In some ways, I don't think it is a useful distinction. I had a boss once say (tongue-in-cheek), "It's work that I don't know how to do, which makes it hard." I think that's how most people actually think about it: "hard tech" is anything I don't know how to do, while "trivial problems" are anything that I know how to solve.
There are certainly some things that other people view as hard - like searching the web on every keystroke - that I view as...well, not trivial, but a simple matter of applying capital and writing code, because I know how it all works behind the scenes.
I'm guessing this article is attempting to focus attention away from all of the "The fundraising environment is falling!" and "My mobile app never got traction!" posts to where there are opportunities to exploit an information monopoly, and trying to recruit founders with this specialized technical information to YC.
(As a side note, I actually expect we're in for a large mobile renaissance in a year or two, with many more actually useful mobile apps becoming commonplace. But the "specialized knowledge" that will drive this is market knowledge, not technical knowledge. It's people with intimate knowledge of a problem space being able to acquire just enough technical skills (or partner with a mobile app dev) so that they can build & market a useful app. This is a power shift from technical founders to business founders in the mobile space, while the technical founders go off and build hardware/VR/AI startups.)
There are certainly some things that other people view as hard - like searching the web on every keystroke - that I view as...well, not trivial, but a simple matter of applying capital and writing code, because I know how it all works behind the scenes.
I'm guessing this article is attempting to focus attention away from all of the "The fundraising environment is falling!" and "My mobile app never got traction!" posts to where there are opportunities to exploit an information monopoly, and trying to recruit founders with this specialized technical information to YC.
(As a side note, I actually expect we're in for a large mobile renaissance in a year or two, with many more actually useful mobile apps becoming commonplace. But the "specialized knowledge" that will drive this is market knowledge, not technical knowledge. It's people with intimate knowledge of a problem space being able to acquire just enough technical skills (or partner with a mobile app dev) so that they can build & market a useful app. This is a power shift from technical founders to business founders in the mobile space, while the technical founders go off and build hardware/VR/AI startups.)