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The Fall of Hacking

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: The Fall of Hacking

#51

Post by kragen »

noname123 wrote: post #48
BrentRitterbeck wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this line hundreds of times before. Hacking is not dead. Something can't be killed if you have the ability to turn on your computer and start doing right away. If you are concerned about whether hacking is alive or dead, perhaps you should fire up your computer and bring it back to life. It's that simple.

I agree with you completely and my writing was (intentionally) too liberal artsy; so let me put on my technical hat and level with you why hacking is no longer subversive. 1) Growing Complexity of Software Projects : in some sense, it's not about computer programmers "selling out." Because in both FOSS and enterprise software, the code-base has usually third-party dozens if not more dependencies. Writing software is…

> in both FOSS and enterprise software, the code-base has usually third-party dozens if not more dependencies

Lua. ColorForth. STEPS.

> Writing software is now a team effort

There have always been software teams of many different sizes. But most projects on Sourceforge (or Github, or Freshmeat) are one-person projects.

> Think back to the day when a individual or two person could write a 2D side-scroller in DOS

It was more common for a group of two to five people to do it, you know, than for one person to do it. And there are any number of popular games these days built by small teams: World of Goo, Mafia Wars, Super Monkey Ball.

> as an example of someone who followed his vision without regard for profits or social acceptance.

Lots of people still do.

> today is optimizing on status quo

Most people are always trying to improve the status quo incrementally, except when that's obviously suicidal (e.g. the Ghost Dancers). In the early 90s "everyone" seemed to be working on graphics cards, database software, spreadsheets, word processors, and video games with themes licensed from movies or sports. The internet doesn't even appear in The Road Ahead. But some of us were doing other stuff... we just weren't visible until there was Wired.

Working on something new is never a popular activity because most new ideas are worthless. It's a generalization of the thing about 90% of startups failing: the other 10% mostly don't fail because they let their ideas fail and switched to something else.

> the only art form where its leading ... practitioners openly condone "selling out."

Massage, graphic design, architecture, cooking, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, warfare?

There's a lot of stuff going on.

Re: The Fall of Hacking

#52

Post by kragen »

brl wrote: post #50
wmf wrote: post #2

Those people are still out there; you just don't hear as much about Real Hacking as about more accessible, mainstream stuff. Also, get a blog.

Kragen started blogging about 5 years before blogs were invented: http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/mailing-lists.html edit: oops, I thought you were responding to Kragen's comment. Read his 'blog' anyways, it's awesome :)

Hey, blogs had already been invented, they just weren't called that yet. And it wouldn't surprise me if Wes were already a subscriber, although I haven't looked :)

Re: The Fall of Hacking

#53

Post by kragen »

Locke1689 wrote: post #11

The big ideas of the day is a PHP database CRUD application that displays everyone's colleges and geographical networks, with full names and whose purpose essentially, is a repository for pictures of inebriated hot chicks. Apparently, the new new thing is now this CRUD forum database application that has a character-limit of 120 words per post, but get this, it's written in a really cool language called Ruby on Rails…

The first sentence of your comment, "This really strikes home for me," may be correct. The rest of it seems to be wrong from beginning to end.

Re: The Fall of Hacking

#54

Post by spc476 »

pj wrote: post #18
wmf wrote: post #2

Those people are still out there; you just don't hear as much about Real Hacking as about more accessible, mainstream stuff. Also, get a blog.

I actually have a lot more respect for people who come here and type their heart out in the open for no other reason than bringing in content and sharing their ideas. Getting a blog is lame compared to that. You get a blog to get ads and attention and a following. On the contrary, noname123, came here, created an account, and wrote his/her heart out for nothing. Expecting nothing, wanting nothing except to be honest…

Kids today, no sense of history. The hacking scene was dead by September 1981. Oddly enough, it was marked as dead, again, in February of 1990. The last time the hacking scene was declared dead was April of 2000.

We probably have a few months before this hacker scene is also declared dead.

Re: The Fall of Hacking

#55

Post by tmsh »

i too thought 80's and 90's hacker culture might have subsided. and not to be a fanboy or anything, but then i actually read the arc source yesterday.

http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=10254

loaded it up like the 'how-to-run-news' file mentions. and it worked. and when you start reading the actual arc and scheme source, you may notice there is like an entire language in one file. it's crazy. it's like how your average non technical person might imagine it: there's this 'programming language file'. the whole source is like a dozen files (forget line count, the fact that you can even conceptually organize it that well is crazy). and then you start to re-read 'on lisp' -- and it's like holy crap, why was i not paying attention, and then maybe you're rewriting your code from whatever other project you were working on and basically you're happy and hacking again....

true story. i only mention it here because obviously this is hacker news and so people might be interested in hacker news.

Re: The Fall of Hacking

#57

Post by HalcyonMuse »

Surprised no one has posted this link yet: http://hackingisnotcracking.com/

It's only 100 days old on HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577224

I found the link memorable, anyway. I've been sharing it with my "liberal arts friends" when they talk about hacking as if the sum of its parts resulted in the OP's third paragraph.

Re: The Fall of Hacking

#58

Post by vaksel »

kragen wrote: post #44

People who got their internet access by credit card fraud were never hackers in the first place. They were just cheats and wannabe hackers. Drama and marginal status doesn't make you a hacker. It just makes you a social outcast. It's true that there are lots of wannabes today, too — more than ever before, now that the richest man in the world got that way by writing a BASIC interpreter, now that Sergey and Larry get…

Yeah real hacking is still around, just take a look at any torrent tracker to find pretty much any app/game hacked. Or better yet how about all those security breaches at Pentagon and NASA.

The reason you don't see "real" hackers hacking, is because they aren't eager to have public identities, since they don't feel like getting arrested/sued into oblivion.

Re: The Fall of Hacking

#60

Post by Andys »

"a cowboy on the electronic frontier typing silently the night away to a CRT monitor but the internals (of man and machine) is intense full of drama"

Life in a startup company is similar to this sometimes :-)

Conceiving and executing a successful technology startup, is quite a rare ability and to me, is like the "ultimate hack". Twitter and Facebook don't quite count because I don't understand how they are making money or what their product even is.

But there are also plenty of posers who talk the talk and have pretty blogs and like to talk business ideas.

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