Honestly, hackers/HN may be the wrong audience to ask this rhetorical question to (not that Sam was specifically asking it to us). The biggest difference of the

Honestly, hackers/HN may be the wrong audience to ask this rhetorical question to (not that Sam was specifically asking it to us). The biggest difference of the last 10 years isn't so much the incredible new technology or protocols being built, it's how accessible those are to the everyday person, and how much easier they are to use. Look at the original HN submission for Dropbox (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863). The response from a lot of hackers was negative. Why? "We already have rsync." "We have FTP mounted locally with curlftpfs, with SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem + open source tools." That problem was already solved for hackers. But for the 99% of people who aren't hackers, seamlessly sharing files across computers (with backups and a sort of version control built in) was incredible. There are certainly technologies I love and adore that didn't exist 10 years ago (Twitter, everything being mobile, Uber/Lyft). But what I can do is largely unchanged. For someone who doesn't build things or understand github or use a terminal, however, the world has been revolutionized. Chris Dixon has pointed out that a lot of the great companies of today are Unix commands made accessible to the everyday person. (Grep->Google, rsync->Dropbox, man->stack overflow, cron->IFTTT). Some are a bit of a stretch (Google != Grep), but an interesting way to think about starting big companies is to think of something really cool or useful that only hackers can do right now. So, going back to Sam's question, "What was I doing 10 years ago?" It was pretty close to the same. I use almost all of the technologies he mentions, but could probably get by without them. For me, it's much more interesting to consider the question, "What was your mom doing 10 years ago?"