7 ms·

maybe he's subtly alleging that they didn't do much in the way of solving it.

• DaniFong 19y ago
  Maybe, but I think his main point was that the environment has changed, and now that the gritty fundamentals of just making a web app are polished, there's nothing left to do. Except there probably is. In previous years, you'd have to do all sorts of backbending to get your software in a cardboard box and on someone's shelf. Or schlepping to the Fortune 500. Now, people can access underlying magic, if there is any, much more directly. I can't think of a better example than Google. There's a certain magic to reddit, too. In it's heyday, the frontpage was really, genuinely good. An algorithm doesn't have to be complex to work well. And consider eBay. Let's just let people post stuff, right? But it would be a mess without a search system, without a way to detect fraud, and without a way to award users. None of these things are solved problems, really, and the existing solutions took enough thought that many would be online auctioneers said they thought it would never work.
  • neilc 19y ago
    I think that's all true -- there are core algorithmic issues in both reddit and eBay that are interesting and for which there is a lot of room for improvement. But at least to me, the problem with most of the work being done on webapps is that very little of the time is spent on these kinds of problems -- the vast majority focuses on moving data back and forth from the database, adjusting the UI, working around browser bugs, and similar grunt work. IMHO, anyway.