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Where have all the hackers gone?

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Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#261

Post by monksy »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #252

They're busy building stuff without blogging about it. It's tough to assess a change in culture when your heuristics are limited by selection bias favoring loud contributors over productive builders. That's not to say there aren't great hackers who blog; but there are certainly bloggers who are bad hackers, and by definition they're more immediately visible than great hackers who don't blog. I'm sure there is a term…

I completely disagree with your claims here. Communicating about your work, your discoveries, your work is one of the aspects of being an engineer. Developing and maintaining a blog takes work. Grinding out code alone is not productive, nor is it a long term successful way of achieving anything in this industry.

My take of this situation is that people are overworked, and community has become overly regulated, unrewarded, and suppressed. (Language/tone policing, spam, aggressive individuals encouraged in groups, bad group membership policies [CoCs used as bullying devices more than simple rules to follow], dev advocates stepping on everything)

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#263

Post by tracker1 »

Mezzie wrote: post #226
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…

This is very astute. I'd like to add that the pipeline for child/adolescent hackers that existed in the pre-00s is basically non-existent. The only major path that still exists that I can think of is game modding. I'm a third-generation techie on both sides of my family (my paternal grandpa (b. ~1915) got started working with TVs and their mechanical parts and my maternal grandmother (b. mid 1920s) learned C in the 7…

Pre 00's hackers, or pre 80's for that matter, mostly tinkered with physical things... pulling apart a radio, remote controlled toy or reading popular mechanics. Now, you can do so much in pure software, and it's far easier and less expensive that it's the direction most will go. That doesn't mean there weren't hackers or nearly as proportionate an amount of them before the 00's.

For that matter, my great grandfather was the type that actually built cabinets, or did plumbing, electrical, etc in his home. The most I've done is run an ethernet cable or change a light fixture or switch. That's not a critique of younger generations, just pointing out that a desire to learn, understand and do things has always existed. It just presented a bit differently.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#264

Post by srpablo »

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…

Hi! Author here. This is fair; I can see how you feel this way from the article. That said, "I suspect he didn't know or think much about them" isn't a value judgement on him; just as I didn't care much about his point on `for` loops, we all have things we care about more and less about than others. Same with "fruitful conversation" — I meant that for both of us! I think both of us could have had a better time.

I'll try to be more mindful in the future, but I think "the original characterization doesn't trash him" is defensible. If he sees the blog and thinks its unfair, he's perfectly able to reach out (we're not actually very close). I make it clear we value different things but I never explicitly say "this guy sucks" _because I don't believe that._ He's a fantastic dev who's built great systems, but I wish we had a better framework for chatting about Golang.

Edit: I've updated the language with a few more details to better reflect how that whole interaction went down, which was a playful chat between two seasoned devs with ~12 companies between them. I didn't want to spend too much of the article on the anecdote, so I originally cut out some surrounding context (he was excited to "get into it," it's not like I just came at him when he said "I like Go").

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#265

Post by drewcoo »

duncan-donuts wrote: post #63

Maybe I’ve just fallen out of love with the nitty gritty of programming but this blogger sounds insufferable. If I’m wearing a duck duck go shirt and someone comes up and wants to talk about how DDG uses/used bing I’m not going to engage in this conversation. Who the fuck wants to talk about the Golang GC just because you have a Golang shirt on? Also, how condescending to assume the person doesn’t think about it at a…

> wants to talk about the Golang GC just because you have a Golang shirt on?

If I see someone wearing a political t-shirt, they're clearly virtue signaling. If I ask them about it, I might expect political slogans, but often they won't even be able to manage those slogans, much less explanation of a party platform.

If I see someone wearing a branded beer shirt, they're likely to be able to represent for their shirt-beer. Most of the time I'd only expect advertising slogans, but once in a while maybe they'll have something interesting to say. They're going to be generally more informed than the political shirt crew.

A programming language t-shirt is much more niche and advertises that the wearer has an interest in that language and wants the world to know about it. This goes far beyond the virtue signaling of the political shirt crowd. If all they can do is repeat slogans (like most of the beer-shirt-wearers), I'd be disappointed, too.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#266

Post by mparnisari »

> Most developers have major gaps in their understandings of the tools they use. This is fine. [...] Many people across the 7 companies I've worked for are best described as "adequate."

Okay so, according to the author, then it's not fine...

How do we fix this? Is it every employee's fault that they don't know the nuts and bolts of the things they work with, or is it the company's fault for not providing the right training?

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#268

Post by Mezzie »

tracker1 wrote: post #263
Mezzie wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very astute. I'd like to add that the pipeline for child/adolescent hackers that existed in the pre-00s is basically non-existent. The only major path that still exists that I can think of is game modding. I'm a third-generation techie on both sides of my family (my paternal grandpa (b. ~1915) got started working with TVs and their mechanical parts and my maternal grandmother (b. mid 1920s) learned C in the 7…

Pre 00's hackers, or pre 80's for that matter, mostly tinkered with physical things... pulling apart a radio, remote controlled toy or reading popular mechanics. Now, you can do so much in pure software, and it's far easier and less expensive that it's the direction most will go. That doesn't mean there weren't hackers or nearly as proportionate an amount of them before the 00's. For that matter, my great grandfather…

Yeah, a part of it is that there's not really a mechanic class in the way that there used to be. I mentioned that's how my grandpa got his start: He was obsessed with TVs and repaired them/made his own FrankenTVs as a side from his automotive job, which in turn meant that when the computer and arcade revolution hit my dad had the tools and expertise to get really into things like pinball machines, Pong, and Atari leading him to programming which in turn meant I (born in 1988) was raised in a household where pulling apart machines and doing what you want with them (rather than what was taught or what they were 'made' for) was normal.

The decline in basic mechanical tinkering in the population definitely is a factor if only because the mindset transfers to hacking: "This is a human made tool and I am a human with the right/ability to screw with it/alter it to do what I want". Very few kids now grow up being encouraged to play with and take things apart. Both because the adults don't have the knowledge to put it back together or the tools for the kids to use and because our culture is way more risk averse than it used to be.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#269

Post by srpablo »

belter wrote: 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…

haha yeah, my comment was mostly a throwback to the genre of articles we saw in the late aughts where people were discovering dynamic programming environments, and would say the line about Ruby/Java but not mention all the cases the Java case was handling that their Ruby `File.read` example didn't. I put it in quotes not to make that exact point, but more to reference how I've seen the conversation go.

Generally I'm extremely positive on Java :-p

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#270

Post by esafak »

Mezzie wrote: post #226
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…

This is very astute. I'd like to add that the pipeline for child/adolescent hackers that existed in the pre-00s is basically non-existent. The only major path that still exists that I can think of is game modding. I'm a third-generation techie on both sides of my family (my paternal grandpa (b. ~1915) got started working with TVs and their mechanical parts and my maternal grandmother (b. mid 1920s) learned C in the 7…

I don't think so. You can easily play around in the browser, using Javascript, or on https://processing.org/, https://playground.tensorflow.org/, https://scratch.mit.edu/, etc.

If anything the problem is that today's kids have too many options. And sure, some are commercial.

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