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Comment by projectileboy | Hacker News Reader

Alan Kay once pointed out something along the line that when excitement exceeds knowledge you get fashion. For 10 years I’ve been in and around languages that were declared dead by the HN crowd because there wasn’t enough new hype around it. It’s not a perfectly inverse correlation, but honestly at this point when I see HN is excited about something new it raises red flags for me.

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I see this more on twitter to be honest. HN, of late, has been a great source of info on the ‘boring’ stacks e.g Rails.

Twitter is where you get the JavaScript ‘influencers’ who appeal to a core demographic of engineers with FOMO who signal their ‘in status’ by waxing lyrical about the latest framework

Not to pat myself on the back but fashion was the exact analogy I came up while describing the situation. When everyone begins focusing on tech as an end in itself as opposed to it serving a bigger purpose we end up here.

And add to that the zero cost of capital of 2010s, it lead to engineers being given almost free reign which is generally a bad idea. “we are a technology company” would attract VC money, as if tech itself was a product of every darn startup.

>And add to that the zero cost of capital of 2010s

I suspect the timing of ChatGPT release just as interest rates started going up is a ploy to layer more obscurity into tech choices to drive the hype harder ad keep the gravy train going even as capex becomes more costly.

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