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Comment by firmnoodle | Hacker News Reader

I miss when we were called slackers. Then we built the Internet and modern world but nobody gives us credit for that.

I'll give you credit. The early Gen X is where most of my mentors reside and I've had a number of exceptional ones.

So, thanks, Gen X. You did good.

I think Gen X are the finest, most practical, the most insightful generation of engineers. Sure, its is a generalization - of course it is - but it is worth noting how exceptional both the circumstances and the incentives were for them to lead us into the technological prowess.

From semiconductors to the internet, thanks folks. I have many mentors from this generation and I find a common thread of extreme discipline and rigor in their work - this is largely lost in my own generation (millenial).

Transfer of knowledge needs to be from prev to next gen. Unlike tutorials on YT teaching horrible practices, which is exactly the opposite. Experienced people from Gen X doesn't have the time, motivation, etc to go on YT with full blast click bait tutorials and compete with user engagement tactics. They write books. They're better than edu-entertainment IMO.

That's way too much (I'm in gen x). I think you are being sarcastic!

Gen x didn't have all the advantages of great economy like baby boomers, but we still had it better than today. My college total cost was something like $5k. I went to grad school and had multiple job offers at each stages.

It's not just engineering! I don't think we would have progressed so far, so fast if Gen X had not discovered the laws of thermodynamics and invented peanut butter.

Ha, we were left to our own devices and I think it was to our advantage. 70s moms. I remember when I was about 10 my buddies came over and asked if I wanted to go night fishing with them down at the pier on the bay. My mom said "sure, but be back by 10:30pm. Have fun." So off we went walking about a mile with our fishing gear in the dark. Now I don't think that would happen and that's kind of a problem.

Seriously. I've had this talk with other parents.

The world hasn't changed, our reach has. And we're abusing that power.

And -- in the US at least -- crime was out of control and off the charts in comparison to today. Everything is so much safer now but people seem so much more paranoid. It is perplexing to me.

Those were heady days. Using news groups before everything in them morphed into German pornography. The glory days of Gopher. We had the foresight to write the whole thing in C; paving the way for many future generations to work on endlessly patching it.

And Archie (for FTP) and Veronica (for Gopher)! It all seemed so difficult at the time but I remember it so fondly now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_(search_engine)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine)

I was briefly unstuck in time when I watched Bio-Dome for the first time since I was little (millennial) and the adults were complaining about Gen X slackers Bud and Doyle. The '90s don't feel that long ago, and yet...

> I miss when we were called slackers. Then we built the Internet and modern world but nobody gives us credit for that.

The internet? Our parents and grandparents did that.

I'm pretty sure we get to take credit for cat memes, though.

It went public in 1994, when GenX was in college and entering the workforce. I wouldn't call what the internet was in 1994 as "built," it came well after.

Facebook was create by a Millennial though, just sayin'.

Gen X is the last good gen. (I'm a millennial)

I take your statement to be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but if you're unfamiliar with Strauss-Howe generational theory[0], you'd think there would be another "good generation" right around the corner.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...

While I do think we went kind of downhill since gen x, I wrote that comment as a joke.

You actually could argue that new generations are worse because we're lazier, hedonists, more disrespectful, etc or you could argue that boomers and gen x are actually the bad ones that left everything in such a bad state that following generations spent decades to make everything right again.

GenX isn't even in power yet for the most part. Most of the people representing us in government are the Boomers.

>because we're lazier, hedonists, more disrespectful, etc

Also, "they" said the same stuff about GenX.

"they" said the same thing about boomers too. and the silent generation before them. and ...

GenX will never be in power. There aren’t enough of us. They’ll just skip us and once the Boomers die off, we will be a handful of elderly kooks watching Seinfeld reruns and dealing with Millennials making all the rules for themselves.

>You actually could argue that new generations are worse because we're lazier, hedonists, more disrespectful, etc

None of this is true

I didn't say it is, I said you could argue that. And depending on your point of view it could be true for you.

I'm sure when boomers eventually will relieve the world of themselves, you'll get to bear the blame for all the wrongdoings.

More likely we'll just keep getting kind of ignored. "But, like, whatever"

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