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Where have all the hackers gone?

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Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#321

Post by uoaei »

derivagral wrote: post #320
uoaei wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Partner went to a top10 MBA program. This was not the takeaway or remotely close to the summary. Very popular meme though.

It's true they've begun to "reform" the curriculum to be more human-centered across different (but far from all) departments, but it's akin to the clumsily-tacked-on ethics classes in scientific/technical tracks: if you take them seriously, they're valuable, but even among the cohort of students there is little respect for them and are usually considered mere drudgery if not an afterthought.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#322

Post by JohnFen »

Mezzie wrote: post #318
JohnFen wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm guessing from your comments you're in your 40s-60s. Yes, late 50s. I was introduced to computers when I was about 10 by a hacker who took me (and a few other kids as a group) to play with a mainframe computer every couple of weeks. Since all of us kids were from very, very poor families, this was a particularly incredible opportunity that I didn't fully appreciate until I was an adult. > These are the adults wh…

> Since all of us kids were from very, very poor families, this was a particularly incredible opportunity that I didn't fully appreciate until I was an adult. It's interesting having been early and poor (or relatively so), isn't it? We had a computer because my parents were horribly irresponsible and did things like starve themselves and fake weighing enough to give plasma to get money for tech. Grocery budget? Warm…

> It's interesting having been early and poor (or relatively so), isn't it?

Yes. The older I get, the more I realize how much of a difference that has made in my entire worldview. More importantly, I notice how often differences in childhood socioeconomic status can make real communication and understanding difficult. In both directions.

> That's part of what makes it harder: [...]

Wow.

That hits close to home.

I have never had any interest in climbing career ladders -- I am a professional dev largely because that's the only marketable skill I have as a consequence of my love of computers. The money is certainly nice and I feel gratitude literally every day for it, but it's not even a small factor in why I do what I do.

That said, I have still been focused on my own world to the extent that I have not done as your mom did. I have not planted trees for the next generation to shade in.

Outside of my own children, who all have the hacker spirit even if their interests are in things other than computers, I have been a part of the very trends that we are worrying about here. I can see a little more clearly now. If nothing else, I owe a debt.

> especially since I often feel crazy

The only people I've known who never questioned their sanity were ones who weren't actually all that sane.

> I think we need to decouple our cultural insights from specific tech skills and teach them to everybody.

I could not agree more.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#323

Post by than3 »

mrkeen wrote: post #295
than3 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You might want to make that a bit more clear then.

It seemed more like hyperbole, and I certainly didn't get that from what you said.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#324

Post by mahogany »

drewcoo wrote: post #265
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-b…

Sometimes people are given a shirt as a gift, or they just think it looks cool. I never knew others took shirt-wearing to be such a serious activity.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#325

Post by JohnFen »

Mezzie wrote: post #284
JohnFen wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I like your point of view (and very much appreciate your comments by the way). By your definition, I would definitely count (as would, say, my cousin who is buying laptops for her kids to take apart and homeschooling them and taking a hacker's approach to parenting or the one who got really into theology for about ten years or my uncle who was obsessed with cameras or...), but I think the prevailing view sees hackerd…

That's a very good point.

As a hacker, I have a stubbornness and a strong sense of the justice of technical correctness, so I can't help but try keep the larger sense of the word alive. Even if only as part of a background chorus of hackers saying "well, actually..."

But I do try to remember that we're the weirdos here.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#327

Post by jasonm23 »

rlpb wrote: post #294
JohnFen wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you may have missed the point, and I apologise, if I didn't infer your thought as it was intended.

At any level of the stack, the hacker mindset of "learning how things work...(and utilizing that knowledge)" is generally applicable.

It's arguable that while, say, Steve Jobs wasn't a technically adept hacker, he was a business, product and people/behavior hacker.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#328

Post by mardifoufs »

hu3 wrote: post #148
mardifoufs wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are referring to the famous Robert pike quote (though I disagree that it implies a lack of talent from its users, it just means that the language was designed to be practical): "The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of und…

Yeah I knew it was referencing that. Thanks. It's just tiresome and lazy to use that misquote and I see that often. I don't even code in Go these days but I hold HN to a higher standards.

Completely agree. Especially since most languages are designed to be simple and even "stupid simple". That's a good thing! There's nothing inherently smart or talented in having to wrestle with a complicated language just to get stuff done.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#329

Post by winternett »

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…

The stakes are much higher now with new security methods like Zero Trust around. On vital systems, logs aren't stored directly on the same infrastructure as host infra... That means more footprints that can snitch on a hacker, and the penalties are much higher for hacking offenses because so much more is riding on key systems now... Mitnick got a job instead of jail... That won't really happen now because there are simply too many wildly different frameworks. It also explains why most breaches are state sponsored, well funded, wide scale, and from overseas... ;\

People are hacking social media a lot for growth and money, but the best secrets are very illusive and flooded out by lies, novice content, boilerplate advice, and outright scams... The actual hackers quietly scrape pennies off of the net in micro-transactions until they start racking up as thousands of dollars, most of the time though it's heavily coordinated group activity rather than the lone kid in his parent's house like it used to be... The hacker kid now is too busy shilling crypto scams, playing video games, revving stonks, or working on yet another GPT tool that no one really needs IMO. :P

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#330

Post by pjmlp »

tinco wrote: post #243
hnarn wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just imagining a timeline where Kubernetes was written in Java gives me chills.

If Mesos has managed to be slightly more useful, it would have been a Kubernetes written in C++ situation. Of course in my opinion it being written in C++ was the whole reason it had limited usability so it probably would never be.

Borg is written in C++ as well, and there are no plans to rewrite it into Go, which is mostly used outside Google anyway.

And how things are going in CNCF projects, if Rust had been more mature in 2014, most likely it would have been Rust instead.

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