Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?
i’ve seen a movement recently. we’ve been more and more nostalgic here, talking about software, hardware, and things in general from the past. why so?
i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever.
ii) The fact that the past keeps growing. The body of interesting developments keeps growing and while some stuff is obsolete / nostalgic, other stuff is totally not. In fact revisiting the mindset and vision of past decades is many times very inspiring and educational.
iii) The fact that the present is shrill, exhaustively hyped, manipulated and in a sense damaged. Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available.
I agree with this sentiment to some extent. Yet, I am struggling to identify if it's "just me getting old" or if there is more to it.
These days we can see first hand just how much societal degeneracy it has helped facilitate. All the latest Culture Wars, malice, scams, cancellations, filter bubbles, misinformation madness etc would not be possible without the Internet.
This easily helps explain the point of looking backwards to when the tech was just just that, tech.
The latest, sure, by definition.
But nah, people were plenty good at getting worked up much earlier than the internet.
"It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio....It is no exaggeration to say that the German revolution, at least in the form it took, would have been impossible without the airplane and the radio. ...[Radio] reached the entire nation, regardless of class, standing, or religion. That was primarily the result of the tight centralization, the strong reporting, and the up-to-date nature of the German radio....Above all it is necessary to clearly centralize all radio activities, to place spiritual tasks ahead of technical ones,...to provide a clear worldview"
While a decentralized internet may host extreme views in certain pockets, it also enables a diversity of viewpoints to be expressed, which more often than not serve to regulate those in power as well as inform those without.
Maybe the censurious social media apps booting off people with opposing opinions to liberal mainstream in collusion with intelligence agencies actively embedded in their organizations? But that just underscores the dangers of centralization.
I suspect, based on your posturing in the reply, however, that you've been convinced that more control is necessary to counter extreme x or y wing viewpoints. If that be the case, then you would find great solace in the writings of Goebbels.
I for one hold freedom of speech to be sancrosanct, and being a student of history will never waver from its defense.
> it also enables a diversity of viewpoints to be expressed, which more often than not serve to regulate those in power as well as inform those without.
I have grown very doubtful about the notion that just having a diversity of viewpoints being expressed serves as a check to those in power, or that it serves to meaningfully inform people.
It increasingly appears to me that the sheer quantity of different viewpoints does the opposite of those things. It generates an ocean of emotional noise that provides cover for those in power to do what they wish, and encourages people to only accept information and views that support the opinions they already have rather than meaningfully informing them.
> I suspect, based on your posturing in the reply, however, that you've been convinced that more control is necessary to counter extreme x or y wing viewpoints
Your suspicion could not be more mistaken. I'm baffled as to what led you to it in the first place. I'm just saying that it is increasingly looking to me like the internet (especially social media) has managed to remove a lot of the benefits of free speech.
Saying that is far from saying "free speech is bad" or "speech needs to be regulated". It's saying that the mechanisms on the internet appear to amplify emotional or tribal, rather than rational or thought-out, responses. That sort of discourse has very little social upside.
Further, I suspect that those mechanisms are intentionally like that, because they provide the easiest and most profitable method of monetizing.
What you're describing is a balkanization of viewpoints by both consumers and producers rather than a real exposure to a diversity of them. To some extent that has occurred in modern society. It is certainly possible to fully live within your bubble and never be exposed to earnest criticism of your worldview. This trend, of course, pre-dates social media by many centuries.
Prior to the printing press and mass literacy, people would only ever be exposed to opinions within their immediate vicinity (and you would almost certainly never hear the opinions of ancient dead people such as Socrates or Locke). Even still, after those proliferated, there was quite a bit of friction and most people have always defaulted to adoption of local norms or customs without a second thought about correctness.
Mass communications such as TV and radio (along with nationally syndicated newspapers) enabled a handful of companies to gather an immense amount of control over the national conversation. They could almost mold an outcome in a presidential election on the basis of what questions they posed at a debate and how they made the candidates look on camera and what headlines they ran. From a certain perspective, it may have appeared as if the media was rather neutral. But the mass media itself became an embedded fixture of Washington and all the other major power structures that exist within the country. How could the media both act as an agent of common people and maintain a tight relationship with powerful insiders to get exclusive scoops and invitations to social functions? The internet enabled a critique of the media at the same scale as the media itself, in addition to those in power. A viral critique of ABC, NBC, Fox or CNN will often exceed the peak viewership of either of those outlets.
I think it's an important value worth protecting, even if there is a large bubble on both sides. There is some limited penetration and cross-pollination between the groups and it does filter through sometimes.
I honestly believe that freedom of speech and the willingness to engage in earnest debate of opposing ideas is as much a cultural value as it is a legal one. Without the cultural respect of such an idea, the legal value is not much use. If your university is filled with a student body that will loudly shoutdown and protest and cancel anyone with an opposite opinion from speaking there, it's a sign of a decline in that cultural value. I don't know what the solution to that is, it's certainly not an easy one, but there is no regulatory solution, and the internet isn't the source of the problem.
Maybe the only real defense is just the sum noise of a bunch of loud cranks like me desperately shouting into the ether that it's a value worth protecting.
> Your suspicion could not be more mistaken. I'm baffled as to what led you to it in the first place.
I jumped the gun based on past conversations I've had or read.
> Further, I suspect that those mechanisms are intentionally like that, because they provide the easiest and most profitable method of monetizing.
That may be true to some extent (although I suspect they're waning as people tune it out), but those mechanisms are inherent in all forms of mass media as well. Maybe the triopoly that existed between CBS, NBC, and ABC was comfortable enough and stable enough for those decades they had it, that they seemed to not be desperate for income and eyeballs in the same way that they are in today's cutthroat battle for attention. The modern situation is more of a throwback to the yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer's day, which itself dates back to the founding of the country. Check the emotional noise of the political cartoons from the Civil War era, for example: https://www.history.com/news/abraham-lincoln-political-carto... https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/Islandor...
I guess my main argument is there is nothing new under the sun, although it feels different than whatever we had in the nostalgic era prior to this.
Granted, for things like Breitbart, one has to affirmatively opt-in.
Facebook and Twitter are a pretty damned big pocket.
By the way, threats to life, liberty, and property have always been illegal in this country. But no, I'm definitely not afraid or worried about some idle threats from basement dwelling neckbeards.
How much more important is it then, to protect free speech on the internet, when so much power and threats are wielded in far more subtle and insidious ways?
You can see, in real-time, how well a comment went over, how quickly it spreads, and rapidly correlate it with specific demographics.
The upvotes on each comment here are a simple version of that, but it functions just as easily with Likes, reddit updoots, re-tweets, etc.
It's almost a skinner-box at this point
Scams however always existed
This makes the present “more shrill”. Being able to more quickly identify content of value (or lack thereof) means you trawl more easily through large amounts.
Of course, it’s important to remember that we are not infallible and trusting yourself too much with these techniques is an easy way to become disconnected from the real world.
Being younger means more easily being able to narrow your focus, and less easily feel like the world is too loud.
that said, technical or no, the overall level of discourse is still better than mainstream reddit, and light years better than things like the local facebook page. I may disagree with a lot posted here, but I'm willing to consider the posters here to be on the "peer-level" far more than other sites.
I suspect if you got a bunch of doctors, lawyers, architects, etc to discuss economics you'd get the same results as here for the most part.
HN users are mostly (but certainly not entirely) from a very specific and narrow demographic. It's true that the tech world is much broader and more varied than is reflected here.
This isn't a criticism of HN. Most fora have users from very specific and narrow demographics. Just different ones.
slightly different decentralization patterns on matrix and discourse
so the tech/programming discussion is very much alive, but the entrepreneurship angle quite a bit less so...
Furlough (Great Startup Community): https://discord.gg/furlough
Science and Math Association: https://discord.gg/Yqf9GGjV
Mathematics: https://discord.gg/zZ94XYkt37
Control Engineering: https://discord.gg/mPwkRJKG
DIY Tech: https://discord.gg/diytech
Computer Vision: https://discord.gg/4BXczxNJwK
Adafruit: https://discord.gg/adafruit
Better C++: https://discord.gg/e3aXc2xUWr
Python: https://discord.gg/python
Unity Discord: https://discord.gg/unity
The Programmers Hangout: https://discord.gg/programming
The Coding Den: https://discord.gg/code
Game Dev Network: https://discord.gg/gdn
Developer-Ecosystem: https://discord.gg/deveco
OpenAI: https://discord.gg/openai
Makers HQ: https://discord.gg/QWtd5Z6N
Do you remember the comments sections on torrent links, where people ask questions about things that were already explained in the torrent's readme? Discord is like that; people don't bother searching and ask the same things over and over.
Thin clients, however, mean you're data minable and get to pay for things that, instead of occupying your and your friends' machine (like custom emotes, animated avys, voice clips), now occupy valuable company server space.
My historiography here spans from the present to 2000, though; I have no idea how IRC worked or what people did pre-Yahoo! Messenger or WLM.
It takes a lot of courage to discuss a new technology while in its baby form, which can easily be smothered by demands of perfection. A private group chat can do a better job at helping to cultivate an environment for growth.
Who needs courage when there's objectivity in facts?
Even so, people still rabidly defend the new shiny simply because it's new or something they're heavily invested in, so courage and facts aren't always the whole story either.
This is the kind of bullshit commentary people discuss things in private to get away from. Your comment contributes nothing positive, encouraging, no suspension of disbelief, no nurturing environment, only hostile derision and holier-than-thou posturing.
iii) I’m convinced that the single worst social/cultural event of the previous 25 years (and maybe longer) was the invention by social media of algorithms that bias what you see toward what maximizes engagement. Think about what this does. I put it this way: one person passes you on street and smiles and says “hi,” then another punches you in the face or publicly urinates themselves. Which maximizes engagement?
I’m not totally pessimistic though. I see the above cultural trend peaking. I’m also weirdly optimistic about AI. I say weirdly because I feel contrarian about this. Even super intelligent AGI doesn’t frighten me that much.
Let me put it this way: I am less afraid of a superintelligence than I am of mobs of ignorant humans, and I think the superintelligence might have more to fear as well. Neanderthals may have been smarter than us, but I’m sure we had that genocidal mob thing down. Intelligence doesn’t always win.
This isn't autonomous AI takeover. It's humans getting their hands on a brand new kind of rock and bashing each other over the head with it like they have with every previous kind of rock.
It's not that I have zero concerns about AI, just that I'm not on the Yudkowski freakout train. There is no such thing as a technology that can't be used for evil.
A slightly different twist: an ever increasing fraction of the hacking that we might want to talk about was in the past or is tied to the past (e.g. retrocomputing). The industry has grown, but it has also become more corporate and business-focused. Normal users, and even most programmers, don't "hack" in the traditional sense of finding clever solutions or workarounds to make computers do novel things. Some of it's just plain, fairly obvious programming, fitting pieces together more than actually creating. Even ChadGPT can do that, which is why younger programmers who don't remember real hacking are so easily impressed by it. Then there's a lot that's not technical at all, but more about arbitrage and rent collecting ... oops, sorry, I meant markets and business models. Not about abusing people's privacy or ripping them off, no sir, none of that in VC-fueled Silicon Valley for sure. But it's still not hacking.
It's not that hacking doesn't still occur. Plenty still does, perhaps even more than ever, but it's no longer enough to keep up with the ever lengthening arc of computing history. As a proportion it's less, so those who are interested in such things look more and more to the past.
The modern tech industry feels much more mercenary and cruel than the tech industry of the past. Whether or not it actually is, or if this is an illusion, could be debated (I personally think that it actually is).
capitalism took over, and does what capitalism does.
I dont know why you think it wouldn't be as ruthless and brutal as other industries, the signs of how vicious it could be were pretty clear even in the late 90s / early 2000s.
And I agree with your first point. At least it feels like there's much less emphasis on improving people's lives. I still believe that a product has to have some perceived positive impact on a user's life to be successful. But nowadays, most of the time, that positive impact seems to be focused on instant gratification rather than long term utility. Since the widespread use of the internet became a thing, the back channel then allowed for treating the user as a commodity. I believe this may be one of the qualitative key differences between "now and then" and, if so, it may be a good answer to OP's question.
Better than "we're just getting old, it has always been that way", which I believe is not true.
The Internet, in its current form, is not a force for good. And the way it is going, it will be a net negative for humanity as a whole.
The Internet itself is just bits pushed between computers, but the things we have built on it are dystopian, are a huge cause of the current loneliness epidemic (epidemics have an end date, this is a trend), and it's a way to control the masses.
The Internet, in a vacuum, could elevate humanity. But whatever we have now, it exploits our shortcomings for the profit of the few, and we are simply not made to have most of our social interactions behind a screen that's always within our cone of vision.
It's been hard to live with this, as a software engineer. A veritable crisis of faith for me.
This reminds me of broadcast television. When TV first started becoming a thing that regular people had, it was widely considered to be a force for good. Being able to educate the masses, to provide people with good information they need to know, to bring communities together.
In less than 20 years, TV showed itself to be a failure at all of those things. To the point where in 1961, Newton Minnow proclaimed TV to be "a vast wasteland" and bemoaned its failure to live up to its potential during a speech at the National Association of Broadcasters.
The internet (well, the web, really) is following a very, very similar trajectory.
i'm convinced the dead internet theory is an inevitability for the reasons you outline.
Even if there is good in the far corners, most don't find it anymore.
Yeah or YouTube or TikTok.
> iii) The fact that the present is shrill, exhaustively hyped, manipulated and in a sense damaged. Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available.
100% agreed!
We thought we were building a better world. We were so wrong.
I'm convinced that what went wrong was monetisation related though. The internet was great when people made things for fun and to educate each other. It was the perverse impulse of monetization that caused recommendation algorithms, the push for 'engagement' caused the bubbles and the inflation of anger posts. The pervasive tracking. The bait and switching. The enshittification.
This is one of the reasons why I block all ads and never whitelist anything.
I disagree. Tech was never a "force for good". It's always been a tool, a physical manifestation of the science we pursue as part of our species desire for knowledge of the world around us.
It can be used for good or evil, whatever your definitions for those are.
Right now it's used for a lot of evil things because the people in charge of using it are not altruistic. By and large, the people in charge of government at all levels in the US are elderly and grew up before the space age began. Their focus is not on bringing technological benefits to anyone. It's on bringing all benefits of any kind to themselves.
Tech will be a force for good if we can change ourselves and our country to make it that. It will be used for evil, too. Like any tool, it's on us to use it correctly and wisely.
And getting worked up about all the "new and exciting!" is an outlook best suited to being a simple consumer of entertainment. Vs. if you're no longer a kid, in a world that has some rather dire social and sustainability problems...then whether you're trying to understand the big picture in order to do something useful about the problems, or just to lose yourself in nostalgia for a bit, the past gets considerably more important.
No I don’t think these things are going to become sentient (in their present form at least) but no technology has ever been able to do what these models do.
> but no technology has ever been able to do what these models do.
That's not new. Steam power, the first computers, _especially_ electricity did things no previous technology could.
And it massively changed the world.... so, um, buckle up, I guess.
Electrification is an example of that, it takes a massive amount of time to put the infrastructure in. Then even when you got a power pole to your house, you had to run lights and it was unlikely you had any other appliances that used power. Those were slowly and expensively added over time.
AI may work from the opposite direction. It uses the infrastructure that already exists, we have power poles, and network lines, and all kinds of computing devices gathering information and feeding it back to datacenters. This sets up a 'fertile data environment'. One potential outcome here is we see an increase AI compute power over the next few years with only a moderate increase in AI intelligence, then by change in algorithm that compute power is now far more efficient in creating intelligence. This could manifest itself as "AI is a great helper for a programmer" to "Actually, why do we have so many human programmers at all" in an exceptionally short time frame.
It is the disruptive timeframe that is the largest risk to society. If for some reason we go from "Corporations need people" to "Corporations don't need people" in a very short time frame, we'll Moloch ourselves in to high unemployment and social instability quickly.
It's a modern phenomena to disregard everything that has gone before as "outdated". The tech industry has had a good long run of not looking back, but we are far enough along that a lot of good ideas that have been abandoned or left fallow are sitting around waiting to be re-implemented or reinterpreted.
Two examples I'm involved in:
- https://htmx.org is building on the idea of hypermedia and has a distinct 90s flavor to it
- https://hyperscript.org is a re-imagination of HyperTalk, the scripting language from HyperCard, for the web
I like the idea of building organically on the ideas of the past. Lots of people way smarter than me just happened to be born at a different time in the arc of the computer revolution. Why wouldn't I look back at what they did, play with it and maybe think about how it might apply to today?
Everything has shifted towards planned obsolescence and I barely spend money today when I make way more than I used to when I first started working.
I got a Tesla and it was built crappy and interior kept breaking. A purchase should make me happy but I felt like my dollar didn’t go far enough for how much I paid.
I balled out on a $900 iPhone and it cracked on the first drop. Since then I’ve only purchased used iPhones for <200 bucks that I don’t care if I break.
Almost every single video game I have tried in the past few years crashes or has bugs. The last game I played was Cyberpunk and I even put a new computer together to play it. What a nightmare lol.
Everything is subscription based now. There’s no support unless you pay even more. And if you use it for a while and then want to use something else good luck because most of they make it hard to migrate.
Maybe I’m just getting older but there ya go.
They sucker you in, every time, and you don't learn.
iPhone have gotten more and more like glass art objects than functional phones. Apple knows people want their products, and their whole model made to extract as much money out of people as possible (apple care) obviously shows they are masters of capitalism and creating tons of shareholder value. It sucks, but hey at least I'll use the gains from holding apple stocks to spend on something else (which will also break lol).
I find it much better now that I don't spend money on anything beyond basic functionality and create the aesthetics around it myself. I save a ton of money, and makes me feel better that I don't contribute to these companies beyond holding their stocks.
I appreciate the quality items from my past (that were not that high quality to begin with during their time - they were just built better than what's available today at similar price points) that have lasted to this day. Everything else just gets tossed out when I'm done using it, and I buy it either used or the lowest end model.
Um....maybe there's another takeaway here. Maybe Apple created something people love, are delighted by and find useful in their lives.
Maybe people want their most personal computers to be beautiful glass art objects. Intimate, daily-carry items have ALWAYS become fashion at some level (wallets, handbags, belts, etc). Phones were fashion and art long before the iPhone. Cases are perfectly great solutions for those who want more protection.
It's much tougher to look yourself in the mirror and admit that maybe they're not tricking anyone, you just don't understand the market.
People are stupid and the stuff they like is stupid, and understanding the market means your product will redound down to the lowest common denominator of quality.
It's why addictive mobile games earn an order of magnitude more than good console games, which in turn earn an order more than good PC games.
One counterpoint, though, is that no one likes cheap plastic interiors, and yet they're in the highest end cars now: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vXKOPwJ2Ink&t=120
Absolutely not.
People are not stupid just because they don't value the things you think they should.
People love beautiful objects. People love art. People love to be entertained. All of these things have immense value. People love color! There is a ton of value in bringing more color to the world and engaging people senses and emotions in new ways. So when HN-types deride Apple for releasing fun new colors, I find it telling and amusing; the HN-types simply don't understand people while Apple understands people more deeply than any other computer company.
And no, not everyone wants to sit and watch information dense documentaries about complex world problems every day after work. Sometimes people just want to shut off their brain, relax and watch stupid content that encourages that state of mind. That content is serving a practical purpose. But I'm sure you'd deride it as trash and rotting people's brains while totally missing the point about why people gravitate towards it.
Do some people take things to the extreme? Of course. Are mobile game mechanics often problematic? Of course. The world is a messy place.
The way I see it, there needs to be at least one company in the world that sees computing as a functional artform. It's an important perspective and clearly it resonates - people love it.
We have plenty of companies that don't take this perspective. In fact, it's the default way of thinking. We're not really lacking choice here.
The paperclip maximizer has started eating puppies to produce too many paperclips.
I'm enchanted by the phrase "quality that's too high for the market to rationally produce". It referred to how much quality a hobbyist can put into a physical good because they're not manufacturing them at scale or for profit. I didn't realize that's a moving target though. ;p
While A.I has exciting properties, there's not very much really interesting stuff going on.. Mostly new libraries, written on top of older libraries to abstract some abstraction into something even blander..
When was the last time a new kind of hardware device was introduced ? I don't mean some iteration of an old one, but a new one ?
Like, when we switched from working off of floppy drives to hard-drives, that really _changed_ something.. When we started attaching modems to our computers and went out into the world.. When the voodoo chips came and we started having dedicated pci cards just for drawing 3d graphics!
There is a bit going on with VR headsets, but they're not showing the same kind of promise anymore..
Software is becoming scarce.. We sit with the most powerful general purpose computers in the history of mankind in front of us, and we use them to view "web apps" crawl forth with abhorrent efficiency compared to the wares of yesteryear.
So, maybe some of the nostalgia is not so much because we want to look back, but rather because looking forward is frankly a rather bleak sight.
So it's much more fun to talk about the different ways, say, 1980s game consoles handled graphics – each had unique chips and unique ideas, but all simple enough to be explained in a single blog post – than it is to talk about how all consoles today use the same hardware and the same software stack to achieve the same mind-bogglingly complicated results that require years of study to understand.
Same with OSes, cars, cameras, you name it.
Now, the marketplaces are largely commoditized and new products are incremental improvements and extensions of previous ones. The old ideas and products are still there, fascinating history to be explored.
An example - on a new Linux system, look at the man page for "termcap", and you will find configuration data for the Teletype model 33 and the Lear Siegler ADM-3. That makes people like me go "Hmm!" in a fascinated tone of voice.
History is like dead reckoning navigation. We only understand where we are by knowing where we were and what was done to get from there to here, and there are those of us very interested in such things.
This is only a partial answer to your question.
The thing vi was written on! (Which is why vi has arrow keys on hjkl and not jkl;. Which is why my dead reckoning for vi's evolution makes me wanna stop using it.)
I didn't quote the surrounding context from the essay, which itself is quite fun; do read the full essay if you can.
https://medium.com/@lindynewsletter/is-culture-stuck-eb31712...
Perhaps the same is true of HN / tech communities more generally. Tech as a sector was much smaller a couple of decades ago. And many of us probably only got our first computers in the late 90s early 2000s. I'd argue it was until the 2010s that the internet really become ubiquitous. I'm guessing a large segment of us have only recently been able to talk about past technology in any meaningful way.
I think this accounts for a lot of it.
It seems like all generations know we aren't in great times.
You then got ahold of a $3K Apple ][ computer with 32K of memory and integer basic, and the only way to get performance was 6502 assembly programming. A struggle.
Then PCs came along, where nobody ever needed more than 640K memory, so it was a struggle to partition your work to fit it all in, but at least you didn't have to do assembler anymore since there was FORTRAN or Pascal.
And then the barriers lowered even further with GUIs and more memory, but you still had to worry about true multitasking not really being implemented correctly, and your poorly-written program could still hog the cycles. A slightly lower struggle.
And now there is more memory than you know what to do with, unless you are a rocket or climate scientist. And you infrequently have to worry about performance. Code efficiency? Bah!
It's all about the struggle.
Soooo much in hipster tech is reinventing the wheel all over again.
(Why culture is dead is another topic…)
This covers that nicely
With past, you know what it was, you have a romanticized image about it. At least I do.
Unfortunately reality doesn't require us to, it's only our comfort that does.
The past is attractive because we were different then. We felt different, and we thought different. We like who we were then more than we like who we are now. We liked our future then more than we like our future now.
While the technician was manipulating the thing I was surprised how badly its designed. How fragile its whole "state" and memory and how easily you can get it to reset itself or to lock yourself. This is, supposedly, an important thing and it can be critical (no technician that night? You'd be locked out of your apartment until morning. Good luck figuring it out.) What if it happened when you took the garbage out and your wallet/phone are not with you? Well, you are in a weird situation. I take my wallet and phone now to throw the garbage out. This is a regression of living standards.
And I'm a techie and I'd love that everything become IoT or "smart" but it has to be done right. The developers have to consider the criticality of the tool they are building and designing. Unfortunately, today, this is not taken into consideration. There is a blatant disregard of any of that and instead you have a focus on aesthetic, advertising, marketing, short-term profit, scale, reach, data collection, etc... But real, reliable functionality is thrown out of the window.
The system got to be breaking at some point. I think we are at that point and a big re-structuring of the tech sector will eventually happen.
I don’t want to focus on the past, because the thought of the future, of making up for and crushing that sucky past, was what kept me going. But what else is there to focus on? Focusing on the future isn’t really an option when you are in this situation. I am not even going to have the money to go to the gym anymore soon. I might be living on the street by then. Focusing exclusively on the present will mean breaking myself mentally staring at the screen, simultaneously praying for and dreading the next interview that comes. If I break down now, I eliminate any prospect of escape. So I have to do whatever is necessary to prevent that, however counterproductive in other areas it is.
Although my childhood is not particularly trouble free as my parents are very strict with me, I still turn my thoughts back from time to time to temporarily escape from all the hassles I brought to myself.
Later, he talks to someone else about it, who points out that Paulie has nothing in his life now, and that Tony should just accept it if he wants to dwell in times that were more meaningful for him.
Marshall McLuhan had something to say about the phenomenon of how the emergence of new media drives society to retrieve remnants of the past…something new influences us to seek out something old.
Or something like that.
But yea, there’s something going on.
The cold, pale, glare of tokenized elucidations from large language models.
YC and the general startup culture has been to do quick MVP's to validate product. This is great for making companies, but these companies have been more about reducing friction than to create something inspiring.
And maybe people have become jaded by new startups becoming successful with boring products. Dropbox is a great company but it's not really an inspiring product. Nor is AirBnB. Or Replit.
On the other hand this has lead to people also being skeptical about actual inspiring companies. I don't have the link here but the amount of negativity about Boom was disappointing.
If you don't want HN to do old stories, stop wearing flares!
Wearing flares, in the right context, can be hip and counter-cultural as well!
We just tend to remember the victors. Have a skim through some old computer magazine archives, or old audio gear magazine archives, you'll soon realize that there was a lot of junk even 40 years ago, let alone plenty of inappropriate uses of tech that never caught on in any meaningful capacity. The industry has always been full of solutions in search of problems.
Some sick, demented part of me loves seeing whacky and weird over-engineering of decades-past. Another part of me loves being humbled by realizing the potential of something that simply never caught on, but is now lost in terms of patent limbo or IP ownership. I've bought a few old bits of tech, loved them and make regular use of them.
And the ones cheering it on here are the ones that still believe deeply in the power of the market and capitalism (E.G. if you're not good enough to have a job then you're not good enough). Even if it doesn't work for them, it might someday so better not have any worker protections in place.
kidding aside though theres really just a lot of good things to talk about in the past, so why not haha
Still, speculating is irresistible so here's my 2c. It's because tech is relatively stagnant at the moment.
i. A lot of traditional "hacker" stuff is about how computers work/are designed, but innovation there has largely stopped. If you look at the newest operating systems (Android, iOS, ChromeOS, Fuschia), they're all extremely same-y. The web meanwhile is kind of more grown or discovered than designed. To the extent these platforms do things different from 90s era operating systems, they're trying to make things less hackable and powerful in order to increase robustness and simplicity. Three come from a single company (or four if you count the web), and reflect the mindset/culture of that company. So people who hanker for the hacker spirit look backwards to an era when how computers worked was still up for grabs and was at least some interesting competition of ideas.
ii. PL theory is likewise kinda stagnant. HN gets excited about Rust partly because it's the only new language for a while that has new ideas in it. Go, Swift, Kotlin etc - all nice langs but very much of a muchness and avoid new ideas (maybe Swift gets some credit for trying stuff with strings). Compare this to the days when C, Lisp, Objective-C, Haskell, Perl were duking it out. All very different paradigms and approaches. People who get absurdly passionate about PLs are kind of an anachronism these days but were once common because there used to be more at stake.
iii. Hardware: also stagnant outside of mobile. This is mostly the fault of Microsoft and Linux vendors IMHO. The mobile industry has shown that it's perfectly capable of doing cool stuff with hardware over the past 10 years, with folding screens being one of the latest gizmos we get to play with, but how much of that stuff made it to the professional workstation-class machines we actually use daily? Almost none! Even hiDPI screens are a trainwreck. The problem here is firmly in the software camp. Microsoft checked out mentally years ago, Linux is hostile to HW vendors doing new things because drivers are such a PITA to ship out of the box, and PC/hardware vendors can't do anything meaningful with Windows other than try to optimize cost. So the landscape consists of Apple porting HW upgrades from their mobile R&D, and that's about it.
iv. Web ideology has been fading with time and Google's dominance. HTML was never going to win any design awards but for years many hacker types were extremely loyal to it, perceiving it as an open system unowned by any particular company. Nowadays the loyalty is less, for various reasons. It's now OK to criticize it, it's not taboo anymore. People can look back on what it displaced and compare more rationally, hence the semi-common "Delphi was cool" type comments. This is a healthy pushback against the often irrational collective progressivism of the first decade of the 2000s, in which every "open" platform was cool, brilliant and the future, and everything privately owned was dangerous hot garbage. Sometimes I personally feel the pendulum has swung too far, like with the people who celebrate the inability to install non-Store apps on iOS, but there's no question that the pendulum has swung.
Agreed. This is the central argument present in the old "Unix Haters Handbook". It describes Unix as a virus.
> Go, Swift, Kotlin etc - all nice langs but very much of a muchness and avoid new ideas
Agreed. This is what I think Greenspun was getting at with his "tenth rule".
> iii. Hardware: also stagnant outside of mobile.
Agreed, but I sure hope it doesn't stay this way.
I still want real smart glasses that look like regular glasses, but perform as well as an expensive VR headset.
My wife still wants digital nail polish like the receptionist in Total Recall (1990) has.
> Web ideology has been fading with time and Google's dominance.
I'm not sure that "web ideology" was ever really a thing outside of those responsible for describing why the WWW took off. The reason I say this is that people have been trying to shoehorn it into an application delivery platform since almost day #1. If something akin to Java applets had taken off, then I think we'd be looking at a very different, significantly-less-open web today.
Still, I definitely think you can do way more exciting stuff with OS design than what anyone currently does. It would be at the higher levels rather than how the kernel works, but you can do it. Academia is a particular disappointment in this regard - that's the one place that should be able to do really interesting stuff here, yet academic OS research is dead.
There's less scope to do new stuff in PL research, IMO. Most of the radical ideas there have hit dead ends. The whole pure FP thing turned out to be a dead end, when was the last time you thought about Haskell? Probably even Clojure has done better. It's not clear where you can go from here beyond usability improvements which is probably why modern languages all look the same.
Hardware: there's definitely a ton of scope to do cool stuff with AR/VR goggles in the work environment.
Web: Java isn't less closed than the web. Arguably it's actually more open as there are interestingly different implementations of the JVM, it's a way more modular ecosystem that's way less dependent on the absurd army-sized dev team that Chrome requires.
Transformers are going to create huge shifts in how businesses work on a fundamental level. The stable diffusion and LLMs could collectively eliminate huge numbers of jobs.
The past doesn't have the same worries, and this tech revolution is not looking good for many.