The obsession with next | Hacker News Reader

The obsession with next

37signals.com

118 pointszdw52 comments

I dunno, 99% of the people I talk to (the rest of the world) is less worried about what new technology is next than when current technology will work right. What's next, according to them:

  - When will the website work for any browser?
  - When will the website talk to the fulfillment system?
  - When will I be able to log in with less than 14 passwords?
  - When will we be able to use our mouse on the Report Writer?
  - When will credit cards go through without problems?
  - When will my phone not drop calls?
  - When will Ticket # 15429 be done?
  - When will my email tell me I have voicemail?
  - When will it take less than 5 minutes to power up?
  - When can I stop worrying about viruses?
  - When will someone stop spam?
  - When will someone in IT listen to my problems, even if they're not cool?

You will never be able to stop spam (I assume you mean email). A few years ago I realized this when looking through my logs I saw emails to ... bob@domain.com ben@domain.com berry@domain.com ... etc Blindly trying the most common. I knew then that if I wanted the account name ben I could never 'solve' spam on top of our general email system we have today.

For all those who downvoted this how do you 100% 'solve' spam?

Public-key channels over e-mail. Think about how your body works: each cell has certain receptors (a key) and only reads data from objects that are shaped to plug into those receptors. Thus, random messages can float around in the bloodstream without every random cell trying to interpret them. Similarly, we could have an actual "inbox" (a bloodstream) that never gets displayed, and then channel-specific inboxes that are.

When a spammer begins to spam on a certain channel, a message can be sent via a secondary channel (maybe a special control channel, or just any combination of other known channels that hits everyone who had authorized access to the original channel) to automatically shift just the valid users over to a new channel, and discard the original. It could be completely invisible from a UI perspective, with the new channel retaining all the old channel's metadata.

The nice thing is that it's almost entirely compatible with all the e-mail infrastructure we have now, but also allows for a very convenient use-case if you're willing to switch to a new UI. The only problem is in people's current knowledge of, and access to, public-key encryption. If Facebook or another major identity provider started pushing people to send them public keys and set up a queriable API for them, that'd be a nice first step toward solving that.

I didn't fully understand that explanation, but I'm trying to see how a potential client can contact me using the system you suggest.

And if a potential client can, why can a spammer not?

Here's one way: The guy that tried adam@example.com, anna@example.com, berry@example.com etc., sending basically the same message to each, before trying ben@example.com is probably not a "potential client".

Then you get into the spam-filtering based on content, which is already successful at preventing massive amounts of spam.

So I don't see what you're adding. You guarantee that people I know can get through, which I already do with whitelists, and you require content based filtering on the rest, which I already do.

So I don't really understand how what you're proposing makes a difference.

How does Ben know that the guy previously emailed adam, anna and berry?

Shouldn't Adam, Anna and Berry be concerned about their email privacy if Ben just reads their email on a whim?

Spam filtering is still required in this case, by definition: potential clients and spammers are not disjoint sets. Any completely unknown sender who sends you a message has no metadata attached to their message which may enable trust rating; therefore, the only thing you'll be able to judge them on is the quality and relevance of the message content itself.

However, assuming ubiquitous identity servers, of the kind Diaspora is trying to enable, each identity server could be subscribed to a feed of updates for a respective channel key. So, for example, you could have an identity server at work from which other employees could pull your current "work" channel key, or an identity server at a hackathon meet-up from which other people who came to the meet-up could pull your current "meet-up" channel key. Then, people who contacted you would be contacting you with the trust score of the identity server pre-applied (you'd assign your work identity server a high score, because only employees may be members, while the meet-up score would be lower because anyone could show up and sign in, etc.) If you only want to deal with people you've physically met, you can just draw a line saying to discard messages below a certain trust score, and be done with it.

If not, though, channels are still a helpful complement to spam filtering, as each channel could have its own spam filter trained on channel content—so something that would be perfectly fine in a "work.offtopic" channel would be considered spam in a "work.ontopic" channel. Because people would likely have multiple means of contacting them (you'd have access to most people you actually knew through multiple channels), individual channels could be much harsher about rejecting content—probably just silently discarding it for everyone but the sender, and either acknowledging the rejection to the sender, or just saying nothing. (If clients sent a message to all relevant channels simultaneously, and messages from different channels with the same ID were re-combined for other clients, this wouldn't be so much of a problem.)

Any extension to this concept would simply be sticking an identity server in a new place: one sitting on each person's phone or computer providing temporary access to a "proximity channel" that constantly shifts (so as soon as you go out of range, you're unsubscribed from the identity server and can no longer send messages), topic-oriented free-to-join identity servers (basically equivalent to IRC servers, except that they don't have to handle message routing themselves), and so on.

This is the oldest bias there is. Singling out technology is a bit myopic, because as far as I can see, every field is obsessed with what's next. The sciences are an obvious example, the whole point is to discover something new and present it to your peers. Fashion is another easy example, no one cares what happened last year, they want to see this year's collection. Art was the first example I thought of: I once visited a museum in New Zealand filled with beautiful paintings by people no one has ever heard of. The main reason why? Their styles were not original. In each painting you could plainly see which master the artist took after.

Next is exciting and last is boring. That is how it will always be. Hoping that you are going to be written up in a NEWs paper for making your five year old product a little faster and more stable is wishful thinking.

This is not to belittle the importance of incremental improvements to existing products at all. Fixing small bugs and making your software more stable is incredibly important work that will make your customers happy, and make your software great. But it is not the New, so don't be surprised when most people don't care.

"I once visited a museum in New Zealand filled with beautiful paintings."

Was that in "Te Papa"? I saw an exhibition of local artwork, nothing ground-breaking but most were quite exquisite.

I'm pretty sure it was http://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/

I'm embarrassed that I don't remember for sure. I was mostly guided about by my friends that trip.

This post seems inspired from a discussion DHH had on twitter with @obie (founder of hashrocket) yesterday about people in their positions moving on to new ventures or staying for the long term of what they helped start.

Obie's position was primarily that it's better to get out of your comfort zone and continue to create new things.

(Discussion starting from http://twitter.com/#!/obie/status/39778057610997760)

Is there way to follow a twitter conversation like a thread on HN with indented replies? Or maybe a 3rd party site that does that?

http://bettween.com/dhh/obie

http://bettween.com/

http://twitter.theinfo.org/39778057610997760

I think the obsession with next comes not because we're obsessed with new, but because we're excited about it!

New technology, new ideas, new innovation - it's all happening at lightning speed. We're part of the greatest time in the history of the world IMO, and that's why we love next - we can't wait to see it.

We're inventing fire, the wheel, and the printing press back to back. Whether we like it or not, next is the new drug.

I agree. I think the title of the article is quite unrelated to what comes after.

What DHH is railing against is impatience and not about what comes next. After all, isn't Rails itself the result of DHH being fed up of the "now" and wanting to do the "next"?

>We're part of the greatest time in the history of the world IMO

That's quite a claim. Technology must be advancing fast if you already have Muad'Dib's ability to perceive all of human history simultaneously as one infinite structure extending in both directions. How did I miss Steve Jobs getting the Arrakis fiefdom?

Or could it be that Now is always the greatest part of history because it's by definition the only part that you can ever inhabit? Like how your headaches will always be so much worse than everyone else's because they're happening in your head.

There's a simple argument to be made that the events that are unfolding in the course of our lifetimes have resulted in an unprecedented degree of societal and technological progress than ever before in the history of the world.

You're offering a reasonable critique, but no alternative. I'd love to hear an argument for another period in history that might be a contender for being as or more "great".

The taming of fire may have been relatively more significant

The laying of the first transatlantic telegraph, to pluck an idea out of the air.

Or, the rise of Freud's ideas in society in the latter half of the 20th century.

Or, the change from hunter-gatherer societies to agrarianism.

Or, The Terror in france and the various other european uprisings of that time.

Or, lest we forget, WORLD WAR FUCKING TWO.

EDIT: I'm defining 'great' here as 'greatest change' because 'greatest progress' is ill-defined to the point of meaninglessness.

EDIT2: Here's another one: the invention of the 2" ABS plastic pipe and it's employment in sanitation and irrigation.

Although it obviously depends on how old you are as to whether or not that falls within "our lifetimes."

Establishing the groundwork for this discussion:

What do you mean by "societal progress"? Do you mean things like reduction of poverty, or production of arts, or decrease in the frequency of mass murder, or some combination of all of the above and more? Or do you mean something else entirely?

What constitutes "technological progress"? Does the progression from a dozen websites to ten million constitute meaningful technological progress - is pushing ten thousand cars off an assembly line twice as progressive as a mere five thousand? Or do you mean actual innovation? In the case of the latter, how would you measure the rate of innovation today with that of earlier periods? (In principle, the number of patents granted per year should give you a rough idea of this, but (1) patents have only been around for a fairly short period of time, and (2) their actual value in measuring innovation is highly disputed).

Finally, you seem to imply in your last paragraph that the "greatness" of an era is a function of its social and technological progress, and no other factors. Is this reading correct? Or is the door open to other measures as well?

Sure, that's a reasonable objection, but look at what our society has accomplished over the past 32 years of my lifetime:

1. The Internet, computers, and everything that comes with 2. DNA Mapping 3. Treatments and cures for hundreds of diseases and other maladies. 4. Private space travel 5. Sending a robot to Mars 6. Taming the elements to provide real natural energy

These are just a few things that get me excited, but the list could go on and on. I just can't think of another time in history when so much happened so fast.

Many of those things only affect a tiny minority of, relatively speaking, incredibly rich people though. They will have knock on effects for the rest of the world, especially in the long term, but I submit that there are other events in human history that affected everyone on the planet at once, or at least very quickly.

An example would be plastic water piping for sanitation, as mentioned in my other comment.

I would also count the start of the Nuclear Age with the bombing of Hiroshima as something that affected almost everyone on earth by completely rebalancing the international political structure.

I'm not incredibly rich and many of those things have had a huge impact on my life. My brother surviving stage IV cancer, for example. Being able to build a business with nothing more than a domain name and a programming book, etc.

If things keep moving as fast as they are, then my guess is that the trickle down effects will...well...trickle faster.

In global terms, you are incredibly rich. If you have ever owned a domain name or a programming book you are incredibly rich.

Around half the world lives on less than $2.50 a day[1]. If you have one dollar a day that you can afford to waste on something you don't need to live, you're in something like the top ten or twenty percent of the world's richest. Sorry, I don't have a source for that last one, although the figure could likely be derived from the stats here:

[1] http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta...

Right, but we're talking about innovation, not sociological issues, and I'm not ashamed to be given the opportunity to be on the forefront of that.

The best way for me, as an entrepreneur, to help those less fortunate is to make more money so I can build greater things, and that's at the core of the innovation we're seeing here.

The thing about software development is that the technology (tools) changes faster than you can evolve a product. Integrating new technologies into an existing product can be a real challenge. If all you do is evolve, there inevitably comes a point where your product is behind the curve. Basecamp and Fogbugz are good products that were probably great at some point, but now they just seem old and crusty compared to products like Asana and Pivotal Tracker.

I'd argue that in order to stay competitive, you need to either evolve rapidly enough to keep up with the pace of technology (Gmail, Facebook), or rethink and rebuild the product before it falls behind.

There are lots of hottest web startups out there that use LAMP as their primary stack. Even more, first version of Mint.com was written (horror!) in Java.

The technology stack has absolutely nothing to do with your ability to keep the pace with competition.

  first version of Mint.com was written (horror!) in Java

You're implying that it was entirely rewritten in something else later...

I'm still pretty sure that if you pick your frameworks and tools right, Java can be a competitive development framework. If you go all Java Beans, EJB, etc, you might be in trouble, but it's not so much the language per se.

Grails FTW :)

It's hard to compare Asana, which still hasn't outgrown beta, to a product like Basecamp that has serviced millions of users.

I agree that Basecamp feels a bit stale, but I don't think it's as much about technology as it is about their design and development philosophy.

That's fair. I suppose the real point is that it's easy for a product get stale, even if it's constantly evolving.

or rethink and rebuild the product before it falls behind.

You mean like Netscape did?

oh, wait...

The tools to make Gmail and Asana existed when Basecamp was launched.

Specifically, the fallacies of distributed computing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput...) and approaches to address them existed when Basecamp was launched.

That they are now starting to be addressed more and more by applications like Gmail and Asana are not a function of revolutionary advances in our tools, but of an evolution in the collective understanding of our tools.

It is not so much about keeping up with the pace of technology, as it is about understanding technology, and the advances already made.

This is definitely a problem in our culture and the 'what's next' mentality can end up adding a lot of noise to innovation. New is exciting & fun for sure, but what's better for business and progress is something novel that is then flushed out over a relatively long term to become a successful business. Then the business is in a better place to make huge impact (see Apple...)

What makes sense depends entirely on the context. Sometimes, it needs to be realized that it will take time for technologies/solutions to mature. Other times, it will be more clear that a new technology has high prospects. It also depends on your team, the business model, the solution, etc.

The other side of the equation is the internal mechanics of large corporations. There are many that yearn new ideas and any form of innovation, "stirring of the pot" if you will, after decades of using the same winning strategy. They realize they are making bets on some new technologies, but the alternative is to stand back and lose by default. Surely, corporations of all sizes (and their people) often make strategic mistakes and take the wrong approach. But they also make some good decisions and there are many examples of new ideas emerging so fast that they put entire industry categories out of business.

I don't think it is right to issue blanket statements such as these. They feel more like a ranting for popularity than well thought-out observation. Different approaches might have varying levels of value at varying levels in the value chain. You might have a good strategy that works for you; you don't need to assault every other approach out there in order to stand out.

Sure, if nothing has changed in the product, the press doesn't want to write about it, the news is about whats changed in the world.

But what the press does like is hearing about how existing products have made businesses successful. These stories are about the success of the business as a result of the product, which is the thing that is changing for companies with more static products that are very successful.

The economy needs to grow, consequently developers are always going to feel pressure to make new products and improve current products. The question I have is, is it better to make products that empower antiquated markets (anything to do with a fax machine) or develop for new markets (skype) or invent your own market (?).

I knew Steve Jobs was doing it all wrong!

Is it a tad odd that this comes from the RoR guys? Ruby + RoR in the mid to late 2000's was _the_ next language/framework.

So it's ok for next as long as _you_ benefit, but not if it causes you inconvenience.

Using the latest tools for the work that you're doing is great if the tools actually make your process better.

Adding new features, chasing empty trends that people don't want is quite different.

You're accusing them of mercurial morals, but did they ever previously promote the idea that "next" for the sake of "next" was a good thing?

Did they ever previously promote the idea that "next" for the sake of "next" was a good thing?

No one ever does that.

How about "Progressivists"? My terminology may be incorrect here, but they believe that progress will bring a better state even if the long term plans are unknown, and the short term appears to be negative. So long as things keep changing, new and better things will be invented.

For us, "what's next" was Pivotal Tracker.

He's not really talking about current vs. next, but what I made vs. what users want, which is probably the number one problem for makers.

DHH is talking about ADD.

What's Next is a big problem for software because the simple stuff is easy and noticeable, but the refinement is tricky and doesn't look like much.

At my old work, our basic software showed a series of line graphs crossing a page in realtime. Compared to the previous available tech (paper pen printers) it's Big and New.

Comes version 2 of the software and it has many refinements - antialiasing and smoothing algorithms to make the data look nicer and more interpretable but with no loss of significant detail; improved analytical algorithms with tighter results; reduction in data stored per unit of information; so on and so forth. But the users don't see this, and certainly don't think it's "much more" than version 1 - "Shouldn't this be a patch? Why should we have to purchase it again for v2?"

That job also taught me that what users want and what devs think users want are frequently miles apart.

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