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Where have all the hackers gone?

morepablo.com

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Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#271

Post by JohnFen »

Mezzie wrote: post #258
JohnFen wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm too much of a generalist But one of the primary traits of hackers is that they tend to be generalists.

I care about other things and people as much as tech. I can't just tinker with computers/machines and to stay up to date you have to invest some time in both the work and the communities. I'm very, very much a generalist. My other hobbies that straddle the line between hobby and professional interest (in that I do them for play but have gotten money for them) include fiction writing, marketing psychology, humanities…

See my other comment about what being a "hacker" traditionally means. It's not specifically tech-related. Your explorations of the physiological nature of emotions is well within the scope of hacking.

I honestly think that one of the things that has diminished the hacker community to a degree is that it has become synonymous in most people's minds with computers. But really, computer hackers are just one subset of the larger hacker community. There are legit hackers who have no interaction with computers beyond what most people do.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#272

Post by srpablo »

Dowwie wrote: post #64

Pablo, turning the question towards you, what would you have liked to know about Elixir up-front before using it to build an authorization server at Ramp? Let's get an honest take.

Hi! Have we met?

Elixir has been great for our Authorization server. I really believe in the BEAM for high-uptime cases, and love a lot about Ecto's design as an ORM. That said, I only felt comfortable bringing Elixir to Ramp because I'd already built ~3 Pheonix projects before joining, and had a decade on other Erlang projects. I make a light reference to it in a few places in the article, but I think introducing Weird Tech is very, very easy to mess up and most people would be better off not doing it.

I lead with that in my other article that made it to HN, on strategies for learning exotic tech https://morepablo.com/2022/09/so-you-re-using-a-weird-langua...

More on BEAM at Ramp and why I like it https://engineering.ramp.com/elixir-at-ramp

Me comparing/opining Ecto and SQLAlchemy, the two ORMs at Ramp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ep9CDXUHNU

It's been running Authorizations for 4 years and had remarkable good mileage.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#273

Post by srpablo »

foldr wrote: post #102
gregors wrote: post #53

His comment regarding preemptive vs cooperative scheduling, so which is it? Does Go have preemptive scheduling or not? I was under the impression that it did get that somewhat recently? Could anyone point me in the right direction?

Yes, this is a mistake in the article. Go has had preemptive scheduling since Go 1.14, released at the beginning of 2020.

Hey, thanks for letting me know! I'll correct the article

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#274

Post by blululu »

janalsncm wrote: post #76
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…

I think that’s a little harsh. I honestly think the anecdote at the beginning was shoehorned in as some kind of clumsy attempt to add personality. But the dirt/surface/air framework seems useful to me.

The starting anecdote might have been tacked on at the end. It might even be a fabrication. It is certainly unnecessary to the framework they are advancing which is itself reasonable. The fact that the author chose to frame their thinking in terms of them being a snide jerk to a colleague really made me unsympathetic to them as a person.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#275

Post by srpablo »

gregors wrote: post #53

His comment regarding preemptive vs cooperative scheduling, so which is it? Does Go have preemptive scheduling or not? I was under the impression that it did get that somewhat recently? Could anyone point me in the right direction?

Hi! Thanks for posting this, it and the replies pointed out an error. I've since corrected the article.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#277

Post by JohnFen »

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…

> There are almost no pathways into tech now that revolve around tech as play and I think that's where a lot of hackers came from.

I don't think I agree. Many of the old pathways don'ts exist anymore, but they've been replaced with new ones. Look at the maker community ("makers" are mostly just hackers by a different name), or look at the resurgence of hobbyist electronics.

I think electronics is a great example, actually, because I often hear old electronics nerds lament that hobbyist electronics is essentially impossible because most things a surface-mount these days. But what they don't realize is that designing and assembling circuits with surface-mount components is well within the realm of the hobbyist and is very common. This is proven by the wealth of wonderful projects they are engaging in.

The difference with electronics is that the soldering techniques are different. They're not really any more difficult, but require a different set of skills that the graybeards often haven't learned.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#278

Post by Mezzie »

esafak wrote: post #270
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…

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.

There's a huge difference between something being gamified and something being play, particularly unstructured play. Scratch is great, but it's structured and something presented by adults to children for learning. That has a whole bunch of social baggage attached as well as a 'win' condition set by adults. Also I'd say that the transition to hackerdom probably could truly take place at late elementary/middle school age and at that age anything 'kiddie' or designed for kids is lame, making it less likely that children will use it for building their own communities. This is pretty common with most of the options. It's why I wouldn't consider things like Roblox to lead to hacking because it's still a supervised playground with content 'rules'.

TensorFlow probably will lead/is leading to some hackers.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#279

Post by andai »

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).

(Since it's too late to edit)

I believed this to be literally the case, that Go was designed for the "lowest common denominator", i.e. to make that area of programming at Google more accessible than it was previously. Have I been misinformed?

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#280

Post by imbnwa »

lethuel wrote: post #239
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…

Current culture of squeezing every bit of productivity out of programmers is absolute cancer. In many companies practices like scrum actively discourage spending more time on research / refactoring. "Of course you can spend some time on this task! Also you have the other five to complete. And the sprint ends in two weeks". Imagine Einstein was told "oh, you have such a nice idea about relativity, let's time frame it…

Its insane how popular it is, when it comes to the decline of the true hacker/engineer, to blame individuals for systemtic changes in process and environment
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