[HN Gopher] When is tech not hype? Tulips, toilets, trains and tabs
___________________________________________________________________
When is tech not hype? Tulips, toilets, trains and tabs
Author : alex-moon
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-07-15 11:03 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ajmoon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ajmoon.com)
| 1270018080 wrote:
| If Linkedin influencers and consultants aren't changing their
| bios from X-Expert to Y-Expert, then Y is probably real.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| When you can actually see it improving life, for one, rather than
| just improving efficiency, which doesn't really benefit the
| individual but only the corporation.
| esafak wrote:
| Increased efficiency translates to reduced costs.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| But often at the expense of something else: the commons,
| employee satisfaction, or even the joy of having just enough.
| No, costs are not as important as many other things.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Only in the presence of healthy competition which businesses
| do everything in their power to avoid.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| Is there any rational scheme to how they numbered the toilet
| components? If they had started with the handle at 1 and
| proceeded in the order of operation, the diagram would explain
| the process all by itself.
| nottorp wrote:
| > What do I do when I first wake up? I grab my phone.
|
| Those supermen... when I first wake up I crawl to the coffee pot.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Sometimes I really struggle to make coffee pre-coffee.
|
| Forget the grinds and it's kind of weak.
|
| Forget the water and nothing comes out.
|
| Forget to turn it on and nothing happens at all.
|
| Switching to a single serve coffee maker adds new failure
| methods. Forget the cup and it brews onto the floor.
| nottorp wrote:
| We solved that by using a drip coffee maker with a timer
| function.
|
| You fill it in the evening while you're still coherent. It
| starts on its own 10 minutes before the alarm in the morning.
| rozap wrote:
| Forgetting the portafilter cup and drinking the mess that
| comes out does wake you up though.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Relevant satire, "The Hustle":
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U
| bgwalter wrote:
| There was no hype at all about the white plastic they put in your
| teeth instead of gold or amalgam. There was no hype about bullet
| trains, they just happened.
|
| Hype happens when people don't really need a product and the
| marketing machine has to compensate. It helps if the product
| seems like magic for the first month and then becomes obnoxious
| and boring without marketing.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Bullet trains had/have lots of hype.
| cperciva wrote:
| _There was no hype at all about the white plastic they put in
| your teeth instead of gold or amalgam._
|
| When these came in, I remember my dentist being clearly very
| excited. There was absolutely hype... we just weren't the
| target for it.
| azalemeth wrote:
| The NHS largely prefers amalgam over white fillings for the
| simple reason that there is consistent but low quality
| evidence that they last longer (1) and are lower cost. There
| absolutely is hype in dentistry, and it's very dangerous as
| most procedures are irreversible.
|
| (1) https://www.nature.com/articles/6401026
| jxntb73 wrote:
| The author misses the crucial final stretch of tying all that
| logic concretely into Bitcoin; indispensable through
| infrastructure and habit. The tulip bubble (Holland 1634-1637)
| didn't get the fastest-growing ETF in history in year 15.
| sealeck wrote:
| When was the first ETF released? (Hint: late 1900s).
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I thought the Dutch East India Company started selling stock
| in 1602?
| vel0city wrote:
| ETFs are different from company ownership stocks.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| World finance is secretly backed by vaults of tulips held at
| each central bank, but THEY don't want you to know!
| bgwalter wrote:
| An example of tech that was super hyped _and deservedly popular_
| _and faded later_ is the Rubik 's Cube.
|
| There was a real rage in the press and in the street after it was
| released. Now it can still be bought, but most people would
| consider it uninteresting.
| taeric wrote:
| I'm curious what you mean? It is a good puzzle, but it is hard
| not to think that hype helped make it more popular? Heck, used
| to you could go buy a ton of little puzzles to play with.
| Nowadays, I assume you can still do that, but it isn't exactly
| easy without going online.
| PokemonNoGo wrote:
| Honestly think the Rubiks Cube is more hyped than ever.
| bgwalter wrote:
| It went viral in schools and among adults in the real world.
| The press hype seemed organic and not dictated by the
| newspaper owners.
|
| What we see now with "AI" is that the hype is mostly by
| online shills with some connection to the funding. The
| traditional press as well as the alternative YouTube press is
| increasingly negative.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| iPhones comes to mind - except for a small group, most people
| no longer care. They used to stand in lines for the midnight
| release.
|
| But the granddaddy for your question would be the Polio vax.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Man, that is really a story. I do remember tabs. They were this
| revolution in browsing. You could look at two things so easily.
| "Open in New Tab".
|
| I love to "folks these days" so I shall. Folks these days don't
| know what a revolution Firefox was. Before that there were no
| "web standards" or anything. You had IE6 compatible and Netscape
| compatible and this and that. Linux web browsers would struggle
| to render pages. They came up with these ACID tests and these
| standards.
|
| And Firefox was crazy back then. People now would lose their shit
| over the "lack of consent". People were talking about how they'd
| install Firefox and give it the IE logo so their parents would
| use it and everyone would talk up its leanness and this and that.
|
| You couldn't get Netflix on Linux. It needed Silverlight to
| enforce DRM. These days the web is the platform. The complexity
| in the runtime and every application runs on Linux. Man, I never
| could have guessed 20 years ago that this would happen.
|
| For me the fastest I've seen mind-blowing technology go from sci-
| fi to banal is LLMs. When TalkToTransformer first allowed you to
| do it there was this completion model that seemed insane. Like
| magic. Now, everyone I know uses an LLM for all sorts of things.
| It's so integrated into life. Wild.
| bee_rider wrote:
| > And Firefox was crazy back then. People now would lose their
| shit over the "lack of consent". People were talking about how
| they'd install Firefox and give it the IE logo so their parents
| would use it and everyone would talk up its leanness and this
| and that.
|
| I always interpreted those sort of stories as kind of...
| somebody doing something they consider at least a little
| duplicitous.
|
| At the time though, there was the concept of a "family
| computer," which isn't really as much a thing anymore. Also it
| was assumed (whether or not it was true) that kids knew tech
| better than their parents, so there could at least be a kind of
| justification. "I'm modifying the shared resource that I know
| best in a slightly underhanded way so that my parents will use
| it better." I dunno. I didn't do that sort of thing but I was
| an annoyingly conscientious kid.
|
| > You couldn't get Netflix on Linux. It needed Silverlight to
| enforce DRM. These days the web is the platform. The complexity
| in the runtime and every application runs on Linux. Man, I
| never could have guessed 20 years ago that this would happen.
|
| Was 4K Netflix ever finally fixed on Linux? IIRC it was limited
| to lower resolutions for the longest time.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > I always interpreted those sort of stories as kind of...
| somebody doing something they consider at least a little
| duplicitous.
|
| Often it's a situation where someone doesn't really know what
| programs are, they just know that the blue E is the button
| for Internet. In that case it's not trickery to keep using
| the blue E on the Internet button, just practical labeling.
| LiquidSky wrote:
| Hype is the difference between the buzz around something and what
| it can actually deliver, and lasts as long as those selling the
| hype can convince people that difference is small or zero.
| taeric wrote:
| This is an amusing attempt at finding the field of marketing
| through a first principals analysis of some successful products.
|
| Could have fun by looking at any social spread. Not just of a
| technology through the society. Fashion similarly spreads.
| Behavioral patterns spread. Language usage. All of it.
| dawnofdusk wrote:
| I think the more interesting observation here, although the OP
| doesn't originally point it out, is that the spread of
| technology is associated with some sort of utility. Fashion and
| language seem more subjective: there's not a reason to prefer
| one over another. But with technology the idea is often that
| there are better or more productive tools. For example, the
| steam engine is more productive than the water wheel.
|
| The point of "hype", on the other hand, and the reason to be
| "hype-optimistic" as the OP is, is that it can result in the
| spread of technologies that are not necessarily better. In
| other words, tech hype or marketing will not necessarily spread
| technologies in a meritocratic way. But actually what many
| cultural anthropologists know, such as by studying the spread
| of early human tools, is that there is a wisdom of the crowd
| effect where large social adoption of suboptimal technology
| tends to improve that technology unintentionally.
|
| Those who decry "hype" are operating from an engineering
| background, where good tools are designed from the top down.
| But "hype" is more like a social force, which can emergently
| produce better tools from the bottom-up. The latter dynamic is
| robust yet uncontrollable, but it's definitely a real thing.
| taeric wrote:
| I want to give kudos to the OP for seeing that infrastructure
| matters. The fanciest syphon system in the world doesn't
| matter if you don't have a way to get water to and from it.
| (For the toilette example.)
|
| I'm seeing similar with so many people hyping solar power.
| People are fawning at how useful today's panels are. And they
| really are. But, that is largely only true if you have all of
| the other technology that we have to use the power it can
| generate. And this cuts in multiple amusing ways. Without
| electric lights, a lot of the power you'd have at home would
| be wasted. And, without modern electric lights, far more of
| it is lost in non-light generation than what we see today.
| (Lights are particularly interesting to look at. The amount
| of energy used by lights had such an extreme drop off that it
| is almost hard to really grapple with.)
|
| Directly to your post, fashion and language may seem more
| subjective, but I question that. Obviously parts of it are
| driven less by utility and more from some other factors. But
| that is almost certainly true for technology, as well. Is why
| many places hold out from technology for longer than others,
| as an easy example.
| throw0101c wrote:
| Two good books that intersect technology, hype, and
| economics/finance are _Technological Revolutions and Financial
| Capital_ by Perez (going back to the 1700s):
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_...
|
| And _The Rise and Fall of American Growth_ by Gordon:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
|
| Most actually innovation (in the US?) occurred from about
| 1920-1950,+ with mainstream acceptance from 1950-1980, with very
| little newness (leading to economic/productivity growth)
| occurring post 1980s: the main exception of course being
| computers and the Internet, but that seems to have maxed out in
| the '00s.
|
| + The (first?) Industrial Revolution is discussed, as well as
| early scientific discoveries that led to later engineering
| development that turned into usable products.
| baxtr wrote:
| How is "innovation rate" actually being measured?
|
| It's hard for me to imagine a KPIs that hasn't been affected by
| mainstream internet and mobile smartphone adoption, which
| happened the last 15-20 years.
| thatcat wrote:
| Think about it this way, if we still had a world's fair -
| what would even be on display? Improving some metrics isnt
| necessarily innovation
| econ wrote:
| I've talked a lot with all kinds of people about new
| inventions and things people /we could do if we put our
| back under it.
|
| The responses are very cultural and nothing like what would
| be required to accomplish anything large.
|
| To give an example. We could make tubes with hot and/or
| cold water running from Siberia to the Sahara. There are
| plenty of design challenges in such project. The correct
| mindset is to take a broad outline calculating ROI so that
| you have an idea how much the state of the art needs to
| improve for it to be viable. Then you take the largest
| expenses or technical hurdles and ponder what could be done
| to ease the pain point. You can ponder the diameter vs the
| temperature vs the flow rate or pressure, the distance
| between the pumps etc etc, not to build anything but to
| train the brain noodle.
|
| If it wasn't a stupid idea people would be doing it
| already.
|
| Many countries, if not all, had a period where great things
| were done. After that comes defeatism nihilism and a
| preference for talking about tarifs, Epstein, 911, etc
|
| With tiny improvements everything shifts around. The steam
| engine had many challenges that have been solved long ago.
| Imagine that the 100 mph carburator didn't happen because
| you lose much of the throttle control. How silly this
| excuse is in the age of hybrids? It's pretty much a non-
| argument.
| athenot wrote:
| We still have world fairs, the current one is in Japan. A
| friend of mine just came back from seeing it and it's
| apparently quite impressive.
|
| https://www.expo2025.or.jp/en/overview/purpose/
| throw0101d wrote:
| Will what was on display:
|
| * reduce infant or child mortality?
|
| * reduce maternal mortality?
|
| * increase average life spans (by, say, double-digit
| percentages)?
|
| * increase health or quality of life such that people at
| the end of their lives are more mobile, and perhaps have
| less onerous medical conditions?
|
| * produce more food in the same amount of land?
|
| * produce more food with fewer inputs (energy, labour,
| fertilizer, water)?
|
| * produce more manufactured things with fewer inputs
| (energy, labour, metals)?
|
| * allow for faster transportation with more efficiency?
|
| It's all very well to invent something, but in what ways
| does it improve people's lives:
|
| > _Fortunately Gordon indicates that it is not an end to
| innovation, but a decline in the usefulness of future
| inventions that is taking place. Documenting the
| impressive rise in standards of living between 1920 and
| 1970, with rising TFP, he claimed that it will be more
| difficult than before to replicate such improvements in
| advanced countries like the United States. In the earlier
| period, the American standard of living doubled every 35
| years; in the future this doubling (for most people) may
| take a century or more. Moreover, the newer innovations
| do not seem to be benefitting all segments of society,
| which in turn reflects rising inequality in the advanced
| countries._
|
| > _Gordon's thesis raises many questions: Is he correct
| in saying that the era of rising labor productivity
| associated with innovation and technological change over?
| Will the digital economy imply a new rise in the standard
| of living? From a development perspective, what
| implications does his thesis have for middle- and low-
| income countries?_
|
| *
| https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/developmenttalk/declining-
| pac...
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _It's hard for me to imagine a KPIs that hasn't been
| affected by mainstream internet and mobile smartphone
| adoption, which happened the last 15-20 years._
|
| The Internet got going in the 1990s, and everyone in the US
| was basically connected by (say) 2010. Can you be "more
| connected" that already having your business or home being
| online 24/7 (i.e., DSL or cable, not dial-up modem)? Certain
| transfer speeds have gone up, and going from a V.92 56kbps to
| DSL is improves things, but how much productive is going from
| 10 Mbps to 50Mbps: do you get a 5x rise in economic
| productivity?
|
| Can you point to a FRED chart or cite a DOI that shows that
| GDP is better in societies pre- and post-smartphone?
|
| If all KPIs have been affected, then it should be easy to
| post a graph and see where there is an inflection point or
| change in the slope.
|
| If you find it so hard to believe, shouldn't it be easy for
| you to cite the data showing so?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > ...how much productive is going from 10 Mbps to 50Mbps:
| do you get a 5x rise in economic productivity
|
| Diminishing returns has kicked in for me. But hard to rule
| out any future bursts until the baseline raises. Perhaps
| lower latency could make things like VR and AR more
| appealing and useful.
| scroot wrote:
| To add: one of the main arguments in Gordon's tome is that many
| if the most impactful innovations dealt with "networking the
| house" (gas, electricity, plumbing, and communications) and
| could _only happen once_. It's actually kind of sobering to
| read.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| I started disabling tabs in my editors and only using the quick
| open menus, and got back a lot of time wasted managing tabs. Saw
| it in a presentation from someone at Jetbrains long ago and tried
| it with some skepticism at first but I am a convert now.
| necovek wrote:
| I was expecting the story to go: look at the toilet flush
| mechanism, such a simple gravity/float device with such a
| wondrous utility -- arguably, one can make it themselves with not
| much experience or tooling (it might not work as well, and might
| leak a bit, but it really is simple IMO).
| cjensen wrote:
| Conflating "hype" with the "business cycle" is not a good choice.
| The content is interesting reading once you move past that.
|
| The business cycle would likely exist in the absence of emotional
| choices. Part of it is that businesses that are near-failure tend
| to fail when the economy declines, which causes additional
| decline. This means that near-failure tends to build up during
| good times and then fail en masse during a decline.
| grishka wrote:
| There are technologies that actually solve genuine problems or
| meaningfully improve people's lives, and then there are
| technologies that are immensely overhyped solutions desperately
| looking for problems. We're having too much of the latter kind
| lately.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Hype is foremost a word embedded in a framework of specific
| values and a specific concept cluster. It's a pejorative used by
| a variety of factions: those who share the values, and concepts,
| but are in some fashion competitors or allied with competitors,
| etc.; or, those who have a different set of values.
|
| Most human behavior, especially commercial and economic, is a
| function of one's own received beliefs--and one's observations
| about and participation in the beliefs of others.
|
| Whether a given assertion is factual is secondary to whether it
| alters belief.
|
| Though I suppose even "belief" is too strong a word. Let's say
| "behavior."
|
| One need to not believe the hype, to seek to extract value from a
| market.
|
| The question I'd look it is, how are beliefs and behavior shaped
| by various assertions, and how well do those assertions
| correspond to various observations and predictions about the
| nature of reality--including collective behaviors.
|
| The funny thing about ponzy schemes and hysterical markets is
| that the usual account about how they form and how they collapse,
| hand waves around the core of the whole question: the source of
| value.
|
| A good socialist materialist might attempt to link value to
| utility amid other prosaic and pragmatic qualities,
|
| but our nature as a social species--one motivated in increasing
| part as we shuffle down the hierarchy of needs by intangibles
| such as status and its signaling--means that even the concept of
| utility is just another contentious ambiguity.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| A somewhat cynical but not that I can see incorrect inference
| from this might be that the critical thing to look at in any
| market is primarily, to what degree is it a matter of
| "fashion"; and what are the contributions of current and
| anticipated social capital concentrations on whether something
| stays in fashion.
|
| Nearby is the concept of novelty: fashion in the clothes sense
| obviously chases a convoluted but ultimately cyclical path
| through relatively limited spaces.
|
| Many of us who have been on HN or in the industry prior to its
| inception have seen the pendulum swing in technology fashions
| as well--a regular example being the architectural decisions
| made in front-end frameworks.
|
| The fiction of classical philosophy of science was that it was
| additive, and that information was well preserved over time,
| and hence the entire process of scientific progress one of,
| well, progress.
|
| The equivalent fiction here might be that there is some obvious
| way in which the over-hyped and the real, usually, are
| determined not by intrinsic merit but rather through the tidal
| swinging of fashion.
|
| Usually. Every once in a while actual progress is made, thank
| god.
|
| ML and AI are obviously one of those cases.
|
| The noise of the industry churn and frenzy don't obscure that
| much, at all.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-17 23:00 UTC)