Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647462

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Notwithstanding anything about LLM tools being able to do GUIs any way you want in 2026, I'd really consider just about anything else at this point. JavaFX, React Native, Electron, Flutter, etc.

I didn't really know what I was doing (I was 17), but it was an awesome unpaid summer internship. There were two parts of the search engine - a crawler and the search engine. Both were written in Perl.

Lightning Beneath the Sea: The Race to Wire the World and the Dawn of the Information Age by James M. Tabor (Author)

About this telegraph cable, and all of the different attempts to lay it on the sea floor.

I also recommend The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (1998) if you want to learn more about telegraphs.

It's also fun just to look at the article titles to see what the zeitgeist of the era was for a given time period.

I built in 1996 as an internship, it all ran as some perl scripts, and I had no idea what I was doing, of course, I was 17. I just thought it was clever to use the links between pages as a signal to the search engine. I'd never heard of citation analysis.

EDIT: It did let me in, but I don't know why it took so long.

I've worked on teams where there's been one person on rotation every sprint to catch and field issues like these, so taking that job and giving it to an AI agent seems like a reasonable approach.

I think I'd be most concerned about having a separate development process outside of the main issue queue, where agents aren't necessarily integrated into the main workstream.

For the most part, everyone used some kind of SDK that translated WSDL (Web Services Description Language) specifications to their chosen language.

So you could define almost any function - like PostBlog(Blog blog), and then publish it as a WSDL interface to be consumed by a client. We could have a Java server, with a C# client, and it more or less just worked.

We used it with things like signatures, so the data in the message wasn't tampered with.

Why did it stop getting popular? It probably really started to fall out of favor when Java/C# stopped being some of the more popular programming languages for web development, and PHP and Ruby got a lot more momentum.

The idea was that REST/JSON interfaces would be easier to understand, as we would have a hypermedia interface. There was sort of an attempt to make a RESTy interface work with XML, called WebDAV, that Microsoft Office supported for a while, but it was pretty hard to work with.

I've got some old SOAP code from 2001 here at the bottom of this article:

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2160672/build-portals-with...

The idea behind it was that Behavior-Driven Development might be a great idea, but Gherkin was a pain to work with. LLMs bridge that gap now:

https://www.jefflinwood.com/2025/zapcircle-bdd-2025/

I saw "To Fly!" for the first time at the Smithsonian Air and Space Dulles location (Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center) on their IMAX screen two years ago. Definitely a film of its moment, and I can see how that influenced future science film documentaries.

My dad worked for Spitz doing Omnimax installations and planetariums, but I don't know any of the details. I would assume this was probably the late 70s or early 80s.

I worked on their e-commerce store, you could configure and buy and ship one from the web site in 1999-2000.

The prices were still really high.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42302319

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

As a vendor, I (well, my company) had to pay for meals at SGI, I have no idea if the employees got free meals.

I don't think the Oracle headquarters change makes a huge difference, but I did figure Twitter would move to Austin, and that hasn't happened yet.

One of the neatest things is that they let us (Trilogy/pcOrder) put together a sand volleyball team to compete in their company intramurals.

Their cafeteria was also top notch.