Comment by tnone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tnone | Hacker News Reader

Strange, I'm absolutely jaded on the technologies of today's world. The web and mobile phones have locked us into a shitty content consuming culture. Almost nobody is writing real novel software, they're just gluing together premade parts and managing the plumbing. I don't even blame them, the amount of effort required to just get people to look at something that doesn't open with 1 click is immense.

But shunting data in and out of sql databases and making REST APIs is not novel tech work, it's just a very fragile way of describing and maintaining policy. The tech sites of old had more interesting and novel implementations in a handful of articles than passes through HN in a week, and it wasn't stuck behind a SaaS wall either.

As for VR or AI, one is stuck in a rut of uninspired arcade shovelware and the other is being used for terrifying totalitarian purposes. Welcome to cyberpunk dystopia, population you.

My own feeling is that we're now smack dab in the middle of two tech hype cycles, and yeah - it does seem kind of boring right now to be honest.

We've probably hit and passed peak web/app/social but the horizon technologies seem still very immature, with relatively high barriers to experimentation.

I've found this is reflected in my own experience perusing HN. In the past I found something on the first page almost every single day that blew my hair back. Now I'm mostly like "Oh, some ancient civilization used scorpion venom to make birthday cakes..." or "Oh, this React library hit version 8.5.2...guess I'll go...make a CRUD app now?"

I don't think my experience says anything about HN though - this community is as good as ever. I'm probably just getting old. One thing I know for sure is that there's a ton of opportunity out there for those with a prepared mind and enthusiasm for technology.

> Almost nobody is writing real novel software, they're just gluing together premade parts and managing the plumbing.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

One man's "novel implementation" is another man's "unreadable and unmaintainable pile of hacks".

I'm not saying we should all standardize on a single set of tools, but after the fourth project you've cleaned up that spends tens of GB of RAM editing XML files, you'd probably wish "uses a database" was a business requirement for every future project too (just as an example).

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