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Comment by gerbilly | Hacker News Reader

Ok, I never said there weren't smart people still around.

But I stand behind what I claim. A large collaborative, and disinterested project like DARPANET could not get off the ground today.

Are you seriously arguing that the generation who used pocket protectors and HP calculators didn't have an advantage in concentration over the one who's been shown to distractedly check their phones every 15sec in case a cat might be doing something interesting?

But really the argument behind your argument seems to be that there is a monotone increasing function to 'progress'. I'm arguing that it's not and that sometimes we regress.

We can't even agree on what is real anymore, isn't that a serious disadvantage?

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> But really the argument behind your argument seems to be that there is a monotone increasing function to 'progress'. I'm arguing that it's not and that sometimes we regress.

Where did I ever say that? Your claim was about the Internet, not "progress" in general.

> Are you seriously arguing that the generation who used pocket protectors and HP calculators didn't have an advantage in concentration over the one who's been shown to distractedly check their phones every 15sec in case a cat might be doing something interesting?

Yes, because again you're generalizing to an entire population based on a stereotype. Do you think everyone back 50 years ago was similarly concentrating? No, because certain people can simply concentrate more than others, and those are the people building the Internet back then, and those are the same kinds of people who can build an Internet today. 99% of people were not doing so, we are talking about the differences of 0.0...1% of the population who built the Internet, so let's compare the same amount of people today too.

Think of all the coworkers you've ever had and see if you can imagine them writing RFCs and debating back and forth and revising them?

I have worked at a lot of companies and I find the kind of people who can or are willing and able to do that is decreasing. It's nearly zero today.

If the Internet was invented today, it would work only for the happy path and fail with a million different error modes, each handled differently depending on the specific implementation.

And you know what? People would accept it's unreliability probably, the way we accepted the 'all computers crash' from the DOS era till about NT 40. Everybody knew that computers just crash like that. :shrug:

Today ChatGPT makes up facts and gets things wrong. But it's OK cos it's newer than Google, or printed books.

I sometimes participate in the Rust RFCs, so yes, I can imagine them writing RFCs and debating back and forth, which they do daily.

Again you're focusing on coworkers and teams here and there at various companies, not in the best of the best who are the ones who built the internet and who would build it today. They are not average developers like one might normally work with, as I said, they are 0.0...1%.

> If the Internet was invented today, it would work only for the happy path and fail with a million different error modes, each handled differently depending on the specific implementation.

This is exactly how the internet works today and you just don’t see it. Try using source routing in your IP packets and see how far it gets. BGP implementations had to carry a “work with Cisco’s bug” flag for decades. Send some >1500 MTU packets across the world with varying paths and see how fragmentation and assembly is inconsistent across operators and implementations.

RFCs are loaded with errata, they skimp on critical details, and have bullshit “design by committee” features that never panned out. They aren’t special.

I think times are also just different now. Now a lot of the talent just gets vacuumed up by the Big Tech companies where they can be a cog in some wheel.

You seem to be ascribing some moral failure to the younger generations whereas there are also factors at play that go beyond individuals. It might be more sensible to say that the internet could not be invented in the current economic/social climate.

DARPANET was no more complex than large multi organizational projects like LLVM or Linux.

It wasn’t a giant coordinated thing that needed decades of patience. It was the epitome of an iterative project that involved stitching university systems together as the opportunity arose.

LLVM and Linux are done by 20 something? Just curious. I also think one issue with these comparisons is the breadth of tech stacks. It was easier to kick-start a JavaScript framework when Backbone JS came to be. But now given the competition, you need to have 8+ years of experience to contribute anything meaningful. This locks most of the young people from doing such stuff, even if they can have deep Buddhist focus.

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