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Comment by jaaron | Hacker News Reader

This is me, 100%. I've seen enough to realize that progress is largely each generation re-thinking and re-mixing the previous generation's problems. Sometimes the remix makes things better, but plenty of times, older generation look at what's being done and says, "wow, you really don't understand what this was originally intended for" and there's a pain in that misunderstanding and inefficiency, watching work get redone, wars being refought, and hard won triumphs being forgotten.

That goes for technology, words, political concepts, music...

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Since you have decided to expand beyond tech, I'd like to share a possibly optimistic perspective.

We are instructed to think that progress is a straight line. Without any surprise, it is not. But I like to picture it with a direction nonetheless... upwards. So as it's not a straight line, I see it as a pulse, with its ups and downs, the ups usually being mild and the lows potentially dramatically sharp.

But still somehow going up.

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On the current and future challenges: I am mortified about what we did and are doing to the planet and horrified to witness the political tensions in Europe (not only the war, because Europe has seen Crimea, the Balkans, and war never stopped after 1945, but now, there are severe risks of expansion). Also, I do not believe in tech as a means to solve our problems, never did, never will.

So maybe my tiny optimistic pulse trending upwards is too candid and naive but at the moment, maybe blind with despair, I hold on to this idea.

Time is a flat circle.

But not really: time is an upward spiral, which just looks like a flat circle from the wrong perspective. Sometimes the distance between coils is so small as to vanish. Our job is to shove the coil up as much as we can while we are here.

The amount of people that think that insert musician here had this great original song is one of the most encountered fallacies in my daily life and online.

Not only that, people tend to compare in word and concept from the newer song to the older song! “Hey wow this song from 19xx sounds just like this new song I love”

No you fool, your new song sounds like the previous one :P. Causality matters!

Like the thousands of songs using Pachelbel's Canon.

Yuuup. Us fossils had a saying - "complexity kills". We learned it the HARD way.

Now the new generation of devs is re-learning the same lesson, all over again. It's all fun when you are in your 20s and the time and energy seems to be unlimited. Then you get a life, and you really start valuing a simple and working design, where everything seems under control, and your codebase is not on fire all the time.

This is why we got into distributed systems as last resort. It was a difficult solution for a difficult problem. For those that don't know, "distributed systems" is what you call "microservices" now, and 97% of the companies don't need to go anywhere near them.

this reminds me when I was learning programming. I was talking about it to my granddad (that pioneered a few things computer-related), and he asked me "okay great you program in C, but do you write computer programs or applications?". I'm pretty sure this nuance mattered in the mainframe-era, but 15 year-old me did not get it at all, and frankly, I'm still not sure what he meant, despite doing it for a living. But nowadays the distinction disappeared (did the two merge? did one fade?), and the REST APIs nuances did also disappear to only keep the parts that matter: those that made this model successful.

In Javascript world what you describe happens every two years.

At least to me it feels like it.

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