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Where have all the hackers gone?

morepablo.com

111–120 of 351 posts

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#111

> Today, we're afraid to do anything that's not JavaScript, Java, Python, or Ruby…Where have all the c̶o̶w̶b̶o̶y̶s̶ hackers gone? Kids these days want to build games and discord bots. They don’t want to build little text-based adventure games. And if you want to do those things you’re going to use a language that’s mature and has libraries built for that purpose. I do like the breakdown the author gave. But the “atmo…

> Kids these days want to build games

Raylib supports over 50 languages.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#112
post #74

Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes, around hackers being less common? The author has a list of reasons (VC money, business culture, managers, fear of the unknown). I, personally, have observed this reduction over my career, and I have my own idea of why that might be, my own phrasing of it. Perhaps it gets at the same thing as the author from a different angle. I think the reason, plain and…

I think the hacker culture of the ‘90s to early ‘00s is behind us, and it really saddens me. I’ve yet to find a corner of the current tech / startup landscape that ignites the same excitement I felt over a decade ago. It’s too commercial now.

Isn't the startup landscape inherently commercial?

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#113
post #44

I think the author of this article grossly misunderstood the purpose of his interaction which lead to this article. You aren't architecting a new programming language, man, you're talking to a guy about computers because you're wearing a shirt of a computer thing he liked. He wanted to talk to you because he had a mutual passion he wanted to share, and you openly challenged him in front of other people. Sorry, you we…

The description of this interaction in the article makes me sad for the author - they criticise and belittle another. Imagine instead what they could have learnt if they opened themselves up to another persons perspective.

It’s notable how little this article actually discusses the delivery of any form of value. The tech is not the end in itself, it’s a means to an end - and we live in an age with so many well matured and valid options that for many of the problems we seek to solve what tech we use isn’t necessarily a critical decision.

The author answers their own question - where have the hackers gone? We are getting on with it and building stuff. This kind of language flame war stuff just isn’t as important as it once (debatably) was. It’s a dying trope.

Thinking on the initial mistake our author made - framing the conversation rigidly through their own frame of reference - I’ve personally found Matthew Syed’s work on cognitive diversity helpful in understanding and addressing this. [1]

[1] https://graphic-designer-richmond.co.uk/2021/01/business-boo...

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#114
post #74

Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes, around hackers being less common? The author has a list of reasons (VC money, business culture, managers, fear of the unknown). I, personally, have observed this reduction over my career, and I have my own idea of why that might be, my own phrasing of it. Perhaps it gets at the same thing as the author from a different angle. I think the reason, plain and…

I think the hacker culture of the ‘90s to early ‘00s is behind us, and it really saddens me. I’ve yet to find a corner of the current tech / startup landscape that ignites the same excitement I felt over a decade ago. It’s too commercial now.

I grew in the 80s 90s. The culture of phrack, 2600, Fravia, phrozen crew, etc was absolutely phenomenal.

My take is a bit worse than the GP: Theres people interested in that but nowadays they sell their skills for money. That's why you see lots of ransomware, darkweb sells and whatnot.

Even the torrent-ing has shown the change of culture: back in the Napster, kazaa, imem days, people (layman) shared just because. Now theres not that much interesting material, and a lot of it is behind private trackers that make you jump through hoops to get in the club.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#115
post #80
post #74

Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes, around hackers being less common? The author has a list of reasons (VC money, business culture, managers, fear of the unknown). I, personally, have observed this reduction over my career, and I have my own idea of why that might be, my own phrasing of it. Perhaps it gets at the same thing as the author from a different angle. I think the reason, plain and…

There are just a lot more programmers today. All the same hackers and stuff who used to be there are still there, but there's a lot more of everyone else. If Harvard started admitting 50,000 students a year, the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find.

> They'd still be there

Unfortunately.

Not sure the concentration of Zuckerbergs and the concentration of hackers is particularly related, except maybe the latter attracts the former.

Zuckerberg's no genius, he was in the right place at the right time near the right people. He's competent, but no more than most of the people here. His morals (or the flexibility thereof) were what made him rich.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sorry if this is off-topic but I often see in HN (either in articles posted here, or in the comments) lack of empathy. You are absolutely correct. This place is populated with quite a few nerds. Nerds typically have subpar social skills, which is is both fueled by and results in a lack of empathy. >"I ♥ people; look for ways to make them happy, and empower them." The propaganda arm of the Soviets is called "Pravda",…

It’s why nerds hate MBA-types. They see little value in understanding and engaging with the qualitative side of being human.

[dead]

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sorry if this is off-topic but I often see in HN (either in articles posted here, or in the comments) lack of empathy. You are absolutely correct. This place is populated with quite a few nerds. Nerds typically have subpar social skills, which is is both fueled by and results in a lack of empathy. >"I ♥ people; look for ways to make them happy, and empower them." The propaganda arm of the Soviets is called "Pravda",…

It’s why nerds hate MBA-types. They see little value in understanding and engaging with the qualitative side of being human.

One reason, but to be fair MBA types can have the same lack of empathy. Their interactions can turn into (actually kind one of the things the author complains about) treating people purely as capital and relationships as means to financial end.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#118
post #74

Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes, around hackers being less common? The author has a list of reasons (VC money, business culture, managers, fear of the unknown). I, personally, have observed this reduction over my career, and I have my own idea of why that might be, my own phrasing of it. Perhaps it gets at the same thing as the author from a different angle. I think the reason, plain and…

I think the hacker culture of the ‘90s to early ‘00s is behind us, and it really saddens me. I’ve yet to find a corner of the current tech / startup landscape that ignites the same excitement I felt over a decade ago. It’s too commercial now.

Definitely the culture has changed as tech has become a mainstream career path. Also I think there used to be a sense of the "wild west" where you could push the boundaries while hacking and get away with it. Now someone smart enough to hack is probably smart enough to realize how much of their activities are logged somewhere.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#119
post #72

Not the purpose of the article but as I am a bit negative on Ruby, and I am neutral to positive on Java... "Ruby is so much better than Java! Look at how you open a file in Java (shows you 30 lines) vs. Ruby! (2 lines)" Ruby Example. ================ begin File.open("/path/to/your/file.txt", "r") do |file| file.each_line do |line| puts line end end rescue Errno::ENOENT puts "File not found" rescue Exception => e puts…

If you're writing a quick script, there's absolutely no point to caching those exceptions in Ruby—it's just going to cause your program to continue when it otherwise should have quit out due to an error condition outside of its control. Java's checked exceptions breeds overly defensive programming like this.

Anyway, here's a slightly better ruby version:

    File.readlines('file.txt').each do |line|
        puts(line)
    end
Notice how I don't have to worry at all about constructing or manipulating a Path object, which I find to always be a very tedious part of file IO in Java. It's fully correct, sure, but for a web server that's only ever going to be deployed on Linux containers or a 50 line CLI script that's trying to wring a useful task out of some Java-only library, it's just insane overkill. The only thing worse then using Paths objects is trying to figure out which file calls do and don't work with path objects and which need to be converted to some other class that does the exact same thing.

Notice also how this is much more equivalent to the Java example provided, except it also consumes the file so you don't have to worry about introducing a new syntax construct to understand how the file gets closed. (Same, incidentally, with the File.open case, which just reuses a standard ruby block instead of introducing a new magic try statement that autocloses the file). You lose laziness, but you can get it back by using File.foreach instead, at the cost of a little bit of readability

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#120
post #74

Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes, around hackers being less common? The author has a list of reasons (VC money, business culture, managers, fear of the unknown). I, personally, have observed this reduction over my career, and I have my own idea of why that might be, my own phrasing of it. Perhaps it gets at the same thing as the author from a different angle. I think the reason, plain and…

We've seen this historically with other technologies. There was a short-lived era when people knew how to repair cars. To tune and modify engines. But as automobiles became ever more of a commodity, that population seemed to shrink too.

It may be difficult for a child to become fascinated with a particular technology once it becomes ubiquitous. It's a testable hypothesis too, because if that were true then you should see hackers appear in different geographic regions at different times due to how unevenly these technologies are distributed.

The confounding factor, I think, for computer technology at least, is that by the time they become ubiquitous in the third world, they may no longer be simple enough to "get started" on.

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