If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged

I think you've misread the article. You have worked hard, which is great. Other people have also worked hard, but they started later and had fewer opportunities in this field. Does this mean you should feel guilty? No. It means that you should try to treat everyone with respect, not just the lucky ones who had the right kind of access to the right kind of tools as children. It means sneering at that person in class who doesn't know what a for-loop is is unhelpful and jerky. If you don't behave that way, you have nothing to be ashamed of.

Ok, I'll add my anecdote too. Hacking != Having a personal computer. I started programming on my 3rd grade (required-to-have) programmable calculator (that had 10 steps & comparison to 0 only). Then, my father showed me Pascal on his computer at work (and programmers in the 1980s Soviet Union did not upper middle class make; plumbers made more), and I started programming on paper, and bringing in my paper programs to my father's work to "check". Then, the school I went to was a special math school (merit, not privilege) and they got computers (the only school computers in our city then) in my 4th grade. When we came to the United States, we were on welfare, so, no personal computer till I was in college. And yet, the schools had computers, you know. Granted, old macs, but computers.

The reason the "anecdote" is relevant is that the article doesn't state any probabilities or historical context here, it's just "If A, then B". There were plenty of periods in America when that couldn't have been true even for most people. E.g., in 1970s, if you were hacking, it didn't mean privilege, just luck in having access somehow. If you're learning to hack _now_ as a child... Come on, pretty much anyone can get access to some type of device now, even if it's just in the library.

This is true for almost everything. In poor households, the children are generally required to perform more work to help support the household. For example, the cleaning lady at my work brings her son with her to help... can't be more than 14. Even if he had a computer, thats 2-3 hours everyday that he can't be using it, or practicing basketball, or whatever else he might succeed in. Poor parents also can't pay for coaching, etc.

This article boils down to: privileged people are privileged. True, by definition, but also meaningless.

He was "privileged", it's just that the term has a particular meaning when used here that is different from "rich" or "wealthy" which you and it seems every other poster in the thread so far has missed.

There's a fairly comprehensive introduction to it here:

http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/faq-what-...

"Since social status is conferred in many different ways — everything from race to geography to class — all people are both privileged and non-privileged in certain aspects of their life. Furthermore, since dynamics of social status are highly dependent on situation, a person can benefit from privilege in one situation while not benefiting from it in another. It is also possible to have a situation in which a person simultaneously is the beneficiary of privilege while also being the recipient of discrimination in an area which they do not benefit from privilege.

Male privilege is a set of privileges that are given to men as a class due to their institutional power in relation to women as a class. While every man experiences privilege differently due to his own individual position in the social hierarchy, every man, by virtue of being read as male by society, benefits from male privilege."

That's just male privilege, you get others from class, sexuality, religion, health etc.

The same attitude is effaced on HN about persons in liberal arts studies. A hacker was brilliant enough to see that the world was headed into computers, or their parents were, and they were led down the right path.

People are bound to want to claim that people deserve what they get, it justifies their wealth, and comforts them in the face of another's misfortune.

Anyone who had access to a computer at 8, whether their parents worked hard to buy it, or had flows of wealth, was damn lucky, and needs to recognize that they are damn lucky. Anyone smarter than the average has to recognize that they're damn lucky. And if there's any posthumanists in the crowd, they should figure its quickly in their interest to view society from a perspective where the weak get supported: we're all of us quickly falling into the category of the weak.