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

91–100 of 235 posts

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

#91

Post by scandox »

namaria wrote: post #87
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 Back in the day that was called 'being charming', not 'charismatic', and it was an offense: you're being intentionally dishonest and manipulative. Now it just means it's cute. Language changes...

It must change a lot...when was being charming ever an offense?

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

#92

Post by namaria »

openrisk wrote: post #76
devilsdata wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're onto it. Basically the wealthy freeze technological growth until they can understand how to make profit from it. Results are science and tech slowed to a glacial pace. We may not even be able to outengineer our problems due to this one thing.

I am not sure previous epochs and generations ever had to face this kind of active throttling of creativity and problem solving capacity. Maybe they did and its just that the context and feeling of despair is lost to us due to distance. But in any case due to the cumulative nature of both knowledge and our own aggravating problems with sustainability, the impact of this socioeconomic malfunction is probably the grave…

James Watt's patents stalled steam engine development for about 20 years. There was a sudden burst of innovation after they expired in 1800.

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

#93

Post by lazide »

rockskon wrote: post #62
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…

It can also be explained by there being stuck with the same soul-destroying business model for decades that's slowly taking over everything and making life shittier for everyone except marketers to optimize revenue.

Aka ‘burnout’ or ‘late stage of the business model’.

Eventually, people just get tired of doing it the same way.

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

#94

Post by lazide »

scandox wrote: post #91
namaria wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like the way people claim Steve Jobs had a "reality distortion field", as if the term "charisma" wasn't coined for good reason Back in the day that was called 'being charming', not 'charismatic', and it was an offense: you're being intentionally dishonest and manipulative. Now it just means it's cute. Language changes...

It must change a lot...when was being charming ever an offense?

It depends on the crowd.

Being charming to old school Germans means you’re a scam artist/unauthentic.

Most ‘greatest generation’ folks (if they’re still alive) had a similar feeling/overtone.

Because it’s true - someone being charming is making themselves likable to be liked (selling themselves), instead of letting their warts show. Because at a minimum they want your company. And it often works.

Someone being grumpy and unpleasant probably doesn’t give a shit, eh? And isn’t trying to sell you anything. In fact, chances are they’d be happier if you didn’t buy anything, and left them alone.

Which one is more likely to be a scam?

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

#95

Post by openrisk »

namaria wrote: post #92
openrisk wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure previous epochs and generations ever had to face this kind of active throttling of creativity and problem solving capacity. Maybe they did and its just that the context and feeling of despair is lost to us due to distance. But in any case due to the cumulative nature of both knowledge and our own aggravating problems with sustainability, the impact of this socioeconomic malfunction is probably the grave…

James Watt's patents stalled steam engine development for about 20 years. There was a sudden burst of innovation after they expired in 1800.

Even before patents there were actively ringfenced technologies by state actors (silk comes to mind).

But todays supression feels almost catholic in its reach across the economy. Which is imho directly linked to digital tech being both a set of sectoral technologies and the universal means of information exchange.

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

#96

Post by asjir »

underdeserver wrote: post #48
Animats wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, "Plug-in vehicles". I considered getting one of those, but it only has 22 miles of electric range. If they got to 50 miles, I could run on electricity almost all the time.

This is where the US is the outlier. A very small percentage of people I know in Europe and elsewhere in the developed world drive more than that on a regular workday. Perhaps the hybrid car's batteries just need to be bigger.

Yeah, interesting why there isn't a US version of hybrids yet

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

#97

Post by luckylion »

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…

I understand that line of thought, but I find it similar to "Shakespeare shouldn't get all the credit, what about the manufacturer of the pen he used? he wouldn't have been able to write his plays without the pen."

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

#98

Post by freehorse »

kredd wrote: post #65
wg0 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Self driving works. No it doesn't. Only in San Francisco maybe.

But it works? We only have functional public transit in small amount of cities in NA as well. If we can scale it up, it might be a game changer. I’m as pro-transit as it gets, but unfortunately we don’t have political appetite for it.

Public transit could scale up with drivers too, as it does in many other places.

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

#99

Post by nine_k »

Quothling wrote: post #42
gipp wrote: post #3

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

I would completely agree with this if it said "All Cook and no Woz". I say this because I think it is unfair to label Jobs along the line of all the other MBA spreadsheet CEO's. Jobs actually had a talent for products. Woz and other brilliant engineers may have build these things, but Jobs had a talent for picking the right products, the right packages and the right timing that I don't think anyone else in Tech has e…

> right products, the right packages and the right timing

Hmmm, sometimes yes, sometimes no. Apple III, Apple Lisa, Apple Newton, Apple Pippin.

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

#100

Post by cjblomqvist »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #84
wg0 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reads like 99% cities are like San Francisco. The world unfortunately is lot more diverse than that.

> 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…

Have you driven in these cities? I think it's quite a different problem!

But, there are a lot of places that are quite similar to San Francisco! Can we scale it to a thousand cities it'll still be revolutionary. And we then haven't even started talking automating transports! It's just taken longer than what people thought. The usual Gartner Hype Cycle.

Post reply on HN