Web apps aren't tech. They're “tech” | Hacker News Reader

Web apps aren't tech. They're “tech”

questinglog.com

27 pointsAlchemistCamp44 comments

if you studied computer science before 1960 you did maths and electronic engineering. If you studied computer science after 1970 you probably learned a subset speciality. All fields change and all work looks different 10 years later.

Web apps are sufficiently turing-complete that the arrogance of "thats not tech" is just wrong.

Carmack wouldn't write asm for a device now, in all cases. He might do Verilog for an FPGA but he might be doing something else.

I think the author's point is that modern toolchains make spinning up a basic web app more like following a recipe, and as such is free of many (novel) technical challenges. As technology goes, it's still complex, but so is building a microwave oven and yet we don't call GE's white goods department a tech company. It's a challenge that's already been tackled and is well understood.

If your web app is doing something that's never been done before, which requires the application of scientific principles and so on, like... translating baby babbles into English, then it's still technology, but that would not be because it's a web app.

There is a great spanish saying (I got this from historical fiction) "let no new thing arise"

Vonnegut wrote a course for eng. lit creative writing on the 7 canonical plotlines of all stories. ever. I thought "goodness whats the point in writing now" but it hasn't stopped people making good entertaining fiction

All code is variations over abstraction, synthesis, loops, decision forks, recursion (tail or not) and all data structures iterate back over lists and arrays, over trees and DAGs.

"never been done before" is pretty rare anywhere.

That's not really true. Unless you're specifically following a recipe, chances are most of what you're doing has never been done before, at least in some aspects of it.

But I do think it's a bad way of evaluating this. Personally, I would say that a more important distinction between tech and "tech" is the degree to which the technology makes or breaks the business.

For example, for Uber, the tech is an enabler, but the business is made or broken by the cabs, the vetting, the pricing, the number of cabs they can hire, the salaries and benefits they can avoid etc. Sure, the tech has to work, but there is no reason that Uber would be falling behind if their tech went into maintenance mode today - even if their competitors kept investing in new tech. So, Uber is a "tech" company in my book (even though they have spent inordinate amounts of money on the tech before).

On the other hand, a company like Cisco must make ever better routers or Arista or F5 or whoever will quickly steal their lunch. So Cisco is a tech company, at least on the NEM side.

Just because the barrier to entry is lower today doesn’t mean complexity is also lower.

An app doesn’t have to be cutting edge in order to clear some arbitrary bar of what constitutes “tech”.

So your claim is that anything turing-complete should forever be called "tech" and that any disagreement is arrogance?

That's a difficult position to engage with constructively.

At some future date, assuming the GPT-3 adherents are right, nobody will "write code" because we will describe systems design goals to an intermediary which then writes the code.

Where is the tech then?

I do think there is tech and non-tech. But it gets very like pornography and the Meese commission: I know it when I see it.

What I find hard, is how many people writing for the REPL or compiled languages, dismiss what is done in CSS or in JS outside of webasm. or PHP. The arrogance is the exclusionary behaviour.

Carmack is very smart. Had he been born 40 years earlier he might well have been the one to work out how to optimise track to head delay on a drum memory, or hacked delay lines, or even have done something amazing in LSI before VLSI. But then some non-carmack doing bitblt optimisations to make games happen would have been wondering "am I a real tech or not"

(btw I think GPT-3 Adherents are smoking strong stuff. I don't expect anyone to write informally stated natural language of intent and have proscriptive, defined code come out the other side, but you know this is a strawman argument too)

I graduated in 82. Because I did not do the Mudge VLSI Course I was held in somewhat contempt by my peers who did. I did Pascal. I was held somewhat in contempt by the Fortran NAG library maintenance squad. We who ran the boxes, and wrote controllers for the plotter were a bit contemptuous of the ones coding for the BBC micro and I was completely distainful of the guy coding .BAT files. None of this is "good" behaviour because we were all doing "tech" But the guys in the engineering labs doing Hypersonic wind tunnels were sometimes a bit elitist about us in s/w ... Over in the school for the logical foundations in computer science they were already writing abstract meta-code which was as far removed from an instruction set as its possible to be: theories of computation, proof systems, you name it.

Physicists and Engineers have been arguing for centuries about the difference between their disciplines.

>At some future date, assuming the GPT-3 adherents are right, nobody will "write code" because we will describe systems design goals to an intermediary which then writes the code.

Well, the fundamental problem with this is that you just made the programmer even more powerful. A single programmer is now as productive as a thousand programmers. You still want to have a programmer because you want someone who understands what the system is actually doing right now and keeps it running. You also need someone who understands the limitations of the software generator. You can't just say "please create software that solves the halting problem". You also need someone who understands how to optimize software. You can easily ask for something that is possible but it could cost you millions of AWS credits.

There will always be someone who has intimate knowledge of the tool he is using and can charge appropriately for it. The more powerful the tool the more attractive the employee. Compare an engineer drafting on paper vs one doing it in CAD.

Ah this explains the disconnect. I see the "Web 2.0" era as closer to the frontier than Quake 3 (as cutting-edge as it was in its day). In the era of Flickr, a young group of devs with no resources would have had a tough go at it in 3D gaming and would have been better off making Flash games.

I can't say much about if and when we're worse at everything than AI, but we're not there yet. At least for now, there are still new opportunities just as open to aspiring techies now as web apps were 15 years ago or PC games were 30 years ago.

> But people don't talk about ancient inventions as "technology", outside of a historical context. When we call something technology, we generally mean something invented recently

This is rediculous, the whole articles schtick is based on an inline redefining of the word its about.

Well I guess the sky isn't blue anymore because the word blue doesn't mean blue anymore, it means red.

I dunno about you all, but when I talk about technology, I am referring to the accepted definition meaning. Not "recent tech", although a lot of contexts this can be assumed.

But nobody out there is assuming you mean recent tech when you're talking about ancient Egyptian technology.

Words mean things, so does context, stop trying to redefine the meaning of words all the time, it's tiring, and we usually have a word for what you want to convey already.

Do you refer to cars, microwaves, refrigerators or light bulbs as "tech"?

yes.

They're undoubtedly technologies, but I don't think that in practice people would call those industries part of "tech".

The whole "tech" label needs to die as it's overstayed its welcome and now just funnels engineers towards narrower and narrower segments of the economy where the benefits are less and less clear.

If you estimate the "tech-iness" of a domain by the depth of the tech tree or the "height" of the leaves people are working on, most "tech" work these days is working on CRUD apps based on a 20-ish (?) year old paradigm. It's hardly cutting edge, and probably isn't the most deserving of the label.

"tech" is short for technology.[1] So yes, any technology is tech. Of course you might want to define tech differently in which case it might be helpful if you're explicit in what you understand "tech" to be.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tech

Homeware companies refer to their technology divisions all the time.

What you're calling "tech" the rest of the world calls "I.T."

I wouldn't mind that re-labeling.

From it's own definitions this article is patently false. Quote: "applying scientific knowledge for practical purposes" You're doing that when you try to reduce time to display from 1 second to 1000ms, when trying to chose algorithms that better match your users real usage of the site, to just plain moving a button a few pixels so people see it better. It doesn't have to be the new shiny to make an actual impact.

I 100% agree with you, and to dismiss web apps in this way is to devalue making thinking easier for people. However, I'm also amused by the Freudian slip of 1 second to 1000 ms, which would of course be "tech" instead of tech.

Yeah, that one would indeed be "tech":). I meant 100ms of course.

WeWork is a "tech" company in the sense that the actual business is a thin tech veneer around an established business model (like Regus Group). A huge number of SaaS services are effectively a thin design layer around a database, a technology that has been established decades ago. I think that's the real thrust of the post.

I tried writing this three times, and I'm probably going to screw it up anyways but here's my take on business models and "tech": If the entirety of your approach is an existing model but "on the internet" and you don't spend any effort on what "on the internet" really means, then you might be in "tech". However if you take the time to carefully apply yourself to how the new environment changes your business model and your relationship with customers, and exercise sound technical and product focused expertise in so doing, then you're in tech. Efficiency, expanded markets, better experience, ease of use, etc are real tangible benefits, even if the whole product is just a shell around a 1970s COBOL database.

The article explicitly gives that definition to show that everything is tech by the dictionary - from fire and pottery to vertical-landing rockets and quantum computers. It then points out that the common-use definition of tech has more to do with the (fuzzy) novelty of the scientific discovery than with the existence of it.

Is this very different from people who tune the design of springs in car door handles so they have a nice click when you open them? That's good engineering, but is it what you'd call tech? Or does it need to be done on a web app to be tech?

Absolutely that's tech. Metallurgy, force maps, 3d models, computer controlled machining, etc is in fact HIGH technology. To previous generations that's just plain magic, even if the user doesn't spend more than 1/10th of second thinking about it.

Aside: When I moved to SF for my first job in 2014 I thought I'd be working in "software". I was a bit surprised to learn that what I'm actually working in is "tech" (and that I'm something called a "techie" as well). It seemed to me that nobody really talked like this in college - you wouldn't say you majored in "tech", my fellow ACM members weren't "techies". Since we are almost always talking about software, the label seems a bit odd. I suspect it's the influence of finance that lumps all these industries together, but the work and environment is very different in HW vs SW.

In this thread: heated discussions that boil down to different definitions of the word "tech".

Since "tech" is mostly a marketing term, this seems fairly pointless. For suitable definitions, a real-estate company is hot "tech". For other reasonable definitions anything that is is mass production is not "tech".

Yeah, this discussion is merely about the word, not about it's meaning.

My intents were:

1) Share something I found profoundly encouraging for newcomers trying to make a dent with their technical skills

2) Explore how conflating two different (but overlapping) things we use the same word for makes it easy to mistakenly feel like it's "too late" to make a dent with technical skills.

Given just how many people got upset after interpreting it along entirely different lines, this piece is clearly going to take some more revision.

I think what you’re really trying to describe is disruptive innovation. The way new technological development creates new market / business opportunities.

It’s not just about technology itself, but the relationship and timing between the technology’s capabilities and potential customers.

And you’re right, that technical skills will be invaluable to these businesses because in many cases, these technologies still have technical challenges to overcome before it’ll meet the customer needs, i.e. technical risk.

I think it’s great that you expressed your ideas, shipped it and then iterated on the clarity because many engineers with entrepreneurial ambitions will find your insights useful.

I thought this was going to be another blog about how Javascript isn't a real programming language and web apps are cancer.

It's not.

It's actually a very nice article about the BAFTA acceptance speech that John Carmack gave.

> I do hear sometimes from programmers who are kind of sad that they don't have the opportunity to write game engines from scratch like I did and have it matter or make an impact...

> here's where some perspective really helps - I can remember when I was a teenager, I thought I had missed the Golden Age of 8-bit Apple 2 gaming, that I was never going to be Richard Garriott...time went by, and I got to make my own marks in things after that. And, in that time, I also see so many opportunities that have come by.

> The 90s PC wave was great - I was happy to be there, and I'm glad I took a swing and knocked one out of the park with that. But since then, we've seen mobile games, and web games, and free-to-play games, the Steam revolution...and now virtual reality. And all of these are amazing!

> So, yeah, the opportunities that I had aren't there for people today - but there are new and better ones. And personally, I'm more excited about these than anything that's come before. So, thank you very much for this honor, but I'm just getting started.

> -John Carmack (BAFTA acceptance speech)

So unless you are building a strong AI or a full-dive VR set you are not building `tech`?

If you're building a website for a non-tech business (e.g. an online store) then that's pretty much a commodified industry at this point, no more "tech" than e.g. building a building or a bridge. Not saying that there isn't important, valuable work, and even certain kinds of innovation involved, but it's a different kind of thing from work that's inherently about applying genuinely novel scientific advances.

If you're doing something that's been widespread for 15 years, you'll likely have so much competition that it will be about marketing, not technology.

You're confusing innovation and technology.

And the gatekeeping is really unbecoming.

Gatekeeping? Literally, the entire thrust is encouraging someone just getting started.

Large companies gatekeep the markets that boomed in the 2000s, but there's still a lot of open space and there will be more waves to catch.

You’re missing a wide chasm of design and data between tech and marketing.

In our own spheres of tech, we have a nostalgia for the childhood that we missed. A childhood where everything was still new and magical. Where fairies might plausibly be lurking around the corner. Things like realizing that phone lines were using sounds as control signals let you play in this field more easily. I imagine living in the era where they were just realizing that you could define a common interface for different instruction sets that allowed portability and I wonder how many of those ideas I would have come up with.

That's what I attribute "golden age" talk to. I guess the author's point is that there are other field of technology that are currently young. I agree, but it's not exactly the same magic: Computer Tech is uniquely accessible, and our freedom to explore and play in other fields is limited by the current economic situation.

However, even if I'd been born earlier, the golden age wouldn't have been as accessible to me geographically (I'd be in <small-mountain-town>, India).

Also, my current goal is to get myself to a place where I can play in mature fields and explore younger ones.

I think the author is reading way too much into the word "tech". Using general words to abbreviate specific concepts is pretty common in English. Gas usually refers to a specific fuel used in cars (gasoline) even though it is also referring to a much broader category that describes a state of matter and any material in that state. This leads to situations where words Autogas and gas refer to completely different things.

The word tech has a colloquial meaning which doesn't actually stand for technology in general. Tech actually stands for a very narrow form of technology namely information technology. In other languages you see the exact opposite. Instead of using a broad category to abbreviate a specific meaning the abbreviation is actually based around the meaning of the word itself. Information technology isn't "Techno" in German, it's "Informatik". In French it is "Informatique". In Italian its "Informatica".

This article is primarily a complaint about the English language than about "tech" itself.

I read that.

I still don't know what the title / that line is supposed to mean.

Much of what we call "tech" is 10 to 20 old technology. We still call an interactive website tech, but in reality, they're no more cutting edge now than CDs were in 2010.

The fact that it's not new technology is part of why there's so much competition and so much of the market is controlled by established players.

It used to be possible to reach a massive audience with a trivial iPhone app 10 years ago or with a plain text blog a few years before that.

New those spaces are crowded but there are new ones opening up.

I'd say most of what we consider a webapp has been "perfected" around 10 years ago. There have been some major usability upgrades such as flexbox but again this is only a productivity booster. It was possible to do everything without flexbox and the price you had to pay was only the cost of your sanity. Now that youtube has changed its algorithm I keep seeing videos from 2013 and in terms of quality they might as well be made in 2020. 1080p has become a well established standard and Youtube no longer skimps heavily on compression. The biggest reason why videos look "old" today is that people just compress videos heavily.

Mike Lesk on UUCP: "i occupied a vacuum. UUCP was hard to replace because they had to push me aside"

Ok we got it. Websites/Online-Stores and custom coded backends are not "tech" according to the article (much as CDs/Videos are not tech). But still the ways of building these things change every day. UX/UI patterns change. Frontend Frameworks change. Its all about the tech in "tech" in my opinion. The web and how we perceive content in 10 years will be much different than it is today and its our job to make this happen.

Tech as in technology is literally anything that makes a task easier...

If you're working on something that makes a task easier, congratulations you're working in tech!

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