Hacker News Reader

I'm confused why people see this as "revolutionary". At the core of it, this is just an abstraction around DOM-hacking. Anyone could have done this, and it is foolish to call such an "innovation" revolutionary.

View on HN

It's a well maintained schlep of a DOM hacking API that makes complex interaction in a hugely important installed base of 1 billion users (previously nearly impossible) possible. Just because you understand the mechanism doesn't mean you should demean the herculean efforts of other good hackers.

Also innovation isn't the idea. Innovation is actually implementing it.

I have a hard time following this reasoning. Of course almost anything new could have been done by anyone. The nature of invention and innovation is that someone figured something out. People could have (and did) say the same thing about Facebook, Dropbox, and a number of other "revolutionary" companies/products. What matters is that someone did it and is packaging it in a way to solve problems and improve the lives of others.

Perhaps "revolutionary" is just marketing fluff, but why get hung up on subjective semantics?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com