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Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

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Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#441

Post by astrange »

lnwlebjel wrote: post #432
astrange wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading too much science is actually common with anti-vaxxers and other such people, they love quoting renegade doctors and having absolute faith in arxiv papers they misread or quoted out of context. Most published research is false even if it's peer-reviewed, and it may be better to leave it to people who read it full time and understand it's an ongoing conversation.

Is it "Reading too much science" or is it just that human characteristic of confirming ones own biases (ie anchoring bias, confirmation bias or whatever they're called)? Personally, I think its a lack of Baloney detection skills: https://www.openculture.com/2016/04/carl-sagan-presents-his-... Don't just leave it to the experts! Also, I'm not sure you can say that "Most published research is false". There are many deg…

> Also, I'm not sure you can say that "Most published research is false". There are many degrees between true and false. In the physical sciences, with which I'm familiar, the papers are demonstrably 'mostly true'. For example, as a bi-product of an experiment last week we observed an Ekman spiral (first published in 1905 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekman_spiral).

I agree it depends on the field. I was thinking of medicine, where there's a well known paper about this[1] that's led to some improvements like pre-registered experiments, although there's some newer ones that show ongoing problems in social sciences[2].

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... (Why Most Published Research Findings Are False)

[2] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/21/eabd1705 (Nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones)

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#442

Post by avaldes »

mattl wrote: post #301
mildavw wrote: post #231

I downloaded and installed the first “browser” (what a weird name) to see what the hype about “hypertext” (sounds sci-fi!) was all about. It was a page of text where some words were underlined and blue. And if you clicked on a blue word, it would jump you to a new page before you were even finished reading the first page! I remember thinking how dumb that was and must be for people with short attention spans. Uninsta…

What browser was that?

Mosaic I think.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#443

Post by GeertB »

When I started studying CS in 1990, people told me that "programming" was a dead end: 3rd generation languages wouldn't require programmers and anyone would be able to bend computers to their will without programming. I didn't heed their advice... We're farther from retiring the profession of Software Engineer than we were 30 years ago. But, is that a good thing?

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#444

Post by hnfong »

jfengel wrote: post #403
csours wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2001 High School Graduate - People told me everything would be outsourced to India and it wasn't worth getting started in programming.

I graduated high school in 1988, and made the same assumption. I don't think anybody explicitly said it to me, but it seemed obvious. They're plenty smart and they're sufficiently good at English (often, flawless). I still don't entirely understand why it turns out to be so hard to outsource. I get some of it, but it seems like something that we should have figured out by now. I'll be interested to see what the post-…

I've been thinking the same as I read this discussion.

My current best theory is that the software industry is overflowing with money, and it's still more beneficial to try to optimize for output quality and quantity (i.e. hire better software engineers no matter the cost, bring people into the same locality instead of hampering progress by splitting work into different timezones), instead of trying to cut costs to improve profits.

Once the growth finally ends, outsourcing to cheaper places might become a very attractive option.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#445

Post by rewgs »

kstrauser wrote: post #326
geocrasher wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss genuine differences in hardware. Happy hour discussions about alpha vs sparc vs intel etc. I'm hopeful that diversity will come back around as a thing. THIS. Right now there are three mainstream choices: Win, Linux, Mac And I'm sorry- no matter how diverse your Linux distro is or even what hardware you're running it on (x86 vs ARM etc), it's still just Linux. And again, sorry- Linux just isn't interesting anym…

A lot of people around me are playing with Plan 9 these days, but I haven’t paused to figure out why yet.

It's hip.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#446

Post by KronisLV »

pjmlp wrote: post #268

As someone that did my degree during the 90s, I had hoped desktop development would be native compiled RAD tooling similar to Delphi and C++ Builder, the Web would have stayed as interactive documents, all computers would be improved Amiga like experiences and the depency on the CLI would have long been replaced by REPL based environments. Ah and all modern OSes would be written in memory safe systems programming lan…

I'm sad that things didn't get all the way there, because it sounds like it could have been an interesting world to be in.

Delphi/Lazarus/QtCreator are still some of the best RAD platforms for desktop apps and the idea of being able to easily add abstracted cross platform components that would work with the native frameworks of the platform you're working on was great.

And REPLs really help with development in every capacity that i can think of, be it Python's, Ruby's or now even Java's REPL - heck, even platforms like Repl.it and Jupyter have gotten more popular and I'm all for it.

While web being just documents would be a bit boring, i also feel that it'd be way better for the energy consumption and often the performance and user experience as well. Not every site needs to be a SPA, if you just want to display some content and allow simple interaction.

And personally, memory safety is the way to go for most things! Not having it be at compile time and with zero cost is probably what's keeping us back from adding it to the OS level.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#448

Post by sprkwd »

I never expected the top minds of our generation to spend their skills manipulating me into pressing buttons on behalf of other people trying to make me buy things I don’t need.

I knew video game worlds would get bigger and more realistic than the wire renders of the BBC Elite, but I didn’t expect them to be full of loot boxes and other people.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#449

Post by jonnycomputer »

ergot_vacation wrote: post #401
jonnycomputer wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a bicycle for the mind. Remember back when if you wanted to learn about a topic, you had to travel to a library, spend a couple hours looking up books in a card catalogue, and then find 1 book, that maybe answers your question. I'm constantly using the internet to learn new things, to learn about all kinds of things (e.g. Californian urchin galls, best way to process small branches for firewood, the use bison h…

Put another way, computers and the Internet are a tool to accelerate the process of becoming more of what you are. If what you are is a curious, humble person looking to understand the world better, it can help with that. If you're a vicious self-promoter looking to crush everyone on your way to the top, it can help with that too. If you're a terrorist looking for how to build a bomb or fly a plane or use certain gun…

I like this, except that I think it misses that the internet doesn't just give people a way to do whatever they were going to do, but:

1. creates a giant, complex vector for the transfer and recombination of ideas, and attitudes: it's an influence and innovation engine 2. facilitates certain kinds of collective action and organizing, from traditional interest groups, to flash mobs, and getting ratioed. 3. facilitates certain kinds of illicit or illegal behaviors, activities, etc while making other kinds much harder. Anonymity is difficult, widespread surveillance is the norm; but you can hold entire pieces of infrastructure hostage, like oil pipelines, from your couch. 4. creates a new set of dynamics that we are only coming to recognize. for example, social media platforms like Facebook make it like we've all become more densely packed together, and we've not really developed a set of norms to accommodate getting along at that level of density.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#450

Post by sebastianconcpt »

twox2 wrote: post #363
sebastianconcpt wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought the opposite. I remember seeing Yahoo for the first time in 1993 and thinking "I can't believe they aren't using this to censor ideologically everything". They are doing it now tho.

Interesting. I imagine you are probably a few years older than me. I was too young to have that thought back then... but maybe I would now.

Yes. Also I was born in a latinamerican "third-world"country where you see that the political class would use that hands down if they would knew and be competent enough to execute such a feature. China was, tho.
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