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Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

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Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#41

Post by dnsworks »

onedognight wrote: post #37
dnsworks wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you've cited here just says "marginally better and cheaper crap to buy". Education has not improved in the past 20 years. Neither has public transit. Manufacturing has gotten cheaper, but it also puts out cheaper products in terms of quality. Oh, and we have better video games. Yippee!

Are you kidding? Education has made great strides if you don't need it shoved down your throat. Every person with an internet connection can take any class they want from MIT and Stanford for free! That's progress.

Have you noticed the inability of anybody under the age of 21 to spell common words?

Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#42

Post by evgen »

dnsworks wrote: post #32
gkefalas wrote: post #7

In terms of medical advances, there may not have been any major blockbuster disease cures found, but there were several very important advances & innovations. I'll crib from ABC News and call out a few that I think are impressive as a layperson: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Decade/genome-hormones-top-10-m... - Heart disease numbers dropped considerably: so many heart-related diseases and emergencies that previously w…

I will definitely buy this. Stem cell research might be the one "world-changing" innovation that's happened since the dawn of the internet, but I don't know if we'll have a clear view of that for another decade. Arthroscopic surgery is also pretty awesome. So maybe it isn't all bleak. Maybe it's just the tech industry that has failed to do anything but sell us more crap, invade our privacy, and advertise us into subm…

Are you kidding? Let me rewind you to Y2K in case you were still nursing a collegiate hangover or two. Banner ads were everywhere, advertising was in your face, the marquee/blink tags had not yet been banished, and the only way to avoid it was to run an actual http proxy so that meant that only the tech-savvy could get away from it (and almost no one was blocking cookies or other "simple" tracking mechanisms.) In Y2K some of us were still worried about whether or not crypto would ever enter the mainstream (most people had no clue what we were talking about or why we cared) and while the crypto export laws had only been relaxed a couple of months earlier it was still recent enough that including strong crypto in a product was considered a political/legal risk. We were finally to the point where you no longer needed to use a generic crypto library API (so that users could link against a non-US crypto lib) but SSL certs were still rare for most web sites.

The tech industry has changed significantly for the better in all of these areas.

Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#43

Post by evgen »

robryan wrote: post #8

As a society we put a lot of effort at the moment into incremental improvement rather than completely new innovation. When TV, Cars, Computers, The Internet were invented they were all breaking new ground in innovation because they were big areas that helped with life. Now I think more smart people look at the way things are and can't see as many obvious things missing, so instead choose to incrementally improve what…

When TV, cars, computers, etc. were invented they were breaking new ground because they were areas where the low-hanging fruit were within easy reach. The hard part, the one that took decades for each invention, was turning them from a neat curiosity into an indispensable part of daily life. I hate to break it to you, but "the Internet" may have been quite innovative for the first two or three decades of its existence, but it didn't mean jack shit to humanity. Back when midnight cabling runs through campus steam tunnels to deploy a SLIP line was "cutting edge" it may have seemed like the coolest thing in the world and an obvious game-changer to us at the time but it had absolutely zero impact on 99.9999999% of humanity. The past ten to fifteen years of so-called "incremental" improvement have turned a glorified research toy into useful and productive part of daily life for a large portion of the planet.

Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#44

Post by evgen »

dnsworks wrote: post #31
drcode wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheaper food, better cars, faster computers, improved life expectancy, cheaper energy, better education, enhancements to human intelligence, better public transportation, more efficient manufacturing, better understanding of biology, better understanding of physics. Empirically, it seems to me all of the above have seen noticeable, but merely linear improvements in the last decade. (admittedly, computers are much fas…

Everything you've cited here just says "marginally better and cheaper crap to buy". Education has not improved in the past 20 years. Neither has public transit. Manufacturing has gotten cheaper, but it also puts out cheaper products in terms of quality. Oh, and we have better video games. Yippee!

Dude, you really need to refill your paxil prescription.

Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#45

Post by dnsworks »

jsz0 wrote: post #39
dnsworks wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't be impressed until humans no longer fgeel the need to point out that a leader is of a specific color. That's just proof that racism is very real. And Mr. Obama himself is filled with religious hatred, as seen by his turncoat stance on the "Defense Of Marriage Act" that he originally promised to repeal. A black man denying others equality is pretty messed up.

Personally I don't think there's anything inherently bad about acknowledging someone's membership in a minority group. Otherwise I feel like we're denying minorities, and majorities, an important perspective on how we got to where we are today.

At some point I like to think there will be no concept of minority groups. Just people. But sadly we're allowed to pass on bad lessons to our children, so old hatreds just stick around forever.

Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#46

Post by jodrellblank »

I'm in bed typing on a triple radio, camera, touch, motion, sound and proximity sensitive phone so I can't easily get links for citations from the wotld's first distibuted volunteer enyclopedia, but I think I read there that Guinea worm infection is well on the way to being the next eradicated disease, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation.

I think you have rose tinted glasses on the past - in 2000 I was at university where they ran NT4 with Netscape, and was rocking a Celeron 433, with a new USB1 100Mb zip drive. Now a 4Gb pen drive holds 400x more and costs 1/25th the price and tranfers data faster.

New cars today can have vision recognition blind spot checkers, radar based cruise control, pedestrian sensors, brake appliers, regenerative brakes, head up displays, Internet connections, all in ordinary models not 100k luxury ones.

The UK has migrated to digital TV and Radio. In 1999 I bought a VHS recorder, now HDD recorders are standard.

In 2000 there was nothing as good as Skype, train times were on paper in stations, airport checkins had queues, maps were paper based, polyphonic ringtones on phones were fancy, the HP200lx was the netbook of choice, the L prize for LED lights was nowhere to be seen, nor were snooks or really Amazon and Internet shopping and consumer reviewing on such a grand scale. Joule Biotechnologies, the LHC, ITunes university, the idea of an OLPC, virtual machines all absent.

China, new fastest train recently.

Now, if I had the cash, I could put a deposit down for a personal space flight!

I hear you on the computer still chugging thing, but don't want Netscape back.

Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#47

Post by dnsworks »

jacoblyles wrote: post #36
dnsworks wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they aren't. Humanity is a social failure. The number of people who go without food, shelter, and basic healthcare in this world is pretty staggering.

The proportion of people who go without basic necessities is at or near an all time low.

And that somehow makes it better? Can you say with a straight face there's a good reason that anybody in this country should be homeless or hungry when we've spent a trillion dollars fighting enemies who weren't really enemies in the past decade?

Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#48

Post by dnsworks »

evgen wrote: post #42
dnsworks wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will definitely buy this. Stem cell research might be the one "world-changing" innovation that's happened since the dawn of the internet, but I don't know if we'll have a clear view of that for another decade. Arthroscopic surgery is also pretty awesome. So maybe it isn't all bleak. Maybe it's just the tech industry that has failed to do anything but sell us more crap, invade our privacy, and advertise us into subm…

Are you kidding? Let me rewind you to Y2K in case you were still nursing a collegiate hangover or two. Banner ads were everywhere, advertising was in your face, the marquee/blink tags had not yet been banished, and the only way to avoid it was to run an actual http proxy so that meant that only the tech-savvy could get away from it (and almost no one was blocking cookies or other "simple" tracking mechanisms.) In Y2K…

Cute. I've been building infrastructures for almost 20 years now. There's really nothing new under the sun. The last time I drank the koolaid was at Napster, since then I've never been really excited about a company. Fusion-IO is the closest tech that has even made me take pause. Web startups are the worst. I worked at idealab in 2000. We invented the me-too web site business model that is now Web 2.0. It's all kind of a joke.

But at least we have new ways to advertise!

Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#49

Post by dnsworks »

dnsworks wrote: post #45
jsz0 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I don't think there's anything inherently bad about acknowledging someone's membership in a minority group. Otherwise I feel like we're denying minorities, and majorities, an important perspective on how we got to where we are today.

At some point I like to think there will be no concept of minority groups. Just people. But sadly we're allowed to pass on bad lessons to our children, so old hatreds just stick around forever.

I am highly saddened to call whoever down-modded this comment either a "peer" or a "colleague". I guess some people like to be able to single out groups in order to feel better than those other groups.

Re: Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

#50

Post by shabda »

jacoblyles wrote: post #35
dnsworks wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't be impressed until humans no longer fgeel the need to point out that a leader is of a specific color. That's just proof that racism is very real. And Mr. Obama himself is filled with religious hatred, as seen by his turncoat stance on the "Defense Of Marriage Act" that he originally promised to repeal. A black man denying others equality is pretty messed up.

I am pretty sure he is the first black man elected head of state in any country that is not majority black, and I know of no precedent of a leader being elected from any racial minority that makes up only 13% of a nation. Outside of cutting into people's brains and taking out in-group preferences that have existed since before the Cambrian explosion, I don't know what else you want us to do. Barack's election does sa…

> Now the rest of the world, they are still racist as hell. Try pulling the same stunt in Japan, or France.

And thats statement is not racists at all

> I know of no precedent of a leader being elected from any racial minority that makes up only 13% of a nation.

India. We currently have a Sikh PM(religious minority, 1.3%, from wikipedia), our last President was Muslim(13.43%). There have been 3 Presidents of India, from religious minority groups below 13%.

Thats not racial minority, of course, but afaik, US is yet to have a non Christian president?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_India

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