Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by JumpCrisscross » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:16 PM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #140

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> none of the items on your list are things we really need This can be said about practically any technology outside agriculture. It’s wild to pretend the items on that list don’t increase quality of life.

The problem is not of technology. The problem is that we are working to apply technology solutions with no regard to the scale and trade-offs involved. - Automation is good. Striving for "100% robotic warehouses" is a recipe to further concentrate wealth around the handful of corporations that can deploy it. - Electric engines are good. Thinking that we would be better off by giving one car to every adult person inst…

> problem is that we are working to apply technology solutions with no regard to the scale and trade-offs involved

This has been claimed for everything from writing to the printing press and steam engine. If you want perfectly deliberated technological development, you’re against new technology.

> if this problem is so important to solve, would you still work on it even if you gained nothing from it?

You’re describing research, not technology.

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

#142

Post by jessekv » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:18 PM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #134

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…

Except of AIDS, none of the items on your list are things we really need but just a naive attempt of masking the problems of modern society life. Worse still: most of these problems were caused by the psychopaths who wanted nothing but money and power and found in the "techno-optimism" the perfect excuse to justify their actions.

> Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations

I expect this one to be a big one. Food production is not yet a solved problem. Imagine if robotics could scale "food forest"-style organic farming to the size of our current mono-crop farms.

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

#143

Post by steveBK123 » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:26 PM UTC

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #105

zoom6628 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, ageism is bad. I'm in my 50s too and I've seen my share of hype cycles. But I think there is a danger of overreacting to the unbridled enthusiasm of younger people. Every new cyle comes with ideas that are similar to what we have seen before. Sometimes I find myself thinking, OK, been there, done that, doesn't work. But I suspect that there is a sort of experience bias that lets me see the similarities far more…

One problem with ageism and youth bias in the industry is that we are still heavily populated with devs more interested in hopping on the latest framework they heard about at a conference than in actually solving users problems.

The amount of "how do I justify a rewrite because our tech stack is bad" posts you see in your typical reddit/etc programmer forum would remind you of this.

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

#144

Post by ozim » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:29 PM UTC

privacymatters4 wrote: post #29

From a post I saw in another thread, I don't know how to link to the direct comment: > "Same year for me. My college experience was a mix of PCU, Animal House, Hackers and Real Genius (ok not quite). I first saw email in a Pine terminal client. Netscape had been freshly ripped off from NCSA Mosaic at my alma mater UIUC the year before. Hacks, warez, mods, music and even Photoshop were being shared in public folders o…

I wonder why there is no mention of Bill Gates in your post, somehow he is not fitting the narrative with his work on reducing suffering in the world?

Also Jimmy Wales is not some kind of saint working for free, he cashed in nice pay checks from wiki and it was more of his lifestyle business than charity work.

I see laundry list presented as infantile so I don't really have time or will to address each one of the points separately. All those topics are much more complex than "should have been public".

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

#145

Post by alephnerd » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:29 PM UTC

steveBK123 wrote: post #143

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, ageism is bad. I'm in my 50s too and I've seen my share of hype cycles. But I think there is a danger of overreacting to the unbridled enthusiasm of younger people. Every new cyle comes with ideas that are similar to what we have seen before. Sometimes I find myself thinking, OK, been there, done that, doesn't work. But I suspect that there is a sort of experience bias that lets me see the similarities far more…

One problem with ageism and youth bias in the industry is that we are still heavily populated with devs more interested in hopping on the latest framework they heard about at a conference than in actually solving users problems. The amount of "how do I justify a rewrite because our tech stack is bad" posts you see in your typical reddit/etc programmer forum would remind you of this.

> devs more interested in hopping on the latest framework they heard about at a conference than in actually solving users problems. The amount of "how do I justify a rewrite because our tech stack is bad" posts you see in your typical reddit/etc programmer forum would remind you of this.

These are old complaints.

My dad worked in the tech industry since the pre-Mosaic days, and even then you'd hear the same arguments and complaints.

The same way people complain about React today is the same way people complained about Spring, and then about how old school C programmers complained about C++ with it "training wheels", and BASIC programmers complaining about "OOP", and old school networking types complaining about built-in TCP/IP instead of spinning up your own stack.

Technologies and frameworks change. That's how tech always works. Sure I can demolish a building with a sledgehammer, but why not adopt dynamite or bulldozers if it efficiently solves the problem.

At some point, all these complaints are just Ludditism from techies who didn't upskill and/or are unable to communicate.

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

#146

Post by mlinhares » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:36 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #81

thr0w wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it seems clear that general vibe is trending to the negative, it's interesting to me that everyone has their own slant on it. My personal issue with Graham is that his writings are all trite common sense-isms dressed up as complicated analogies or profound insight. Like the way people claim Steve Jobs had a "reality distortion field", as if the term "charisma" wasn't coined for good reason a billion years ago..…

> Like the way people claim Steve Jobs had a "reality distortion field", as if the term "charisma" wasn't coined for good reason a billion years ago... Charisma is active - as in, the charismatic leader talks you into believing their bullshit. Reality distortion field is passive - as in, you hang out too much around the leader, or people hanging out around the leader, and you end up believing their bullshit.

If there’s a person on this planet what was never passive that person is Steve Jobs.

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

#147

Post by mlinhares » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:41 PM UTC

alephnerd wrote: post #145

steveBK123 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem with ageism and youth bias in the industry is that we are still heavily populated with devs more interested in hopping on the latest framework they heard about at a conference than in actually solving users problems. The amount of "how do I justify a rewrite because our tech stack is bad" posts you see in your typical reddit/etc programmer forum would remind you of this.

> devs more interested in hopping on the latest framework they heard about at a conference than in actually solving users problems. The amount of "how do I justify a rewrite because our tech stack is bad" posts you see in your typical reddit/etc programmer forum would remind you of this. These are old complaints. My dad worked in the tech industry since the pre-Mosaic days, and even then you'd hear the same arguments…

I was there when both react and spring were both and they were both revolutionary tools, especially spring, the only people unhappy with it were the J2EE vendors, us plebs were calling out the name of the lord.

I think the problem here is the usual bloat and enshitification that these tools eventually devolve to due to their success. People get so used to them they want to use them for everything and create this universe where you now forgot why they were created and the places they were useful.

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

#148

Post by stuartjohnson12 » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:43 PM UTC

screcth wrote: post #128

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This isn't always true - dropshipping is being a sharecropper of a manufacturer. Enterprise software that most people will never touch has wildly better margins than consumer software like Spotify.

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

#149

Post by rglullis » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:43 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #141

rglullis wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not of technology. The problem is that we are working to apply technology solutions with no regard to the scale and trade-offs involved. - Automation is good. Striving for "100% robotic warehouses" is a recipe to further concentrate wealth around the handful of corporations that can deploy it. - Electric engines are good. Thinking that we would be better off by giving one car to every adult person inst…

> problem is that we are working to apply technology solutions with no regard to the scale and trade-offs involved This has been claimed for everything from writing to the printing press and steam engine. If you want perfectly deliberated technological development, you’re against new technology. > if this problem is so important to solve, would you still work on it even if you gained nothing from it? You’re describin…

> If you want perfectly deliberated technological development, you’re against new technology.

This is absurd and the exact opposite of what I am saying.

It's fine to work on new developments. It's not fine when people take their new developments and try to force them down everyone's throats.

To illustrate, look at Sam Altman going to congress and having the petulance to argue that they can not make a business if OpenAI had to pay for copyrighted material.

He is not arguing "we should work together with the copyright holders and give them ownership in the venture".

He is not saying "developing this is crucial and can benefit everyone, so we hope we can make up for the copyright infringement by putting all our work in the public domain."

He is just saying "I need this because without it I can not make money, and to make this I need money". It's self-serving circular logic.

> You’re describing research, not technology.

Which is exactly how VCs dress up their investments and justify how unethical their companies are.

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

#150

Post by badpun » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:45 PM UTC

screcth wrote: post #128

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NVidia makes more money on a GPU sale than the vendor selling it, even though it's farther from the consumer.