Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What happened to nerds?

mrmarket.lol

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 541 posts

Re: What happened to nerds?

#291

Post by tantalor »

jappgar wrote: post #170

Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg were two nerds on either side of the privacy spectrum in the twenty-teens. One was framed and tortured, the other was given an empire. The message was received. We now only have the Zuckerberg type.

> on either side of the privacy spectrum

Oh how quickly we have forgotten:

> We plan to build this the way we've developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case -- messaging -- make it as secure as possible, and then build more ways for people to interact on top of that, including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce, and ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services.

March 6 2019; https://web.archive.org/web/20190306191516/https://www.faceb...

Of course, none of that happened. But he did make a big fuss about it.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#292

Post by hdhdhsjsbdh »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #35
TrackerFF wrote: post #14

Money happened. Wherever there's big money to be made, will also attract ambitious people hungry for money and power - it's that simple. Now that FAANG jobs aren't looking all that attractive, many such people have set their sights on AI research/dev and quant finance jobs. The latter one has exploded in popularity / virality the past years. Previously a niche profession within finance which, frankly, most had no clu…

> What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing. > The money and power corrupted them. Actually accomplishing things in the world that constitute building a sci-fi dream world requires significant amounts of money and power, and any person or institut…

> I rode across town in a self-driving Tesla the other day while giving orders to its AI system about how and where to go. That was a pretty sci-fi dream world experience. That's worth quite a bit of corruption.

This is why people hate nerds. Will not explain.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#293

Post by nathan_compton »

azalemeth wrote: post #178
sumitkumar wrote: post #55

This happens in any industry where value/status are at a premium. Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status. Another change which has happened recently is that the economics of engagement farming have become common place wisdom as alr…

Academia is the most relevant, toxic example that I can think of. Be horrible to others on a short term contract (grad students, postdocs) and break them whilst extracting maximum value -- get more papers, more grants written -- more money -- success. Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic an…

> Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic and managed into obscurity.

I'm in academy and I'm mostly quiet and seek to contribute honestly and I've been managed into obscurity but I'm also quite happy, pay the bills, and more or less enjoy the work. If you want glory you have to deal with bullshit. If you don't want glory, life provides many opportunities to live a modest but productive life.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#294

Post by sevenzero »

boringg wrote: post #274
sumitkumar wrote: post #55

This happens in any industry where value/status are at a premium. Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status. Another change which has happened recently is that the economics of engagement farming have become common place wisdom as alr…

How do we remove that? Those are the exact kind of people most intelligent people find quite grating in an organization - though because they self-promote so much its difficult to unpack the truth until they have kind of weaseled their way into an entrenched position (normally they are reasonably good at politics). I'll use the All-in podcast as a perfect example of the type of person described. They have some value…

>Those are the exact kind of people most intelligent people find quite grating in an organization

Most intelligent people contribute to this as well though. Being intelligent doesn't automatically remove egoistical traits, for some it's even supercharged if it results in personal growth within the organization.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#295

Post by nyeah »

KaiserPro wrote: post #255
negergreger wrote: post #6

Nerds used to have a internet to discuss tech in, you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning. Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up, giving zero shit about tech or logical reasoning, this pulled the discourse down to the lowest common denominator and the rest is history. Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same cour…

> you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning. Old man here, No this was never the case. Nerds were always hysterical and used the ban hammer frequently. the difference between then and now is that there were more distinct islands of nerdary you could escape to, and they wouldn't blend together. also they generally had a "no outside opinions" rule that meant that forums were single subject. This…

Exactly. I'm glad someone else remembers the pre-eternal-September internet. (For me mid to late 1980s.)

Re: What happened to nerds?

#296

Post by Klonoar »

throw4847285 wrote: post #288
andyferris wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think nerd -> believes in science. Science -> requires honesty, curiousity, humility, persistence (i.e. admit you are wrong, accept you losses). Generally I'm not sure you'd be considered a nerd if you weren't too honest for your own good. Not that this covers all types of virtuous behavior - there do exist nasty scientists. (And there is some level of fraud/dishonesty in academia, too).

The mistake comes with the very first arrow. You don't have to believe in "science" to be a nerd. You have to be passionate about technology. And that's a very different thing. Most of the scientists I know can spend years of their life pursuing a hypothesis that turns out to be wrong, shrug their shoulders, and dive back into it. Technologists are all about output. If it's not outputting, you have to give up and see…

You are confusing “nerd” and “geek”, historically.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#297

Post by FractalParadigm »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #222
maxbond wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the low hanging fruit that could be discovered by self-funded gentlemen scientists has been picked. That doesn't scale to a supercollider or a large RCT. Funding at the whims of rich benefactors is very susceptible to petty politics. Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors. That could be a better set, but when it is it's…

>Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors. We ideologically privatised the water sector into regional private monopolies in the UK, and anyone who's had experience with the water monopolies knows this is the truth.

I don't know, maybe it's the way I was raised, but to me it just seems like common sense that a privatised monopoly is going to be worse in literally every metric imaginable, than maintaining public ownership - not just with regards to water and/or similar critial-to-life infrastructure, but everything in general. Highway 407, the most expensive toll road on the planet, is a prime reminder to Ontarians why privatisation is objectively bad.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#298

Post by moron4hire »

conwy wrote: post #251
boelboel wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's been in both engineering school and medical school, I would say you're very wrong. Most doctors aren't in any way virtuous, most are in it for status or money and plenty don't care one bit about humans (some just like the thrill of being in charge of someone their life). There's only a small minority that's extremely virtuous. This might've been different 50 years ago but it's the number one striver…

Admittedly this is anecdotal, but I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned. Again ... maybe it's just my experience. None of these were super life threatening conditions. However I did go under the ope…

> I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned.

You are extremely lucky, then.

As a man, I've been gaslit by my doctors about my depression. My PC in my early 20s told me I was just lazy and needed to get a "real" job.

For women, by all accounts, it's much worse. I have not met a woman yet who has not had a story about some doctor treating her like a child, minimizing her pain, etc.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#299

Post by almost_usual »

abstractcontrol wrote: post #158
TrackerFF wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have made "nerdiness" a premium because other nerds view it as passion. The rationale is that if you craft something out of passion, it will somehow be better than. I think it also comes down to the fact that many tech nerds view engineering more as a art than cold engineering, and they view themselves as artists and artisans. There's also this age-old belief that if you do something out of passion, you're wil…

> Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work. You could cl…

Some people are naturally talented at things. It’s no different than an average athlete who works extremely hard and an elite athlete who puts in half the work but still outperforms the average.
Post reply on HN