Is true hacking dead? What we lost • Hacker News Board

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#111

Post by deaps » Mon, Dec 02, 2019, 1:58 PM UTC

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…

The 'compulsive puzzle' gene really hits home with me.

Really nails my childhood and my life - and explains why I am where I am in life.

It was never enough for me to take something (anything) for granted - I had to know how it did what it did. Whether that be by taking something apart, reading a design sheet, rebuilding something, writing code, whatever, I had to figure it out. This applies to anything from a gas pedal in my vehicle to a mechanical pencil or power lines, a module in programming, etc...

I can pick out those who share this trait from people around me at work and in life - it all makes so much more sense now.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#112

Post by Ocerge » Mon, Dec 02, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

Maybe, but programming now provides a stable income for way more people, whether it's their passion or not. In this day in age, the ability to put food on the table trumps any sort of bit-banging nostalgia IMO. The fewer gates we keep, the better.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#113

Post by bittercynic » Mon, Dec 02, 2019, 2:02 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #83

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 thr…

> The answer to that is astonishingly complicated.

It is, and I think we've lost something valuable by having USB, which is pretty complicated, as the dominant interface. However, the Raspberry Pi makes it pretty easy to blink an LED, and it's pretty accessible. Certainly more accessible that a computer was in the era where it was easy to toggle a parallel port pin.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#114

Post by erikbye » Mon, Dec 02, 2019, 2:06 PM UTC

Speaking of books on hackers, I can recommend Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World. I enjoyed it thoroughly despite the title.

Did you know Beto O'Rourke was a member?

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#115

Post by Annatar » Mon, Dec 02, 2019, 2:07 PM UTC

"We buy cars and go to mechanics, right? We don't know how to peek inside the engines anymore."

I don't know which world you live in, but it sure isn't mine! Even at the height of working as a senior system engineer / technical architect in the heart of Silicon Valley, I regularly wrenched on my car; I even found a self-wrench shop near the Tesla factory in Fremont. In fact I just wrenched on my car this past weekend. I wrench on all my cars. How could I call myself an engineer without understanding what I use?

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#116

Post by zozbot234 » Mon, Dec 02, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #108

zozbot234 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please use Godot rather than Unity. Hackers and educational institutions should not be advocating for proprietary software that locks in its users.

This point was made a lot in the article - Hackers didn't care about Open Source or the ideology. I tend to agree with that. First it's "don't use Unity", then it's "don't publish your Godot game for Windows", then it's "don't publish your Godot game in a form that requires proprietary graphics drivers", then it's "don't allow your game to run on Ubuntu", and so on. There's always another step to achieve ideological…

If it's easier to do it on Unity, the way to go is to improve Godot until it's even easier to use than Unity! :-) And the actual point of using something open like Godot is to raise kids who will internalize the fact that they could make not just their games, but their game engines as well - indeed, that nothing is 'magic' and anything can be thoroughly understood from first principles if one cares enough to do so. Every hacker knows this already, of course - but normies don't, even though that's the most useful lesson that 'hacking' can teach.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#117

Post by EthanHeilman » Mon, Dec 02, 2019, 2:12 PM UTC

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…

I miss Macromedia Flash, although not from a security point of view. I think there are a lot of parallels between it and HyperCard. I know several people that learned to program because Flash made it so easy to get a prototype running without programming and you just needed to learn just a dash of programming to make it better. There has been nothing like it since.

I'm not the person to do it, but I wish someone would design Flash2.0.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#118

Post by DagAgren » Mon, Dec 02, 2019, 2:15 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #37

Other people have already commented on the core message. I have a nitpick instead: > That's probably why we still have textual source (great for git and merging) over more expressive formats or even the old idea of serializing the entire state of a VM (again lisp, smalltalk) which sacrifices merging entirely to make hotpatching (dynamic software updates) trivial. Good. Not being able to merge squarely belongs in the…

More expressive representations of source code enables better merging. Merging code as opaque strings of text is a bad choice, and causes lots of problems to programmers every day.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#119

Post by 0x445442 » Mon, Dec 02, 2019, 2:19 PM UTC

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!

> Also often the puzzles have very little to do with your coding skills and everything to do with knowing some mathematical trick

Yeah, my favorite "puzzle" that highlights the folly of such things is this; write a function which, given the number of participants (n), returns the number of games/matches necessary to be played in a single elimination tournament to determine a winner.

I actually asked this question in an interview once, only I was the interviewee. I had just fumbled about with all the nonsense algorithm problems that had no relevance for the job when the interviewer asked if I had any questions. I popped that one on him and to my surprise he actually took up the challenge. But since he didn't know the trick he fumbled about on some recursive goose chase.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#120

Post by mertnesvat » Mon, Dec 02, 2019, 2:20 PM UTC

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…

> If you have the ability to give puzzles, leave some around to be found. Watch for the ones who solve them.

Brilliant explanation, I tried to examine that both reading and experiments. The closest thing I got was state called flow where you lose track of time, yourself and give all of your attention to the task.

But most importantly the task has to be in the perfect place between enough hard for you to give all your attention and enough easy for you to solve it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)