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Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#61

Post by cassianoleal »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #32
sundvor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who started working in the mid 90s, we're definitely well past The Internet's "Golden Hour". These days we can see first hand just how much societal degeneracy it has helped facilitate. All the latest Culture Wars, malice, scams, cancellations, filter bubbles, misinformation madness etc would not be possible without the Internet. This easily helps explain the point of looking backwards to when the…

> All the latest Culture Wars, malice, scams, cancellations, filter bubbles, misinformation madness etc would not be possible without the Internet. The latest , sure, by definition. But nah, people were plenty good at getting worked up much earlier than the internet.

Yes but not at this speed and scale.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#62

Post by Otek »

Aromasin wrote: post #52
Otek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(i) Do anyone knows where that would be, or you know specific Discord servers? I would very much like to see how younger generation talk about tech, programming, entrepreneurship

Here are a few STEM focused ones I'm in. Note, that much of the content (due to the younger age demographic) is people asking for homework help and such a lot of the time. Funny enough, that has died down now with the advent of ChatGPT. Equally, I've met many field experts who hang out in these groups too and people I've eventually become friends and colleagues with: Furlough (Great Startup Community): https://discor…

Thanks for that!

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#63

Post by AnimalMuppet »

We've lost our confidence. A decade ago (when I started), it was much more "I'm building this cool thing" or "here's an explanation of how this tech works". It was present/future oriented, and optimistic. Now there's more nostalgia, and the present/future stuff is "here's how we're doomed".

The past is attractive because we were different then. We felt different, and we thought different. We like who we were then more than we like who we are now. We liked our future then more than we like our future now.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#64

Post by sundvor »

cassianoleal wrote: post #61
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the latest Culture Wars, malice, scams, cancellations, filter bubbles, misinformation madness etc would not be possible without the Internet. The latest , sure, by definition. But nah, people were plenty good at getting worked up much earlier than the internet.

Yes but not at this speed and scale.

Yep, didn't spell that out - but indeed, this.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#65

Post by kashyapc »

"Many of the commonest assumptions, it seems to me, are arbitrary ones: that the new is better than the old, the untried superior to the tried, the complex more advantageous than the simple, the fast quicker than the slow, the big greater than the small, and the world is remodeled by 'Man the Architect' functionally sounder and more agreeable than the world as it was before he changed everything to suit his vogues and his conniptions." — E. B. White, in an essay called Coon Tree (1956)

I didn't quote the surrounding context from the essay, which itself is quite fun; do read the full essay if you can.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#67

Post by notacoward »

nologic01 wrote: post #4

Its likely a combination of many factors. i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever. ii) The fact that the past keeps growing . The body of interesting developments keeps growing and while some stuff is obsolete / nostalgic, other stuff is totally not. In fact revisiting the mindset and vision of past decades is many times very inspiring and educational. iii) T…

> The fact that the past keeps growing.

A slightly different twist: an ever increasing fraction of the hacking that we might want to talk about was in the past or is tied to the past (e.g. retrocomputing). The industry has grown, but it has also become more corporate and business-focused. Normal users, and even most programmers, don't "hack" in the traditional sense of finding clever solutions or workarounds to make computers do novel things. Some of it's just plain, fairly obvious programming, fitting pieces together more than actually creating. Even ChadGPT can do that, which is why younger programmers who don't remember real hacking are so easily impressed by it. Then there's a lot that's not technical at all, but more about arbitrage and rent collecting ... oops, sorry, I meant markets and business models. Not about abusing people's privacy or ripping them off, no sir, none of that in VC-fueled Silicon Valley for sure. But it's still not hacking.

It's not that hacking doesn't still occur. Plenty still does, perhaps even more than ever, but it's no longer enough to keep up with the ever lengthening arc of computing history. As a proportion it's less, so those who are interested in such things look more and more to the past.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#68

Post by markus_zhang »

When people grow older they tend to recall the days when they had more fun, more energy and less burden. It's nature.

Although my childhood is not particularly trouble free as my parents are very strict with me, I still turn my thoughts back from time to time to temporarily escape from all the hassles I brought to myself.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#69

Post by hammyhavoc »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #43
nologic01 wrote: post #4

Its likely a combination of many factors. i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever. ii) The fact that the past keeps growing . The body of interesting developments keeps growing and while some stuff is obsolete / nostalgic, other stuff is totally not. In fact revisiting the mindset and vision of past decades is many times very inspiring and educational. iii) T…

I hypothesize that a lot of interesting discussion also happens in smaller group chats, where people can be more candid while receiving reasonable responses. Public social media participants are often assholes or have ulterior motives. It takes a lot of courage to discuss a new technology while in its baby form, which can easily be smothered by demands of perfection. A private group chat can do a better job at helpin…

I highly doubt that most people on HN are even involved with most immature technologies other than being an end-user of some aspect of it. Ergo, I doubt that an HN discussion would have any significant impact on the growth of any kind of technology.

Who needs courage when there's objectivity in facts?

Even so, people still rabidly defend the new shiny simply because it's new or something they're heavily invested in, so courage and facts aren't always the whole story either.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#70

Post by hammyhavoc »

CJefferson wrote: post #20
nologic01 wrote: post #4

Its likely a combination of many factors. i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever. ii) The fact that the past keeps growing . The body of interesting developments keeps growing and while some stuff is obsolete / nostalgic, other stuff is totally not. In fact revisiting the mindset and vision of past decades is many times very inspiring and educational. iii) T…

(i) definitely applies. I often see younger hackers talking about “the orange website”, never in positive tones. HN is seen as older, richer, and with various negative tendencies.

"the orange website" negative sentiment is there from a lot of demographics, not just young-skewing, and sometimes it's easy to see why when discussions not infrequently devolve into ad hominems and ass-pull anecdata as a lot of people aren't equipped to deal with the idea of multiple points of view being valid, or x not being so binary as good or bad.
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