Hacker Monthly #01

the launch of now older tech

2022-06-12

During the pandamic I've been revisiting media I've enjoyed, podcasts and books. One I've gone back to as I've been organizing my digital library is the Hacker Monthly magazine.

Hacker Monthly is the print version of Hacker News, a link sharing site for techies and starup founders.

I used to follow it, but there was just too much, a lot of content I wasn't interested in, and the comments are just annoying.

I liked Hacker Monthly, it was an even more curated list and formatted in a nice digital magazine layout.

It came out in 2010, and in that time there already is a lot of articles that are on obsolete tech, defunct companies, or dead links. I'll be skimming the articles and skipping ones that are more for startup founders or career advice. I've tended to be more interested in things that still hold up, like reasons for certain math functions or ways to use `ssh` for instance.

While the magazine was active, they were available to subscribers to download, but knowing the way of these things I made sure to have my own copies. Sure enough they stopped publication, the site went down and you can't get the magazines you paid for.

I've found only a handful online at the Internet Archive. I have I think all of them, so I'll be uploading what I have. Sure, there will be duplicates of a few issues, and maybe I'm not uploading things right, but I think people will agree to archive things even if poorly, which is better than waiting to archive in the best possible way.

I've uploaded Issue #1 here.

2010 was a wild time in tech. Smart phones and social media were only around for a few years so just starting to be popular with a lot of people, and certainly before all of the negative aspects we now associate with them.

Some of the softer articles are on how to be a better developer, what motivates developers, self-learning.

The sites most likely to be still up are personal sites. They may be inactive, but you can still read their posts from 2015.

I just now realized the titles of the articles are links to the original Hacker News post, so you can look at the comments if you care, and try to go to the original link.

One of the defunct links or companies in this issue was art.sy.

Today's Links

Not something from Hacker Monthly, I just recently watched Jurassic Park again, and am reminded of Jurassic Systems, a site that's the desktop environment of Nedry's computers where he locks them out of the system. Spare no expense, except the contractor for the computer system, and that becomes your downfall.

Hacker Monthly #01