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Where have all the hackers gone?

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Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#201

Post by uoaei »

robmccoll wrote: post #117
confoundcofound wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everyone I've talked to about their experience in MBA programs say that it feels designed to teach you to think of people as if they are somewhere between cattle and plants, mere generators of productivity metrics for spreadsheets and dashboards. The only perspective is quantitative, and it's largely based on arbitrary, misleading metrics.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#202

Post by bravetraveler »

Xeoncross wrote: post #104
helen___keller wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> financial incentive to work on big boring software engineering using the same skills This is so true: as I've made more, my github has grown more silent.

Similarly, as I've been promoted (and spend more time advising), my skills have atrophied

I used to be excellent at kernel hacking, random Linux things that would often be several-weeks trials. Now that I'm not 'in it' constantly, mostly just advising, I've lost a lot of that sharpness

Doesn't help the onslaught of the day really kills my desire to learn/play around

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#203

Post by pjlegato »

stereolambda wrote: post #142
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…

It's an interesting notion that you can't disagree or find faults in your friends, especially if we adapt the Anglophone definition of a friend as a loose sorta sustained contact. Would people rush to criticizing in this manner if someone truthfully wrote that their friend has problems hauling 20 kg weights up four floors of stairs? The description is undiplomatic, could be written in a more roundabout way, but this…

This is an inaccurate and highly reductive stereotype of what the supposed "Anglophone" cultural world believes about friendship.

In reality, there are vast cultural differences between different English speaking regions, which foreigners often overlook due to the shared language. California, New York, Miami, Johannesburg, New Zealand, and rural Yorkshire are all technically "Anglophone" in some broad reductive sense, yet are as culturally distinct (or even moreso) as, say, Sweden and Greece.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#204

Post by RobotToaster »

jdm2212 wrote: post #141
margalabargala wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I really wish I was so brimming with self-confidence as to say that I'm just as competent as the guy who founded the eighth or so most valuable company on Earth, and he was just in the right place at the right time. Zuckerberg is clearly a not-great guy in some ways, but 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 intellige…

>competent as the guy who founded the eighth or so most valuable company on Earth

That usually has more to do with machiavellianism than competence

Of course some would consider machiavellianism a kind of talent.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#205

Post by jdm2212 »

coldtea wrote: post #179
jdm2212 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> He just wrote a crappy basic PHP backend.

lol. citation needed.

Among geniuses who can build a FAANG company from scratch, I'm sure Zuck is not the strongest software engineer or hacker or whatever. Like, Jeff Dean is undoubtedly a better engineer. Craig Silverstein, too. And Bret Taylor. But if you're going to tell me Zuck is a mediocrity -- not just "a lesser light than Jeff Dean" but an actual mediocrity like us rank-and-file HN-posting losers -- then I'm gonna want to see some evidence.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#206

Post by justin66 »

nixpulvis wrote: post #8
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…

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.

There's no need to conflate "unfruitful" and "negative." Plenty of people have fun arguing without persuading one another of anything, more or less the definition of an "unfruitful" conversation.

It's negative when someone's not having fun. Or more to the point, when someone feels the need to post on the internet about how defective the "friend" they were arguing with is.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#207

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

lutarezj wrote: post #200

I blame the software methodologies for this. And the dogmatic LoC per reported hour. Imagine a hacker saying: i need 5 story points to figure out for the REST API how the bootloader works.

I've been in Agile shops since 2008, and it's the first time I'm hearing about a LoC/hour metric. Must be some sick sweatshop with micromanagers mimicking being "Agile".

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#208

Post by yobbo »

The tools that people learn on (mac books, IDE and so on) are far more polished today than they used to be, and they don't require or invite learners to "look beneath". Frameworks are even marketed to developers a bit like fashion items with web sites that look like magazine covers.

There isn't much to get people started on the hacker-path - it's presented to them as atmosphere.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#209

Post by cmh89 »

jdm2212 wrote: post #141
margalabargala wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I really wish I was so brimming with self-confidence as to say that I'm just as competent as the guy who founded the eighth or so most valuable company on Earth, and he was just in the right place at the right time. Zuckerberg is clearly a not-great guy in some ways, but 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 intellige…

There are millions of people just as smart and smarter as Zuckerberg. He had access to computers when they were expensive and had an affluent life that sent him to Harvard where he was around people who could do stuff like fund new businesses.
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