Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is true hacking dead? What we lost

c0de517e.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 194 posts

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#71

Post by TeMPOraL »

geocar wrote: post #36
ChuckMcM wrote: post #11

I don't think true hacking is dead, its just lost in a sea of non-hacking. The number of students who could write code in my high school of 2000 was perhaps 35. Those 35 were amazing because they had to work to get access to a computer, so we had already eliminated everyone who was just "oh that's too hard". Of the 35 perhaps a dozen kept at it beyond one class in BASIC. In my daughter's similarly sized highschool 40…

An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do! We were surprised (if also for other reasons) because we confused the product with the means, or to paraphrase Feynman, hacking is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

> An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do!

I'm not sure if that's true all that much, if you take into account the scary things regular people do with Excel and Access, or did in the past with HyperCard.

I think a big part is that as an industry, we've told people that the right way to use a computer to solve your problem is to track down and buy some piece of software that does it (proliferation of open source merely made the "buy" part optional). We then proceeded to take away the means of self-sufficiency, widening the initially small gap between "end-user" and "programmer" into a chasm and hollowing out the middle. It's no surprise people only consume apps, when solving any problem yourself without an off-the-shelf solution requires you to become a programmer. And now the final nail is driven into the coffin with proliferation of SaaS which take away both your data and any ability to control and modify the behavior of an application.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#72

Post by TeMPOraL »

cwingrav wrote: post #62
ChuckMcM wrote: post #11

I don't think true hacking is dead, its just lost in a sea of non-hacking. The number of students who could write code in my high school of 2000 was perhaps 35. Those 35 were amazing because they had to work to get access to a computer, so we had already eliminated everyone who was just "oh that's too hard". Of the 35 perhaps a dozen kept at it beyond one class in BASIC. In my daughter's similarly sized highschool 40…

Puzzle interest may be one aspect of it, but I and others too I would assume, are in it for the creativity and fantasy. I knew basic in 2nd grade and made simple little games. Later I learned to use a hex editor to hack saved computer games. I switched to CompSci in college because of the Internet. Today, I love building projects and hacking electronics (and wish I knew more!). I never really had a thing for puzzles,…

Yup. I'm pretty anti-puzzle, I don't like solving completely arbitrary, artificial, self-contained problems. I've always found them boring (though these days I appreciate their instrumental value). That's why in high school I could easily code circles around everyone else (including the teachers), but I never was the best in the algorithm olympiad. I learned programming to make games, not solve random word problems from exercise books.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#73

Post by non-entity »

javajosh wrote: post #42

If you define hacking as gaining access to scarce compute resources, then yes, hacking is dead because compute scarcity is dead . If you define hacking as controlling your computer hardware at the lowest level, then hacking is dead because no-one wants to write device drivers . If you define hacking as *making the lights blink in interesting ways"[1] then hacking is incredibly, richly, and totally alive! You can make…

> no-one wants to write device drivers

I sure as hell do. I rediscovered my love for programming starting to integrate old hardware with new software after a few years of being burnt out working on trivial CRUD apps

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#74

Post by TeMPOraL »

scoutt wrote: post #32
peteforde wrote: post #16

There was a time when I used to fret that the era of tinkering was coming to an end. Crypto was going to be illegal, they were going to put DRM on speakers, and our computers are designed to be completely locked down to the degree that you can't even add more RAM to a MacBook Pro. However, I think that the rise of Linux, Raspberry Pi and Arduino, OSS and Github and massive package repos for every language, Adafruit,…

Hacking is just interesting only if you are not following any "tutorial". Today you can run an embedded linux under 10 minutes with less that 20 bucks with a RPI by reading some tutorial or watching a youtube video. What's the fun about that? I remember too hacking my commodore and the only help I had was just a book in a strange language (english in my case) and my dad (he was into 8086 at that time) when I was a ki…

I'm guessing you didn't rediscover programming from first principles. There are always tutorials (or books) you learn from. Hacking starts when you start to deviate from a tutorial, when you have a goal of your own and have to figure out how to connect all the various pieces of knowledge and references you have available, and how to fill in the missing pieces.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#76

Post by silveroriole »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #72
cwingrav wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Puzzle interest may be one aspect of it, but I and others too I would assume, are in it for the creativity and fantasy. I knew basic in 2nd grade and made simple little games. Later I learned to use a hex editor to hack saved computer games. I switched to CompSci in college because of the Internet. Today, I love building projects and hacking electronics (and wish I knew more!). I never really had a thing for puzzles,…

Yup. I'm pretty anti-puzzle, I don't like solving completely arbitrary, artificial, self-contained problems. I've always found them boring (though these days I appreciate their instrumental value). That's why in high school I could easily code circles around everyone else (including the teachers), but I never was the best in the algorithm olympiad. I learned programming to make games, not solve random word problems f…

Also often the puzzles have very little to do with your coding skills and everything to do with knowing some mathematical trick. Don’t know if it’s still the case but when I was in uni everyone told you to do Project Euler to prepare for interviews/learn coding. God help the people who had that as one of their first encounters with programming, I would have been turned off it for life!

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#77

Post by TeMPOraL »

dijit wrote: post #26
lsofzz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. I have no idea why "hacking" aka "going fast and breaking things" is so glorified while "building good reliable programs" aka "good programming" is not. The way I see it, `going fast and breaking things' is an iterative process. IMHO, it should not be viewed as `go fast, break things and _never_ iterate to fix things'. Just thought I'd toss my two cents on it. > 2. How come that someone thinks of himself/herself…

There was a term from the early 00's for malicious "hackers", which was crackers. Yes, it doesn't have the same ring to it so I understand why the media didn't latch on to it. But if the media is unwilling to budge should we just make a new word? "Hack" was never a good term to begin with, originating from the model railroad club at MIT.

> But if the media is unwilling to budge should we just make a new word? "Hack" was never a good term to begin with, originating from the model railroad club at MIT.

Well, one of my colleagues and I aspire to become techno-mages.

"We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and invocations of equations. These are the tools we employ, and we know many things."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjToVZTqCbw

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#79

Post by mntmoss »

peteforde wrote: post #16

There was a time when I used to fret that the era of tinkering was coming to an end. Crypto was going to be illegal, they were going to put DRM on speakers, and our computers are designed to be completely locked down to the degree that you can't even add more RAM to a MacBook Pro. However, I think that the rise of Linux, Raspberry Pi and Arduino, OSS and Github and massive package repos for every language, Adafruit,…

He doesn't call the closed tools part of the problem, rather he asks why it is the case that these tools remain more successful at engaging newcomers than all the open source stuff, and draws a connection between the fully proprietary devices of yesteryear and these modern environments:

Whatever the causes, we have software and hardware systems that strive to be entirely open, yet time and again are closed ones that are more accessible in practice, that drive social revolutions. Linux didn't change the desktop, nor the way software is made.

And he suggests the answer that's been in the air lately: open software is now seen as a corporate business strategy, a cost-cutting measure. Which in turn means that proprietary software is now the stuff at the vanguard for the "little guy", creatively speaking, and many of the old hacker credos that correlate with "information wants to be free" are false, are in fact as elitist as you state.

Post reply on HN