
Ask HN: How can we stop making disposable hammers? - peterwwillis
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&#x27;t last long, and it really only works on nails and boards that are made to work with the disposable hammer of today.<p>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&#x27;t imagine trying with my first &quot;fast&quot; computer, a Compaq Prolinea with 50mhz 486DX2 and a whopping 32 megs of RAM (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.totalgeekdom.com&#x2F;?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.<p>A hammer from 100 years ago, or even a telephone, works about the same now as it did then. But the technology we&#x27;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?
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Chyzwar
Part of this can be accounted to Wirth's law.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_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.

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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.

