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Is true hacking dead? What we lost

c0de517e.blogspot.com

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Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#91

Post by bambataa »

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…

I was actually put off taking up programming for a while because of this "it's for people who like solving puzzles" attitude.

Admittedly I have spent days tracking down bugs in personal projects because I couldn't leave them in a broken state, but that was partly because I'd done so much work already that to leave it crippled by a bug seemed criminal. But solving Rubik's cubes? If you enjoy that go right ahead, I'll be over here doing something interesting.

I feel the same way about the kind of problems that appear in pure mathematics books and I worry I'm missing out. Colouring adjacent tiles or whatever doesn't intrinsically interest me.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#92

Post by lsofzz »

javajosh wrote: post #86
lsofzz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nu…

> 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).

Fair enough.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#93

Post by smabie »

atq2119 wrote: post #5

I've never understood the appeal of hot-patching and full process image save and restore. Yes, this technology is neat for some use cases, but as a fundamental way of computing it's broken, because it throws reproducibility out of the window. Reproducibility is everything in complex systems, and being able to reset and start fresh is powerful. Evolution figured that out as well. It's why basically all species propaga…

There’s no reason why you couldn’t have an image based system that also supported versioned images. Then you wouldn’t need any source code at all and still rollback changes.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#94

Post by bambataa »

yoz-y wrote: post #90
TeMPOraL wrote: post #71

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! 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?

Discoverability. Knowing how to connect together multiple services isn't obvious. What kind of information can IFTTT take in and what does google sheets output? That's not obvious. I use Beorg (an org-mode interface) on my iPhone and I still look up recipes the developer puts online showing how to hook it up with the Shortcuts app and do clever things. Mostly because I don't have a good idea of what interfaces between things are available on my phone.

The time of hoping that non-technical users would write little things on the command line seems to have past. I recently read an interview where Aho said that in the beginning awk was used by non-technical people. Now awk usage is probably even on the technical end of technical.

But I'm betting that there are plenty of savvy users who could put together complex automation workflows if they had a unifying tool that demonstrated the potential.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#95

Post by luord »

The point of this article is all the harder to see because there isn't even a definition of what "hacker" means to the author.

There are many different definitions. If one subscribes to, say, Eric Raymond's, then there are many more hackers today and hacking itself is more prevalent than ever.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#96

Post by crankylinuxuser »

So, what does C0DE517E think hacking is? I'm surprised nobody picked up on it...

2/3s of the way down is a link (by the way - wanna see something weird?). That link goes to [0] which is about 'Dark Enlightenment'. The key takeaways here are: democracy is bad, white people are smarter, Urbit, and Yarvin. But surely someone can link without advocating?

And then we get to this bit, "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." The author is making a roundabout case for the Dark Enlightenment, and ecosystems like Urbit which enforce a neo-serfdom and elimination of democracy at a technological scale.

I'm surprised nobody else picked up on who this person thinks hackers are. It's certainly hidden in plain sight.

[0] https://breakermag.com/heres-the-dark-enlightenment-explaine...

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#97

Post by userbinator »

pjmlp wrote: post #28

> Even the Demoscene, one of the last bastions of true hackerism, is completely uninterested in the ideology of software licenses and contracts. Demoscene never cared about this kind of stuff. In fact of the interesting challenges of the Demoscene was trying to find out how competing groups achieved some demos, without having access to the said information, while in process outperforming their demos at parties. This…

In fact of the interesting challenges of the Demoscene was trying to find out how competing groups achieved some demos, without having access to the said information, while in process outperforming their demos at parties.

The demoscene has its roots in software cracking, where reverse-engineering is the norm and you're not expected to be given source or told but to find out yourself, so that's not too surprising. Of course they don't care about licenses, because from that perspective they are merely arbitrary restrictions to be broken at will.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#98

Post by rubinelli »

dmos62 wrote: post #88
barrkel wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A puzzle will more often than not have one right way to do it, unlike real engineering problems which are made of trade-offs, and that one way is unintuitive, otherwise it wouldn't be much of a puzzle at all.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#99

Post by zozbot234 »

octotoad wrote: post #19
cyborgx7 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, that is actually in there. What the hell does this even mean?

Sounds like they’re referring to characteristics of TempleOS that may have suited the original goals of the Raspberry Pi, which was to be a tinker-friendly device for audiences like school children. Some people lament the fact that it simply ended up with a plain, general purpose Unix-like, rather than something more low level and immediately direct (as in, drop you to a BASIC, not necessarily assembler), ala Commodo…

That's a bit silly, tbh. Dropping you straight into BASIC may be appropriate for an 8-bit computer with a few hundred KiB at most of combined RAM and ROM, but the Raspberry Pi is nothing like that. A *nix system is really the closest analogy, since the development tools for that are only an apt-get away! You even get some BASIC implementations, even though it's not very clear how much those help.

I'd actually like to see a roughly BASIC-like language that's simply a reasonably light syntax-wrapper over, say, Rust. It might make it easy for novices to get into hacking and software dev with a language that doesn't abstract too much away from the actual system - and then transition to a "real" language like Rust later.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#100

Post by zozbot234 »

pjmlp wrote: post #28

> Even the Demoscene, one of the last bastions of true hackerism, is completely uninterested in the ideology of software licenses and contracts. Demoscene never cared about this kind of stuff. In fact of the interesting challenges of the Demoscene was trying to find out how competing groups achieved some demos, without having access to the said information, while in process outperforming their demos at parties. This…

> Demoscene never cared about this kind of stuff.

Well, in a way, they did - they cared a lot (and still care) about credit and reputation, even to the extent of making "not for commercial use" licensing terms quite popular. Someone with an attitude of 'true' openness would simply not care about commercial use 'tainting' one's creative output, and trust that good-enough attribution would be kept most of the time, out of simple reciprocity.

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