Matt Bedard
10 HN mentions · mentioned in 7 months, 2014–2015
4:12 · 3.8M views · Jan 4, 2014
A short clip of Louis C.K.'s Conan interview riff 'Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy', about how people take modern technology for granted and complain about marvels.
HN uses it as a reference when commenters want to point out how quickly people forget the wonder of modern technology and complain anyway.
10 comments from Hacker News
> The reason we don't realize the value is because we haven't concocted applications. Some of us realize the value. I just think it's impossible for most people to not take it for granted. If you're under 30, you inherently take it for granted because you know of nothing else, you simply cannot appreciate the technology as much as someone who lived a good chunk of their lives without it. You can "know" and imagine what life was like before our current internet culture, maybe even empathize, but there are still things that are unknowable and can't be experienced by just going off the grid. One such example is culture. The culture of society was different because of the technology (or lack of) at the time. Everything from how you interacted with your friends, to how you received and consumed media, to banking and your place of employment. Everything was different before our current technology. The people who grew up with supercomputers in their pockets don't know of a world where 3-way calling was something magical and you'd get giddy when you used it (or horrified when it was used as a tool to trick you into admitting you liked someone and they were on the phone silently listening). Or a world where if you wanted to find an address or phone number, you had to go find a phone book. Wanted to go on a vacation and look up cool places to see while there? You were heading to the library. If you were on the road driving, and wanted to call someone, you had to stop off and find a pay
> When I bought my first house, using money earned from co-founding a software company, I couldn’t believe that such abstract work could be exchanged for something so big and tangible, hewn from forests and rocks by people sweating in the sun. I've been writing software for years, and it still feels like magic. People work 3x as hard as me and I make 3x as much as them. Many make real, physical things; i just type away on a keyboard. With the right incantations, you can build something that's worth millions. Just you, in your free time, creating something that can be used by the entire world. Always reminds me of this louie CK interview on conan: this video
It's a nice dream, but even if you had that power to go back and time you'd probably just make other mistakes. There isn't an intelligence capable of designing big open standards like the web, rather they only move forward by natural selection, much like terrestrial life has. In the end I think we've gotten some pretty remarkable things this way, remember before the web there was no such thing as cross-platform, instantly-available globally, and accessible to any person with any disability multimedia. Few people seem to recognize how much of an accomplishment this is: this video
> leads to fool's errands like this: >> It’s time to kill the aimless, bottom-up, ad-hoc incrementalism in programming in favor of purposeful, top-bottom and planned innovation. Agree. Let the author put his money where his mouth is first, then we can discuss where he's right. He wants programming to be "easier." Well everybody wants everything easier. It's easy to have just one thing easy scarifying other dependencies. But the limitations exist everywhere. And it was damn hard to even come this far and maintain the state we are here now: Louis C.K's take: this video
The following perfectly describes my sentiments about all the complaints people have about JavaScript, PHP, <name your favourite hated language> this video