Hacker News Reader

Comment by donna | Hacker News Reader

How can you tell the differnce between a fad and an advancement?

Fads usually come with a fair bit of unsubstantiated hype (like RoR and Ajax) whereas algorithms (and such) are not usually hyped at all in the media (sometimes due to copyrights on their publications [journals] and sometimes due to academic obscurity, abstraction, or even complexity).

That's an interesting take. I'd argue that Ajax for example is an advancement, regardless of the hype -- because it increases usability of many real-world web applications, today.

On the other hand, most algorithms are not widely applicable, so might only be counted as an advancement when they're used 30 years from now in a single specialized case.

-Matt (of donna & Matt)

I'd count them as an advancement as soon as they are added to the body of knowledge. XMLHttpRequest has been around for nearly a decade. A decade ago the "advancement" was there. It took almost 10 years for the fad to build up. If someone wants to know the fads (AJAX) just read prog.reddit.com and you're all set. If you want to know REAL C.S. advancements you'll have to dig a bit deeper into the literature.

Maybe an analogy is due. In the car world there are all kinds of people who strap on after market accessories to make their cars faster. These people are in the "fad" part, where as the underlying "advancement" may be decades old.

Silicon has been around for billions of years. Forming it into microprocessors is just a fad.

If microprocessors lasted only 5-6 years before they were replaced by a newer type of technology - then, yes, they would be just a fad. :)

So mosaic, for example, was just a fad?

The concept was not a fad. The concept was an advance which has lived on in other browsers.

With imagination perhaps, one could even apply the paradigm of a browser to mechanical and biological domains ("non-computing" in a software sense).

concepts vs. tools for strategic business and market advantage

IMHO

1) interpreting of tags

2) sending the tagged content at a site, to an enquiring browser so that in a virtual sense, one is visiting the location.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com