Things that used to be hard and are now easy • Hacker News Board

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#291

Post by anthk » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 2:14 PM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #271

pleb_nz wrote: post #152

I would love to see the reverse of this 'things that used to be easy and are now hard' That would be an interesting read

Writing programs that most users could run. It used to be a matter of firing up Delphi, moving some widgets around in a form, writing event handler code, and compiling. The install builder had it all done in less than an hour. It would run on almost any Windows PC in the world. Now everything has to do Unicode, be piped through the internet, work on MacOs, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android and the web.

Lazarus works on Linux, Windows, Mac and even Win 9x.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#292

Post by orsenthil » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 2:19 PM UTC

One thing, I will like to add this. Learning new things and gaining mastery has become approachable too. Note, it is approachable, and as gaining mastery is intensely personal endeavor.

Learning new things via youtube, coursera, udemy, udacity, edx, many things. Mastery via project based learning, Github, tests in courses, certification exams, exercism, etc.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#293

Post by anticensor » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 2:26 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #233

omarhaneef wrote: post #33

“Everything” that is easy used to be hard, depending on your time scale. I’m certain that COBOL programmers were raving about the ease with which you could program the computer back in the day. The items on this list sort of happen within a career so an individual had to experience how hard it was before. It probably reads different to someone coding for 5 years vs 30 years.

There is probably a "Law" to the effect of "The complexity of the task increases to the limits of the current tooling."

Parkinson's law: "Work expands to fill available time".

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#294

Post by remus » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 2:37 PM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #271

pleb_nz wrote: post #152

I would love to see the reverse of this 'things that used to be easy and are now hard' That would be an interesting read

Writing programs that most users could run. It used to be a matter of firing up Delphi, moving some widgets around in a form, writing event handler code, and compiling. The install builder had it all done in less than an hour. It would run on almost any Windows PC in the world. Now everything has to do Unicode, be piped through the internet, work on MacOs, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android and the web.

I think you can argue this one either way. For example, I would say that writing a little html+js calculator web app these days is very easy and works on billions of devices around the world (approx anything with a web browser and an internet connection). I'd say this is reaching more users more easily than your delphi example.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#295

Post by PolygonSheep » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 3:05 PM UTC

WillPostForFood wrote: post #240

theonemind wrote: post #184

Regarding chocolate quality discussions: when Hersey started up, they couldn't get any European chocolatiers to share their process, so they had to invent one. They used lipolysis, which creates butyric acid, the chemical that gives vomit its distinctive smell and aftertaste. You can definitely taste it if you pay attention, like "yep, that's it, it's that vomit aftertaste." https://www.google.com/search?q=hershey+vo…

Interesting article that suggests the context in which you smell the same scent is almost entirely determinant of your response to it: Moreover, motivational responses were entirely different as a function of label. For example, when isovaleric + butyric acid was called “parmesan cheese” it inspired participants to say they would like to eat it, while when it was given the negative label (“vomit”) it provoked the wis…

Yeah I've noticed this too. Everyone says Hershey's tastes like vomit but you never see anyone calling Parmesan cheese "vomit cheese".

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#296

Post by actuallyalys » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 3:24 PM UTC

perlgeek wrote: post #198

pleb_nz wrote: post #152

I would love to see the reverse of this 'things that used to be easy and are now hard' That would be an interesting read

* Running any website with user-contributed content. Spam is just everywhere nowadays, and you cannot publish a simple hiscore list for your game anymore without some kind of anti-spam measures, otherwise the spammers find it astonishingly fast and flood it with spam, even if it doesn't allow any clickable links * Thinking about it some more, everything related to security. Back in the days, the whole Internet wasn't…

I'm not sure about drawing things on screen, actually. There are still tools similar to QBasic: Processing and Python's turtle module, in particular.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#297

Post by taylorlunt » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 3:33 PM UTC

CharlesW wrote: post #164

tomaloner wrote: post #155

There's another facet I've watched with interest: >> Building videogames, with Roblox / Unity This has resulted in something like 90 new games entering Steam every day. While some games may still be art, they're increasingly difficult to find among the noise. I've heard the mobile game market is in worse shape[1] by the deluge of games. "More games for everyone!" sounds great - but note that definitely doesn't mean m…

Is there a law for "when a thing becomes easier and/or cheaper to do, more of that thing is created, and the mean quality of that thing goes down"? Of course, there are positive effects as well — desktop publishing was responsible for countless design crimes, but it also unlocked some real innovation during print's last stand.

The mean quality goes down, but the total number of games above a certain threshold goes up, which makes discoverability a bigger problem than it used to be, but, assuming we can solve that problem, makes the gaming industry better.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#298

Post by zaccusl » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 3:33 PM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #106

skulk wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The number of times I've been bitten by the very specific semantics around async/await in JavaScript makes me wonder if I've hit some kind of a ceiling in trying to grok it. Got any examples? I've mucked around a fair bit with JS's async and never felt like it got in the way. (Other than the whole function coloring ordeal)

> I've mucked around a fair bit with JS's async and never felt like it got in the way. When functions return more than one Promise , or when one chains async functions calls, it isn't really clear Error s from which functions are likely to break out and result in an unhandled exception (read also: https://archive.is/ULT7P ). For example, does trapAllErrs() below trap 'em all? Not really. Why? The answer involves unde…

I don't understand why this is complex? We know that Promise.all completes on the first error. That's literally the most basic knowledge of Promise.all (it either completes when all promises resolve, or rejects on the first error).

You only need to understand basic JS to know why this doesn't work. You don't need to know anything about the microtask queue or event loop.

Or am I missing something?

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#299

Post by SyzygistSix » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:02 PM UTC

jacobmartin wrote: post #4

I've only been using desktop Linux for 15 years, but it is vastly easier to use it as a daily driver than it used to be. It still has its problems--just yesterday I sunk an hour into an elusive bug. But when I was doing that, I remembered that such things used to be nearly constant and aren't any longer.

I find it harder to understand internally though. Maybe I just have not kept up, but it seems that since SystemD was added, the additional complexity is significant.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#300

Post by SyzygistSix » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:07 PM UTC

iforgotpassword wrote: post #21

jacobmartin wrote: post #4

I've only been using desktop Linux for 15 years, but it is vastly easier to use it as a daily driver than it used to be. It still has its problems--just yesterday I sunk an hour into an elusive bug. But when I was doing that, I remembered that such things used to be nearly constant and aren't any longer.

As an i3 user, basically going without a DE, I recently tried to breathe new life into an old core 2 duo laptop that was in very good shape and basically just used to browse the web and play spider solitaire. It was on Windows 7, and I don't think upgrading to 10 would have been worth it with that CPU and 2gb of RAM. I picked Debian, and put the different DEs through its paces. I started with those that should have b…

I agree. I've used Mint since Daryna and since version 19 it has not worked on my older, but still quite good laptops. A similar issue with having to choose between dual monitors or having brightness buttons working. It's a shame, since it has always "just worked" for me, unless I was doing something complicated. And this is for a very beginner friendly distro.