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Where have all the hackers gone?

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Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#171

Post by davedx »

dboreham wrote: post #156
davedx wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked with Scala I disagree it’s a safe choice. Scala is a huge, complicated, difficult language built on the huge (but very powerful) JVM. It’s also hard to hire Scala devs AND hard to train non Scala devs to write Scala, because it’s not a language you can learn in a weekend. (Speaking from experience)

Also speaking from experience: Scala takes much less time to learn if you have someone familiar with regular programming concepts (not FP religion) to decode it for you. But ultimately agree, it's a bad choice for pretty much any purpose.

Mmm... depends, I guess. We had a team of JavaScript programmers and we (me included) needed to maintain the Scala back-end our client consumed, that was built by contractors a year or two previously and not really been worked on since then. It used Spray for routing, which IMO was the worst part of it, but there were a lot of other quite "cerebral" Scala-specific concepts in there too like implicits and other stuff that I forget now. A lot of it I'd never really come across before in any other programming language.

Maybe if you're familiar with something like Haskell Scala is more straightforward to decode?

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#172

Post by justinator »

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…

>When I first started coding, I didn't get paid. I didn't think I ever would.

How did you make a living?

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#173

Post by 908B64B197 »

jdm2212 wrote: post #80
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…

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.

> the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find.

Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career, with offshoring replacing expensive American engineers.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#174

Post by satisfice »

rickboyce wrote: post #113
drones wrote: 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 mature…

This was my first reaction, but the author won me over to his point as he went along.

I find the soil, surface, atmosphere analogy useful.

Also, I am one of those many many Python programmers who don’t know much about Python. Fascinating how you can be quite productive in tech, even so. Perhaps that’s the glory of Python. But for the record, nobody cares about the specifics of import, or anything else, unless it is likely to influence a problem or solution that we are grappling with.

I’m curious about Python… but I also have a job to do and a deadline.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#175

Post by dragonwriter »

908B64B197 wrote: post #173
jdm2212 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find. Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career, with offshoring replacing expensive American engineers.

> Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career

Believed by whom? Because AFAIR this was never either the general public sentiment or consistent with BLS projections across the fields that CS feeds into.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#176

Post by spacemadness »

drones wrote: 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…

This very much read like the comic book guy of programmers to me.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#177

Post by mananaysiempre »

helen___keller wrote: post #90
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…

Also: potential hackers might never really form into hackers because there’s a strong career path and financial incentive to work on big boring software engineering using the same skills That’s actually the exact same story of how I ended up in computer science instead of pure mathematics. I was interested in pure logic and set theory, but I could flex the same muscles learning programming language theory and end up…

> If I could enjoy my work 30% more that would be great. Is it worth making less than half income though?

If that’s the calculation—if you find yourself doing the calculation—probably not. However, if you can’t make yourself not do it (build software, build hardware, figure out maths or better ways to put maths into words, write fiction, ...), if you find yourself doing it even at your most busiest and staying up at night when every other minute of your day is occupied, then... Many such people have found they still need the income, and every one of them that I’ve seen is deeply unhappy because of it.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#178

Post by daveslash »

seydor wrote: post #38
nixpulvis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can absolutely have friends that you have unfruitful conversations with. The idea that every interaction needs to be positive to constitute friendship is extremely unhealthy and sterilizing.

you can have such conversations with anyone, they are not a friend. friendship implies a certain emotional investment, which implies a certain bias

I agree. I think in modern American vocabulary, "Friend" is thrown around quite loosely to mean "somebody who I know and I'm not adversarial with".

Personally, I have very few friends - people with whom I have an emotional investment, who I'd trust to call if I had a bad breakup or needed money or some sort of personal help. But I have tons of casual relationships with folks that I'm on friendly terms with.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#179

Post by coldtea »

jdm2212 wrote: post #164
coldtea wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I with I was as starry-eyed as to think he did it because of his "hacker skills"... > the reason we're all posting on Hacker News during the workday and he's running a centibillion dollar company is because he's an immensely intelligent and talented and focused man and we are... well, the kind of people who post on internet forums during the workday. There are people who post regularly in HN (even in the top-50 contr…

so in the original context of my post... Zuckerberg : Harvard :: hacker : software industry. it's an analogy. I wasn't saying he's a great hacker. But also the dude obviously is a great hacker. There are vanishingly few people who can bootstrap the infrastructure that will let a company grow to Facebook scale -- you need exceptional depth and breadth of computer knowledge, as well as great focus and an ability to pri…

>There are vanishingly few people who can bootstrap the infrastructure that will let a company grow to Facebook scale

Well, he didn't do that. He just wrote a crappy basic PHP backend. The "scaling at Facebook scale" part happened later, after people were hired and VC money flew in.

Same like early Twitter was a crap Rails app that they even had to restart a few times a day because of memory leaks. It still got them through to attract users (even though it crashed all the time) and money, so they eventually were able to fix that and grow to Twitter scale.

None of those things happened because of very talented hacker founders. Those kind of apps aren't even very technical or different to the average CRUD app - not until the scale/infrastructure people come in much later: those do the actual hard work.

Cloudflare, Redis, SQLlite, Nginx, ElasticSearch etc, on the other hand, are a different story. Those are absolutely apps/platforms made from scratch by seriously talented hackers, even if others were involved to improve them later on.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#180

Post by Kalium »

chefandy wrote: post #170
Kalium wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been my experience that in conversations about AI, literally nobody actually wants empathy. People want to talk about empathy and deplore the people they disagree with as lacking it. The underlying assumption and implication is that a person experiencing genuine empathy would both display it in some legible manner and agree with the speaker's positions on things. In short, the idea of empathy is weaponized. Perh…

a) I was responding to an admittedly off-topic comment, and not the article. b) Your argument that people solely use empathy as a kudgel to get their way is not reflected in reality. What you describe is emotional manipulation, and as far as I can tell, you're essentially arguing that all calls for empathy in conversation are emotional manipulation... which is ridiculous. c) Simply speaking about people respectfully…

My argument was and is that specifically and narrowly in conversations about AI and its impacts on the livelihoods of people, calling for empathy from others is deliberate emotional manipulation with the objective of cudgeling people into compliance. It's also often a rallying cry, used to de-legitimize the positions of their counterparts as cold, uncaring, unfeeling, and devoid of humanity. Common enough ad-hominem material, though obviously fully emotionally justified.

The only broader comment I offered was that I have worked with a number of people who operate that way on a daily basis. I understand why. It helps them hit their professional goals, ensuring their livelihood and those of their families. Many of them see a resistance to these tools as a lack of respect for their skills, abilities, hard work, or reasonable economic interests.

As to personal respect - how prepared are you to see respect in someone saying they understand but disagree? I can both understand the impact of my words on other people and refuse to shift my position because of their emotional response. Many others may not react as well as you to a compassionate, empathic, kind, caring, and understanding essay arguing that creatives feeling threatened by AI should seriously consider a change of career.

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