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How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

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Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#171

Post by sanderjd »

daveloyall wrote: post #150
sanderjd wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not surprised that your response is so charitable – I wouldn't have bothered responding to you to start with if I thought you seemed like you're just a jerk out to score points against "the other" – but thanks anyway. What I dislike is not so much the existence of cliques, I agree with you that they have an important place, and I certainly have, and in the past have always had, various "circles" that I enjoy bein…

This is interesting because there's like, a role-reversal thing going on here. I don't know if you're aware of it, but I tend to go to the mat for the underdog, the abused (the pejored, if you will!). But that's it. I'd oppose somebody if I observed them on the attack, but never start anything. And that behavior was systematic. Frankly, it's exploitable. So, I dunno. I'm in flux. Rethinking some things. Practicing al…

Yeah, I can see the role-reversal you're talking about. I suppose my point is that everyone deserves empathy, not just the underdogs.

You're probably right that "some people suck, objectively", but I don't think I've ever met such a person, so I'm never going to assume that someone I meet who seems to suck is actually an objectively sucky person, but rather just a normal person who, like me, is trying to do the best they know how, and just failing at it in that moment, for whatever reason.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#172

Post by ethbro »

rquantz wrote: post #60
CPLX wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SF has changed. It's becoming Manhattan West. Just in time for Manhattan to try to become Brooklyn West.

No, Manhattan is becoming Mall of America East.

“America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.”

So now we just have New Francisco, and a half-bulldozed New Orleans?

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#173

Post by yellowapple »

jaegerpicker wrote: post #41

This is such a poorly thought out article. The term hacker has also meant so many different things to so many people. I grew up with the 90's hacker scene. I was a teenager for almost all of the decade and I started programming and reading about, interacting with, and being a part of the 90's hackers groups. Those groups were called criminals, crackers, or cybergangs but a lot of the old school MIT crowd of hackers.…

> Then my age group entered the workforce and redefined the term to mean an excellent programmer, as in hacker news.

It's worth noting that "hacker news" was probably never meant in the sense of "excellent programmer", but rather in the sense being criticized by the article: one of venture-capitalist-backed businesses "disrupting" industries to dominate said industries (bringing money to the venture capitalists in turn). The implication that HN - which was created and is owned and maintained by YCombinator, arguably among the more prominent of such VCs - was named in reference to anything but the very thing the article describes is inaccurate.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#174

Post by busterarm »

roneesh wrote: post #168
busterarm wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18K + loss of income while in class and job searching + inability to write off the expense as job search/education costs. Even now making twice my previous salary, come tax time I will have taken home half of my income from the previous year. I'm not knocking my school for a second; it was great... But for someone with a decade of work experience in tech before switching and no degree, I found the opportunities avail…

> I found the opportunities available -- especially fulfilling ones that provide the mentorship to give foundation to a long career -- few and far between post-graduation. The opportunity that I did take will lead to another year of just scraping by and a lot of uncertainty while I continue to "prove myself" worthy of a decent fulltime offer. I appreciate the honesty. I think you hit upon a common problem. There's re…

Email me and I'll tell you :)

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#175

Post by yellowapple »

yarrel wrote: post #164
stillsut wrote: post #157

Here's the key point where the author and me diverge: > In this context, the hacker ethic is hollowed out and subsumed into the ideology of solutionism, to use a term coined by the Belarusian-born tech critic Evgeny Morozov. It describes the tech-industry vision of the world as a series of problems waiting for (profitable) solutions. Trade is the ultimate form of autonomy because when someone willingly buys what you'…

Oh they quote Morozov? That's an instant fail.

Do you mind elaborating?

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#176

Post by sbilstein »

pyre wrote: post #159
sbilstein wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I see Burning Man as a sorta weird expression of the same elitism, except in this norcal style. Rather then these tech/artists/trustafarians/whatever investing their energy into arts and music in public spaces in the Bay Area they work year round to build a completely inaccessible community hundreds of miles away and light it on fire. Nothing more indulgent than that in my opinion. I have mixed feelings abou…

> why can't some of that happen right here in the Bay for everyone. Because then all of the people that protest things like high-rise apartments, and Google shuttle buses will show up to protest that too.

I'm not advocating a protest...I'm advocating that us techies should focus our extra energy for creative activities locally and share the, rather than keep them exclusive with this desert party.

All these well known famous tech founders such as the FB guys or Larry and Sergey are big burners and certainly participate in arts there but are nowhere to be found right here in SF/Oakland. Same can be said about my peers sadly.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#177

Post by angersock »

Animats wrote: post #136

I suspect that the author has read Derrida. He's obsessing on the meaning of a word and following semi-random threads trying to deconstruct it. That's classic Derrida. That approach doesn't solve any problems, but it's a useful way to generate papers. If you read some Derrida, you too can learn to generate blithering of that type. As for yuppies vs. hackers, it helps to go back further, to understand how hippies morp…

What happened to the hacker ethos was the absorption of computing into the advertising industry. The hacker ethos survived the Microsoft era, but not the Google era. Microsoft was about tools, which was consistent with the hacker ethos. Google is about ad clicks, and its success created a whole industry focused on ads and user exploitation, not tools for user empowerment. That's what destroyed hacker culture.

I love this paragraph--I think you nailed it. Netheads and bellheads.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#178

Post by jasode »

yellowapple wrote: post #173
jaegerpicker wrote: post #41

This is such a poorly thought out article. The term hacker has also meant so many different things to so many people. I grew up with the 90's hacker scene. I was a teenager for almost all of the decade and I started programming and reading about, interacting with, and being a part of the 90's hackers groups. Those groups were called criminals, crackers, or cybergangs but a lot of the old school MIT crowd of hackers.…

> Then my age group entered the workforce and redefined the term to mean an excellent programmer, as in hacker news. It's worth noting that "hacker news" was probably never meant in the sense of "excellent programmer", but rather in the sense being criticized by the article: one of venture-capitalist-backed businesses "disrupting" industries to dominate said industries (bringing money to the venture capitalists in tu…

>It's worth noting that "hacker news" was probably never meant in the sense of "excellent programmer", but rather in the sense being criticized by the article:

I think your notation is revisionist history.

Here's an example of a PG's use of "hacker" from 2001. PG is very much talking about "hacker" as an above-average programmer not content with an inferior "blub" language:

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

YCombinator was started in 2005. The "Hacker News" was started in 2007.[1] The audience it intended to serve was the type of "hackers" mentioned in the 2001 essay.

PG also later uses "hacker" in the sense of a tech nerd who would rather focus on a startup rather instead of being discontent working at a corporate job. This definition of "life-hacker" is also not relevant to the article's definition. The article is talking about programmers who serve VCs' agendas instead of pursuing their true desires. PG has never advocated that. The essay also complains about the VCs who are pseudo-hackers because of their monetary influence. PG isn't talking about them either. Ergo, this website was not trying to attract them as an audience. (The "demo days" does try to attract VCs but that's an event separate from the website.)

One can look at Internet Archive Wayback Machine[2] and see that the front page was dominated by topics unrelated to "chasing the money". Just a bunch of tech geek topics. Programming languages, algorithms, etc. It was very much "news" for "hackers" in the positive connotations of that term.

[1]http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

[2]https://web.archive.org/web/20071016064109/http://news.ycomb...

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#179

Post by hyperpallium »

Animats wrote: post #136

I suspect that the author has read Derrida. He's obsessing on the meaning of a word and following semi-random threads trying to deconstruct it. That's classic Derrida. That approach doesn't solve any problems, but it's a useful way to generate papers. If you read some Derrida, you too can learn to generate blithering of that type. As for yuppies vs. hackers, it helps to go back further, to understand how hippies morp…

Re: Ham radio. It goes back further than living memory, to telegraph operators. They also used morse. And I have the impression that some aspects of unix terminals derive from those days... Edison grew up in those times, commercializing as much as he could. Yet hackers continued, as they do today.

Though perhaps we've reached the end of the road with communications - the interconnected net of networks seems all encompassing, like globalization and the end of history. Can there be any new, technically difficult means of communication?

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#180

Post by daveloyall »

sanderjd wrote: post #171
daveloyall wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting because there's like, a role-reversal thing going on here. I don't know if you're aware of it, but I tend to go to the mat for the underdog, the abused (the pejored, if you will!). But that's it. I'd oppose somebody if I observed them on the attack, but never start anything. And that behavior was systematic. Frankly, it's exploitable. So, I dunno. I'm in flux. Rethinking some things. Practicing al…

Yeah, I can see the role-reversal you're talking about. I suppose my point is that everyone deserves empathy, not just the underdogs. You're probably right that "some people suck, objectively", but I don't think I've ever met such a person, so I'm never going to assume that someone I meet who seems to suck is actually an objectively sucky person, but rather just a normal person who, like me, is trying to do the best…

Hey, keep it up! I just got tired, and scared, and really not confident that I'd "make it", much less everybody. So I'm performing an experiment. That you are out there only encourages me.

Meanwhile:

A. mosquitoes (or fleas, if you prefer) are in a category that is very difficult to defend, right? I mean it takes an very broad definition of "we" to include bloodsuckers.

B. If the category described in A. exists, if "we" excludes some creatures... then you have to ask yourself where to draw the line, and that's crappy territory to traverse. But what if it is necessary to traverse it?

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