Voice control. Give me a keyboard and a mouse or track pad any day. I can't even articulate a reason, I just don't like it.
Ask HN: What are some modern technologies that you refuse to adopt?
41–50 of 61 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some modern technologies that you refuse to adopt?
#42Short videos, stories, etc. I refuse getting addicted to them. Terrifying watching everyone around me consuming the stuff like we are in a crack house.
I never looked at short videos and couldn't understand how my friends and family would open their phones given even a minute of quiet time for these things. I viewed some Youtube shorts (maybe the least effective short video provider in terms of content and the recommendation algorithm?) and was shocked at how easy it was to burn time looking at crap. The experience really opened my eyes about how a person can be pulled into endless viewing.
I think the crack house comparison is entirely appropriate. The brain is weird . . .
Re: Ask HN: What are some modern technologies that you refuse to adopt?
#43Voice control. Give me a keyboard and a mouse or track pad any day. I can't even articulate a reason, I just don't like it.
> I can't even articulate
That seems like a good enough reason.
Re: Ask HN: What are some modern technologies that you refuse to adopt?
#44IoT. I have no interest in home appliances with fancy screen, internet connectivity, apps, and any of that other nonsense. I’m also pretty skeptical of the whole smart home market. A lot of it seems like technology in search of a problem… and it also seems very buggy.
I have a few of these. They came with the house. 1) The power cuts out frequently and the autogate can't be manually opened. There's a battery and a switch that opens it but if the power is out for a few hours, I can't go home. 2) We have lights that trigger when the alarm rings. We can't turn off the button or it won't work. There's some glitch with many of them where the neighbor's lights burn out faster. Some of t…
> it means I have to watch an ad if I go home.
These companies deserve to go out of business. Just hearing this makes me so angry. I’d be ripping that thing out and installing a traditional lock.
Re: Ask HN: What are some modern technologies that you refuse to adopt?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
React and similar frameworks are for the developer, not the user. But since it seems you don't use large scale UI based applications, you don't see a need for them.
React and similar frameworks are more for the employer than the developer. A capable developer can execute without them, but employers need them to vastly widen candidate selection without investing in training.
Not really, when the training burden is the same between knowing DOM manipulation and knowing React, yet the latter is more scalable when multiple people are working on a project, and just in general even for solo development without having to go through the annoying process of imperatively adding DOM nodes to the HTML. Anyone "capable" can do it but it doesn't mean it's the best way. This is like the same argument C or C++ devs use when they talk about memory safety as opposed to Rust which lets the computer handle it.
Re: Ask HN: What are some modern technologies that you refuse to adopt?
#46I've been running small SaaS businesses since 2019 with varying degrees of success (currently running a profitable one). I never really got into JS front-end frameworks. The sheer complexity, and the idea of maintaining essentially 2 apps as a solo dev, never really appealed to me. The furthest I got into JS world was tinkering with Rails' Stimulus framework. https://stimulus.hotwired.dev/
what kind of stack do you use instead?
Rails, SQLite, Redis, all hosted on a bare metal server (Hetzner). Deploy with Capistrano (a fancy bash script). Tailwind for styling -- i heavily use their components/templates, which is quite convenient.
Re: Ask HN: What are some modern technologies that you refuse to adopt?
#47Automatic transmissions for cars. I'll be sticking with manual.
New-fangled music formats like 8-tracks, cassettes and compact discs. Vinyl records work just fine.
Any payment technology that didn't exist by the year 1000.
Re: Ask HN: What are some modern technologies that you refuse to adopt?
#48IoT. I have no interest in home appliances with fancy screen, internet connectivity, apps, and any of that other nonsense. I’m also pretty skeptical of the whole smart home market. A lot of it seems like technology in search of a problem… and it also seems very buggy.
Of course this had to come up heh.
Having outdoor and indoor lights turn on when I come back home feels like I'm a millionaire. Cost me like $50 to setup.
Side effect of smart home is you get pretty good monitoring (power use per room/appliance, unusual power use when you away - something left on).
Other nice things:
1. Garage door opener on your phone - long press iPhone lock button. Already got car key and contactless payments are ubiquitous here. Haven't had to carry anything else but my phone with me for years now.
2. Temperature changing light bulbs - one part of my house is lacking natural light so I got LED's that change temperature - blue-ish by day, amber after sunset.
3. Dedicated wireless buttons to turn on/off lights across halway without running wiring.
4. Long-press/double-press tricks with wireless buttons - turn on/off all lights, etc. Can customize to whatever you wish.
5. Per-bedroom heating using $20 smart plug, $10 tiny wireless temperature sensor and simple resistive heaters. Shuts on/off based on presence of course, but nicest feature is changing temperature by time of day (i.e. cooler for sleep). Precise control also means it's cheap to run (I've calculated heatpump payback would be 20 yrs).
6. Water leak sensors, smoke alarm notifications - cheapest form of insurance.
7. Hot water control - utilize TOU/excess solar and shut off when you leave / preheat after coming back from holidays.
8. Preheat home before coming back (probably easiest hack of all via infrared blaster).
9. Excess solar battery / EV charging - not strictly smart home feature, but using Home Assistant for this.
10. Crank up ERV speed when sensor in bathroom reaches humidity threshold.
11. On shoulder season, we start shutting windows during night and turn on ERV (helps keep heat in, but also avoids mosquitoes, neighbor wood burner smoke, noise, etc). I've added automation to check forecast night time temperature, turn on ERV automatically and send notification to close windows.
12. Lowkey, but HomePod plays news over radio every morning 8AM.
13. Home Assistant doubles as NAS for backups and NVR for cameras (thingino) with local AI object detection.
Re: Ask HN: What are some modern technologies that you refuse to adopt?
#49React - Let’s be honest about this. The primary purpose of React is not building things or rapid prototyping. Its primary purpose is to open employment to people who are otherwise less experienced or less qualified. I got tired of working with less qualified people, because less qualified people tend to be less capable of problem solving, less capable of rapid innovation, and more entitled. Chrome DevTools Protocol (…
Just because you preceed your self-aggrandizing rhetoric with "let's be honest", doesn't make what you say factual.
Re: Ask HN: What are some modern technologies that you refuse to adopt?
#50React Native. I do most of the mobile technologies but something about RN rubs me the wrong way. 1) Whenever we do an analysis of which codebase to use for a new project, RN gets cut off early for multiple reasons. What's the advantage? KMP allows native-level control. Flutter/Dart was built from the ground up for mobile and multiplatform. 2) Whenever I ask someone who went with React Native, the answer tends to foll…
It seems like you consider the technology but find it doesn't benefit your use-cases, which is a perfectly rational take.
React has advantages, and if you already have React, using React native has advantages. But if you can greenfield with Flutter or if you have a team for KMP already, it's entirely preference.
I think the biggest advantage at that point is that React has an enormous community with high-quality solutions, in particular some for "Figma to component library" kind of stuff for white-label products and companies with strong branding requirements.