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Ask HN: How can we stop making disposable hammers?

3 points by 0xbadcafebee ↗ HN
The tech industry feels to me a lot like a disposable hammer factory. The hammers we make are made out of a non-durable material, and they tend to break down without constant maintenance. Every few years you have to buy a new hammer because the old one becomes ineffective. You can get a new hammer for really cheap, but it won't last long, and it really only works on nails and boards that are made to work with the disposable hammer of today.

Trying to use a Netbook with a dual core Atom processor and 1GB ram recently to browse the web was a bit like pulling teeth. I can't imagine trying with my first "fast" computer, a Compaq Prolinea with 50mhz 486DX2 and a whopping 32 megs of RAM (http://www.totalgeekdom.com/?p=356). If my Compaq could browse the web back then, it should still be able to browse the web now, but I imagine that it would be very difficult. Good luck trying to put any new files on it.

A hammer from 100 years ago, or even a telephone, works about the same now as it did then. But the technology we're making today seems like it will be completely unusable in just a few decades, or less. This is pretty wasteful and probably not sustainable. How can we stop making disposable hammers?

2 comments

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Chyzwar
Part of this can be accounted to Wirth's law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

I also partiality disagree with you. Hammers did not change much for last few hundreds of years. The web made a massive leap in just a few years.

We created an abstraction to develop faster. We build it on top systems that accumulated decades of cruft. In my opinion, a new start like RISC-V and Fuchsia/Redox is needed.

drjasonharrison
How often do you use a hammer? What else can you use a hammer for?

Now answer the same question for a computer.

Some of the technology changes are due to "shiny shiny" and others due to "people time is more important than CPU cycles.