Sign of the times?

I have been following posts on Hacker News, albeit, not religiously. I wish I had time to neatly categorize posts based on the content in the post but in general, a few themes standout: (1) sagely start-up wisdom (2) another day, another web application (3) another day, another debate about the best MVC framework for the web app (4) VC gossip (5) gossip around Apple, Google and Facebook (6) Another post about how language X sucks, a contrarian spinning his/her wheels on why language Y rocks. That pretty much sums up hacker news. The Signal/Crap ratio is scary if you rip apart fluff masquerading as technology.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the site. What bothers me is this penchant to appropriate the "start-up" cool as opposed to focusing on the idea, product, or service that is being innovated -- as if a start-up is the end-all-be-all in life. Is start-up association the technology community parallel to celebrities who are famous for being famous? That brings us to another abused word namely, "innovation." Since when did 100 lines of web application code become innovation? Where is the innovation that focuses on the hard problems? I am not sure if there can be a scale for innovation but a 100 line web 2.0 application is no match for the integrated circuit. I am sorry, I cannot put these two in the same league. As a developer myself, I can tell you, code is just code. Pasting code on blogs and sites is just show-off; much like the friendly sales guy in a suit who is flashing the latest smartphone at the airport to appropriate the phone's coolness.

What seems to be also missing is the appreciation for incremental and painstaking detail oriented innovation. There is joy in watching sustained growth in small increments. The satisfaction comes not from the magnitude of change but in nourishing the small yet subtle and perceivable increments that are part of the larger vision of a hard problem.