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

Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

ianbetteridge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 235 posts

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

#151

Post by steveBK123 »

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…

No, the point is to weigh the pros & the cons.

Not every tech is the new Spring, OOP, etc.

Not every project benefits from being immediately migrated to the new thing.

Once you've been through a few train wreck "get on the latest thing" projects, you see the benefit of actually delivering to users, regardless of whether the tech is bleeding or trailing edge.

If you are a small tech org, the benefit of being able to hire a team of people who have SUCCESSFULLY delivered with TechX (which is 3-10 years old) can outweigh jumping onto the latest thing.

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

#152

Post by steveBK123 »

mlinhares wrote: post #147
alephnerd wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 univ…

With backwards looking rose tinted glasses, we can remember all the good tech people were slow to adopt.

But what about all the mis-adopted or abandoned tech that blew up projects.

The amount of stuff ported to NoSQL that had no business doing so. UML/Nocode tools in the 90s.

A lot of the push away from Java only for a lot of performance considerations pushing devs back to it. Sorry about the projects that got force migrated to Scala since it was, briefly, The New Thing.

The one man webdev app deployed firmwide on some brand new framework which was immediately deprecated.

Again, nothing wrong with any of these tech choices if they were driven by actual user requirements which exceeded the current implementation tech. But most of us know that is rarely the actual motivation of devs...

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

#153

Post by silverlake »

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…

> small differences were important enough to change the world unpredictable ways

I completely agree with this. I’m also in my 50s but I lean techno-optimist. Whenever there’s a new hype cycle, I’m looking for those small differences that might overcome the hurdles we’ve seen in the past. For example, the PicturePhone was demoed in 1964. Now we’re all on Zoom constantly. I’ve lived through many AI hype cycles. The current LLM craze is significantly different from past exuberance. LLMs aren’t perfect but they are remarkable when they work.

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

#154

Post by JumpCrisscross »

rglullis wrote: post #149
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Open…

> 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

Sure. That is bad. That doesn’t make GPTs bad nor the good they do irrelevant.

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

Sure, arguments can be used well or badly. The point remains that technology has to have utility to be technology. Otherwise it’s research or art (or fraud), the first two of which we pursue for their own purpose.

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

#155

Post by fullshark »

preommr wrote: post #28
gipp wrote: post #3

> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. Distills the post to a sentence, and boy does this nail it.

> 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…

I feel the same way you do, then I realize how depressing it is, this attitude that the only thing that matters is monetary compensation / ownership of monetizable patents. I guess I was naive, but that's the game and everything else is noise.

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

#156

Post by rglullis »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #154
rglullis wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Open…

> 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 Sure. That is bad. That doesn’t make GPTs bad nor the good they do irrelevant. > Which is exactly how VCs dress up their investments and justify how unethical their companies are Sure, arguments can be used well or badly. The point remains that technology has to have utility to be…

> The point remains that technology has to have utility to be technology

I haven't argued otherwise. My argument is that utility alone is not enough a justification to keep working on specific technologies, much less to promote them as an universal solution to existing problems.

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

#157

Post by jillesvangurp »

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.

Who is the royal "we" here? Are you claiming there is no market or that there shouldn't be one?

Techno optimism and opportunism go hand in hand, of course. But I don't see anyone else inventing the future. To paraphrase Alan Kay.

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

#158

Post by jillesvangurp »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #70
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…

Those aren't flying cars. Flying cars can drive on the ground. On wheels. Hence the name.

There are a few companies working on actual flying cars. But they are lousy cars and lousy airplanes typically. And to quote doc Brown: “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” Or cars.

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

#159

Post by potatoman22 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #64
BigJono wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just, maybe, starting to work. Maybe. We're getting close to Amazon warehouses, at least, going fully automatic. We might get more general purpose automated factories. This has been expected since the 1950s, but this time it might happen. Neural nets are better and cheaper now. How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side? Roombas came out 20 year…

> How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side? Navigating a house requires a level of understanding that we still can't get using a top end GPU and optimal sensors.

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox

"It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility

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

#160

Post by jillesvangurp »

mihaic wrote: post #83

> If you are hiring “professional fakers” that means you are a poor manager. > Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. If the expectation for your average Woz is to handle seasoned bullshitters, how can you expect them to also be hackers? It's true that VCs and an ossified economy contribute more to the blandness of new companies, but ignoring the problems with the hiring market leaves you with half a picture. I'm not b…

Actually, as a hacker, I find I have less need for the Jobs types these since I can do more myself.

VC have a distorted view of the world because they look for unicorns in a world where most companies just aren't. Most companies don't start out using VC money and finance their operations with revenue the company makes. It's easier than ever to get started building a company. All you need is time. And even that is getting better.

The web and cloud removed most of the cost over the last thirty years. And with LLMs we can remove a lot of people and time from the equation as well. It's gotten to the point where you can outsource a lot of things to specialized service providers instead of doing them in house.

Post reply on HN