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

141–150 of 194 posts

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#141

Post by javajosh »

scoutt wrote: post #133
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…

Your first 3 points reassembles too much to embedded programming + electronics. And no, there is not just a few or no-one of them: it's an entire industry. I do it all day long and I don't feel like I'm hacking if I know and understand what I am doing. You don't need to necessarily code to hack. You can hack with just electronics. Perhaps you are too inclined to java or upper layers of abstraction.

I disagree, but I think there's something here worth figuring out.

Just like particle physicists aren't the only real scientists because their objects are the smallest ones, low-level programming (and FPGA/electronics work) isn't the only kind of hacking. People hacking genes with CRISPR are still hackers even though there are also people hacking the smaller components (at several levels of zoom) of those systems.

Look, personally I want really clean memory layouts and elegant lead routing, simple causal chains, and open, verifiable designs in hardware. Even without that I would like to understand DRAM refresh protocols, Bluetooth, USB, and every detail of how PCI works. It's not that I don't want to, it's that I don't have time. (And honestly it's such a mess "down there" I'd really like someone to clean it up before I get in there.)

Re Java: after using Python+MyPy I've never appreciated Java more. I've read the JVM spec and the language spec more than once; I'm sort of a "JVM hacker", if you will. I will happily edit a class file with a hex editor to achieve an effect. It's a simplified machine that is fully specified; it's a kind of opinionated VM that, unlike it's Xen counterparts, attempts to jettison some of the annoying stuff from real machines. Also ironically, Java was originally intended for embedded systems.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#142

Post by dep_b »

Animats wrote: post #25
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,…

the author wasn't talking about hacking but recreating the exact same conditions that existed when he was a young person... That sums up the article. Kids can do far more today than in the Commodore 64 era. On the other hand, the field is much bigger, so they won't be doing the same thing as their local friends. But there will be someone on the web doing something similar to talk to.

> Kids can do far more today than in the Commodore 64 era.

Kids can do far more but they're not instantly warped into a fully programmable environment. You enter the following:

    POKE 53281,8
And you're immediately changing stuff like the background color, something you also saw happening in turbo loaders or those quick color cycling screens before a game started. You get the feeling that it's possible to achieve anything yourself.

It's pretty empowering and a lot of kids knew these kind of "secrets" and some basic BASIC.

Nowadays it's actually easier to do a lot of things with autocompleting IDE's and Stack Overflow but you're not exposed to it so directly.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#143

Post by scoutt »

javajosh wrote: post #141
scoutt wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first 3 points reassembles too much to embedded programming + electronics. And no, there is not just a few or no-one of them: it's an entire industry. I do it all day long and I don't feel like I'm hacking if I know and understand what I am doing. You don't need to necessarily code to hack. You can hack with just electronics. Perhaps you are too inclined to java or upper layers of abstraction.

I disagree, but I think there's something here worth figuring out. Just like particle physicists aren't the only real scientists because their objects are the smallest ones, low-level programming (and FPGA/electronics work) isn't the only kind of hacking. People hacking genes with CRISPR are still hackers even though there are also people hacking the smaller components (at several levels of zoom) of those systems. Lo…

I was just referring to your 3 definitions of hacking... To hack doesn't necessarily mean to go particle-level or low-level, or learn something from the bottom-up or master some field.

And your first comment also gave me the impression that you think hacking can happen only at low-levels, like embedded or electronics. Manipulating and hex-editing a binary... I call it a hack, and congrats, it seems like you are doing it already.

Read (or watch) The Martian for one hack after the other, at several levels and different fields.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#144

Post by jaxn »

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…

"compulsive puzzle gene"

I like that a lot. I'm curious if you hire people and if you use that concept in that process.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#145

Post by whatitdobooboo »

I didn't personally get the sense that the author was reminiscing about the past. I just thought of it more as what he thinks is a lack of ambition and vision in computing today in ways that will solve larger problems rather than going with the closed environments that are available today.

tldr; Maybe having an open plane with few imaginative restrictions (as early computing did) allows one to rethink certain patterns we assume as truth today. For example, if no one is working on a new OS because of Linux, Windows - could that be worse for the world in the long run?

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#146

Post by greggman2 »

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…

people who solve puzzles and the 8 of 1500 students who became software engineers at my school had little if any overlap.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#147

Post by sirsar »

0x445442 wrote: post #119
silveroriole wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This doesn't sound much like a trick[0] question to me, it just takes working out a few examples by hand to guess that it's `n-1`, and the proof isn't hard either. And the result shouldn't be surprising: if sorting can be done in O(n log n) comparisons, it should be easier than `n log n` to just find the maximum/minimum element.

Even without doing any math, or proofs, or having any algorithmic background, it shouldn't take "fumbling about on some recursive goose chase" to write the function from first principles:

    >>> def games(players):
    ...   if players >> games(8)
    7
If your interviewer couldn't come up with that, I wonder how well they do with real-world recursive algorithms on the job. It bears some resemblance to real-world problems I've had: groups of IPs combining into groups-of-groups-of-groups for addressing, computing permissions for teams-of-teams on the org chart, etc.

[0] To me, trick questions involve some hard-to-come-by "aha" moment, like the XOR trick to swap two variables without a temp. This one doesn't seem to have that.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#148

Post by saalweachter »

0x445442 wrote: post #119
silveroriole wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A cognitive psychologist I worked with referred to these as insight problems. You need to have one critical piece of insight to solve the problem, and then it's done. If you have the insight, you solve it, if you don't, you don't.

He was constantly bemoaning how much of the research into human thinking revolved around insight problems, which you can give each subject once and at best time how long it takes for the insight to occur, instead of repeatable cognitive tasks that you could give the same subjects over and over while varying different parameters, to draw richer conclusions from.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#149

Post by schoen »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #136
0x445442 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't even know what a single elimination tournament is.

It's a tournament where the loser of each match is immediately eliminated from the tournament. Normally with a tree-structured bracket, or as nearly as possible.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#150

Post by Pete_D »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #77
dijit wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 emp…

"In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells."

https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...

Post reply on HN