Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 603 posts

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#431

Post by watwut »

tablespoon wrote: post #253
Quinner wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 years ago in order to navigate somewhere you had to ask someone for directions and write down notes. If you missed a turn, god help you. We fundamentally move through the world vastly differently thanks to digital maps. Many people (and in a few years, the majority) are doing so in cars that use electric motors instead of internal combustion engines. One way to tell whether you're in an 80s house would be to look…

> 30 years ago in order to navigate somewhere you had to ask someone for directions and write down notes. If you missed a turn, god help you. We fundamentally move through the world vastly differently thanks to digital maps. Many people (and in a few years, the majority) are doing so in cars that use electric motors instead of internal combustion engines. Honestly, it seems like you're just picking some incremental o…

> Someone from 1950 wouldn't even notice the difference

You really should go to some museum or google how cars in 1950 looked like, functioned and sounded.

> I deliberately stopped using GPS for several years, because I realized it was preventing me from building up geographic/navigational knowledge, and instead was just training me to follow instructions blindly and never learn anything

You are in minority there from pretty much all aspects. People are not ditching GPS. They are not looking into GPS constantly either, generally people don't go to places they don't know that often. And if you are refusing "weird shortcuts" then you are lessening your geographical knowledge even more - you are opting out for routes with easy to memorize milestones instead of learning how streets are really connected.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#432

Post by watwut »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #407
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Electric cars? Come on. They're barely even a change from a consumer perspective. Someone from 1950 wouldn't even notice the difference, unless you told them exactly what they were looking at. Wut? I call major bullshit on this. Yes, obviously electric cars generally do the same thing as ICE cars, but the consumer experience is so much better for me is that after owning an electric car I will never, ever even consi…

You know electric cars aren't a new invention, right? First ones came about in the 1880s, and they were quite common in the early 20th century. Sure, not common in 1950, but the user experience difference between an ICE car and electric is, to a 1950s or 1910s person, basically noise. The ICE car is noisy, electric not. The acceleration, ride comfort, features - all are similar enough to be interchangeable to someone…

> The acceleration, ride comfort, features

This is not true at all. Ride comfort and features is massively improved in todays cars compared to 1950. Or to 1980. That goes for both the driver and passenger.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#433

Post by herbst »

phasersout wrote: post #412
torginus wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to bring the analogy into the realm of computing, I feel like progress isn't lightning fast here either. I just watched this video of Office 3.0 from 1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsTydF09hbg This looks and feels like the Office I use everyday. Likewise, I feel like the changes in the realm of software development, a purportedly fast moving, tech and investment heavy industry, have been a mix of sidegrade…

In case of operating systems I often wonder what our GUI and workflow would look like if Windows, MacOS and Linux had equal market shares for the last twenty years.

Kinda like gnome shell :) the thing Windows 8 wanted to be and the heavy Facelifting apple is so afraid of.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#434

Post by Ekaros »

XorNot wrote: post #266
kareemsabri wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that was the point. The OP said "we have [them]", not "they've gotten better". I agree, Dyson is quite a bit better than the vacuum my parents had (though central vac was pretty damn good). Dishwashers are quieter, though not that different. Microwaves seem about the same.

Dishwashers use a fraction of the water they used to. It is more water and power efficient to use a dishwasher then to wash dishes by hand. [1] In all these responses what I'm noticing is people missing the vast gains in efficiency from our appliances over the last few decades: everything we have gives more, and uses less. [1] https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2008/data/papers/1_1...

On the other side the water and energy use has been trade off for time use. Living in country with plenty of fresh water I might prefer to waste some for faster cycle time. So in sense things have actually gotten worse.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#435

Post by throwaway981572 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #122

Because new technology is as Thiel often quips limited to the world of bits rather than the world of atoms. Paul Krugman once asked, if you go into an average house right now and you take out all the screens, could you tell that you're not in the 80s? Gordon in the Rise and Fall of American Growth gives a similar example, what if you went into a time capsule between say 1890 and 1950 compared to 1960 and 2010? In one…

> The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet.

The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can do online many of the things you needed a car before. The speed difference is between minutes or hours to milliseconds - much more than the difference between cars and horses.

The whole aspect of looking at cars is funny. It’s like judging progress 60 years from now by checking by how much their resolution improved.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#436

Post by Gigachad »

alaricus wrote: post #423
angarg12 wrote: post #123

One thing I don't see mentioned often is that productivity in software development has skyrocketed, but it's hard to appreciate. Today's services are much more sophisticated and complex than just a decade ago. Even if some of that complexity is incidental and undesirable, it's undeniable that today a small team can pump out a much more refined app that entire companies did back then. This isn't only guess work, here…

Today's services are indeed much more sophisticated, but not necessarily better. This is because better and cheaper hardware made people sloppy, not because we have much better services.

We do have much better services though. The feature set and scale of modern platforms and tools is mind blowing and so far ahead of what existed 10 years ago.

If you released any of the major apps we used 10 years ago today, most people would consider them unusable garbage.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#437

Post by KronisLV »

chii wrote: post #371
KronisLV wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The software we use is 1000 times more complex than it was 20 years ago, leading to performance that really have not improved a lot, and a lot of functional stagnation. Many applications are slower to start today than they were 10 years ago, because back then they were binaries and today they are Electron apps. Also known as Wirth's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law Sometimes it worries me. If we had…

> [XYZ] basically demand that I do, if I want their other shiny features well, they aren't doing the demanding, if you're the one who wants those shiny features!

> well, they aren't doing the demanding, if you're the one who wants those shiny features!

That's just the thing: they use all of these browser based UI technologies, these slower scripting languages and other ways to ship software in a reasonable time and so i could have the actual fancy features that pertain to the logic...

...except that I'd be far happier if they hadn't cut those corners and I'd have a fully native app using the OS UI frameworks and so on. Of course, that isn't possible, if I want the software in the next few years, not a decade from now, or much more expensive (at least that's the prevailing argumentation).

In my eyes, it is the coupling between the desirable bits (what the software actually does) and the undesirable bits (mostly how it does it). But it's all about tradeoffs, similarly to how we often choose to ship code that isn't thoroughly tested just to meet some deadline.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#438

Post by herbst »

KronisLV wrote: post #162
marginalia_nu wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a weird disconnect with computers. The software we use is 1000 times more complex than it was 20 years ago, leading to performance that really have not improved a lot, and a lot of functional stagnation. Many applications are slower to start today than they were 10 years ago, because back then they were binaries and today they are Electron apps. Your average web based word processor with cloud storage perform…

> The software we use is 1000 times more complex than it was 20 years ago, leading to performance that really have not improved a lot, and a lot of functional stagnation. Many applications are slower to start today than they were 10 years ago, because back then they were binaries and today they are Electron apps. Also known as Wirth's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law Sometimes it worries me. If we had…

I am doing mostly Ruby and code in Atom, or Sublime before that. I don't have noticeable starting times for my editor.

Long ago I started coding in gedit. Since then the language got only faster, I need less code because more major libs do more of my work.

Also my computer is like 8 years old, my laptop until recently was over 10 years old and my current one about 3 or 4 (T420 and T480s)

Ruby is not native, but we'll portable. My point is this 'boring' work style is here, people just choose to not use it.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#439

Post by listenallyall »

pixl97 wrote: post #358
colechristensen wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly the change is pretty small. Up until at least the mid 90s everywhere took checks. Honestly today interacting with the cash register at CVS takes longer than writing a check. Sure, a 30 second check writing reduced to a 10 second tap to pay can be a little bit of an improvement (except when it doesn't work), but really it's not that much better.

May you be the luckiest person on earth if the people in front of you only took 30 seconds.

Today's "I have a coupon on my phone but I can't get cell service here" guy is honestly far worse than "slow check-writer" guy.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#440

Post by KronisLV »

dieselgate wrote: post #230
KronisLV wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The software we use is 1000 times more complex than it was 20 years ago, leading to performance that really have not improved a lot, and a lot of functional stagnation. Many applications are slower to start today than they were 10 years ago, because back then they were binaries and today they are Electron apps. Also known as Wirth's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law Sometimes it worries me. If we had…

Ruby on Rails? Edit: for web apps

Ruby on Rails is pretty cool and nice to work with, but in my comparison it'd probably be somewhere next to Python as far as performance is concerned.

Oh, also, for a while I ran GitLab which is written in Ruby and still run OpenProject, which also is. Both of those underperformed and wanted both unreasonable amounts of memory whilst also running slowly when under load.

I'm yet to see a Rails codebase that can actually compete with the likes of Java/.NET/Go, since projects like Gitea are snappy and use about 1/10th of the RAM. Then again, nobody really picks languages/tech stacks for their performance outside of a few industries/domains where that is indeed necessary (HFT?).

Most of the time people just choose whatever is the easiest to work with, has the best integrations/frameworks/libraries and will let them ship features in a timely manner. Now, upgrading old Rails projects, though, is something that I cannot recommend doing. Very much not a fun experience.

Post reply on HN