If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged
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If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged
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Re: If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged
#2Ugh. I sympathize with this argument but its flaws are so glaring that it's trivially knocked down, which is a shame, because there is a class privilege argument to be made about this field. Before you say "programming since age 8 just means you had rich parents", you have to address the fact that most kids with rich parents don't become hackers, and that even if you're not impoverishing yourself to support the hobby, you're still making sacrifices (notably social) to support it.
Re: If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged
#3Wholeheartedly disagree.
As evidence, the author mentions the late average age that the underprivileged "received" their first computer. As I recall, one Bill Gates began hacking at an early age, not because his privileged family showered him with cutting-edge technology, but because he bent a few rules to gain better access to a terminal through school.
Let's not confuse resourcefulness with privilege.
Re: If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged
#4oh wow, this article is bound to get flogged on HN ;) before the onslaught begins, i'd like to add my own short anecdote. reading this article reminds me of when i took my first CS course as a freshman in college over a decade ago ... i remember that there were clearly 2 groups of students (i belonged to the latter):
- those who, like this article describes, had hacked since a young age (sorry for the gross generalization, but these tended to be middle or upper middle class white males)
- those who had maybe taken AP Computer Science in high school but otherwise had no real programming experience (these tended to be minorities in race, social class, and gender)
i remember that despite the best efforts of the teaching staff to 'level the playing field', the people in the former group clearly had a much easier time while many people in the latter group were intimidated by those in the former group (even when no ill will was intended). i dunno where i'm going with this anecdote, but that just popped into my head :)
Re: If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged
#5Wholeheartedly disagree. As evidence, the author mentions the late average age that the underprivileged "received" their first computer. As I recall, one Bill Gates began hacking at an early age, not because his privileged family showered him with cutting-edge technology, but because he bent a few rules to gain better access to a terminal through school. Let's not confuse resourcefulness with privilege.
but because he bent a few rules to gain better access to a terminal through school.
iirc, gates went to a pretty well-off private school that actually HAD computers. i doubt that most people attending public schools in the 60's could even find a computer anywhere nearby. this is documented in Gladwell's Outliers (ducks!)
Re: If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged
#6Honestly, I don't think those computers were that expensive. My first Computer was not even a C64, it was a ZX Spectrum. Not sure how much it cost - but if that was too much, you could get "build your own" kits for ZX 81, I think they were Without a doubt, there were a lot of people in the world who couldn't afford it. But in the western world, I suspect not that many. The privilege is more having parents who are understanding and caring enough to make the investment.
Granted, you also needed a TV... How common were TVs back then? I am pretty sure a TV was way more expensive than a ZX Spectrum.
While for the C64 you needed an extra storage medium, the Spectrum could save to and load from normal tape recorders.
Edit: this link says the initial price was 125GBP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Research Unfortunately I still don't know how much that was in $ or DM.
Re: If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged
#7The class privilege in hackerland is when Youtube gets bought for a billion dollars because one of the founders is getting married to the daughter of SV royalty, not that your parents could afford a $600 computer in 1985.
Re: If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged
#8guilty as charged.
i attribute a lot of my success and my love of computers to my dad buying me an apple 2E and a programming book when i was 10. now hardly a day goes by when i don't think how lucky i am to be doing something i love. so yes, i was privileged and for that i am incredibly grateful.
Re: If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged
#9Ugh. I sympathize with this argument but its flaws are so glaring that it's trivially knocked down, which is a shame, because there is a class privilege argument to be made about this field. Before you say "programming since age 8 just means you had rich parents", you have to address the fact that most kids with rich parents don't become hackers, and that even if you're not impoverishing yourself to support the hobby…
I've had a computer for a long time, but looking back, when I was 8 I was lower-middle to middle-middle class at best. I say "looking back" because I didn't really realize it at the time, but in hindsight it's pretty clear. My dad bought a Commodore 64 not because he was rolling in filthy upper-class lucre, but because he saw the future coming and made that a priority for himself. And it had been out for a while before I got one; I think my dad said he bought it at $299. Which is of course still more than $299 today, but there's a lot of people who could scrape up enough for the C=64, disk drive, handful of floppies, and some TV somewhere (mine certainly wasn't a new TV!).
I find it hard to apologize for being lower-middle class at the age of 8-ish. Over the years he clawed his way up to middle-middle class and I did end up with a family computer of more value in my midteens, but, well, again, I have a hard time apologizing for this.
(Which was actually somewhat harder to work with than the C=64, in many ways; open source was terribly young and I had no access to the Internet for quite a while. The BBS software percolation system wasn't necessarily the best. Everything commercial was out of my reach, especially before open source started forcing dev environments down in price.)
There has to be some point where people take responsibility for themselves, after all; nobody forced me to actually learn about it instead of just playing games like all my friends of equal class who also had such machines.
Re: If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged
#10Wholeheartedly disagree. As evidence, the author mentions the late average age that the underprivileged "received" their first computer. As I recall, one Bill Gates began hacking at an early age, not because his privileged family showered him with cutting-edge technology, but because he bent a few rules to gain better access to a terminal through school. Let's not confuse resourcefulness with privilege.
but because he bent a few rules to gain better access to a terminal through school. iirc, gates went to a pretty well-off private school that actually HAD computers. i doubt that most people attending public schools in the 60's could even find a computer anywhere nearby. this is documented in Gladwell's Outliers (ducks!)
Trying to take this point back to the 60s is stretching it beyond usefulness, though; in the 60s even having privilege would hardly have been a guarantee of access to computers. It depended on many other things, too.
Note that I do not accuse the original author of trying to stretch this, nor you; just pointing out that if we're going back that far it becomes a completely different issue. (We can wish really hard that every child of the 1960s had access to computers for learning, but we might as well wish that every child of the 1860s had such access for all the practicality that has.)