I'm looking forward to self-driving electrics. You hop in the car, it takes you to your destination, and then you hop out. At off-peak hours they drive themselves to a car farm far away from the city, and recharge. The car service handles all maintenance.
There's this phenomena where anything invented before you turn 10 is just part of the natural order of things, anything between 10 and 30 is a great new opportunity that you might be able to make a career in, and anything invented over 30 is a threat to the natural order of things that must be resisted at all costs. I've put a lot of work into maintaining the ability to see change as opportunity past the age of 30. I suspect that most of this site is just hitting that demographic where new things become offenses against the natural order of things, though, and that's why we see such resistance to things like self-driving cars and cryptocurrency.
> I'm looking forward to self-driving electrics. You hop in the car, it takes you to your destination, and then you hop out. At off-peak hours they drive themselves to a car farm far away from the city, and recharge. The car service handles all maintenance.
I really think that you're being overly optimistic about this. Kind of like people were about the cloud 10 years ago. There is going to be all sorts of new bullshit that you can't even imagine. I bet there will be surge blackout periods, where only rich people can travel. This will only trend worse over time, to the point where poor people are less mobile than they were when they could own cars. And you might have to subscribe to different car fleets, and will get screwed a bunch of different ways that way too.
> There's this phenomena where anything invented before you turn 10 is just part of the natural order of things, anything between 10 and 30 is a great new opportunity that you might be able to make a career in, and anything invented over 30 is a threat to the natural order of things that must be resisted at all costs. I've put a lot of work into maintaining the ability to see change as opportunity past the age of 30. I suspect that most of this site is just hitting that demographic where new things become offenses against the natural order of things, though, and that's why we see such resistance to things like self-driving cars and cryptocurrency.
I try not to be a luddite. But I think you are discounting how people with more wisdom can see how things have degraded over time. Obviously those in power have a vested interest in you believing that things are only getting better. Phone manufacturers don't want to remind you of the days of headphone jacks and user swappable batteries.
>There's this phenomena where anything invented before you turn 10 is just part of the natural order of things, anything between 10 and 30 is a great new opportunity that you might be able to make a career in, and anything invented over 30 is a threat to the natural order of things that must be resisted at all costs.
As a 26 year old working in the tech industry, I see lots of newer tech around that I'd say is threatening, and I have for several years now. Though I suppose I'm probably in the minority. :)
The trend of technology today seems to be towards more centralized ownership of everything we interact with, when the platform providers can get away with it.
20 years ago you would buy a book and it was yours. You obviously still can now, but if you buy an ebook from Amazon, they can take it back from you. (Or if you poorly chose to buy an ebook from Microsoft... well, they all stopped working recently.)
IBM, though never a bastion of openness, had a very detailed repair manual[0] for the original IBM PC. Sure, modern machines don't have nearly as many user-serviceable parts, but in many cases today you'll find legal and technological barriers to repair in place of even the most basic of repair manuals.
It's a trend that's hard to fight, and opting out means sacrificing a lot of convenience, but I try all the same.
I like to build my own PC and also help friends. Most PC gamers also build their own PC. Most parts come with instructions and almost all pieces fit nicely, its kinda like building Lego. I switched to Linux a couple of years back. But last month I helped a friend build a PC and when installing Windows 10 it just said "missing drivers" with no clue. Then my friend went to a computer shop and they installed Windows without any issue.
One would think the resistance to crypto has more to do with it's basic value proposition. Watching 4 years of every crypto coin functioning as a honeypot trap for the naive, then exploding, leaves a mark. Bitconnect making billions from scamming people rings truer in my mind than some vague ageism.
Also a good chunk of the crypto coins are based on a positive feedback loop between greed and electricity waste, which is kind of a scheme you'd expect from a supervillain.
You're making some great points here. I'm curious to know how you're handling this part:
> I've put a lot of work into maintaining the ability to see change as opportunity past the age of 30
I do agree with you mostly and most younger coworkers don't seem to want or care about hacker news. I remember when I was in college and found this website, it was the greatest discovery ever and there was so much interesting content. But (purely anecdotally) the viewership seems to be limited to that demographic.
> But (purely anecdotally) the viewership seems to be limited to that demographic.
From the opposite perspective of a 20 something, my more technical friends with a genuine interest (the type to build their own PC/NAS clusters, Arch Linux/Gentoo users) are the ones I know that do browse HN regularly. We're still around but I also can see most people would rather browse Reddit.
I'd like to think the conversations here have more substance than on other sites and that is still a major draw.
> I'm curious to know how you're handling this part:
> > I've put a lot of work into maintaining the ability to see change as opportunity past the age of 30
There're a few big skills, both of which are really about mindset and worldview than anything else:
One is to recognize and embrace impermanence, and to do so as a way of inoculating yourself against sunk-cost fallacies. So for example, I put in a lot of work to learn Python, Django, and web development when I got out of college, and then to learn C++, scalability, and optimization while I was at Google. When I left Google, I had the idea to do an API-compatible reimplementation of Django where all the framework bits are written in tightly-optimized C++. But as I started evaluating that idea, I looked around and realized a.) Django was no longer the preferred way to build webapps b.) The web, arguably, was no longer the preferred technology to build apps at all and c.) users of Django either didn't care about performance or they'd gotten to be big sites that can afford massive AWS bills. Sucks to be me. Better to recognize that early before sinking a lot of work into that project. I've still got those skills (though both Django and C++ are moving targets), and they came in handy when testing and rejecting the following couple startup ideas.
A second skill is to view learning as rewarding for its own sake, and something that you do lifelong rather than just when you're young so you can get a job. I'd internalized this pretty well as a kid.
A third is to pay attention to people around you, and when they're doing something seemingly stupid, ask yourself why they're doing it rather than immediately judging. And a fourth is to pay careful attention to things that disconfirm your previous hypotheses.
As an example of both of these - when I first heard about Bitcoin in 2013, I read the whitepaper, mentally filed it under "Distributed database; might spawn 2-3 interesting companies but won't go anywhere else", and then forgot about it for a few years. When the bubble hit in 2017, I was like "Pyramid scheme. Actually double pyramid scheme, which is kinda clever. Wait for it to burst."
But then from that assessment comes a hypothesis - when I looked in detail at the ICOs being funded, I should expect to see 100% scams. I only saw roughly 35% scams, plus another 50% that were well-meaning teams who were in well over their head. With over 6000 ICOs being done, that's hundreds of projects that might actually have a chance of being something real. So while the vast majority of crypto projects are scams, there's still something very interesting going on, and perhaps its younger boosters may be onto something.
There's this phenomena where anything invented before you turn 10 is just part of the natural order of things, anything between 10 and 30 is a great new opportunity that you might be able to make a career in, and anything invented over 30 is a threat to the natural order of things that must be resisted at all costs. I've put a lot of work into maintaining the ability to see change as opportunity past the age of 30. I suspect that most of this site is just hitting that demographic where new things become offenses against the natural order of things, though, and that's why we see such resistance to things like self-driving cars and cryptocurrency.