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Is true hacking dead? What we lost

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Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#171

Post by MuffinFlavored »

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…

I was always concerned that as more high schools taught programming, six-figure salaries would cease to exist because of an increase in programmer supply.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#172

Post by VRay »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #171
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…

I was always concerned that as more high schools taught programming, six-figure salaries would cease to exist because of an increase in programmer supply.

I remember when I was in high school reading the weekly horror stories on Slashdot about how every job was going to be outsourced, everyone was doomed, etc

Turns out that if anything, the opposite happened. The best engineers in India and China got sucked into six figure jobs in the USA. Software Engineers are now the most valuable part of every business in the world. The demand for them just keeps going up endlessly, outstripping supply even though just about everyone who can rub two bits of logic together gets sucked into the industry

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#173

Post by pontifier »

In some sense, I think that there is something of a tragedy of plenty happening in the maker/hacker community. When options were few, you had dense groups with deep knowledge about different hackable technologies. The abundance of options, while good in general, limits the usefulness of that kind of deep knowledge in favor of a broader kind of knowledge.

How many ways are there to blink a light or read a potentiometer? Expanding on a simple project can take hundreds of different paths depending on your hardware and software stack.

It's not dead, it's just adapting to the current landscape of abundance.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#174

Post by spookthesunset »

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…

Right this instant you can talk to the bare metal of a computer with more power than anything you had way back when C64's roamed the planet. Get yourself an ESP32 and you can talk directly to the metal with no OS to get in your way. Get two, they only cost a few bucks each.

> I see this occasionally on electronics.stackexchange: "how do I attach a light to the end of a USB cable and turn it on and off from the computer". The answer to that is astonishingly complicated.

It is astonishingly complicated because what they are asking the wrong question.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#175

Post by 0x445442 »

sirsar wrote: post #147
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…

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'…

It's even easier than that... return players - 1. The trick is knowing in any single elimination tournament in order for there to be one winner there must be n - 1 losers.

edit: Also, I'm not sure your solution works for 13 players.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#176

Post by smadge »

peteforde wrote: post #164
z3phyr wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author also calls out Unity as part of the problem I am sorry, where does he do that?

Because your Ctrl-F key is broken: > Steam, the Apple store, Microsoft XBLIG, Youtube, Twitch, Spotify... Unity, Pico8, Dreams passing through Minecraft and Roblox and the game modding community. In other words: all of these perfect souls are being captured by less-pure tools before they can make their way to someone experiencing the frustration of learning BASIC on a C64 in the early 1980s.

I think you misinterpreted that passage. The larger context is:

> Look at my industry. Videogames. What did make games tinkerable? Liberated individual creativity, art, even the ability to make a living?

> Steam, the Apple app store, Microsoft XBLIG, Youtube, Twitch, Spotify, Patreon... Unity, Pico8, Dreams passing through Minecraft and Roblox and the game modding community... Not the blockchain, not linux or torrents and so on.

I interpreted this as saying the free software, linux, torrent, blockchain, torrent communities, which are nominally attempting to empower and liberate users ultimately failed to do so, and it was actually these proprietary products which successfully did by focusing on an accessible user experience open to tinkering. He compares these proprietary products to the proprietary C64.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#177

Post by sirsar »

0x445442 wrote: post #175
sirsar wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

It's even easier than that... return players - 1. The trick is knowing in any single elimination tournament in order for there to be one winner there must be n - 1 losers. edit: Also, I'm not sure your solution works for 13 players.

I wrote that it was `n-1` in my comment. Doesn't seem like much of a trick to me.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#178

Post by c0de517e »

smadge wrote: post #176
peteforde wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because your Ctrl-F key is broken: > Steam, the Apple store, Microsoft XBLIG, Youtube, Twitch, Spotify... Unity, Pico8, Dreams passing through Minecraft and Roblox and the game modding community. In other words: all of these perfect souls are being captured by less-pure tools before they can make their way to someone experiencing the frustration of learning BASIC on a C64 in the early 1980s.

I think you misinterpreted that passage. The larger context is: > Look at my industry. Videogames. What did make games tinkerable? Liberated individual creativity, art, even the ability to make a living? > Steam, the Apple app store, Microsoft XBLIG, Youtube, Twitch, Spotify, Patreon... Unity, Pico8, Dreams passing through Minecraft and Roblox and the game modding community... Not the blockchain, not linux or torrent…

Author here - indeed this is the correct interpretation. Sorry if the post isn't clear. I do love Unity (and all the other things listed).

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#179

Post by c0de517e »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #96

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…

Author here - no, that link was to show something bizzarre, how (some) people lose their minds in weird elucubrations on the politics of software - instead of actual hacking. I am definitely not endorsing in any way ever that cesspool that is D.E., I'm sorry if it wasn't clear from the text.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#180

Post by scoutt »

peteforde wrote: post #166
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…

Yeah, I just don't agree. I don't think you (or we) get to decide what makes someone feel that hacking feeling . There's a term for not finding "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" exciting: jaded. "What's the fun about that?"... seriously, dude? Listen to yourself. It's only not fun because you've done it so many time…

> get to decide what makes someone feel that hacking feeling

I agree, but I wasn't deciding for anyone; just saying what happens in my case.

> It's fucking incredible.

I totally agree, but it's not hacking. It assembling LEGO with instructions.

I am not saying I'm a better hacker or that it has to be done the way I say. What I'm just saying is that if you follow the instruction books, tutorials or videos, you are not doing any hacking. You are just assembling IKEA furniture. I am not saying that is not useful, that won't teach you anything or that you should be doing something else. I'm just saying that is not hacking.

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