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Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

ianbetteridge.com

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Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#121

Post by imiric »

j4coh wrote: post #101
imiric wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very much on the side of the hackers in this argument, but honestly, why is a hacker turned businessman seen as a bad thing? Most people on this forum and in this community are trying to do the same thing.

It’s selling out. Trading in your idealism to work on spyware/ad tech or whatever.

Oh, please. "Selling out" is such an immature take.

Andreessen was one of the first people who saw the potential of the web in the early days, worked on the first graphical web browsers and built a highly influential business around it. Then he went on to create one of the most powerful VC firms in the industry, which in turn funded some of the most successful companies. His impact wouldn't have been anywhere near what it is today had he stayed working as a software developer. His ideals and goals were clearly much higher than that, and he got rich in the process. Sounds like a capitalist success story if I ever heard one.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#123

Post by virtualritz »

grecy wrote: post #115
virtualritz wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but have you driven in a city in India or Indonesia? Just for example? My favorite example is a major intersection with no traffic lights. Everyone just drives onto it and then you get a sticky sauce of cars that move at a fraction of the allowed max speed until they leave the intersection again. Horns and eye contact are used to negotiate progress by all paricipants. I would love to see a "self driving" car o…

Of course, a self driving car not trained for that situation would do as badly as a brand new 16 year old driver. Just like the newbie it will learn, and get as good or better than everyone else.

Yeah, it's the eye contact part that I'm really curious to see the self driving car learn.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#124

Post by hcks »

zoom6628 wrote: post #15
dannyobrien wrote: post #4

I think another way to explain "being bored" (and a bunch of other features that this post describes). These people are getting old: Andreessen is 53, Graham is 59, the author is in his fifties; I am too. Nothing too surprising about having older people be the supposed "blowhard" voices of an industry -- except during the golden age that these posts harken back too, all of these pundits were twenty or so years younge…

As an older person in tech I see ageism alive and well in tech. The young ones don't understand why we oldies roll our eyes at hearing the 13th iteration of "this is ground breaking new idea" or when we gently interrupt a personnel or strategy discussion with a few use cases from the past to illustrate the pending shit-storm being proposed. Time for the world realise this tech stuff and programming has been around ab…

> The young ones don't understand why we oldies roll our eyes at hearing the 13th iteration of "this is ground breaking new idea"

Why not constructively contribute by explaining what could be different for the idea to work this time? Or if you hate innovation (i.e. retrying age old ideas slightly differently - hoping this time it will work), why don't you pick another industry?

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#125

Post by TeMPOraL »

virtualritz wrote: post #123
grecy wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, a self driving car not trained for that situation would do as badly as a brand new 16 year old driver. Just like the newbie it will learn, and get as good or better than everyone else.

Yeah, it's the eye contact part that I'm really curious to see the self driving car learn.

Oh you will, soon. Eye contact itself isn't hard, given it's 99% in the mind of the beholder anyway.

You'll see it and then either regret it, or join the cohort of people saying it's not true eye contact because there is no soul behind the window of machine eyes; mimicking the current talk that LLMs are just stochastic parrots without a mind behind them.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#126

Post by WhereIsTheTruth »

sulandor wrote: post #89
WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #22

The industry is mostly run by opportunists, I refused to make career despite my appetite for low level programming I have no desire to contribute to this whole circus full for fraudsters

> industry is mostly run by opportunists yes, non-participation is hardly possible though

I ended up participating and contributing to open source instead ;)

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#127

Post by TeMPOraL »

ForHackernews wrote: post #113
TeMPOraL wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The world unfortunately is lot more diverse than that. It is, but only at the surface level. 99% of the actual problem of driving in urban areas is the same everywhere on the planet, because all human cities are pretty much the same, because all humans are pretty much the same - once you start comparing with the rest of the universe , and not just with other people. San Francisco, Moscow, Cape Town and Prague are a…

Driving in New Delhi is an entirely different universe than driving in San Francisco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnPiP9PkLAs Contrary to your assertions, operating a vehicle in an environment with humans is a social problem.

> Driving in New Delhi is an entirely different universe than driving in San Francisco

Only if you assume driving is solved as a baseline. For self-serving, "driving" is the 99% of the problem; "driving in $specificCity" is just the cherry on the cake, a small part of the problem that doesn't even need to be solved.

Keep in mind that humans are the most flexible parts of any system they're in. When human and machine negotiate, human always yields, simply because the machine cannot. With increased popularity of self-driving cars, infrastructure and social norms will adjust to eliminate technical problems and cultural idiosynchrasies that the tech can't handle. This is how it always was.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#128

Post by screcth »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #35
preommr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. Because it's a lot more true than most tech people want to admit. I am continuously amazed at how many brilliant people there are, that do fantastic things, that do not bring in anywhere near what their value is. Look no further than open source, there's people that write important software begging for scraps while flashy startups get showered with money if they yammer the right…

Yeah, this is something which FUTO really made me aware of. That this Facebook was built on top of an entire ecosystem of open source tools and yet these tools like PHP and Apache will get not even a fraction of the wealth which Zuckerberg now has. And if you think about what he built in comparison to what PHP and Apache are, it's such a thin layer. So somewhere we are getting the distribution of economic reward wron…

When Starbucks sells a cup of coffee who makes more money? Starbucks or the coffee farmer?

This is the same thing. Businesses that are closer to the consumer make more money than their suppliers.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#129

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

Animats wrote: post #24

The part of "tech" which is ad-driven has become both boring and seriously annoying. Unfortunately, that's where the money is. There are interesting things going on: * Self-driving cars finally work. San Francisco is full of them. Next step is to get the cost down and replace those rotating scanners with something cheaper. At least the ones that aren't on top. * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just…

>Medical. AIDS drugs are in good shape. Diabetes may be next. There's been real progress on some kinds of cancer. Even obesity can be cured.

Would disagree, we have possibly regressed. We have more gizmos (like diabetes monitors) and diagnostics, but no real cures and a significantly more sick people.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#130

Post by 331c8c71 »

dannyobrien wrote: post #4

I think another way to explain "being bored" (and a bunch of other features that this post describes). These people are getting old: Andreessen is 53, Graham is 59, the author is in his fifties; I am too. Nothing too surprising about having older people be the supposed "blowhard" voices of an industry -- except during the golden age that these posts harken back too, all of these pundits were twenty or so years younge…

Getting older is indeed a factor and I am surprised tha author didn't reflect on that himself.

While it might be the case, there's definitely something else going on which I would describe as tech "globalisation" or "unification". The industry that looked like an archipelago of islands with their own ecosystems, philosophies and values increasingly looks like monoculture fields replicated zillion times (yc-style startups and "big tech co" being the two most popular breeds). Of course, the reality is more subtle than this - but the alternative voices and perspectives are completely overpowered by the mainstream narratives - to the point of being barely detectable.

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