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Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

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Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#271

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

user_7832 wrote: post #187
atlasunshrugged wrote: post #68

In my impression it really accelerated after the '08 financial crisis (+- a few years for all the people who left wall street and went to HBS) after being an ibanker was no longer cool or well paid and the people who would have gone there decided to come to Silicon Valley. That's a huge mass of people who are grinders who just want to make money and quick and have a totally different mindset than the people who wante…

Slightly off-topic (but related to your comment) - do you know of any company or organization that's truly for public welfare? Or, any VC that cares more about society than a super-high rate of return where such a society-focused company can be launched/funded?

MITRE maybe? They're a US government-supported non-profit R&D company.

Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#272

Post by Damogran6 »

There was a time where each month showed something new…ICQ, Pointcast, CuSeeMe…there was lots of new things to play with. Now, there’s still amazing new things, they’re just harder to pull out (I can now use AI to make a title in a video follow my head around. That’s pretty amazing)

There’s also 4 Star Trek pipelines, 5 Marvel pipelines, 3 Star Wars Pipelines and all movies of a certain range have been completely wrapped up in rental fees.

More and more people are all doing more and more at the same time, and very little of it is really new.

Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#273

Post by bfung »

> More tech is no longer necessarily better.

Welcome to the next phase of a technologists career.

Why do we build so many things if no one’s going to use it. Or if no one knows how to use it?

^^^ coding for the sake of code, for the “flow state” high, is partly why we have a lot of useless software.

When we build these software tools and the tools are useful to build other stuff - application of these technologies is actually really fun!

Until we exhaust that to a good point, more code is t going to do much.

Opinions my own and mine alone :)

Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#274

Post by Damogran6 »

pessimizer wrote: post #242
koonsolo wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you crazy? I'm from '79, so probably a bit younger than you. We can now buy an Arduino board for the price of a computer game, and make a flying drone. Even with a small camera or some sensors if you want. Or create some small robots with all the motors and sensors that you want, custom 3d printed. My son is now 13 and doing STEM. I only wish I had access to all the things that they can now do for cheap, especial…

> We can now buy an Arduino board for the price of a computer game, and make a flying drone. I'm pretty sure you could do this 20 years ago, there just hadn't been that wave of marketing around microcontrollers as a hobby that happened around the time of Make magazine. $2 for a PIC and $45 for a programmer, maybe? Waiting excitedly for the next issue of Nuts & Volts? Idly flipping through the Jameco and Small Parts c…

Drones only became technically feasible on the shoulders of the mems development for cellphones, so, no. The Lego-if-I-cation of digital hardware is a relatively recent thing.

(Yeah, there was radio shack and Heathkit, but the barriers to entry are MUCH smaller today)

Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#275

Post by madeofpalk »

> Nowadays I'm a software dev and tech entrepreneur. At best, technology bores me. At worst, it terrifies me. Today's startups are solving the most boring problems imaginable. Gadgets are a snoozfest. Programming languages and frameworks seem to be running in circles.

You grew up.

The other part is that we are, in my opinion, coming out of a period of hyper growth and technical advancement where we were picking all the "low hanging fruit" of tech, which was exciting to see.

Now that, to one degree we're "done" with that, what's left is either the commoditisation of all of that (making existing more affordable and accessible) which is much less exciting, or companies desperately throwing shit at the wall to try and invent "the next iPhone", which can be quite depressing.

Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#278

Post by Narishma »

foldr wrote: post #159
eternauta3k wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What microcontroller are you thinking of?

Quite a few of the following options would give a 386SX from 1992 a run for its money in terms of raw computing power: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded-microcon... To compete with a high end 486 desktop from 1992 you might have to pay a bit more than $1, particularly if you want floating point.

Not to mention the lack of memory on microcontrollers.

Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#279

Post by nicoburns »

mrob wrote: post #264
nicoburns wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> technological progress is still going on, but it's more "your smartphone can now do what your desktop PC did 20 years ago, or your laptop did 10 years ago" In terms of tech that would excite a geeky kid, I think it's more like "you can now buy a $1 microcontroller that's as powerful as desktop PC from 30 years ago". Which is pretty exciting as it means you can throw computing power at all sorts of real world automa…

A typical desktop PC from 30 years ago had at least 2MiB RAM. There's no cheap microcontroller with this.

I guess not, but you can get a Raspberry Pi Zero with 512MiB for £10. That's not $1, but it's definitely still "within relatively easy financial reach of a kid" territory

Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#280

Post by drewcoo »

Damogran6 wrote: post #274
pessimizer wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can now buy an Arduino board for the price of a computer game, and make a flying drone. I'm pretty sure you could do this 20 years ago, there just hadn't been that wave of marketing around microcontrollers as a hobby that happened around the time of Make magazine. $2 for a PIC and $45 for a programmer, maybe? Waiting excitedly for the next issue of Nuts & Volts? Idly flipping through the Jameco and Small Parts c…

Drones only became technically feasible on the shoulders of the mems development for cellphones, so, no. The Lego-if-I-cation of digital hardware is a relatively recent thing. (Yeah, there was radio shack and Heathkit, but the barriers to entry are MUCH smaller today)

> The Lego-if-I-cation of digital hardware is a relatively recent thing.

That happened in the 80s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms

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