A Question | Hacker News Reader

A Question

blog.samaltman.com

141 pointsphilip1209120 comments

Ten years ago? Not sure. I know fifteen years ago I was making video calls over my GSM phone, chatting with people via SMS, AIM, and ICQ, etc. Literally nothing in this post is in any way amazing to anyone who actually remembers life ten years ago. We had smartphones. We had social media. We had web forums. Just because you've dumped money into some of them doesn't make them special or even interesting from a technology standpoint.

I, too, support SpaceX (as well as Orbital Sciences, Virgin Galactic, etc) but pretending that reddit is even anywhere near that list as far as being "unimaginably fantastic" is either depressingly credulous or else clumsy false optimism.

Specifically in computing, the past ten or fifteen years have been a war on general-purpose computing; all the brands names he's slinging around amount to a celebration of the black-boxing of internet services. Ten years ago I could do all this stuff without needing a quad-core 2GHz phone to run a full-featured HTML5/CSS/JS browser platform.

More generally, in cars, computers, and most other sectors in technology, things are getting less and less accessible to casual interest or even moderately-dedicated hobbyists. Sometimes it's in the name of efficiency, sometimes it's in the name of corporate control, but with the exception of the Tesla, everything he talks about existed ten years ago in some form. It was just easier to learn the internals, then, when programs were programs, instead of HTTP APIs, and circuits were circuits, instead of closely-held intellectual properties. When was the last time anyone bought an appliance of any sort that had the wiring diagram pasted to the inside of the case?

Sorry Sam, things are prettier now, but there's nothing new under the sun.

I agree with this whole-heartedly. I was doing video conferencing on my iLamp in 2002, I worked remotely and globally since 1994, my Nokia phone paired over Bluetooth to my computer long ago, things are pretty certainly, but I'm not seeing massive innovation in day to day computing.

I am weary of the clichéd argument against someone who speaks about an app being badly made or complains about a computer crashing. It always goes something like "you know everyone moans about how limiting this technology is, failing to realize how amazing our world is now" and I just want to scream every time I hear this empty and self-important pseudo critique being dolled out by some vapid hipster-esque person.

When I know how rock solid my computer was a few years ago, and know how easy it is to make software that doesn't crash or cause data loss, I am entitled to make a comment about sloppy apps and buggy operating systems. In fact, it's my duty to in the hope that someone thinks twice about how they make something.

Yes, our current world is good. But it could be a lot better, and it's not whining to say so.

I think the major difference is now everyone is doing those things, not just the minority of us who knew how or cared enough to figure it out. So maybe the innovation is the refinement of all of these technologies that made them so accessible.

...and closed to one ecosystem. E.g., Google and Facebook took XMPP and killed most of its good properties (federation).

It's that e-mail was already to widespread, or we would be using disjunct mailing systems.

Specifically in computing, the past ten or fifteen years have been a war on general-purpose computing; all the brands names he's slinging around amount to a celebration of the black-boxing of internet services. Ten years ago I could do all this stuff without needing a quad-core 2GHz phone to run a full-featured HTML5/CSS/JS browser platform.

I fully agree. Ten years ago, I was chatting using XMPP without any problems on a Pentium II or III machine. SIP was the new kid on the block at the time and gave interoperable voice chats. Now I am messaging with disparate groups over Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, and Whatsapp, because none of the systems are compatible.

Ten years ago, there was still genuine optimism that Linux was making inroads on the desktop. Ubuntu was just getting started and things were getting better all the time. Now we have two major systems that run on the most popular devices (phones and tablets) and while they are built on open systems (Linux plus BSD and Mach plus BSD), they are nearly closed for the general consumer, with locked boot loaders rather than BIOSes than run any operating system.

Of course, there are good things like the Raspberry Pi, that still allow newer generations to tinker and not get locked into incompatible ecosystems, however that is more despite the assault on general-purpose computing.

The key difference here now is that billions of people are doing these things and there are emergent behaviors from the ubiquity that are powerful.

Sure, but that's not technological innovation, but mere gradual evolution. Things were moving a lot faster in the nineties and the oughts. I think most people who remember the advances in computing in the nineties feel that we're in a technological slump. We hoped that with more people going into computing things would speed up, but that hasn't happened. That's not necessarily anyone's fault, though. Maybe the low-hanging fruit had already been picked.

I can remember the early 90s. I think the feeling then was very similar.

We had a number of technologies that were cool, but didn't work right. Think WebTV, PDAs, speech recognition, OCR, virtual reality. We also had continual evolution in the price/performance of PCs. I remember all the IBM clones - seemingly a new vendor was popping up every couple months, and they all had dozens of models available. Even Apple was drowning in continuous, gradual improvements - this is when they numbered all of their products. Remember the Centris 660AV, Powerbook 520/c, or Power Macintosh 9500?

I think we're seeing the same effect now. Existing technologies are being gradually refined. The price of cloud computing is falling through the floor. Those industries where the building-blocks are open (notably web startups & mobile apps) face a deluge of small-time competitors. Those where it's closed (search, mobile OSes, hardware) face a number of small incremental improvements. And on the horizon you have a number of exciting technologies that are far away from commercialization (SpaceX, self-driving cars, Bitcoin, 3D printing, wearables, VR...still).

I bet that the next big thing is being worked on in someone's garage or living room right now, and it's probably nothing we've heard of. The WWW came out of nowhere in 1995. Except it didn't - it built on TCP/IP (1973), DNS (1983), the personal computer (1975), and graphical user interfaces (1984).

If you read Kuhn, he describes the history of science as long periods of gradual refinement of theories ("normal science"), punctuated by overthrows of the established scientific consensus ("paradigm shifts"). Tech is much the same. It's been a long time since we had a paradigm shift, but that doesn't mean that it'll never happen again. Rather, it may mean that there's fertile ground for one to happen now.

The one caution is that very often, paradigm shifts don't look like paradigm shifts to people inside the old order. They look like trivial toys, because they grow out of small experiments within the existing paradigm. Scientifically, it usually takes a whole generation for new paradigms to take root, because the old guard of existing scientists never considers them important - they have to die off before the new paradigm replaces the old. The same thing happened with webapps - old-school mainframe and desktop programmers considered them trivial toys - and it may be happening with mobile. So, something for all the folks on HN who say there's been no technological progress - has there actually been none, or are we just the dinosaurs who're out of touch with what kids these days are using?

Maybe technology is both exciting and disappointing. And maybe we are dinosaurs, but I can tell you this: my grandparents were really impressed with PCs, cellphones and the internet; Snapchat -- not so much :)

Even if you're 100% right, I think it's safe to say that there's certainly no more innovation today than a decade ago; or two, or five. This is what makes the new SV religion so fascinating.

EDIT: I think mercer nails it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8597947

The important change isn't when X becomes possible, it's when X becomes used by a billion people (or several billion).

Agreed, and I think a lot of early adopters ignore this. Creating the technology itself is a milestone, yes, but so is advancing it to the point where it's appealing to and digestible by the masses.

My mom recently created a WhatsApp chat for our family using her Android phone, and now I keep in touch with her a lot more easily and often than I would have otherwise. That would've been unimaginable to me a decade ago.

Unimaginable? You couldn't have set up an email account for her? I'm not saying more accessible communication is not good but the unimaginable part is a bit of stretch.

Yeah, it's hyperbole. I could've imagined it, but I wouldn't have predicted that she'd ever start using that kind of tech. For the record, she's been using email forever. There used to be a huge gap between "using email" and "chatting online".

Then maybe you should elaborate on that a bit because your post doesn't mention any of that. I'm also curious what emergent behavior you're talking about. When I look around I don't see any kind of qualitative difference in the kinds of things people do with technology. The tinkerers and hackers are still doing what they were doing from the time general purpose computers and networks became widely available and the rest of the population is still using them as convenient application platforms.

Example of emergent behaviour that's changing lives: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/fashion/how-uber-is-changi...

I fail to see how people getting around in cars is emergent behavior. You will have to explain to me the emergent part.

Did you read the article?

I did. I noticed it was a lot of high-class socialites using Uber to get around to their social events. Some golden nuggets from the article itself

> on weekends, preppily dressed crowds wait patiently for sandwiches from Eggslut.

> At the Mandrake, a bar he co-owns near Culver City, customers may be more likely to order a third cocktail when they know they can be whisked home safely; he certainly is.

> A night out in Los Angeles used to involve negotiating parking, beating traffic and picking a designated driver. Excursions from one end to the other — say, from the oceanfront city of Santa Monica to the trendy Silver Lake neighborhood on the eastern side — had to be planned and timed with military precision, lest they spiral into a three-hour commute. More often than not, they were simply avoided.

> On a recent night, she bounced from drinks at the Ace to dinner at a Roy Choi hot spot in nearby Koreatown then more drinks at a new bar in West Hollywood. “I can just, like, YOLO with Uber,” she said.

> Still, the fares can add up. Ms. Schoenhals, co-author of the satirical novel “White Girl Problems,” based on the popular Twitter account, subsidizes her Uber habit in digital-age fashion. The company offers credit to people who sign up new riders, so she gives out promotional codes to her 812,000 Twitter followers. “I just keep riding Uber for free,” she said gleefully.

None of that remotely qualifies as emergent behavior of any kind.

What I find amusing is how Silicon Valley's hubris grows inversely with its achievements (and everybody mentions Tesla and SpaceX, but they're clear outliers): Back when people built Intel and all the way through Google, they knew they were advancing technology -- and changing the world through technology -- but that's pretty much where their aspirations ended. Now when people build Snapchat, there's talk of changing the world's currency and seceding from the US, as if Uber and Groupon were the missing pieces to figuring out whatever there was left to understanding how the world works, and now SV can take over.

Obviously, I'm exaggerating. People have always built toys, and it's always hard to understand what's important and what isn't. But the culture -- or religion, if we wish -- around computer technology is new (or at least at an expansionary stage). I think there's more of a political[1] change in SV than a technological one.

[1]: In the sense of how society is viewed, and how the powers that comprise it are understood and manipulated.

It's a good point, and it remains to be seen how we'll look back at the 'achievements' of current Silicon Valley.

That said, I don't think the hubris is entirely unwarranted. I consider myself generally too much of a skeptic of new things, and yet I quite regularly marvel at what's happening.

It's not that the things coming out of Silicon Valley are hugely innovative, but rather, as others have also pointed out, the growing ubiquity of all this stuff, and not just in the West.

Perhaps a lot of the sentiment that often seems like hubris is really vindication and excitement: vindication because all the stuff we early-adopters loved and that others didn't understand (or even made fun of) is now used by everyone, and excitement because it means there's a market for the stuff we've been working with for so long.

Perhaps the younger among us are mostly excited by what they see as new possibilities and what are, to them, new discoveries.

For example, I remember making a game for Windows and I remember how excited I was that my parents and even some colleagues were playing it! I even put the game on floppies and printed my logo on it.

Now, I'm teaching my younger brother programming by building the same game. The first difference this time around is that we're using javascript and HTML/CSS. In one day I set up the basic project with him that he can push to heroku and immediately show to friends and the world, and in about two weeks he worked through a number of CodeSchools lessons and has access to vastly more resources than I do.

I feel happy and vindicated, in way, that my weird hobby is now practiced by someone who is not very nerdy, and my brother is getting excited about all the stuff he can imagine building and releasing into the wild. No need to buy floppies and hand out his game: it's instantly accessible to everyone with internet and a browser.

Now this is just one example. Consider also the access to all kinds of roboty goodness that can be programmed with the same javascript, the fact that there's a huge potential paying audience through various app stores, and the huge (but probably rather unattainable) carrot of making the next Flappy Bird or whatnot.

This vindication, as you call it, might actually explain the rise of the SV religion. When nerds build cool stuff it makes them happy; but when the cool(ish) stuff they built is used by masses it makes them feel like gods :)

> I know fifteen years ago I was making video calls over my GSM phone, chatting with people via SMS, AIM, and ICQ, etc.

As an early-adopter with sufficient income to afford whatever gadget you're talking about, I'm sure you found a lot of utility communicating with the <1% of our population that shared your position and enthusiasm. The other 99% of us had land-lines. Only some of us had the internet.

> Specifically in computing, the past ten or fifteen years have been a war on general-purpose computing

I have no idea what you're talking about. Our society is now saturated with computers. We carry computers in our pockets that we casually call 'smart'. These devices are wirelessly connected in a global network that we casually call 'the internet'. Computing is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it anymore.

> Sorry Sam, things are prettier now, but there's nothing new under the sun . . . everything he talks about existed ten years ago in some form.

Yes, the retina display existed in some form: in low-contrast PDA displays. Yes, 4G and 100mps broadband existed in some form: as in, dial-up screeching. Yes, Reddit existed in some form, as in your local BBS.

Sometimes difference of degree are so great that they become differences of kind, precisely because they make further technological innovations possible. Any startup that hinges upon "network-effects" knows this. Anyone who's used an Oculus Rift has experienced it.

There's nothing new under the sun? Only if you're living in the past.

There's nothing new under the sun?

I don't think anyone is suggesting that nothing is new. Just that nothing is mind-blowingly new. As you say, the last ten years have seen a lot of improvements in existing concepts - connections are faster, displays are better, etc. etc.

But that's not the kind of mind blowing change Sam suggests that it is. If you had told me ten years ago that tech would look like it does today I would say "yep, sounds about right".

I think the Oculus Rift is certainly mind-blowing. Also the fact that I can work remotely effectively.

Thinking on this further, the difference between 10 years and 20 years is immense: 2004 vs 1994. Maybe we just need another 10 years to see how far we've really come since 2004. We are only just beginning to experience what happens when you connect the global population wirelessly.

I was working remotely effectively starting in '98-'99. DSL + VPN + Thinkpad + cell phone + etc...

Heck, back in 2004, I was using a Nokia 3650 to SSH to one of our servers and make configuration changes to our backup software. While riding in a car.

Yes. It felt like there was some kind of tipping point around the late 1990s, when mobile phone + ADSL + popular internet all seemed to happen at once. 1994 to 2004 = big changes; 2004 - 2014 = not so big.

I suppose that looking back it just seems like by 2004, there was a whole ton of stuff that by 1994 standards would have been implausible - whereas here in 2014, a lot of the impressive stuff would in 2004 have been merely impractical.

Or perhaps I'm just old and tired now. Who knows. Maybe I'm underselling SSDs. Anyway, whatever. Time for my nap.

> As an early-adopter with sufficient income to afford whatever gadget you're talking about, I'm sure you found a lot of utility communicating with the <1% of our population that shared your position and enthusiasm. The other 99% of us had land-lines. Only some of us had the internet.

I can only assume this is a deliberate refusal to see my point. "Whatever gadget I'm talking about" was nearly every nokia or ericsson phone of the era -- and they interoperated, unlike facetime or whatsapp. Nice try invoking some kind of class war crap; I was engaging in video calls while I was a part-time cook at a diner.

> I have no idea what you're talking about. Our society is now saturated with computers. We carry computers in our pockets that we casually call 'smart'. These devices are wirelessly connected in a global network that we casually call 'the internet'. Computing is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it anymore.

Setting aside your poor attempt at sarcasm, the computers you are talking about are not general-purpose machines. Selecting a hardware platform today is largely selecting which walled garden you prefer. Ten years ago I could pick any hardware manufacturer and any software stack and have a reasonable chance at interoperating with other people who had made other decisions. That's not the case any more; hell, Apple Keynote won't even open files written by older versions of Apple Keynote. And none of the functionality you're talking about was absent in 2004. I had maps and navigation on a cellphone even then.

>Yes, the retina display existed in some form: in low-contrast PDA displays. Yes, 4G and 100mps broadband existed in some form: as in, dial-up screeching. Yes, Reddit existed in some form, as in your local BBS.

Your analogies are specious. I had a 1600x1200 15" laptop in 2001. I had DSL in 2001. I had internet web forums in 2001. Fast forward: resolution has gone up, DSL has got cheaper (100mbit fiber is available to a VANISHINGLY small subset of the population, mister 99%), and the number (not quality) of web forums have gone up.

> Sometimes difference of degree are so great that they become differences of kind,

This is something that only cheerleaders and PR directors say. A difference in degree is inevitable; a difference in kind is difficult.

Oculus Rift is a perfect example. It's shitloads of hype surrounding no product, no market. It's a really neat gadget with very specific possibilities, just like the Virtual Boy was. It is not a revolution.

Granted, I was in high school in 2004, but I don't think many (any?) people I knew back then even had unlimited texting. Most families had a single computer in the household, and if you wanted to chat with friends on MSN you'd have to block out a piece of your evening specifically to sit at the computer and do that. Better hope your friends are on! People would call each other very briefly to tell them they were going to be on MSN. Once you're off, you're off -- no MSN messages on your phone.

Sure, the improvements between now and 2004 have mostly been incremental in nature. But those incremental improvements have added up to a vast net change. General access to technology and the internet has increased exponentially. Every little piece of technology is a bit easier to use, it works a bit better and more reliably, and 10x as many people are using it and connected with each other while doing so.

> Only some of us had the internet

Ten years ago was in 2004, not 1994 or 1984. In 2004 EVERYBODY had Internet and email, and most also had a mobile phone.

Since 2004 the only innovation that I use everyday is Dropbox... it improved my life but didn't "change" it. I used to copy files on portable hard drives, and I don't have to do this anymore, which is great, but that's it.

I have yet to step into an Uber car or (God forbid!) rent an apartment on AirBnB; I text to my friends (like I have done since at least 1995!), as neither them nor I use Snapchat or WhatsApp; I started a collection of mp3 files in 1999 and it's still growing, no need for Spotify (I did buy a Sonos system --in 2006-- that is still running unchanged).

I don't think I live in the past but I fail to see what great innovation happened in the last 10 years. To me, the last two were the Internet itself, and then Google search.

The Spotify example is pathetic - their catalog sucks and their social features are terrible. Dragging music licensing onto the Internet is not innovation - it's just helping prop up the idiotic regime (read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_licensing#.22Happy_Birthd... and talk to someone who has worked in a music rights clearinghouse).

You can say "what about Soundcloud!" for the things you can't get on Spotify. mp3.com was around doing the exact same thing in 1998. Between mp3.com and Napster, Internet music was actually a better experience in 1999. VKontakte is the only thing better that's out there right now in terms of catalog, social discovery, and streaming.

In 2004 I had 100 Mbps broadband.

I had a 3G phone.

I had a work laptop with a decent screen. Those actually regressed in the market for several years before a certain manufacturer popularized high-DPI again.

I also had a fanless laptop before that one. I'm still waiting on a modern one... (Apple, are you listening?)

One major innovation that has occurred over the past decade has been the distribution of technology that was only available to a lucky few.

Over the last decade tech has had a major impact on the daily lives of people like me. Today I can work from anywhere and communicate with everyone I know at any time of day, while 10 years ago I didn't have internet fast enough to watch a youtube video. iPhones weren't even sold in my state until 2008 (I might be off by a year in either direction).

Honestly, hackers/HN may be the wrong audience to ask this rhetorical question to (not that Sam was specifically asking it to us). The biggest difference of the last 10 years isn't so much the incredible new technology or protocols being built, it's how accessible those are to the everyday person, and how much easier they are to use.

Look at the original HN submission for Dropbox (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863). The response from a lot of hackers was negative. Why? "We already have rsync." "We have FTP mounted locally with curlftpfs, with SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem + open source tools." That problem was already solved for hackers. But for the 99% of people who aren't hackers, seamlessly sharing files across computers (with backups and a sort of version control built in) was incredible.

There are certainly technologies I love and adore that didn't exist 10 years ago (Twitter, everything being mobile, Uber/Lyft). But what I can do is largely unchanged. For someone who doesn't build things or understand github or use a terminal, however, the world has been revolutionized.

Chris Dixon has pointed out that a lot of the great companies of today are Unix commands made accessible to the everyday person. (Grep->Google, rsync->Dropbox, man->stack overflow, cron->IFTTT). Some are a bit of a stretch (Google != Grep), but an interesting way to think about starting big companies is to think of something really cool or useful that only hackers can do right now.

So, going back to Sam's question, "What was I doing 10 years ago?" It was pretty close to the same. I use almost all of the technologies he mentions, but could probably get by without them. For me, it's much more interesting to consider the question, "What was your mom doing 10 years ago?"

Making something complex easy is an excellent way to start a business. Convenience is a huge driver and dropbox managed to keep it simple (at considerable cost in blood, sweat and tears no doubt). Hiding complexity is hard, doing it well is harder still.

that chris dixon analogy is really interesting ... can you provide a link if you get a chance?

EDIT: nevermind it was only a tweet :)

https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/505118160811728896

Yeah, the Chris Dixon analogy piqued my interest too. I've thought about it a bit, and I've identified two useful ways to generalise UNIX commands to web businesses:

1. Take a command that would run over files on a filesystem, and instead run it over pages on the Web.

Examples: find | xargs grep -i -> web search engines (Google, etc.). talk -> IRC / ICQ. Creating timestamped text files in a per-user directory -> blogging.

2. Take a very powerful & useful UNIX command that's complex to use correctly (and possibly damaging if you screw it up), and make it easy, user-friendly and risk-free.

Examples: rsync -> Dropbox. awk -> spreadsheets (Visicalc, MS Excel).

I'm currently racking my brains for other commands that seemed useful but complex to me in my Linux sysadmin youth. :)

You could extend that concept to bash one-liners, those tend to do a lot of work for the amount of effort put in.

That sort of thing.

I agree, to a point. But the thing that gets me is the passage where he says:

I think it’s remarkable how much of what people do and use today didn’t exist 10 years ago.

But all he lists above is apps. Yeah, sure, WhatsApp didn't exist ten years ago. But SMS did. Dropbox didn't, but PhotoBucket did. And so on, and so on.

There's been a lot of change, but focusing on the kind of consumer apps that barely ever last a decade isn't a good way of highlighting it. Our interactions are still very similar to their ten year old equivalents, we just have different colour schemed apps to do them with.

> WhatsApp didn't exist ten years ago. But SMS did.

SMS was barely accessible to most of the world and was often unaffordable when it was. It's easy to write off WhatsApp as just another app, but it was a vastly better solution for huge chunks of the planet than SMS ever was.

> SMS was barely accessible to most of the world and was often unaffordable when it was

Sure. But everyone got SMS before they got data (and Whatsapp).

Wi-Fi? Besides, what exactly is your point? People might have had access to SMS first, but it wasn't a good solution for much of the world. It seems to me that you're trying to argue that we haven't made much real progress in the past decade and that you're trivializing WhatsApp in order to support that point. It seems to me that you're focusing entirely too much on the longevity of specific apps and not looking at the changes that those apps actually represent.

As for Dropbox, it's sort of like the iPod of cloud hosting services. Yes, hosting services like Photobucket existed. They were mostly bad and slow and hard-to-use and special-purpose and didn't offer much free storage.

you're focusing entirely too much on the longevity of specific apps and not looking at the changes that those apps actually represent.

OK - what change does Whatsapp represent over SMS?

As for why WhatsApp specifically was such a success over competing apps, it's hard to say, but speculation is that a large part of it was due to their supporting many legacy phones.

Anyway, the main differentiator vs. SMS is simple. At the time, many carriers charged for SMS separately, even if you had a data plan. WhatsApp did not. It just used your pre-existing data plan or even Wi-Fi. You therefore didn't even have to have a data plan to use it if you could get Wi-Fi. On top of that, it was just a far more polished experience than SMS and didn't rely on MMS for pictures, etc.

This sounds trivial and it's easy to write it off, but this is why the app came to be used by half a billion people around the world instead of SMS.

If I agreed with this any more, I might sprain something.

Fifteen years ago, I worked for a company that wrote software in Java, targeted at mobile phone users (one that would fail and be acquired within the following year). I did most of my shopping on-line. All of my friends could be contacted via instant messengers, phone, or e-mail. I could argue with strangers on bulletin boards. If I were more garrulous, I could have published a personal blog.

There are very few things that have changed for me between then and now:

1. More of the bandwidth I consume is over wires, instead of via optical discs sent through the post or carried by hand. Netflix, Amazon, Steam, and GOG have largely replaced... Netflix and Amazon. Hmmm.

2. I am charged more for paid services. I also note that the quality of these services is often not substantially improved since then; they merely represent a larger share of my budget.

3. I am more concerned about my privacy. Companies are still as sloppy about protecting it as they ever were; they just collect and keep more information about us.

4. DRM schemes are more pervasive and annoying. Casual copyright infringement is easier than ever.

5. My video card can push out more hi-res triangles at 60 fps.

6. My oldest still-in-use computer is 6 years older, and is more likely to be replaced due to its relatively high power draw than its inability to run newer software.

The last 15 years have been a predictable series of minor improvements on existing technologies, enabled largely by cheaper and more capable hardware, and pushed out to a progressively larger audience. This has been accompanied by aggressive attempts to squeeze more blood out of drier stones.

10 years ago, Sam's question would have appeared as a link on Slashdot, and parent post would be (+5, Insightful). There might even be meme images circulating of a caveman with caption "Facebook? // I do cave painting of my lunch 8000 year ago".

I couldn't agree more with your comments: the innovations sama mentions are just shiny copies of what existed ten years ago, or maybe more - with a few exceptions.

This article is pretty depressing, since what he is saying is in essence "we created lots of innovation in the last ten years, and now we are going to change the world even more, because we are investing in energy and biotech". Now the innovation, as you say, if pretty artificial, and the two companies that are worth the more in YC portfolio are one that is semi illegally disrupting hotels (there are reasons why it's forbidden to transform your flat into an hotel room) and another one that built a wrapper around rsync.

I'm from Europe, and the view I have from the SV is more a bunch of hipster programmers with macbooks building social networks to share cat pictures, than a center of technical innovation, and sadly, this post is not making me change my mind.

I do hope to be proven wrong.

One reason it is a little depressing is because many of the technological innovations in the beginning were not driven by consumer needs but were results of actual research initiatives led by some pretty smart folks. I'm specifically thinking of PARC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_%28company%29) and there is obviously a bit of a creation myth kind of setup going on but the general gist remains valid.

You're confusing invention and innovation.

Invention is the creation of a new product or category. Innovation is improving upon that and making it better and more accessible. Internet forums or instant messaging were inventions. Reddit and whatsapp were innovations.

The technology may have been there 10 years ago, but it was nowhere near as robust, user friendly, scalable, well designed, or good. Thus, the majority of Americans didn't use the technology. Sam isn't arguing that those are new inventions, he's arguing that they're innovations that have spread the technology to the average consumer.

> but with the exception of the Tesla, everything he talks about existed ten years ago in some form

Electric cars have existed since the late 1800s. Everything is innovation.

'The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed'... etc.

if the future is instagram and twitter, you can keep it

You mean the ability to instantly and virally let people all over the world know about events happening in your country/region/neighborhood? Yeah thanks, we'll keep it.

E-money and mobile internet on cell phones in developing countries. It's literally changed the lives of entire populations throughout the developing world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

Sam is probably too young to remember what the world was like before the internet. From my perspective (just turned 45), the technological change in everyday life between 1994 and 2004 is much more significant than the incremental improvements in the past 10 years.

- In 1994 I didn't even have dialup internet; in 2004 I had a reliable 1 mbps connection.

- In 1994 I knew few people with mobile phones; in 2004 I had one with a color screen (Motorola v600) that could search Google and take pictures.

Facebook and Twitter did not exist, but the basic entertainment and communication functions they provide are not radically different from those of online forums, chatrooms, email, older social networks.

The main difference that Sam overlooks is that in 2004 all this was not available to hundreds of millions (billions?) of people in the world, just like the internet was not (or barely) available to me in 1994.

A lot of the so-called innovation of the past 10 years seems to purely piggyback on Moore's Law, cheaper storage and cheaper bandwidth, i.e. incremental, sometimes useful improvements via the web, but no nanotech robots that detect cancer, Mars base, nuclear fusion, etc.

Innovation seems to have stalled in the world of atoms, cars (and transport generally), houses, healthcare etc all not noticeably improving, except incrementally (deliberately ignoring Tesla, which will hopefully have a widespread impact on the entire car industry in the coming years).

Some areas have gotten worse overall, such as finance, which seems to be disconnected from creating value for the wider economy and seems to be getting more unstable and risky as time progresses.

EDIT: I don't mean to sound overly negative, some of the YC RFSs sound quite ambitious, I hope they succeed in attracting more of those types of companies funded and off the ground https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/

A lot of the so-called innovation of the past 10 years seems to purely piggyback on Moore's Law

If you believe Robin Hanson, maybe even all software innovation ever.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/06/why-does-hardware-grow...

I have a knee-jerk inclination to agree, but when I think harder about it, I'm not sure if that's just a bias towards the technologies that I had the most free time to spend on -- when I was a kid.

I want to say that Reddit is a poor imitation of IRC, and IRC wasn't really anything new because there were BBSs ... but I probably spent more time on BBSs and IRC than I've spent on Reddit. So, for me, those things have left a greater impression. For younger people who've never dialed up a BBS, Reddit seems amazing.

In general, yeah, the early 90s seems like a whirlwind of technological change compared to today. But, I bet if I asked my dad, he'd say that the 70s and 80s were moreso, because he worked in television distribution systems and has never been really comfortable with a computer. And I bet if he asked his dad, it would be highways and transportation ... and so on.

2014 is the "social" age, and that's not something I've participated in very much. So I'm probably less likely to see Snapchat and whathaveyou as a really big deal.

There certainly seem to be inflection points in computing innovation.

The PC revolution starting with Homebrew, through Apple I and II to Macintosh, and the PC and Windows, was an unbelievable ride. But then there was a slower period of several years where innovation consisted mainly of Microsoft slowly assimilating the remaining interesting features of the Mac.

Then the ascendance of the web and Netscape, through Dotcom bubble, Google, Amazon, Facebook (and millions of other sites).

Then iPhone in 2007 launched the mobile software gold rush.

With smart phone innovation starting to slow down (getting harder to dream up can't live without functionality missing from today's phones), it's not clear where the next inflection point will come from.

Robotics? VR?

I think the question isn't whether or not we innovate enough, the question should be whether Sam believes that YC is funding start-ups that will one day become the new Tesla or SpaceX.

From the previous batches I don't recall a single one that ever stood a chance of that, though there are plenty of new middlemen and some neat innovations. Most of the really interesting ones died off very quickly.

SpaceX and Tesla required massive investments, the long view, a very unique founder and good timing all in one package. If they had been YC funded companies rather than companies funded by a founder that could personally dump a fortune in them when nobody else cared they would have sank long ago.

So I don't think that YC will fund a Tesla or a SpaceX, the model is not particularly suitable for such long haul and extremely risky ventures.

But they'll clean up on making a bunch more companies like Dropbox, AirBnb and so on over the next decade.

Their fusion companies have an outside chance at it.

The frustrating thing about this piece is that there's certainly a case to be made that VCs are funding some innovative companies with wild potential to change the world.

This piece doesn't come close to making that case. Instead it's just kind of whiny.

I should put some time in this and go over the roster of YC companies over the last years to pick out the ones that I thought were really moving the needle. I suspect that the kind of secondary investors that would put money into a YC backed and vetted company are the kind that are looking to exit in the near future, not the kind that intend to see their capital locked in for decades and that this is one of the reasons why media companies, IT companies and middle men tend to have a much better chance of success.

Their models are much closer to what the investors are already used to and how they in turn made their money. Space ships to Mars and electric vehicles do not at all seem to be a good match for the YC model.

You'll note that Elon Musk made his first few millions in a "YC-style" web-only company - Zip2 - that had nothing to do with changing the world.

Maybe starting a company with the ambition of SpaceX and Tesla is fundamentally incompatible with something like YC. I don't know. But YC is still useful if it enables the next generation of Elons to make their first hundred millions.

I'm not familiar with the Zip2 financing, what accelerator/incubator program did Elon and his brother enroll in?

Not that the parent or Sam are necessarily coming from this angle, but one could argue that YC is developing the future Elon Musks of the world by helping talented people practice starting businesses solving smaller scale/toy problems (in comparison).

That was the argument, not that Zip2 went through an accelerator. Thank you.

> What were you doing 10 years ago?

Pretty much the same, but on platforms with a different name.

Also, the fact that people are using some toy now -- even if they love it -- does not mean it's anything more than a toy. After all -- toys are fun; if they weren't, they wouldn't have been made. You play with them for a while, tell people how great they are, and then you move on to newer toys and forget about them very quickly.

In fact, the very reason many don't remember what they used ten years ago shows how forgettable these toys are. I can certainly remember what life was before mobile phones, or before the internet. But before Facebook and Snapchat? It's kind of hard to remember the name of all those companies that were sold for a lot of money and then disappeared. We had MySpace, ICQ, VocalTec, RealMedia -- pretty much the same as today.

Speaking of platforms, user behavior hasn't changed at all and front ends aren't different other than style and name, but back ends have changed a lot.

I'm almost at 10 yrs on my linode cloud account. My servers at work have gone from hardware to mostly virtual images. I used to store data on spinning rust, now I put my trust in the NAS guys. NoSQL went from 0 to hyperspeed hype back down to a normal-ish technology. JVM went from nothing but java to I deploy scala apps on it and think about deploying clojure apps. GIT has gone from doesn't exist to every piece of code I write is in git. Puppet is the same age and trajectory. About 9 years ago I started my first ruby on rails project. If you told me a decade ago that I'd be paying for an account to store my version control repos I'd say you're kidding, but here I am a github subscriber.

I work in a 'top' neuroscience lab in which we study the nature of neural computations theoretically and experimentally, the kind of thing that you may consider Super Duper Really Serious attempts To Innovate.

The things being dismissed in this thread as 'toys' and 'old stuff made prettier' make our work easier.

Scientists communicate on twitter and via blogs; the open-access movement is picking up steam this way. It's much easier to decide to move across the world to work with a particular experimentalist if your mom knows how to use Skype and you can talk to your grandma from the hospital on her iPad.

Innovation happens in the world, not in a bubble. Making things easier to use and more appealing to the mainstream is real, extremely valuable progress.

Not to mention that all of the mathematics we use was developed by mathematicians purely as new, purposeless shiny toys. :)

The best rejoinder to this might be the Founder's Fund manifesto, which originally started with, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."

That specific phrase has since disappeared. But it illustrates that we can enjoy—even invest in—certain innovations like social media, while bemoaning the lack of innovation in other spaces (eg transportation in this example).

Here's the modified version of the manifesto:

http://www.foundersfund.com/the-future/

I recently went on a trip to Paris (~250BC). Finding commercial flights (1969) and good hotels took minutes and I didn't need to talk to anyone (hipmunk(2010)/tripadvisor(2001)). I checked out the area around the hotel (1950) on Google street view (2007). My family kept up to date on where I was via find my friends (2011) on my iPhone (2007). My phone showed me where I was through Google Maps (2005) and directed my with a built in compass (2009?). I used city mapper (2011) to figure out how to get around efficiently on the Paris metro (1900). The trip was noticably different from my last one. Last time to take decent pictures I carried a consumer affordable DSLR (2007), this time I carried my iPhone 5. In 2007 I tried to take panoramas and had to very carefully take individual shots and stitch them together laboriously in software afterwards that took hours to run. This time I took one on my phone and shared it with my family 30 seconds later. I took hand held time lapse videos. I live translated signs with WordLens (2010) after failing to learn much French with DuoLingo (2011). I could go on and on like this about all the changes. Many in the last 10 years or less.

Yes I could have done basically everything I did this time last time. Maps and compasses aren't new. There were tour guides available, and smart phones, and language classes. But the experience was qualitatively different.

If I was feeling early adopter instead of like relaxing maybe I could've done some things that weren't possible last time, like driven in an electric car that is among the best performance cars in the world, tested self stopping or self parking or self driving cars, toured with a consumer VR rig, taken a video with a self-piloting quadracopter, or gotten my genome sequenced, or watched a streaming video from the space station, or....

That's what I could come up with in a few minutes while writing this comment and searching on wikipedia. If you can't get excited about all the innovations happening right now oh boy are you doing it wrong.

That's a very good point but weak examples. USENET was not just comparable but better than Reddit.

I like more succinct version of that observation by Marc Andreessen

Tech only serves rich nerds w/ $$$ products. Same things show up later at huge volumes & low prices for everyone. But those are unrelated.

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/528723742940073986

It seems odd to use Tesla and SpaceX as the counter example to "building toys for rich people".

Tesla and SpaceX are exactly that...toys for rich people. But who cares? Look at the Wright brothers building the first controllable, fixed-wing, powered aircraft...that was a toy for rich people. Tesla and SpaceX technologies to become accessible to the masses likely need to start out as toys for rich people. To paraphrase Henry Ford, if I had listened to what the people wanted I would have given them faster horses.

Sam left out the two innovations that have made the most difference to my life in the past 10 years:

1) the Google Library project, which scanned tens of millions of books and made them free online. 2) ebook readers (first the Kindle, and now AMOLED or super high res smartphones)

I now have access to so much human knowledge, and can take this vast library anywhere.

Much of the other great innovation in the last ten years were in expansions or second versions of existing ideas:

1) Stackoverflow is so much better than experts exchange and random forums. 2) Wikipedia is infinitely better than about.com 3) Between Crashplan, Dropbox, and OSX time machine, backups are in much better shape now. I never worry about losing my files. 4) Smart phones were not life changing, but they did save the annoyance of printing directions and then carrying a moleskin, crossword puzzle, paperback book, etc, everywhere I go. 5) Yelp and Amazon reviews are so much more extensive now, making accessing high quality products so much easier. 6) Goole maps now support transit directions. Finding the right city bus or set of stops to take when traveling is much easier.

Some things have gotten worse. I think newsgroups+AIM+IRC+blogs&RSS were better than Twitter/Facebook/Reddit. Obviously, many will disagree.

Right now, the biggest area we need innovation in is in food and energy. In most other spaces, we are reduced to solving the most minor of "first world problems". Major kudos to Sam and to YC for actually investing in energy startups in the recent rounds.

> massive wealth inequality is likely to be the biggest social problem of our time

The problem is that it's a cycle.

High wealth inequality -> large percentage of population with low SES -> structural forces perpetuating inequality -> ...

Already you see the Republican party copying the tactics that tehran used to turn persia into an islamic republic with great success, due to the systemic issues above, so it's hard to see how this is going to end well.

In glad that he put the bit about wealth inequality into the article. He didn't have to pick that, but he did. We are where we are largely because of cooperation and communication. Tech is the exemplar. We should be worried about inequality. It's a threat to all of that.

I find this fascinating and want to read more, but you haven't given me a lot to go on. Any references? What is SES?

SES is socioeconomic status, i.e. a combination of wealth and education.

In terms of reading more about what's going on in the US in general, the best sources of information are probably just the (often yearly) reports put out by the major governmental agencies: the CDC, the Department of Education, the DoJ, the EPA, etc.

socioeconomic status

The rise of wealth inequality has been substantially documented, for example http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2014/1110/Economic-i...

Facebook- over 10 years old.

Twitter- 8 years old.

Reddit - 9 years old.

I don't think people are saying that smartphones or Uber or even Reddit aren't terrific innovations. They are.

They're complaining about stuff like this: http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/10/and-the-winner-of-techcrunc...

One of the biggest competitions in the tech scene, and it's won by a personal butler service. Not even a robot butler; just a way to order a person to do your bidding for below the rate that you would ordinarily have to pay.

Not to mention all the money wasted on new advertising platforms, and startups that say they'll "change the world" through some trivial, stupid iPhone app. There's too much bluster and people don't get called out on it enough.

The last ten years have not been that notable. The biggest change has been the speed and power of mobile devices - the advent of 3G (then LTE) has opened up a lot of opportunities. But that has nothing to do with Reddit, Facebook, Twitter or any of the other startups Sam mentions - it was technology developed by boring old large companies.

Ten years ago I had a Nokia Symbian phone that (if I recall) could only connect over GPRS. Could still check e-mail fine, though. I was using MSN Messenger to communicate with friends instead of Twitter. I uploaded my photos to Photobucket instead of Dropbox. I ripped CDs to MP3s instead of paying for Spotify.

Yes, there has been innovation. But it's nowhere near as remarkable as Sam makes it - it's simply easier to do things than it used to be.

Perhaps the most unintended consequence of these innovations will have the most profound impact: keeping our youth from turning themselves into criminals.

Juvenile crime rates are plummeting, and the leading theory is that it's because all the kids are too busy on their electronic devices to commit any crimes.

"Arrests of juveniles for all offenses decreased 15.5 percent in 2013 when compared with the 2012 number"

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/c...

That's extremely interesting. What if you could get game addiction to supplant drug addiction?

A therapist told me that the former is almost as bad as the latter in terms of its effects on daily function.

That I readily believe. But game addiction hopefully does not have the longer term effects on the body that drugs are usually inflicting on their users. So one would hope that a gaming addiction could eventually be undone completely without lasting harm (other than wasted time).

Arthritis in the hands?

Beats psychosis or an overdose by a mile or so. Though it's definitely no fun thing. Usually that's not just due to gaming though, unless taken to (rare) extremes, you need some predisposition for that.

Yes, but in the long run it's much more likely that you'll emerge from a game addiction alive, in good health, and with the ability to integrate into society.

Is video game addiction a physical addiction?

> Juvenile crime rates are plummeting, and the leading theory is that it's because all the kids are too busy on their electronic devices to commit any crimes.

I have never heard that theory at all from any crime reporting, statistics, or books. Do you have any information on that?

Agreed, I'm fascinated by this theory but I can't find a single reference to it.

Useful things are wonderful, even if they're obvious and not new or even innovative. The problem is considering things like Snapchat, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter innovative when they're absolutely not. They're fundamentally simple communication channels that almost anyone could create, thanks largely to Internet pioneers and open source developers. Their users and public image make them valuable.

I'm very happy we have these things, and I'm happy they're well-designed and secure. But they're not really innovative.

"I have a question for all the people that use their iPhone or Android to complain on Twitter, Facebook, or reddit about the lack of innovation… "

This reminds me a bit when the Nightly News runs a story about something and then adds "but critics say it's not enough and doesn't go far enough".

Who are the "critics" exactly? Critics are easy to find.

Critics are visible and get attention. But never do I see any quantification of how many people actually "complain on Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit about the lack of innovation". Or even care.

I don't want to get into the argument about whether there has been digital innovation in the last ten years, but I'd like to note an observation about the 'world of atoms' vs. 'world of bits' statement.

One of silicon valley's strengths has been its tolerance for failure. Typically, if you found a startup and it goes under, you pick yourself back up and just get a job at a different startup or a big corp. However, I'm not so sure that this strength exists in the world of atoms to the same extent as in the world of bits. Perhaps it's because non-digital skills are less fungible, or perhaps it's because the valley is so crowded by the digital crowd that there in no room for a critical mass of atom-wranglers, but I suspect that the typical failure path for non-digital startups involves leaving the valley, or at least leaving the startup ecosystem.

Perhaps Sam could speak more to this difference between the worlds of bits and atoms in the future. I know that YC is looking to do more innovative work in the world of atoms, and I laud this. I'm sure that I'm not the only one who has noticed how much more successful the valley has been at bits than atoms since the 90s. I know that VCs would like to do more innovation with the atoms. But silicon valley seems to lack something when it comes to atoms that they have with bits. It's not the VCs; they are present and ready. Maybe it's something else.

People who say we don't have innovation don't literally mean we have nothing new, they mean that the rate, scale or impact of innovation is much less than in preceding decades. This sentiment has been expressed outside of the tech world also: Larry Summers maintains that we are in a period of long term economic stagnation.

I don't know if the claims, as they relate to tech, are true; maybe someone should actually present some convincing evidence for it instead of vaguely pointing to Snapchat.

Part of the problem is we know what is significant today, when we look back. 1904 to 1914? Heavier-than-air flight, cheap automobiles, rural electrification. 1914-1924? Radio, airlines, diesel railroad engines, moving pictures. 1924-1934? Television, talkies, commercial radio. 1934-1944? Nuclear power, commercial TV, colour films, antibiotics. 1944-1954? Jet aircraft, nuclear weapons, commercial nuclear power. 1954-1964? Space travel, colour TV, bipolar junction transistors, vaccination programmes. 1964-1974? Lunar landing, commercial supersonic flight, microchips. 1974-1984? Microcomputers, modern medical imaging, minimally invasive surgery. 1984-1994? Internet, e-mail. 1994-2004? Commercial Internet. 2004-2014? Who knows? Ask me again in ten years.

In 2004, in the wake of the .com crash, the future of the commercial Internet was not clear. Furthermore, the argument for slowing down of innovation is not entirely implausible. The big, foundational innovations like bipolar junction transistors, microchips, microcomputers and the Internet do seem to trail off in recent decades. For all the medical advances we have achieved nothing can touch anti-biotics and vaccines in terms of impact. They aren't even close to the same category.

The transistor is an interesting case for people who claim there is nothing new under the sun: transistor ideas had been around since the '20's, but it wasn't 'til the late '40's that they were "invented" and it was the early '50's that Shockley's innovation made it possible for them to go mainstream. Shockley didn't "invent" "the transistor", but he did invent something that was such a great improvement on existing technology that when we use the word "transistor" we are generally referring to his invention, even though that is not the most general use of the word.

It is perfectly likely that there was at least one world-changing invention in 2004-2014, but it'll be another decade before we can say with any certainty what it is.

I have a hard time believing any of the pre-1974 inventions were not known to be important almost immediately. BJTs are perhaps the only exception.

I still have my sense of wonder when I look at that the hardware, for example the magic supercomputer from the future that is my old Samsung S3 mini. People should really drop their smartphones less.

Culturally we've lost quite a bit of empowerment that the personal computer brought. The loss of privacy and the distinct awareness of an entity in the background collecting all data is always on my mind.

The WeLL, BIX, and BBSes predated the web, and my sub-$200 computer was doing a fine job of it. Newsgroups were a thing.

I love all the tech advances, but just because the old tech wasn't as widely disbursed doesn't mean people weren't doing things that happen today.

I remember a old Byte magazine on conferencing and it had a lot of stuff that is basically todays messaging networks.

Sam's question is interesting, but I think that as much as the world has changed in 10 years, it's also important to remember how much it hasn't.

I was doing a lot of the stuff I do now 10 years ago. Hell, I had a Rhapsody streaming music account and it hooked up to my TiVo, an XBMP-laden Xbox and a Denon system in 2003. And I was AIMing with friends on my cell phone in 2003 too.

But let's roll back the "I'm so l33t and the world isn't that great today" rhetoric for a second and look at why I think the real innovation argument has happened.

Where were you FIVE years ago. What were you doing then?

And in that case, with the exception of Instagram and Uber (and to a lesser-degree, Slack), almost everything I use, every service I pay for and every entity that is part of my daily life was around 5 years ago and was, more often than not, something that I used then too.

That isn't to say that the future isn't great and that there aren't improvements (and massive ones) to those services. But Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, Android, iOS, Spotify, Tumblr, WordPress, Drupal, Skype, Evernote, Hulu, Netflix and the other countless services that exist now, existed then. They weren't all as awesome then as they are now, of course, but the stuff was there.

I don't write this to belittle Sam's point, but to mention that the way we judge what we use and how we use it is changing so fast that I think a decade can be too broad to look at to consider "innovation."

So if I'm comparing what we use today and what will exist in 5 years, or will be a "threshold" moment in ten years, we look at what's available and if I'm honest, I'm not sure what has happened in the last few years that is of YouTube level of game changing.

YouTube, Netflix streaming, Uber, Tinder (I suppose, I'm married so I haven't used it but my friends who use it have had their social lives changed by it), Facebook -- these are truly paradigm-altering services (and yes, Facebook wasn't the first or even an early social network but it is paradigm altering in the sense that its' the first service that literally everyone joined, thus making it feel necessary). If I look at something like Snapchat (just to pick on them because I'm not a fan), I don't see anything paradigm shifting about it. That doesn't mean it doesn't become a permanent thing in the future, but it's not like Dropbox or YouTube.

And as an analyst, that's what I want to see more of and what I'm not really seeing over the last few years (with the exception of VR stuff).

I think in a post-Snowden world, innovation in information sharing and access technologies is met with a lot more skepticism and cynicism.

I was actually surprised how cynical the coverage of Amazon's Echo was. I expected to see at least some geeking out about the specs or the engineering that went into it. But the conversation was dominated by half-serious-jokes and comments about increasing Amazon's ability to sell you stuff, and giving the NSA and much higher fidelity recording of our daily conversations.

I believe we have now passed the point where the first questions we ask about new products and technologies aren't about how cool and innovative they are, but cynical questions about what the corporations selling them are really up to.

Maybe it can't be helped. YC, for example, needs to make money to keep existing. To make money, it needs to invest in companies that are likely to make profit. But the best way for companies to make profit isn't to innovate, is it? It's to find an audience and some business model and all that c*p I know nothing about, but that I feel yields companies and products that "lack [...] innovation," as some complained.

Maybe, if we weren't so money driven and more of us could afford to build things for the sake of innovation and progress only, the results would be different.

But I do concur, that there is at least one exciting and relevant problem that remains unsolved in the world of bits. A problem you're well aware of. :)

What was I doing 10 years ago? That's beside the point. I'm in the top 1% global wealth-wise, as are most people who are able to use the services mentioned. What were people in the other 99% doing 10 years ago?

What's happening now?

We all carry cel phones that are also personal computers, MP3 players, and gaming machines. They're made by Apple, Microsoft, and Google (which started as a search engine, like Lycos. Kurzweil and Berners-Lee work there now.) Apple's and Google's run 'nix. Apple's and Microsoft's are pretty hi-fi miniatures of their respective flagship OSes - in fact, in Microsoft's case, things flipped upside down and the phone UI design started driving the desktop.

TL;DR: Pocket PCs. Unix, Linux, "Windows"

Roughly speaking, most advancements come in two stages

    — initial technology breakthrough

    — building massive companies for mainstream markets

These stages can be 10 years apart from each other.

Companies like Dropbox and Uber are commercializing advancements of the last decade. It's easy to criticize them as "lacking any serious innovation".

At the same time, scientists make serious advancements on materials like graphene. But few people at HN notice this progress because massive commercialization has not started yet.

Interesting, I literally just wrote an article (https://medium.com/@marknadal/rise-of-the-immutable-operatin...) on this exact issue the day before.

My conclusion? The exact opposite of Sam's. For the most part I feel like software has gotten worse while hardware has significantly improved. The one exception I will make is Dropbox, that has changed my life.

Uh, I think they mean meaningful innovation, not mobile apps.

When we look back at the last 100 years of innovations, something tells me Dropbox photo sharing won't make the list.

I think you asked the right question but gave the wrong examples for the HN crowd. Consumer tech doesn't always seem that impressive unless you start thinking about scale.

Instead, I think you should be pointing out GitHub, AWS, CloudFlare, Elasticsearch, Stripe, Mailgun, etc.

No one is going to convince me they want to go back to the days of racking expensive (commodity) servers in a colo and hosting Exim alongside a payments gateway.

I think much of the last decade has been about streamlining information accessibility. Whoever owns information dominates the market.

It's like in one of those third world countries where a dictator coming to power would manifest his control over information channels (tv, print, online, etc) as a first thing. But here corporations are in control in a pretty way.

Honestly, all these mobile apps are quite unnecessary, and sometimes downright annoying or harmful (to productivity, and peace of mind). 10 years ago I used MSN Messenger, and that was all good. I don't need to be permanently connected to other people, especially when I'm supposed to be doing something else.

More examples of how much the world has changed, and how fast, from an essay I wrote a few years ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/raldi/comments/i91og/todays_real_li...

It's already outdated!

I'd like to remind Hacker News that the question is rhetorical.

The same message delivered by Louis CK 10x more effectively http://youtu.be/KpUNA2nutbk

Whats wrong with building toys for rich people? Rich people need to play too.

Sorry, Sam, SV doesn't see much in the way of serious, powerful, valuable, important innovation. Or, with some high irony, the real builder of SV, the US DoD and aerospace, is the real, all-time, unchallenged, unique world-class example of innovation and in comparison the present SV is a bad joke.

Sam, the rest of innovation is not all about atoms, SnapChat, PInterest, AirBnb, Uber, iPhone, Android, or Tesla.

For Tesla, I predict that in a few years Tesla will have gone the way of just another fad, this one only for rich people. Why? The battery technology sucks. Thus, for the car, the range is too short and the charging time too long, especially when charging at home. And the battery durability sucks.

One of the main problems with SV innovation is one of the first steps in innovation -- objective, expert, peer review of the crucial, core technology. Such reviews are standard and easy to get from the Ph.D. committees of the world's best research universities, the best journals of original research, and the NSF, NIH, and DARPA but not from SV, YC, etc. To SV and YC, technology is just routine software, often in, say, C++ or Python. Might regard the application of the technology as new as a business but not the technology itself.

Net, for innovation and technology, SV and YC don't get even half way to first base.

Hint, hint, hint: Information technology is about, right, information, and basically that's not about C++, Python, Tesla, or atoms and instead: And the candidates are, low gluten diets, Yoga meditation, low carb diets, following 10 top psychics, feedback from getting out of the building, a liberal arts education with a lot of attention to the great books, video games, funding the advantages had only by college dropouts, funding teams that arrive to work on skateboards, and powerful, valuable, high quality, original research in pure/applied mathematics. And the winner is (drum roll, please). Oops, sorry, my iWatch just went dead and I lost the answer. Sorry 'bout that.

Let me know when SV is ready to read a math paper. I have one with a small typo and will place a bet with you here on HN, $1, that in the next 30 days no one at a SV VC firm or YC will be able to find the typo.

Then we can move on to noticing some leading examples of L^2, that L^2 is complete, and how to use that as part of the crucial, core foundation to building a company worth, say, ballpark, $740 billion. Hint: Divide that in half and think a little.

From all my time in pure/applied math in research universities, working on challenging US DoD problems, and in one CS lab, I was around nearly all quite bright people. Then I got to know about the SV information technology world and its version of innovation and did a big upchuck and, then, a big laugh.

SV innovation? Smoking funny stuff in an echo chamber. Just where does SV get that really strong funny stuff it smokes?

But, but, but, SV IT VC is making money for its LPs, right? Likely not very much. Or see

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/venture-capital-returns.htm

But, Sam, surely you don't believe that there's any significant interest in innovation in SV IT, right? I mean, about innovation in SV, you were just being facetious, just joking, right? Sam, please tell me you were just joking. If you weren't just going for laughs, then SV IT is worse off than I feared.

> What were you doing 10 years ago?

Wasting my time on Web forums.

Having a good laugh at how Sam Altman doesn't know what Snapchat is... Would love to see someone use it to send a message "about how Silicon Valley only builds toys for rich people."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com