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Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

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Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#41

Post by duskwuff »

lwhalen wrote: post #34
some_furry wrote: post #24

> I've thought perhaps Mythical Man Month and How To Become A Hacker (Eric Raymond essay) but not sure they're quite right. Please don't recommend Eric Raymond's work to people. > technical founder wondering what reading to recommend to a business focused founder for them to grok the hacker mindset What does "the hacker mindset" mean to you? If you ask me: The most important thing about a hacker mindset is that it mu…

What's wrong with ESR's work? I know the man himself can sometimes be controversial, but many of us came up on his works like The Jargon File, Cathedral and Bazaar, etc.

The Jargon File is almost entirely the work of others, in particular Guy Steele. ESR's contributions to it were largely self-serving, e.g. the addition of terms like "anti-idiotarianism" which had little usage outside right-wing political circles (including ESR himself, of course), and he hasn't updated it at all since the early 2000s.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#43

Post by derefr »

some_furry wrote: post #37
fouric wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please don't recommend Eric Raymond's work to people. Why? Do you have some problem with his advice on how to ask questions[1]? [1] http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

> Why? Because promoting ESR's work to people has the unfortunate side-effect of elevating ESR's prestige. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15513086 for more on why ESR is bad. > Do you have some problem with his advice on how to ask questions[1]? No, I think he's a bad person and we do our entire industry a disservice by continuing to elevate his status. Find better heroes, should you even want heroes.

It does our industry an even-greater disservice to base prestige on great works rather than on character. We can get past the halo effect, if we try.

If I recall, there's a Buddhist proverb, where a pig is held up as a good example of enlightenment: it will happily pick truffles out of mud, taking the truffle and leaving the mud behind. It doesn't develop an opinion on the mud in the process; the truffle grew from the mud, but the mud isn't relevant to the truffle. It doesn't venerate/privilege/respect the mud—but nor does it find it disgusting. It's just mud. Irrelevant. Not food. The truffle, clean of mud, stands on its own. The truffle is a necessary part of a creature's mental model, insofar as it experiences hunger; but the mud is not.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#44

Post by fouric »

some_furry wrote: post #37
fouric wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please don't recommend Eric Raymond's work to people. Why? Do you have some problem with his advice on how to ask questions[1]? [1] http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

> Why? Because promoting ESR's work to people has the unfortunate side-effect of elevating ESR's prestige. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15513086 for more on why ESR is bad. > Do you have some problem with his advice on how to ask questions[1]? No, I think he's a bad person and we do our entire industry a disservice by continuing to elevate his status. Find better heroes, should you even want heroes.

You think the side-effect of elevating ESR's status outweighs the value of the ideas themselves?

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#45

Post by sudosteph »

emsign wrote: post #20
vertex-four wrote: post #16

Most technical people you work with, even in early startups, will not be "hackers" in any way, shape or form. Hacking doesn't usually equate to doing things that tend to make businesses lots of money. Sometimes it does, but not usually.

Yep, I think hacking became kind of a buzzword in the new economy. Facebook deciding to name their corporate grounds to "1 Hacker Way" is such an example of how tech companies have appropiated the term to mean something that doesn't really have anything to do with the hacker mindest. They just think it's cool and it attracts young talents. It's part of their brand marketing and hiring strategy. The only connection be…

> Hacker culture by nature is very anti-corporate, anarchistic and against subordinating everything under the dictatorship of profit maximization.

Yes! I came this close to recommending "Steal This Book" by Abbie Hoffman for that exact reason. But I got the feeling that was not exactly the type of hacker that OP was looking for...

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#46

Post by some_furry »

fouric wrote: post #44
some_furry wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? Because promoting ESR's work to people has the unfortunate side-effect of elevating ESR's prestige. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15513086 for more on why ESR is bad. > Do you have some problem with his advice on how to ask questions[1]? No, I think he's a bad person and we do our entire industry a disservice by continuing to elevate his status. Find better heroes, should you even want heroes.

You think the side-effect of elevating ESR's status outweighs the value of the ideas themselves?

It does. Especially since there are a lot of hackers in the world who can articulate the same ideas better and with less racism.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#47

Post by Pmop »

The word "hacker" has been re-purposed so many times.

IMO hacker culture includes but is not limited to computer engineering and science. It is about being so curious about a domain of knowledge that you end up learning it in its little details, and as result, you can bend that domain to your will. Hackers are often working on experimental stuff that have little to no commercial value but are still valuable in their own way. You can read a bit about computer hacker culture in the Jargon file.

Examples of (people I consider) hackers are (YouTube channels) Applied Science, cnhlor, and styropyro.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#48

Post by [deleted] »

tensor wrote: post #5

I have to admit, even I'm not sure what a "hacker mindset" is. As one technical cofounder to another, I think the most important thing is for you to understand the business side. Most importantly, how interpersonal skills matter and how emotions play out in a business setting. Beyond that, a solid understanding of scientific approaches to understanding is the second most important. Being able to tease apart correlati…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#49

Post by dang »

some_furry wrote: post #24

> I've thought perhaps Mythical Man Month and How To Become A Hacker (Eric Raymond essay) but not sure they're quite right. Please don't recommend Eric Raymond's work to people. > technical founder wondering what reading to recommend to a business focused founder for them to grok the hacker mindset What does "the hacker mindset" mean to you? If you ask me: The most important thing about a hacker mindset is that it mu…

Please review and stick to the site guidelines here. Note this one: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#50

Post by tptacek »

Maciej Ceglowski has a good bit in one of his idlewords posts about how the "what makes hackers tick" genre is full of pieces that are really "how to be someone just like the author". There's probably nobody that remark applies to more than ESR, and ESR is probably not someone you'd want to work to resemble more closely.

So, in reality, if you want to understand your technical cofounders, it is probably not a good idea to take ESR seriously when he says that you should find a "real" Unix (your technical cofounders are, actuarially speaking, almost certainly macOS people), hand-write lots of HTML, or "serve" th "tribal elders of open source". And the idea that "attitude is not a substitute for competence" among hackers is both funny on a variety of levels, and also a singularly bad note for understanding software developers you work with.

The Mythical Mammoth doesn't have any of these problems, and is a great book, and one worth reading simply so you can have a sense of what building software actually entails (Dynamics of Software Development is another older book that has aged somewhat well --- as have all of Joel Spolsky's posts on Joel on Software; in fact, I'd probably start there). But while this stuff will help you understand the work that's happening on your team, it probably won't do much to help you with the mindset of your team members.

There probably isn't a substitute for just talking to your cofounders, a lot, and asking lots of questions.

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