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

451–460 of 541 posts

Re: What happened to nerds?

#451

Post by fragmede »

anygivnthursday wrote: post #226
marmarama wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there's an analogue. It's being the tech lead of a team of junior to mid level developers. You design roughly what the solution should look like, split it into reasonable sized tasks so they don't go off the deep end, advise them on some of the details, then assign them the tasks and let them get on with it, keeping an eye on what they're doing, reviewing their output, and course correcting them when they go wro…

Thats my thought as well, LLM agents put you in the role of a (often micromanaging) tech/team lead of a small team, but the speed and fast feedback loop makes it look different.

Oh it's different alright. Yell at a human employee to tell them they're a fucking loser enough times and at best they'll quit on you. The way some people talk to their LLM is ghastly.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#452

Post by fragmede »

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…

They obviously won't say it to your face so I'm not sure that your anecdote says anything.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#453

Post by lossyalgo »

jimbokun wrote: post #408
zelphirkalt wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, and now with the push towards AI slop and letting agents do work for you, it is even less about creativity and talent. You can't even chase trends in libraries while still being clever about it any longer, you gotta chase more and more braindead ways of getting code generated based on tons and tons of mediocre code found online, gobbled up by big tech without the original creator s' consent.

The problem was very few nerds realized this was the most likely outcome as they devoted themselves to improving machine intelligence.

And yet even more nerds than ever are devoting themselves to AI. I just wonder - to what end?

Re: What happened to nerds?

#454

Post by lojban »

ph4rsikal wrote: post #437
lojban wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate? In what ways have men been disenfranchised?

For tenure-track positions—the pipeline for future faculty—white men have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39 percent to 21 percent). https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/

27 percent is roughly the same percentage of white men that are in that age bracket in the US. The lower 21 percent in the humanities could be explained by there being less interest in the those fields from the white male population in the first place.

I wouldn't call that disenfranchised; I'd call that a correction. I suppose you could make the argument that more white men should be incentivized to go into the humanities though.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#455

Post by lossyalgo »

jimbokun wrote: post #420
rayiner wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referring to the "Revenge of the Nerds" trope, which involves nerds who are men. But as to your point, the "nerd" characterization arises not only from the field of interest, but the hyperfocus nature of the pursuit. Hyperfocus behaviors get coded as "nerdy" in men but don't get coded as such in women. For example, my daughter, my wife, and I have the same personality. My hyperfocus interests as a teenager, suc…

I think hyper focus on anything is more likely to be classified as "nerdy" today. People will say "I'm a huge guitar nerd" or "I'm a huge gardening nerd" or whatever.

Related (for the non-grey/whitebeards who saw Revenge of the Nerds): Calling someone a nerd used to be fairly demeaning. Today I would say it swings between okay/acceptable and funny/cool, depending on the social circle.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#456

Post by red-iron-pine »

willXare wrote: post #319
azalemeth wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

presumably in between thinking they're teaching classes, advising grad students, and publishing something -- because it's "publish or perish"

Re: What happened to nerds?

#457

Post by dang »

palmotea wrote: post #447
edu wrote: post #88

Discussion from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361

> Discussion from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361 That post: > 140 points by mrmarket 3 days ago | unvote | flag | hide | past | favorite | 110 comments This post: > 626 points by vrnvu 8 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 431 comments IMHO, it's not a dup, because it's getting a lot more traction today.

The previous thread was only on the frontpage for 30 minutes so we can let this one stay up.

(I've taken "the fuck" out of the title - we don't care about profanity per se but that bit is a little linkbaity in this case.)

Re: What happened to nerds?

#458

Post by plaidthunder »

PaulHoule wrote: post #164
sumitkumar wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that far. Lawyers had a great deal of influence in creation of all modern nation-states, human rights, international law and maintenance of the core social contract in the modern society. Similarly lawyers/bankers were the ones who built in trust in capital, contracts, businesses and protection of investor rights. Delaware c corp is not an outcome of bad guys.

That’s a system though that seems to be at the breaking point.

Yes. It might be a general property of all human organizational structures, to degrade over time in terms of intent drift and erosion of public goodwill.

It offers some predictive power if so, like OBAFGKM + luminosity is enough to determine where a star is on its lifecycle. Maybe there's a similar domain that maps some human coordination structure onto a deterministic trajectory from birth to death.

If that were the case, I wouldn't be surprised to see venture capital--as an organizing principle for the tech industry--reaching a later stage of life.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#459

Post by [deleted] »

hattmall wrote: post #371
vidarh wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge is to distinguish "think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute" from slacking. I am not arguing for bullshit metrics - I personally love working on things that may or may not pay off on a 10 year+ horizon and wish I could do more of that. But at the same time I've seen enough people coast to accept that most places that either isn't -…

We shouldn't really seek to punish "slacking off" though. Because when the opposite of valuable contribution isn't slacking off it becomes unintentional sabotage. It's a lot less noticeable in jobs that don't have immediate consequences for poor performance, but it really stands out in jobs where it immediately matters like construction. In a lot of cases everyone is getting paid the same but talent stands out and so…

[deleted]

Re: What happened to nerds?

#460

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

I don’t understand what we’re talking about here. Plenty of founders still embrace nerd-dom, Jensen Huang constantly runs around signing people’s graphics cards. They’re just no longer part of the story media outlets wish to tell about tech.
Post reply on HN