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Comment by zerostar07 | Hacker News Reader

Toys are on demand because people have become more childish in a way. Avoiding responsibility, seeking protection, hiding behind the groupthink, having more time to engage in juvenile/schoolyard behavior. That is not considered in the article.

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"Unless you are doing cutting-edge research in your daily job, you are not much different from those indies working on "superficial crap", apart from the fact that being "part of a company" gives you the illusion that it's more legitimate. Was google search or skype superficial and trivial? They started as programmer toys. The point of the article is that a programmer can start with $0 and build the whole product."

You, 6 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202808#3203672

"Show HN: A cryptocurrency portfolio simulator game"

You, 28 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16122873

This is not the sense of the word "toy" that the article discusses about. He brings up facebook as a primary example of a toy project, not in the sense that it was fun for the programmer (aren't they all?) but in the sense that it was fun for the end user, not serious business. Google for example was not trying to be fun from the get-go, maybe skype was, i m not sure. Facebook is a tool that brings adults back to high school, with all the ensuing drama of the glass house that schools are. In that sense it was a toy, even though from the get-go it pretended to be the more serious counterpart to myspace (look, real names!). The article also implies that facebook somehow turned more serious after growth, which is simply not truth, the sillyness has just moved from pokes to the collective comment cringe.

now thanks for digging my ancient comments , but it's obvious that i meant "programmer's toys", in the sense of a fun project back then. Also my crypto simulator game is indeed a toy in both senses, its a fun side project that a few people found fun to try.

Amazing quotes. You're a gifted commenter.

I'd be surprised if we are truly more childish than historical periods. Indeed, just going off of naive views of life expectancy, we used to spend more of our living time as children.

Now, leisure time has certainly increased. To an extent. We now have to spend far less time preparing food/clothing/etc. At least, for the average person. Upper classed people probably had more leisure time in the past, since they had other people to do this work for them.

I saw a number recently on how much less time people spend doing laundry. It is impressive.

> we used to spend more of our living time as children.

not really, children used to work as soon as they were able to, agriculture or industry from very young ages and get married young. People marry a lot later now. IF for example we assume that ppl married at 18 when life expectancy was 60, and at 32 when life expectancy is 80, they spend a larger fraction of their life unmarried.

Working age is different than child age. Even today. My point was more on the description "childish." There are childish ways of acting that persist even in work for folks. The way my children "clean" their room, for example, is a lot less deliberate and effective than how I would do it.

Which is really missing my main point. The leisure time aspect is much more relevant.

Many large tech businesses start out as "toys" because its easier to build a new technology to pursue something trivial than something essential. That's just how development works.

Hobbies will pay more for something that might be a novelty than an improvement in efficiency.

Tesla started with Luxury cars for the same reason, and those cars could be considered "toys" of a certain type.

The next Microsoft or Google could very well be developing a "candy crush" style game in VR right now, because that is the market that pays for experimentation.

VRChat is just a toy right now, but could become the gold standard for online interaction by the next decade.

There is also the very real danger of investing in things just because they look toyish in an attempt to follow the pattern. it doesnt always pay out.

I'm curious. Why do you believe those statements to be true? Looking back through history there is a constant pattern of each generation decrying the immaturity of the generations that follow it. Either maturity has been on a constant decline for millennia, or the same mistake was being made again and again in drawing that conclusion. How do you know your conclusion isn't due to the same mistake?

> Either maturity has been on a constant decline for millennia

personal responsibility has been declining with the aid of comforting technology and it has led to the constant extension of state goverment reach. it's very possible the complaints are valid, and that's simply how history advances.

I'd be interested in citations saying personal responsibility has declined. More likely that your exposure to everyone else's responsibility has increased.

We 'd need a personalresponsibilitymeter for that. However we can consider trends, such as the use of death penalty only for heinous crimes, its abolition in most of the world, and constant increases in government welfare.

Are you really equating the abolishment of the death penalty with a decline in personal responsibility?

But... you are the one asserting there is a decline in personal responsibility. How are you asserting that?

There's a third possibility: The definition of maturity is constantly shifting over generations. Each new generation is not "less mature" than the previous, but it's not an illusion either. There really is a change in the mindset of what it means to be an adult, it's just not a strict one-dimensional scale.

Looks like you didn't get pass the title.

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