I have a relative who got really into this mindset. In fact he picked the "HN's Choice" software framework of the day for one of our co-creative projects a couple years ago. Mostly a fun project, but it could have gone somewhere, maybe. He got as far as setting it up so that we had some scaffolding, then basically he flamed out. I don't blame him at all; he'd never even used it before and expected himself to be able to just run with it. And this guy was a _master_ at a certain language starting with the letter P, but he was ashamed to use it. It made me so upset to see him feel all this pressure and then collapse.
Personally I feel that pressure myself sometimes but being aware of it helps a lot. As a hobby side project, I decided to go back and do some 1990s MS-DOS programming and experiencing this FOMO stuff was part of the motivation. I needed to be free to work deep instead of thinking broad, so to speak.
Prolog?
What a shame he couldn't use his best language! It has such nice web frameworks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages#...
There are plenty of other forums and sites to read about conventional tech. HN is where I find the bleeding edge. 90% of it is just fascinating. But the other 10% offer tantalizing possibilities for making something novel, which is to say: solving an unsolved problem.
“How to Become a Hacker” puts it plainly: no problem should have to be solved twice. Drudgery is evil. And by those axioms, a ‘Hacker’ is just uninterested in old solutions to old problems. We need to live in the future so that we can build the future. Although HN’s content has suffered over the last 5 years with the influx that accompanied a wider awareness of startups, it still is the best place I know of to dip your toes into the various futures we may one day encounter.
Having said that, lately I’ve found that Google Scholar is often more thought-provoking. If only there was a HN for Google Scholar.
The highest paid people in our industry are working on drudgery full-time for FAANG. And that's fine, people have families, I'm not judging anyone. But let's not fool ourselves.
The shat on one is the old Java, verbose, obtrusive style. The newly praised one is Haskell-style, type inferred, expressive...
Now you could say that's not new, BUT what is new is marrying ML style type system to languages whose other concepts devs are largely familiar with and packaging it the right way to get into production, instead of just academia and that being the case even for historically impenetrable low-level programming and such.
https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/csharp/union-types-in-csha...
Normally my comment would be an unnecessary back-slapping, but since the conversation veered this way, I think it is appropriate to call out your comment as something that represents the spirit that makes HN unique and wonderful.
Hackernews has an _instagram filter_ where everybody brags about how smart they are.
Then there's a bunch of fresh grads who fanboy their favourite tech companies.
Then every so often you get a gem of a comment from knowledge leader in the industry.
But that's quickly overshadowed by 'my Startup, my Startup, mah Startup' and how everybody wants to be rich one day.
But like every larger community in the internet, it eventually derives itself into an echo chamber.
Look on the front page right now and see how many stories are about startups. That didn’t change in the last five years. It’s always been about technology in general.
HN’s front page 10 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-05-10
HN’s front page 5 years ago
Having said that, the most apparent change to me is in the tone and substance of the comments rather than the front page. And it isn’t a huge change. Just noticeable for me.
Im not surprised the leaders of IT, ppl who create those new technologies, push for a narrative to use those new shiny things.
Or engineers who've convinced themselves that they're Tier 1 engineers...
The concrete value doing such things add to our business is happy staff (which you mentioned), which means the best people don't leave, and stat excited and productive for the long term. Also, when hiring, because it helps us get the best people to join us in the first place.
It's not just about "bleeding edge", it's about giving dev teams the freedom to do that if they want to. Some do more than others, but the point is, if they get it wrong, things break and they get called at the weekend or whatever and they soon change track.
1. Half-done projects started by some happy staff who then went on to start the next project in the next shiny new thing and either more-or-less completed by someone who was just about capable of cut-n-pasting without understanding or who decided that some new shiny thing needed to be added to make the rest wonderful.
2. A monstrous stack of projects in 637 different programming languages, frameworks, ideologies, coding styles, and indentation levels, guaranteed to require rewriting for any change. Result: 638 different things.
Of course, letting someone write whatever and then move on and leave it to someone else is a problem, but that's a problem regardless of whether they used bleeding edge tech or not.
For example, I've personally seen more tech-debt sins in more traditional monolithic Java + rdbms applications than I have an any of the Go based micro-services + nosql/etc I've seen over the years. I'm not trying to prove that "bleeding edge" is therefore better because it's not. I'm saying it's irrelevant.
The problem of leaving behind unmaintainable crap isn't about the tech, it's about the management, the team processes, the prioritisation process etc.
(There may be some overlap)
When dealing with new tech it's a lot more likely to be the first person to run into some obscure use case no one has ever experienced before. And in that case you need devs who are not only capable but willing to invest in solving the problem. Sometimes that means, re-architect something in the stack and sometimes it may even require making a PR to the original project. That's a lot of investment that may make your devs happier but probably provides little concrete value to the business.
That said I'm still building on elixir so what do I know.