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Is true hacking dead? What we lost

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Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#151

Post by marcus_holmes »

zozbot234 wrote: post #116
marcus_holmes wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I get that. But again it's an endless stair of complexity and tool-building. So you can't write your game because first you need to improve your game engine! But your game engine needs improved graphics drivers, so you need to work on that! But graphics drivers only work well on a decent compositor, so you need to work on that! But a decent compositor needs a kernel architecture that actually does what it says on the tin, so you need to work on that!

At what point do you say "enough!" and start writing the game not the tool? I say that for a kid starting out, that point is right at the start.

IF they get good at games coding, THEN by all means get them interested in Godot and helping to write a new games engine. By then they'll have the understanding to be able to contribute.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#152

Post by II2II »

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.

I think that it is more accurate to say that people don't realize that they can tell the computer to do something.

My boss had a time consuming task to do weekly. I looked at the steps, which were very basic and repetitive. It is the type of thing that a small program could easily handle. So I automated it. The problem is that most people see the tasks that they perform as a job that must be done. They may think about delegating it to other people, but they rarely think that it can be delegated to the machine. Which is ironic when the machine is involved in the process.

I suspect that there are many reasons why people don't think about writing a program. One reason is that software developers rarely make such possibilities clear to the end user. Another reason is that there is an aura of wizardry around programming. In a sense there is: programming languages rarely allow users to express a task in the terms process that they would use while performing it in an application. (Another irony, since the user is essentially telling the program what code to execute.)

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#153

Post by ggggtez »

It's kind of funny. The post thinks wistfully about the "real" hackers that wanted everyone to have access to computers. But that already happened. So is it any wonder that no one really cares about that ideology any more?

> [they are] completely uninterested in the ideology of software licenses and contracts.

Sure, but who cares exactly? Isn't an interest in legal nuances of contracts rather orthagonal to "hacking"?

>Linux didn't change the desktop, nor the way software is made.

Here, I'll just flat out disagree. I think saying this is rather blind to history.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#154

Post by pdonis »

steven741 wrote: post #84

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 wo…

I note that the author of the article appears to thing a raspberry pi would work just fine if it booted Windows. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#155

Post by wool_gather »

bambataa wrote: post #91
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…

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…

> I have spent days tracking down bugs in personal projects because I couldn't leave them in a broken state

I would still call this "puzzle" solving like the OP was talking about.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#156

Post by geocar »

shantly wrote: post #139
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 feel this way. I've been at this a long time but all my non-work computing is either futzing about or incredibly low-value. Spreadsheets are pretty nice but I could do without them. Some kind of instant messaging or email is pretty us…

There's no reason your side-project needs to do anything that hasn't been done before; not every new business needs to be a unicorn.

In fact, if you consider that someone else aims to "solve" these media access problems as a thing you can learn from and tweak (perhaps adding some value, or shortening the delivery chain for someone else), then perhaps you can be freed up from having to feel like you have to do everything yourself.

One of the hardest things to learn to do well is to create and run a business, and in my experience it takes more hard work than good ideas to be successful.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#157

Post by cr0sh »

kart23 wrote: post #38

Graduated high school a couple years ago. Plenty of people coded, but I had only had one friend that actually was interested in doing more with computers. We found some pretty cool stuff on the school network, and ways to screw with our less tech-savvy friends. It even cost me a trip to the principal's office one time, due to my stupidity and inexperience. I guess I'm not part of the right forums or boards, but I jus…

> I dont think I'll ever again feel that thrill of being called to the principal's office for hacking.

Once you become an adult, the "principal's office" is much less interesting place to be.

If you still want to do it, though, there are plenty of opportunities to do so on the "white hat" side of things; look into computer security research, "pen testing", and similar stuff - if you can learn that and have a passion for it, you can make some big bucks doing legit legal hacking.

Of course - everything you learn can be applied to grey and black-hat activities as well (which can be lucrative as well - up to a point of course).

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#159

Post by barrkel »

nullspace wrote: post #123
barrkel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 weekl…

I could put it another way. Some people who are comfortable with complexity don't actually come up with the simplest solutions, and instead come up with more complex solutions because they themselves find them relatively simple.

It's a pattern I've seen in talented engineers with less experience.

And on your question, I don't think it's the case. If it were, then there would be little excuse to use Ruby over Java, or Java over C++ / Rust / etc. In the same way as we pay a performance penalty in return for productivity when we use an expressive, high-level language, we pay a performance penalty for maintainable code with clear abstraction boundaries. Efficiencies, when they must be found, often come through vertical integration that burrows through abstraction layers.

Ideally we build our architectures so that we can scale out rather than up, for both hardware (easy) but also the team (the much tighter constraint - aiming for fungibility and elasticity of labour). If we get to the size of a Google or FB, then we can worry about squeezing out more profit, but first comes growth, and that means product, which means features.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#160

Post by anthk »

scoutt wrote: post #32
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,…

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…

Back in the day I had to setup a TV tuner for Linux by hand, by spicifying its module parameters such as the PLL, the tuner and so on. No internet at home, not even by a GSM phone.

Also I had to setup XawTV and AleVT which was no easy task with a Pal tuner and some quirks.

I never learnt so much about IT except when I installed OpenBSD a few years later.

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