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Where have all the hackers gone?

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Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#121

Post by sdenton4 »

andai wrote: post #45
Xenoamorphous wrote: post #4

Sorry if this is off-topic but I often see in HN (either in articles posted here, or in the comments) lack of empathy. He talks about a "friend" and then proceeds to say things like "To be honest, I suspect he didn't know or think much about them" or "This was not a fruitful conversation". How is that supposed friend, who might very well be aware of this person's blog, going to feel after reading this? Is it a cultur…

The entire point of Go is that it's designed for less talented programmers, i.e. people who can't understand or don't want to put in the effort to understand those things. That's the whole appeal of many programming languages, they massively simplify the mental model (for a price). I've been a lot happier and more productive since I switched to a slow language (which younger me would have been sad to hear).

Thanks to the magic of Turing completeness, lots of the complications don't actually buy you anything...

The explicit choice in the design of Go is to prefer fast reading over fast writing, which helps maintainability and debugging.

Complex language features are terrible for maintainability: the reader may not know the feature, it may interact in unexpected ways with other language features, or have other non-obvious pitfalls. Debugging these things are ultimately a waste of time, and time is the highest price of all. And for what?

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#122

Post by revskill »

A developer with a hacker mindset is different from a hacker.

Hacker means to use tricks to "hack", to "break", or to "reverse engineer" a system. It's very specific, very concrete job to do.

A hacker mindset means creative, innvative for the goal of automation instead.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#123

Post by xigoi »

eternalban wrote: post #7

> Where have all the hackers gone? To a newspeak school to unlearn precise terminology. So to translate OP, "soil, surface, and atmosphere" apparently refer to semantics , syntax , and runtime . ("Pedantic" is a favored word these days. In my days, objections to those who actually knew something about CS was that they are "academic", and "theoretical".)

It's more like: soil = runtime, surface = language, runtime = community.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#124

Post by arolihas »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #47
luma wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have fruitful conversations with friends, and exactly none of them have been arguments about our favorite programming languages. This dude just wanted a pretense for a blog post about Very Strongly Held Feelings Concerning PLangs.

I have fruitful arguments about programming with friends. You just have to find people that enjoy banter and aren't insecure, which isn't very easy.

Or maybe there is something going on with the way you argue. It takes two to tango.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#125

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

jdm2212 wrote: post #110
goodpoint wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuckerbergs?! What the hell?

I was using that as a shorthand for "geniuses who found multi-billion dollar companies".

I think I agree with goodpoint and I also think that my own usage of "Zuckerberg" is the exact opposite of yours.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#126

Post by 2devnull »

TheDong wrote: 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 two factors matter: lack of housing and shift to service sector. The lack of housing forces people to prioritize money, just Maslow's hierarchy. Because many jobs now involve sitting at a computer screen for 60 hours a week, not many (healthy/sane) people who want to add even more hours at the computer on top of their 60 hour a week 9to5, or 7to7, or whatever most people now work).

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#127

Post by shrimp_emoji »

2devnull wrote: post #126
TheDong wrote: 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 two factors matter: lack of housing and shift to service sector. The lack of housing forces people to prioritize money, just Maslow's hierarchy. Because many jobs now involve sitting at a computer screen for 60 hours a week, not many (healthy/sane) people who want to add even more hours at the computer on top of their 60 hour a week 9to5, or 7to7, or whatever most people now work).

>implying hackers were ever healthy/sane

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#128

Post by nologic01 »

This is not a period of invention. Its a period of cookie-cutter, step-by-step colonization by imitation of more and more domains (both consumer and enterprise) using well-established (even if mostly questionable) patterns.

It is (or at least was) the period of being the Uber-but-for-X, the Twitter-but-for-Y. A period of page-long lists of uninspiring logos and machine generated startup names. A period where VC ecosystems became cookie-cutter themselves. Silicon Prairie, Silicon Swamp, etc.

The disappearance of hackers is also congruent with the locked and supervised platformization of "big tech". You can't really hack devices. The motto is: "Here is the browser, here is the API, now go play, consume your cloud budget and give us some ideas how to make money". In this context its all about optimizing the execution of more or less the same ideas. And boy did it optimize. Within a few months every silly chatGPTification concept has been paraded here on HN.

Of course today we have more latent hackers than ever. The interesting question is what would be the preconditions for them to start creating wonderful and weird things. Here is a tentative list:

* the massive expansion of self-hosting and shift to having serious compute and intelligence "at home". This is the broader fediverse or small tech movement

* the liberation of mobile devices and next-gen apps that might finally redeem the "supercomputer in our pockets". A related domain is non-smartphone mobile devices.

* the re-incarnation of the workstation concept in business context. Monstrous linux desktops that finally put the moribund "Productivity Suite" to rest and offer various completely new businesses launchpads to the next phase of the digital economy

Hackers currently have been either co-opted or starved to death by the lack of opportunity. Yet the cycle never finishes.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#129

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

mardifoufs wrote: post #100
ChatGTP wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the forced positivity thing, I work for an American firm and if you're not positive, you're reprimanded. I had to be told several times to learn to feedback constructively. While I do appreciate this, and I understand it, I just feel like a robot now, not a human at work. So much tip toeing around issues it all just feels so fake and there is little room for emotion. Sometimes, I think it's ok to just be…

I think this is just "colder" Europeans that can't understand that Americans are usually genuinely happy in those interactions. Like, they aren't being fake or lying to you when they are overly nice and positive. It's just how they actually feel. I'm neither American nor European but I honestly always felt that Americans are much warmer and genuine than Europeans whenever I visit. But I guess it is harder to see when…

It's not how they feel at all. Or, if they do actually feel that way... it's inadvertently the "fake it till you make it" where they have done this for so long and so intensely that they've tricked themselves into feeling it.

It's likely the origin of some large fraction of mental illnesses.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#130

Post by Mc91 »

klodolph wrote: post #92

To be honest, it feels like engaging in a cultural war. I don’t want to liken this to any kind of mainstream cultural war, but instead liken it to the old tech cultural wars, like Emacs versus Vim or some shit like that. I feel like saying positive things about Go is a bit of a fucking minefield, because somebody (especially here on HN) is going to talk about how Go is Awful and Bad and made for stupid people or some…

> Like, the people who say that they can’t work for a manager unless the manager could do their job!

I've worked in IT for over 25 years. Other than a CTO or senior tech executive reporting to CEO, I have seen problems with technical people reporting to non-technical people that I never see with technical people reporting to, if not technical people, at least formerly technical people. A technical manager can have problems of their own, but why enter a new class of problems that don't exist otherwise.

Why would I work somewhere where my boss is effectively a PM?

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