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> 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.”"

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

[1] This is documented by Noam Cohen in The Know-It Alls. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

This is why antitrust legislation and enforcement is so important.

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.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/ [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/guix.html [3] https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/general-discu...

> Electron apps... there is no way to automatically build Electron apps for any of the BSDs.

This is one of many reasons not to use Electron. Claims of Electron portability are a sham.

> 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.

> unfortunately for usenet now we have a problem: fast majority of servers are down... In the past ANY ISP, universities, many companies offer nntp server, now we have only very, very few...

There are fewer, but not exactly "very, very few": http://top1000.anthologeek.net/

Because Usenet is fully distributed, the high number of site-local servers in the past was in large part about reducing bandwidth costs (having a Usenet server on your network is a lot like having a caching proxy, but even more effective).

Running your own text groups Usenet server has also never been cheaper. Most small Usenet server operators will be happy to peer with you, as long as you have a static IP.

The market for binary newsgroup providers is also healthy, but that is not about discussions anymore.

Recently started using RSS2email. Combined with a decent email client (ie not webmail crap like Gmail) it is awesome. The last time I was reading so many blogs and enjoying it was in the "classic" Opera browser circa 2010. Don't discount Usenet either. I know a couple of people who started using Usenet text groups again, and I am planning on joining them. I have come to the conclusion that it will be a better investment of time, because Usenet is archived and accessible. I regularly look up things from the 1990s and 1980s on Google Usenet search. Forums, websites, and blogs just disappear. Hopefully the same thing will not happen to Hacker News, but there is no guarantee.

How do you organize the s-expressions? Interlisp offered what you describe: structured storage, with "in-place" structured editing, for code and data. The unit of organization was still the file; you just had structured files (which BTW was the norm in most operating systems other than Unix). A hierarchical file system is a tree anyway (add symbolic links, and you have a graph). A lot of data storage layouts use it exactly as a data structure. Maildir is an example.