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Is true hacking dead? What we lost

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Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#121

Post by TeMPOraL »

bambataa wrote: post #94
yoz-y wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 betwee…

Right. Discoverability. And I'd also add, paradox of choice. If you have 20 different ways you could use to automate some things you need (but not all, and solutions only partially overlap in the problem space), you may as well have none. Defaults matter. I doubt we would be able to have a third-party solution reach ubiquity again, the way e.g. Flash had, so having powerful functionality integrated at the OS level would be very helpful, as it would remove the problem of figuring out what to use.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#122

Post by Pigo »

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,…

If I'm going to wax nostalgic about what I thought hacking was as a teenager, then I would bemoan the decline of IRC. I know many of us are still on Freenode, but I'm talking about the wild-west days of Undernet and Dalnet.

I met some interesting characters back then. And it was my first exposure to people I would describe as hackers, since there were none I knew in real life. I was friends with a guy who was convinced the military was controlling his brain with microwave radiation. He was an amazing coder, and he introduced me to coding actually.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#123

Post by nullspace »

barrkel wrote: post #110
dmos62 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

For sure. However most code doesn't require "aha moments"; it requires readable code with tests that cover edge cases, following the same pattern as similar code that does similar things. The worry around puzzle orientation is when someone e.g. takes advantage of an obscure feature or does something unusual for a performance gain at the cost of readibility or maintenance. I've seen several repeated instances of cleve…

> It's usually when non-functional requirements are limiting factors; minimizing memory, CPU time, network round trips, etc.

Unless you’re working on something trivially easy, isn’t this almost always the case? The puzzle does not actually show up as “high cpu utilization”, but seeing process stalling, string handling edge cases, weird packaging based problems or that one issue for that one customer happen on a weekly basis for my teams over the past decade of me programming professionally.

Also, the best puzzle solvers or hackers almost always come up with the simplest solutions that solves problem and are literally the only people I’ve seen being able to take on the toughest bugs.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#124

Post by randcraw »

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.

Agreed. Levy's "Hackers" is still the best book I know about the mindset that begets hacking and hackers. I can't recommend it highly enough. It opened the door to my first job in programming.

The author seems to be bemoaning the lack of opportunities today to return to the halcyon days of yore. Mostly I agree. I was coding back in the early 80's, and the energy surrounding computers then was much more dynamic, open-ended, and seemingly limited only by one's imagination. Alas the rise of open source inevitably grew hobbyist computing into the panoply of richly ornamented computing tools we know so well today, from the Linux kernel to the GNU toolchain and far beyond. It was probably inevitable when millions of youngsters with copious free time can dive deep into the bowels of PC hardware using a wealth of S/W tools that the formation of a big complex (daunting) computing ecosphere was inevitable. And all that technical mass makes it much harder to perturb the universe and do something new and cool and share your hack with like-minded friends.

As to the roots of hacking... solving a puzzle is where the adventure begins, but solving it elegantly, even optimally, is where it goes from there. The best hacks open doors to other hackerfolk, enabling them to go where nobody you know has gone before, and they make ever deeper dives into computing that much more compelling. AFAIK, this is true of all hackerfolk, be they white or black hatted, in S/W or H/W.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#125

Post by wccrawford »

lsofzz wrote: post #92
javajosh wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

His same argument means there were never any hackers if you compare it to the entire human race.

There have always been very few "true hackers". That continues to be the case. It doesn't mean they died out, it means that nothing has changed other than that it's harder to find them using the same search terms.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#126

Post by bregma »

80386 wrote: post #51
scoutt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Linux is... a little alienating, isn't it? How many people can hold the whole thing in their head? Not many - and I don't think it's seamless enough to work as another layer of magic, either. People accept OS X because it's another layer of magic. TempleOS was written by one guy, so I assume it can fit inside one head. Linux has been written by a lot of people over several decades. Maybe I'm completely wrong about th…

> I'm a little surprised there aren't more weird OSes going around these days, now that everything runs in the browser except text editors and fancy video games.

Don't know what you're talking about, but I've used plenty of text editors and played fancy video games in a browser.

The day will come when your can run a hardware emulator in your browser and use to it run your hobby OS or even a C64 image for you to hack on.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#129

Post by al_form2000 »

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.

> "hacking" aka "going fast and breaking things" is so glorified

The two sides of your equation do not equate at all.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#130

Post by scott_s »

puszczyk wrote: post #23
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,…

I agree with your comment and feel similarly about the piece. The last paragraph though: > I really didn't enjoy this op-ed, and I wish people wouldn't bring it a larger audience by posting on HN. I think it’s good to have it here, even if I disagree with the article it made me think why and started a valuable discussion in the comments.

I mildly disagree. I've been reading variants of this sentiment for over a decade, and I agree with peteforde's take: not only is it not true, it's even less true than ever before, and this statement holds as time goes on.
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