Discussions on functional programming--particularly Lisp and Erlang--seem much more prevalent then than now. Which is really too bad: functional programming seems to have gotten significantly more awesome in the recent past.
As a simple indicator, there are only two articles about functional programming on the front page, and they're both fairly shallow, general and not current. They're also related: same author and similar subjects.
I'm sure it's just a function (heh) of HN's growing userbase and more diverse audience. Still, I really would like more functional programming stuff. I even vote on interesting FP articles on new, but it often isn't enough, especially because the new page moves fairly quickly and I don't go there that often.
But yeah, ignoring the relative proportions of subjects, the front page actually seems fairly similar to the current one.
If you want to follow a particular topic in the "new" articles, you could try doing what I do - I follow the RSS feed at http://news.ycombinator.com/rss using Google Reader, and since the search in Google Reader results in the feed and query going in the URL, you can bookmark that search. For instance, you could bookmark http://www.google.com/reader/view/#search/functional//feed%2...
By the way, Reader has many of the same awesome keyboard shortcuts as Gmail - you can use j and k to go up and down in the list, 1/2/3 to switch views, v to open the link, etc. (Try hitting ?)
I remember much more Haskell and probably FP talk on HN some years ago too. Although HN back then was just as prone to getting fixated on a topic for a few days and flooded with stuff about it as it is now.
I follow http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/ , which has much more meaty FP topics than hit HN these days. For example, "Files are to Mounts as Abstract Data Types are to Dependency Injection" and "Video:Duncan Coutts on Cloud Haskell" are two I'm looking forward to digging into.
As a simple indicator, there are only two articles about functional programming on the front page, and they're both fairly shallow, general and not current. They're also related: same author and similar subjects.
I'm sure it's just a function (heh) of HN's growing userbase and more diverse audience. Still, I really would like more functional programming stuff. I even vote on interesting FP articles on new, but it often isn't enough, especially because the new page moves fairly quickly and I don't go there that often.
But yeah, ignoring the relative proportions of subjects, the front page actually seems fairly similar to the current one.