Where have all the hackers gone?
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Where have all the hackers gone?
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Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#2This is like every possible language war trope stitched together into a narrative.
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#3[dead]
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#4Sorry 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 cultural thing and this is not offensive everywhere?
The irony is that the main page says "I ♥ people; look for ways to make them happy, and empower them."
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#5Language 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 and are really rare!
>I prefer to work with an excellent software engineer, who doesn't tie their identity to a specific language or technology (e.g. would prefer a great hacker than someone who identifies as a "Ruby developer" or "JS developer.")
Why it matters to you how somebody calls himself?
Is this "single lang programmer" insult variation?
Especially when you are aware that concepts are above languages
>For all my advocacy in this post, it may surprise you to hear that I believe it takes years to be excellent at a language. It's not just syntax, it's soil and atmosphere: common bug flows and how to spot them, footguns, tooling,
Agree!
Many people do not get it, they are always like "you can learn langs after your first within a month" or so
>Functional programmers insisted without evidence that their programs were More Correct.
Hah
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#6Sorry 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…
I wish my friends were this honest and blunt. I acknowledge that the friends I keep would almost certainly disagree though.
The normal (at least in Canada) seems to be as you suggest. I'm perfectly ok with being the weird one though.
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#7> Where have all the hackers gone?
To a newspeak school to unlearn precise terminology.
So to translate OP, "soil, surface, and atmosphere" apparently refer to semantics, syntax, and runtime.
("Pedantic" is a favored word these days. In my days, objections to those who actually knew something about CS was that they are "academic", and "theoretical".)
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#8Sorry 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.
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#9Alright. Lets say in any group of people you have a normal distribution of people caring about the thing you care about. On the left, people dont care at all. On the right people think its the most important thing on the planet.
An argument that suggests people dont want to talk about the things you want to talk about and then uses fabricated classes of thinkers to suggest the things you care about are the grounded ones is just well written flame bait. You can easily find a set of people online who can argue about the garbage collector behaviour of several languages: thats actually pretty cool. But saying people arent hackers because they dont want to discuss it the same way is literally defining a set of people to exclude them from your “group”.
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#10This is the specific spot my suspension of disbelief broke:
> innovation tokens are completely made up, it's like talking about the finite number of "love tokens" you can give your spouse in a given year.
You can't complain that "'atmosphere' questions are extremely based in feelings" and then just get high on feelings like this.
The amount of "love tokens" you can give your spouse in a year is absolutely finite, because they take time and attention. You can see easily this in the complaints that come in advice columns and relationship subs. And innovation tokens are no more made up than anything else. Time and attention are finite at work just as much as at home.
Hackers didn't go anywhere. The solution to the puzzle is that hacking is an ethos not generally suited to creating profitable businesses. However, we've seen a massive expansion in business use of computers, and most of those businesses are trying to be profitable. Yes, a bunch of those early companies were populated by hackers because that's who knew how to use computers then. But the industry has changed as more and more people have seen it as a professional career, not a way to feed a hacking habit.
Hacking is still alive and well if you know where to look for it. People are still doing lots of weird and wonderful things. But they are, thank goodness, not doing them as much at their day jobs. And as a person who has had to clean up other people's "play", I say: hooray! Play at home. Play in disposable playpens. Production is for shit that works.