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Comment by heaney-555 | Hacker News Reader

Exactly, it's utter nonsense. The general public thought the first bicycles, automobiles, computers, mobile phones, smart watches, and AirPods were stupid. And now they are normal. Same with video games and dating apps.

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I lived it. I had a teacher in high school continually scold me for reading books on programming languages and banned me from writing essays on the future of computers. Apparently, I should have been outside getting my ass kicked by the jocks like any normal kid would be. Why the guy even called up my parents to express his concerns about me. Or there was the time my 2nd grade teacher contacted my parents because I wasreading Run Silent, Run Deep during my submarine phase because that was a book for adolescents, not children. Mel Brooks wrote it best...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYTQ7__NNDI

When ecommerce was getting big, I knew a number of people who thought it was absurd. You can't just send money over the Internet, hackers will steal it! You should use normal payment methods, like writing "fifteen dollars and 56/100------" on a special piece of paper the bank gave you.

Never thought I'd see the ycombinator peeps deny the existence of the Luddite mindset, but here we are.

It's more a post GamerGate understanding of a nerds vs the world narrative framing

The death of Harambe and Cecil the lion ruined the whole world and directly lead to GamerGate/Trump and world wise ride in right wing populaism.

> When ecommerce was getting big

When was that?

It was getting huge in the late 90s and we all know now it was indeed the future.

But it still took a huge dot.com crash because the valuations got ahead of the curve.

In the late 90s. Remember that the first PCI standard wasn't published until 2004; people were largely right to intuit that hackers stealing credit cards was a big problem that wasn't being adequately addressed.

Hey, I still think dating apps are stupid. I still chuckle when I hear of people using them.

But agree with you on all the other examples.

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