Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

I think you’ve done a good job of summarizing the landscape – it matches my experience.

The progression seems to be the decline of the nerd-nerd monoculture in the professional tech environment. With some irony, the increase in diversity is from the non-neurodiverse. Product managers, engineering managers, vertically integrated teams.

I believe on the most part this creates healthier productivity for the business – but likely at the social expense of the neurodiverse. Their technical skills can be more readily exploited by the hustlers.

Regarding programming languages: the majority of programmers work for companies using boring technology, so money is seldomly spent on developing new and exciting technologies that go beyond or above what we have now. It's always just going deeper into existing stuff because it's used and needs to be improved, but radically new languages, compilers, tools, etc. are risky and expensive so they're avoided.

We still work with text files, line by line. Programming languages unspool and lose their state upon encountering an error and deciphering pages of stacktraces is left to the programmer. State cannot really be saved and resumed. Everything needs to be desperately backwards compatible even when that means dragging problems along from version to version. The cool things are mostly academic and don't make it into the mainstream.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

I think it's because we still haven't figured out how to architect how economy and society properly. We better systems to promote good outcomes.

Technology has always been a means to an end -- I say that as someone which has always been fascinated by tech, due to my attraction to understanding, creativity and invention.

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I am working with a friend on a system to better reward websites and technologies without requiring advertisements. Think a small payment going to every website you visit, every service you use automatically. You would get some control over how to distribute those payments. Maybe we could set up worldwide funds that reward software based on their contributions to society. You could have local institutions suggesting and supporting funding projects -- distributed, democratic, rational, fair, .

Jane Goodall has been saying all humanity needs to flourish is to get 'the head and the heart' to work in harmony -- which I think means to say we need a society where our work, and our tech, and everything is contributing to make the world awesome -- to promote sustainability, to make healthy happy lives, to make rich amazing existences.

We kind of have the tools at our disposal... this century is a very decisive one, where we show that we are capable of growing and achieving an amazing civilization (and not collapse due to environmental ruin, greed, conflict).

Advertisements and telemetry made it so much more uncool.

But you touch on the real thing here.

>Wherever I looked at the world's problems, more technology seemed to be the answer.

The more you get into just what and how those problems are, the less will it seem that technology is an answer to anything. Technology can cure my loved one but I'll lose them some time nevertheless. Give people something to eat yet not solving starvation. Elevated the lives of many yet haven't eliminated even extreme poverty. Technology reshaped the world but we're still the same humans we always were (terms and conditions apply) - and so, our fundamental problem were, are, and will ever be the same.

There's not even a solution to this, as a feeling. You "just" need to move on with life. Tech can be exciting again but that won't come from the outside.

Kind of but they're really a government agency in essence, no? I mean that's like calling In-Q-Tel a nonproft, really it's just the CIA's venture arm in a nonprofit shell for legal/management reasons