people on my own travels, and it has always been rewarding to take a peek into their lives.
[1] Even in a non-photography-related way: I learned SQL because his site was one of the early database-driven sites, and I read through his tutorial explaining how he did it: https://philip.greenspun.com/sql/
- Travels with Samantha was probably one of the earliest things you really wanted to read on the Web: https://philip.greenspun.com/samantha/ That was in the days when you could have a personal homepage with "the" interesting stuff on the Web worth going to.
- Your #1 is most of the explanation; Phil is a net.personality from way back ("Travels with Samantha", 1994), as well as a pithy writer of several perennial pieces of HN text (like: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science).
