Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

Working on a physical and digital archive of all American vintage print advertising. I've built the archival and database software on Lucee & MySQL to store images and automate, and I use OpenAI to analyze images and extra meta data. All of the full page ads are pushed to https://adretro.com.

I've gotten the process to fully catalog all of the advertisements in a magazine (about 150 on average) down from over a week to a few hours. I should be able to get through the material within my lifetime now :)

It's funny...I absolutely despise being advertised to, yet I find vintage ads fascinating. I don't know what that says about me.

I feel the same about a lot graffiti; if it's recent, it's an eyesore, but old graffiti can be extremely interesting. I guess both domains expose some elements of the zeitgeist seldom explored in other mediums. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nice site, by the way!

Thank you!

Yeah, there is a subtext to the advertising that changes over time that is very interesting. For example, early appliance ads are about saving household labor to spend time with the kids, later appliance become more about status and the allure of technology.

You should organize it both by industry as well as by brand and by year. For instance, if I want to look up vintage Rolex ads from the 1960s I could do that.

Okay thanks for the feedback!

Incidentally, I have come across few vintage ads containing or targeted to black people explicitly. Most of the vintage publications I come across are Life, Saturday Evening Post, and Look. I am on the lookout for regional and local publications which may be different, but they're hard to find because they were not really circulated enough to have survived. But there are so many publications I randomly find it's sometimes daunting how much I feel I'm missing out finding!

A category for politically incorrect ads would be cool.

Good idea! There are certainly some ads where I think "no way that would fly today." Though its not necessarily being PC or not (because a lot of the ads would be considered offensive today). It more like "What were they thinking, this ad makes no sense"

I think it's more about how there's a lot more advertising now than in the past; and just how generally intrusive advertising has become overall.

Think about a newspaper / magazine: The ads didn't suddenly block the article, move the page around, or phone home to the advertiser. Likewise, the ads wouldn't slow the magazine down, flash, or make noise.

Those elements certainly amplify the awfulness, but I am old enough that I remember reading magazines, and I despised the ads there was well. I'm trying to read this OMNI article about colonizing Mars, and this stupid full-page ad for calculator wristwatches is getting in my way. *shakes fist*

I'm sure glad that the inline ads model never caught on in novels.