Making things easy is the problem. It's been long known in secret societies, that guarding entry through a solvable but hard entry barrier makes it more rewarding for those who do make it through and the ones already inside. In programming, we have tried to make everything easy: JavaScript everywhere. Electron everywhere. Slow code everywhere. No need to think about memory of cpu cycles at all. The result is piles of crap like Microsoft products and Slack and hackers are the minority.
Where have all the hackers gone?
21–30 of 351 posts
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#22Sorry 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…
Decades ago, my group of close friends made a pact: if anyone of us is talking shit, talking nonsense, or simply expressing attitude that smells of self deception, do not let it lie and declare it is time for a reality debate. Friends should never let friends descend into self deception, because that slippery slope can kill, as well as sour everything one experiences. Others seeing us in the midst of a reality debate would often form little crowds. If you ever witnessed the "pseudo intellectual club" debates at the Boston Pour House during the late 80's, that was us. That group of close friends is long dispersed into the winds, several still keep in touch, and it is that 'reality debate' activity we continually return, and debate the state of the world.
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#23This is like every possible language war trope stitched together into a narrative.
To me it seems like pretty good breakdown from a seasoned professional. I'm a bit taken aback by your take. For one thing, one of the points he's making seemed to me to be "be language agnostic".
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#24Sorry 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…
That fits exactly with non-fruitfulness. A discussion about programming languages became a discussion about someone's empathy.
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#25Suggested edit: "The song for this post is YAKETY SAX"
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#26So the article seems to imply that "hackers" are the sort of people that look at a partially working system and say: "hmm let's re-write that in a new and untested language" or worse still "lets write this in language x because I've always wanted to try it"
if thats the case, then I formally suggest that such people can get in the sea.
I might be somewhat unfair, but that was my reading.
> innovation tokens are completely made up
So are programming languages.
Innovation tokens are there to make sure that a business can complete a project vaguely on time and vaguely on budget.
Look the reason why people were able to get away with pissing away millions of dollars in pointless re-writes of things is because the speed of business based on those systems was slower. Now, if your site is down, then customers flee.
I mean sure, writing your own database for your SaaS company might be a thing, but its almost certainly expensive and pointless. You're on the hook for scaling it, recovering it when it fails, and finding and fixing all the bugs.
In short, this article, I feel, encourages a damaging, selfish side of CS that I think should be phased out.
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#27Language discussions are unpleasent and waste of time Ive seen like hundreds of discussions like that Java vs c# vs rust vs go vs kotlin It is always heavy of emotions, unverified claims (performance especially) and dependent on what stuff do you value. This kind of discussion requires wide knowledge, hands on experience, curiosity and open mindness. All of those 4 are really desirable itself, so together even more a…
Throw in the fact that most programmers are terrible communicators, and we get complete nonsense non-debates that are little more than emotional cry fests.
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#28People who were inspired by the movie are all in their 40s now.
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#29Just to set the context: I like Golang as a language, but I think writing a program that's more than ~10k lines of code in Golang is a mistake (honestly, the limit is probably a lot lower), and I also don't think they should've added generics, just leave the language as useful as it is.
Anyway, I think the author missed the point a bit with his friends argument about "Go developers knew that all you need is a for loop". It's not just an "atmosphere " argument. The programming language literally restricts you to using for loops. That's a surface property of Golang (or maybe it used to be, haven't used it in a couple years).
Golang has been designed to have a minimal and thus very smooth surface. Those issues the author mentioned about Python, that's rough surface.
The article then digresses into the main point which is that engineering leaders are afraid of spending innovation tokens without giving evidence that this is more so the case than it was before.
Not sure if it's relevant, but Twitter starting on Ruby was them spending an innovation token. They then realised there was a big large scale low latency high throughput situation that Ruby didn't have a suitable ecosystem for, so they hired a team that had experience scaling these sorts of systems specifically with Scala. Picking Scala was in that sense the safe choice, the risky one would have been to try and get the existing Ruby codebase to apply the concepts from Scala (which is now more than a decade later a reasonable thing to do in Ruby).
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#30Sorry 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…
>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", which means "truth". It's like people who say "I'm such a nice guy", "I'm very humble", or this author saying "I love people and my friend" but then they talk shit about their friend in this very article.
Listen not to what someone says, observe what they do. "Actions speak louder than words" and all that.