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Where have all the hackers gone?

morepablo.com

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Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#291

Post by bsenftner »

esafak wrote: post #281
bsenftner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Boston Pour House had just opened! And now it is shuttered. https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/pour-house-landlord-has...

Wow, now that's sad news.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#292

Post by zooch »

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…

Meta is a 10 million dollar company?

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#293

Post by blululu »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #58
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…

> How is that supposed friend, who might very well be aware of this person's blog, going to feel after reading this? Friends are people you can talk like this about and they are still your friend afterwards.

Talking directly and honestly with your friends is a very good thing, but don't talk trash about them behind their backs - it is passive-aggressive, deceitful and reflects very poorly upon your character.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#294

Post by rlpb »

JohnFen wrote: post #255
rlpb wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems that on here, the nucleus of hackers has remained more or less constant since 2010, while all other demographics flooded in. I think this also describes those working on software in general. Everyone uses the same interesting-to-hackers low level parts of the stack. But the nature of software is that _use_ scales infinitely, so roughly the same small quantity of developers are needed the same as was needed…

Being a hacker has nothing to do with how far up the stack you operate. It even has nothing to do with software or computers specifically. Traditionally, being a hacker is being a person who is very interested in learning how things work, and how to use those things in new ways. Historically, proper hackers have focused on things ranging from model railroads to pay phones to bureaucratic systems, to computers and mor…

> Traditionally, being a hacker is being a person who is very interested in learning how things work...

I am aware, and I agree.

> Being a hacker has nothing to do with how far up the stack you operate.

I disagree. The workings further down the stack are interesting only to hackers, and those paid to work in that area. I think that's quite different from the reasons for interest further up the stack.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#295

Post by mrkeen »

than3 wrote: post #288
eropple wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How to be a decent human in the world" is always a fruitful discussion. It is, perhaps, the most important one.

That kind of conversation often lacks for how to deal with deceitful, ruthless, and generally harmful people. Not everyone is decent, and turning the other cheek doesn't work or communicate what it once did in this age of platform megaphones. The corruption of indeceny is everywhere, and most people don't even realize it when they do it because of menticide, indoctrination, or whatever you want to call it.

We are all each other's arseholes. I didn't find what the author posted rude. I find accusing him of having a lack of empathy rude. Ignore the noise, engage with the content.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#296

Post by zamnos »

Right now on the front page is a post about where to see Hokusai's Great Wave today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35985221) or Why is my dryer radioactive (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35990858#35992719).

They may not hold up to morepablo's bizarre demands of hacker purity (like the off-kilter conversation reported in the linked article. If I talked like that to someone who approached me, I'd be so embarrassed. Definitely wouldn't plaster it all over the Internet on my blog where I "look for ways to... empower [people]"), but it sure looks like the hacker spirit to me.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#297

Post by srpablo »

blululu wrote: post #290
srpablo wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"He's a fantastic dev who's built great systems, but I suspect he is not interested in these aspects of software" would have changed the entire tenor of the article. This person doesn't need to be in the article at all and I had a lot of trouble getting past this section to the many reasonable points made after it.

Thanks for the feedback. I updated the language a bit to better reflect how that whole interaction went down, which was a playful chat between two seasoned devs with ~12 companies between them. I also removed the language that was being perceived as judgemental.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#298

Post by klibertp »

hardware2win wrote: post #5

Language 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…

> Many people do not get it, they are always like "you can learn langs after your first within a month" or so

In my experience: half a year minimum, and only after your 10th. The amount of uninteresting trivia that you need to wade through on your way to concepts you already know is vast, much greater than you'd remember from 10 years back when you learned your previous language. More then 10 languages I already know do help, in that I can easily pick up any language in a matter of days, but... that's only if we're talking about the language[1]. Developing a skill in using that language, including absorbing the specific culture (books read, talks given, whose blogs to read, which Discord/Slack/#freenode to visit, and so on) and learning the details of the ecosystem (from stdlib to common libraries to frameworks, to the details of implementation, the FFI, and so on) and it's a lot of things to learn.

Well, at least I know that my next language will be a lot easier to learn, thanks to a revolution in the rubber duck industry, which gave us a duck that can - sometimes convincingly - pretend to understand what we're saying. And sometimes even gives you a hint that turns out to be real! Oh, the progress...

[1] As long as there's no genuinely innovative features in that language. Which, sadly, seems to be the case 95% of the time.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#299

Post by Mezzie »

zorked wrote: post #211
908B64B197 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this was never either the general public sentiment Post dotcom crash in the early 00's? Everyone was saying this was a dead market. Cost-cutting was everywhere.

Not sure of what the downvote is about because this is an accurate representation of the post-dotcom time. Enrollments in CS went down, programmers would be offshored to India, nobody wanted to be in tech anymore, unemployment was high. Hard to belive now but people enrolling in CS at this time were mocked and ridiculed.

Yup. I went off to college right after this and was from a poorer family and that's one reason I opted not to go into CS as a degree despite over a decade of programming/web experience. It wasn't seen as a stable career path and the tech sector had a reputation as a bubble hype machine.

The hilarity is that I went into Linguistics instead, and it turns out that in 2023 that is actually very helpful... I'm not the only one either.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#300

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

dimgl wrote: post #222
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don’t need to learn all of the frameworks in the TypeScript ecosystem to be productive in TypeScript but you should hold in the back of your head a realization that your understanding of said ecosystem and the compiler is limited. Likely always will be, as there are multiple not stupid people working on it, and there's one of you. It happened to me that I knew how to do X (and then did it) which had been boldly…

Understanding enough about how a system works is super important. But I'm also not naive: I'm never going to fully understand all of the internals of V8 and the TypeScript compiler. And I think that's okay. I think there's far worse examples, like the 500+ accounts on /r/experienceddevs who continue to yell at everyone how much more productive they are with ChatGPT and how they're getting two weeks of work done in tw…

The name of that subreddit is a hint for me not to go there for some reason.
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