Hacker culture is still alive at NetBSD community
I was about to say, it is still these but pushed tot he outer regions. There are still many Linux distros that have this spirit but they are usually used by maybe a few thousand people at best.
The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
41–50 of 118 posts
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The "hacker spirit" doesn't require being a Luddite Just to be pedantic, the Luddites weren't anti-technology, they were fighting against a means of production that they could never hope to own and which was ruining their livelihoods.
Why engage with the substance of my comment when you can be pedantic am I right?
I'd accept that challenge, but I can't now because it's been edited out. For what it's worth, I remember somewhat agreeing with it.
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html >Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. I can't think of any comment less interesting and more tangential these days than yet another screed about LLMs using em dashes or particular speech patterns. Seriously who fucking cares
The other thing is who really knows if it was human or LLM. I think I have been accused of writing like an LLM.
With em dashes in particular, a human would have to go to explicit effort to use a non-ascii character. I like a good em-dash myself, but I just use a hyphen because I'm not going to go to the effort of using a character that's not on my keyboard in a blog post or comment. Using em dashes, especially in an otherwise monospace retro-computing theme, is a sure sign of llm output.
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#44this doesnt really reflect the vibe old school hackers give. "solder a wifi module to a calculator" sounds like a cartoon-inspired project. Why not reference call spoofing (i forgot the name) where they were able to call for no charge because they were able to spoof a real call. that's the kind of hacker vibe i want continued.
The word "hacker" comes from MIT students who would cut up circuit boards with a hacksaw and connect the pieces together in different ways. Soldering a WiFi module to a calculator is very oldschool hacker. The word you're looking for is phreaking. I must admit, since the title of TFA's website is only two letters away, it's funny you forgot it.
Ironically, the guy who soldered a Wi-Fi module to a calculator did so to gain access to AI slop with it https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/secre...
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> LLMs are here to stay. The "hacker spirit" doesn't require being a Luddite and rejecting LLMs ... You've got it all wrong. I pay three AI subscriptions and I use LLMs every day, for various tasks. I know models are here to stay (not just LLM ones). At least 12 computers at home (well counting the Pis and NUCs as computers) and at all times at least half of those turned on. And more VMs than that (and agents running…
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html >Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. I can't think of any comment less interesting and more tangential these days than yet another screed about LLMs using em dashes or particular speech patterns. Seriously who fucking cares
This is hardly a tangential annoyance to be annoyed by low effort slop.
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The "hacker spirit" doesn't require being a Luddite Just to be pedantic, the Luddites weren't anti-technology, they were fighting against a means of production that they could never hope to own and which was ruining their livelihoods.
Why engage with the substance of my comment when you can be pedantic am I right?
[deleted]
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#47From the article
> Then: Phrack was the Rosetta Stone. 2600 was gospel. IRC was sacred ground. Zines were copied, not monetized. We earned respect by contributing tools, ideas, or code, never by chasing clout.
2600: The Hacker Quarterly is definitely not quite what it was decades ago, but I was still so giddy when my first article got published there that I dereferenced a null pointer on purpose.
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#48this doesnt really reflect the vibe old school hackers give. "solder a wifi module to a calculator" sounds like a cartoon-inspired project. Why not reference call spoofing (i forgot the name) where they were able to call for no charge because they were able to spoof a real call. that's the kind of hacker vibe i want continued.
That is not something that should be encouraged. Hacking together projects like a wifi calculator is fun, harmless and builds knowledge. Hacking a phoneline can land a kid in jail. Attacking public infra is not something that should be treated lightly.
This is exactly the kind of sanitized hacking this article is talking about.
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#49The original "manifesto" was a deeply cringe zine article written about a group of people who would go on to run IT security practices at the major I-banks.
This update applies a fresh layer of vaseline to the camera lens: "creators in a world of closed systems", "anarchists with a cause". "Our goal was not destruction." Who are you calling "we"? I was there. It was for the most part a bunch of people trading scripts and running them in the hopes of possibly shutting people's phones off or stealing mail spools.
I'm not high-horsing or condemning 90s hackers. They were teenagers fucking around doing what teenagers do (though: I cough a bit when I read Blankenship writing about how we all "existed without skin color" and not "judging people for what they looked like").
What's insidious about this piece is how they use hagiography to cover for a pure gatekeeping argument. Bug bounties commoditizing vulnerability development to produce CVEs! Why, I never: the audacity to pay teenagers in Indonesia to document vulnerabilities when our forebears had to surreptitiously trade source trees on EFNet to participate in the scene.
This piece was written about 6 months before LLMs upended vulnerability research. What LLMs are going to do to the scene is a can of worms, so let's just put a pin in that, and judge it by the standards of August 2025, which by the standards of 1994 were a golden age of hacking, both in opportunity and in the intellectual depth of the field and the possibilities for engaging meaningfully with computer science.
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#50this doesnt really reflect the vibe old school hackers give. "solder a wifi module to a calculator" sounds like a cartoon-inspired project. Why not reference call spoofing (i forgot the name) where they were able to call for no charge because they were able to spoof a real call. that's the kind of hacker vibe i want continued.
The word "hacker" comes from MIT students who would cut up circuit boards with a hacksaw and connect the pieces together in different ways. Soldering a WiFi module to a calculator is very oldschool hacker. The word you're looking for is phreaking. I must admit, since the title of TFA's website is only two letters away, it's funny you forgot it.
For me, I still tend to use the older definition of “hacker” (not necessarily someone exploiting systems which feels more like a “cracker” to me), but someone who has an innate curiosity about the world around them, and finds interesting ways to solve problems or create new things.