I used to love the CandyBar app by Panic. It was fun to customize my Mac and people shared such amazing icons and themes. Miss those days.

I know that HN is basically an SV FAANG echo chamber, so when I read a question like this I assume it’s asked from that standpoint. This world where someone graduates from Waterloo, comes to SV and gets a job immediately making six figures with a seven figure stock future when the company makes it. The tech world is so much bigger than that. I’ve been in tech since the mid 90s. I bring home a base salary of 190K and get a nice COL every year and a decent bonus if the company does well. I’ve been at this company 21 years. A nice, simple, life of 40hr work weeks, working from home, but will try to go in every Wednesday to see the rest of the team. This to me is the real world of tech, and I’m among a few hundred of devs like me in Atlanta just enjoying our Staff Software jobs. So when I hear about devs hating that they no longer get overpaid I just have to laugh. I think the industry will be better if we get back to people doing it for the love of the craft instead of getting that big paycheck to brag about. A lot of my neighbors are PHDs working at the CDC, DOE or FDA. They aren’t enjoying life at the moment. There is not magical degree/job. Find something you enjoy instead of being so caught up in the money. Glad I am a decade or less away from retirement, as the past decade of over privileged devs has made this profession a joke.

Climate change wasn't always such a political topic. Both sides would agree on climate changing over a period of time. Getting hotter, getting cooler. We knew we were in a time of it getting hotter. It's when scientists started pointing out that we were getting hotter faster than what is reflected in the historical record and the studies were showing that it was caused by man. This wasn't news that was taken well by the right. First, you have the religious people, which make up a huge portion of conservatives. They state that only a higher being can affect climate, man can't. Then you had the capitalists, as what was being said is that industry is causing a majority of the CO2 emissions, and we should do something about that with regulations. If there's one thing the right will not tolerate it's policing business. You see the same thing with illegal immigration. The right want to combat it, but if you say we should penalize and fine/jail the owners of businesses that use all the illegal immigrants for cheap labor, they'll say no. Instead we should build walls and have people patrolling the border, can't mess with business. So, we went from both sides knowing it was an issue to one side trying to do stuff about it, and the other side telling people it's a lie and spreading misinformation.

Not so much an answer to your question, as the sites are still around, more than what made the sites enjoyable is gone.

OSNews - while Thom does well, there’s just not as much great content anymore, nor discussions.

Reddit/Slashdot - I think so many of these discussion sites died once Trump and MAGA came around, a bit of it started back with the Tea Party crazies too. So many discussions get overtaken by crazy political posts.

DeviantArt - I used to enjoy that site, now it’s just filled with AI crap.

I used to subscribe to a magazine called Computer Arts. They had a section where they showcased sites with amazing design and UX, lots of Flash fun. That died with Flash and every site being designed around a layout that allows the most ads that can be placed on it.

Long form content sites died too, or are hidden behind paywalls. Surfing the web just isn’t enjoyable anymore.

I do, but I worked my way up to it over the past 30 years. I went to University back in 1989 in Munich, but was only there for a year and a half. My father was in the military and was deployed to the Desert Storm war so my mother had me come home. I did some night school classes while working during the day, but never did end up getting a degree. In ‘96 I went to a state sponsored training program started to train people in mainframe programming for the upcoming Y2K work. So I started as an assembler programmer on an IBM OS/360 system and eventually moved to COBOL. I started off at $26K living in Atlanta, GA. Still live here 28 years later, still a developer, current title was Analytics Architect, but company recently did title updates to match the industry, so I am now a senior staff engineer. I make a little over 200k base and get a COL adjustment and 10-15% bonus every year. I’ve been at my current company 20 years, currently enjoying a month long sabbatical to celebrate that. My area of Atlanta isn’t too HCOL, I live in the city of Decatur area. I’ve avoided leaving the perimeter and moving to the suburbs, trying to stay in the more democratic area away from the white flight. Since I‘be been at my job so long my work life balance is great. I do my 40hr weeks, 4 days at home, 1 in the office. I don’t work late or on weekends. I could have probably been making quite a bit more by now if I’d job hopped, but I like my job and my salary is more than enough to support me and my wife.

I got one of these when I backed them on Kickstarter. It was a fun build and works well. I gave it to one of my neighbors' kids since I didn't really see myself using it all that much, and he enjoys it.

I have a System 76 Pangolin 15" Laptop (4.75 GHz AMD Ryzen 7, 32GB RAM)

About the only complaint I have is the keyboard, which has a numerical pad on it, so it takes up a lot of space for something I never use. I tried out Pop_OS which it comes pre-loaded with and ended up liking it so I kept it. Haven't run into any issues. Sound, wi-fi, web cam, etc., all work perfectly.

A contractor placed a web service call in the onPaint() method of a .NET Windows Forms application. This blocked the paint from happening until the service call finished, causing the app to just be a blank white window.