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Is true hacking dead? What we lost

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Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#81

Post by TeMPOraL »

silveroriole wrote: post #76
TeMPOraL wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Exactly. Now to be honest, over the years I've learned to appreciate the power multiplier deep math knowledge is, but that's not what interested me in programming. And most of the time, it's also not what's useful in a job context.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#82

Post by qmmmur »

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,…

God this was a breath of fresh air to read. Can we stop pretending hacking is reading plain-text websites and nerding out on them?

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#83

Post by pjc50 »

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…

I think people do sometimes want to "communicate directly with the machine", but they don't want to deal with the huge and often crufty layers of abstraction that are currently in the way.

In the AT era, reading a byte from the keyboard could be done with a single IN instruction. In the present PC era, the bare minimum for doing that is a multitasking operating system capable of enumerating USB. Or indirecting it through something huge and opaque like UEFI.

I see this occasionally on electronics.stackexchange: "how do I attach a light to the end of a USB cable and turn it on and off from the computer". The answer to that is astonishingly complicated.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#84

Post by steven741 »

Moving past the "no true scott's man" fallacy of the title; i feel that this article confuses the act of being a hacker with the tools that people use to hack with. Which is a common thing to do when a concept is new. For me, being a hacker means being able to work at a certain level of abstraction and, not being afraid to "open up the box" and start working at that level of abstraction. For example, being able to work with a raspberry pi loaded with linux and, then being able to start hacking at the linux kernel or libraries when needed is what makes someone a hacker.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#85

Post by mntmoss »

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.

One of the things that makes me sigh is how we've gone and built up a huge slate of "required features" for apps that are very effective at professionalizing software and yet may not do much of anything for the end user.

In that respect I think we've hit some kind of endgame for software as it's historically been done - the bells-and-whistles show - because smaller, more targeted software so often hits the mark better.

For example, when people ask how to get into playing piano, I steer them away from a MIDI controller and software and towards the cheap home portable hardware. The hardware has nearly ideal software for the task: it starts instantly, never crashes or glitches, never needs to update, can only be hacked with physical access, has ideal latency, and does not require additional plugs or configuration. Put in batteries and flip the switch and you can practice. And past the very most inexpensive ones, they all have the connectivity needed to control software.

And yet many technically inclined people - my previous self, friends, etc. - will hear that recommendation and still opt for that MIDI controller and get a gadget with more knobs and wheels, instead of a perfect learning tool, just because of the temptations of software that could "do anything." There's a shopper's high in it. But guess what the last software purchase I made was? An emulation of old home portable keyboard sounds(Plogue PortaFM). What goes around, comes around.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#86

Post by javajosh »

lsofzz wrote: post #56
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…

> 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. This is absurd. Dude, let me be clear - Just because you write Java all day long does not mean that there are hundreds if not thousands of embedded system developers who engineer (quite passionately!) the thing that powers your SSD or your wireless card or the thing tha…

You know, I had a moment where I thought "perhaps I should add a disclaimer about what 'no-one' means", but then I decided against proactive defense against a pedantic retort, assuming that HN would understand how tiring it is to qualify statements like that.

Clearly I was wrong.

Thousands do care. So here's what I mean: When you take the ratio of the thousands that do compared to the millions who don't, you get a number that's pretty close to zero (one tenth of a percent, back of envelope).

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#87

Post by [deleted] »

barrkel wrote: post #70
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…

Puzzles don't interest me much, but composition, building and designing things does. When hiring engineers, I sometimes worry that too much puzzle-orientation shows a bias towards "clever" solutions - and complex code - where not necessarily warranted. There's definitely a place for that kind of focus, but it's usually quite low down in the stack, and that's increasingly far away from business value these days.

[deleted]

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#88

Post by dmos62 »

barrkel wrote: post #70
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…

Puzzles don't interest me much, but composition, building and designing things does. When hiring engineers, I sometimes worry that too much puzzle-orientation shows a bias towards "clever" solutions - and complex code - where not necessarily warranted. There's definitely a place for that kind of focus, but it's usually quite low down in the stack, and that's increasingly far away from business value these days.

> complex solutions

Puzzles aren't really about that. It's about making a model of a problem and finding solutions to it. Complex solutions are as bad in puzzles as in any other area. Not sure what you mean by "clever" (maybe "clever" as in unreadable code). Sometimes you come to an aha moment and realise that you can solve something in a trivial way, aka clever way, and that's a desirable event.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#89

Post by watwut »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #41
pleasecalllater wrote: post #18

Three things: 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. 2. How come that someone thinks of himself/herself that he/she has the right to say who is a "true hacker" and who is not. 3. AND THIS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX5Xy3a2uJU Thank you Jayson.

> why "hacking" aka "going fast and breaking things" is so glorified This is not hacking in the proper ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_Manifesto ) sense.

If that is proper definition of hacker, I dont want to have anything to do with that nor understand why would anyone see it as a good thing. Thankfully, there are many other competing definitions around that do not require one share the exact same feelings as this dude.

Just because someone believes he is all there is to hacking and that his personal feelings and gripes should define the word, does not mean we have to buy it.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#90

Post by yoz-y »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #71
geocar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But excel, google sheets, IFTTT and other tools still exist. Some of them are just more successful than others. There is still a lot of people out there who can access computers and before couldn't, but have no interest in automating any of the work.

Case in point: a lot of people don't even use keyboard shortcuts, why would they use a hypercard clone?

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