18 ms·

Is true hacking dead? What we lost

255 points by Impossible 7y ago

wehrkeoruw 7y ago
Management figured out how to manage the "hackers", and the good "hackers" learned how to socialize (what this article calls "politics").
leipert 7y ago
I assume there is the same amount of “true” hackers out there. At least that is my impression from the Chaos Communication Congress and alike. Probably the percentage of “true” hackers is way smaller now as computers became cheap and more accessible. If you look at the “great and true hackers” from the 80s and before, most of them probably come from academia, government agencies or wealthy backgrounds. I for one welcome the change, because I think the entry barrier to become a “true” hacker is probably the same as before, if not easier and we definitely opened the doors for more people.
erikpukinskis 7y ago
We’re still here. More than ever actually. There’s just more noise.
- scaryclam 7y ago
  Do any communities still exist?
  - acoye 7y ago
    Probably somewhere on the other side of the looking glass … I mean freenode.
  - tiborsaas 7y ago
    I've heard about an early Silicon Valley accelerator with some geeky name about functional programming has one :)
  - r3dk1ng 7y ago
    Yes. Though if they were easy to find they'd be overrun with people who don't feel that what they found is worth protecting.
  - acoye 7y ago
    Secret is out, everybody hangs out on twitter nowadays. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCwiZ2dh17Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCwiZ2dh17Q
atq2119 7y ago
I've never understood the appeal of hot-patching and full process image save and restore. Yes, this technology is neat for some use cases, but as a fundamental way of computing it's broken, because it throws reproducibility out of the window. Reproducibility is everything in complex systems, and being able to reset and start fresh is powerful. Evolution figured that out as well. It's why basically all species propagate via the birth of new individuals and the death of the old ones.
- heisenbit 7y ago
  As soon as one works on a non-trivial piece of software and has a team >2 SCM becomes important. There was one SCM system for PP Smalltalk if memory serves right called Envy but it was quite expensive. But even more important than SCM is a module/library eco system. We can’t trade without reproducibility. Without it we are destined to re-invent the wheel. There is value in reinventing wheel - it is entertaining and stress free - as it does not matter for anyone but yourself.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    You always have a team >2, unless you're just writing a quick throwaway hack. Your future selves are members of the team, and there might be quite a few of them over time as you simply forget what you were working on earlier.
- smabie 7y ago
  There’s no reason why you couldn’t have an image based system that also supported versioned images. Then you wouldn’t need any source code at all and still rollback changes.
- xkriva11 7y ago
  You can have the best of both worlds. In some Smalltalks (like Pharo), the image is bootstrapped from the source code but you can still use image persistency.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
entelechy0 7y ago
This title is clickbait af. Who is to say what is and is not 'true' hacking?
tus88 7y ago
> The sad and inspiring story of TempleOS, a.k.a. what the Raspberry Pi should have been. Eh?
- solidgriever 7y ago
  What the...
- cyborgx7 7y ago
  Wait, that is actually in there. What the hell does this even mean?
  - octotoad 7y ago
    Sounds like they’re referring to characteristics of TempleOS that may have suited the original goals of the Raspberry Pi, which was to be a tinker-friendly device for audiences like school children. Some people lament the fact that it simply ended up with a plain, general purpose Unix-like, rather than something more low level and immediately direct (as in, drop you to a BASIC, not necessarily assembler), ala Commodore 64. The peculiarities of the author aside, a live TempleOS was able to have its running code modified on the fly, and allowed direct low level access to what was under the hood in perhaps a more interesting hacker-ish way than your typical Unix clone/descendant.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      That's a bit silly, tbh. Dropping you straight into BASIC may be appropriate for an 8-bit computer with a few hundred KiB at most of combined RAM and ROM, but the Raspberry Pi is nothing like that. A *nix system is really the closest analogy, since the development tools for that are only an apt-get away! You even get some BASIC implementations, even though it's not very clear how much those help. I'd actually like to see a roughly BASIC-like language that's simply a reasonably light syntax-wrapper over, say, Rust. It might make it easy for novices to get into hacking and software dev with a language that doesn't abstract too much away from the actual system - and then transition to a "real" language like Rust later.
- 7y ago
sebow 7y ago
A hacker is motivated to hack great software/systems.(Hacking in the "modern" sense has been more about software than hardware, since not as many people have the resources to tinker around with hardware,potentially breaking in the process). I would argue the reason why hacking has kind of "died" is because of the massive amounts of garbage software that gets put out. On top of that, hacking isn't actually dead,it just kind of moved in the shadows.(This has been de facto true after the 2012 "era of big-brother revelations", and shortly when the "big figures" of hacking have jailed.) I'd say firstly modern hackers have to always adapt by "working twice as hard" while having the "penetrating" mindset towards software that becomes increasingly harder to penetrate(through different techniques,which CS has developed firstly at theoretical then practical levels). Secondly,software developers now usually work in groups and are incentivized by money.Even if they're less skilled individually, together they manage to create harder software to penetrate. However,this "brothership" in the hacking community is very hard to acquire,because 90% of the time it is motivated by something other than money: ethics,sense of justice, etc.(What i subjectively consider a "hacker" isn't someone who "hacks" an ATM by putting a cloning device on a facade) On top of this,you add the fact that governments try to gain more and more control over the internet and all-things computing, punishing people who "legally deserved it" but did the society a favor(Snowden,Assange,etc. basically any leak that has been "proven true" but the means of acquiring information left the boot-lickers unsatisfied). On the bright side, i wouldn't exactly say hacking is dead,it's just that the computing sphere is changing so fast, it leaves hackers undecided.Some people don't even bother when in the relatively short future we'll probably see the "downfall" of classical computing as we know it.
buzzkillington 7y ago
>And no, before we keep going, I don't mean that we should not be political in our actions, today. We are social animals and we should care about society and politics, in fact, it would seem to me that the only reason, at least if one is to take the book at its word, why early hacking was a-political is because hackers were fairly despicable a-social people. Fuck you too buddy. The hackers were anti-social because the mob is not a thing to please. It is a plague to avoid. That we let them into our internet to pollute it with twitter, facebook and instagram was the worst mistake of the 21st century. Enough of 'empowering everyone', most people are barely worth keeping alive, let alone being given a voice. It's time that we empowered those that can create beauty. For a start anyone who can't write their own networking software is not someone who should be online. To quote a better man than us both, destroyed by the mob: >Artists have visited despots, not as subjects to be tyrannised over, but as wandering wonder-makers, as fascinating vagrant personalities, to be entertained and charmed and suffered to be at peace, and allowed to create. There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has none. One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud. And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor. In fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all. But there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/ https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-...
ChuckMcM 7y ago
I don't think true hacking is dead, its just lost in a sea of non-hacking. The number of students who could write code in my high school of 2000 was perhaps 35. Those 35 were amazing because they had to work to get access to a computer, so we had already eliminated everyone who was just "oh that's too hard". Of the 35 perhaps a dozen kept at it beyond one class in BASIC. In my daughter's similarly sized highschool 400 to 500 of the students had some proficiency in writing code, and perhaps 200 had the motivation to keep at it on a serious level after graduation. Of those, perhaps a dozen were people who I would equate to the 'hackers' that we had at my high school. This led me to conclude that its a small fraction of the population that has what I think of as the 'compulsive puzzle' gene. That is they find themselves driven to solve puzzles which they understand must have a solution. There are ways to identify them. If you have the ability to give puzzles, leave some around to be found. Watch for the ones who solve them. In the world where 'everyone is a coder' though it is super easy to not see them.
- geocar 7y ago
  An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do! We were surprised (if also for other reasons) because we confused the product with the means, or to paraphrase Feynman, hacking is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
  - atoav 7y ago
    It is a mix of challenge, curiosity and (probably) the will to be in total control of a little subsection of reality. And it certainly isn’t dead.
    - lsofzz 7y ago
      > And it certainly isn’t dead. Or to put it another way, it's alive and kicking ass :-)
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
japhyr 7y ago
It feels like the word "hacking" is losing more and more meaning over time. In the beginning it was a word only people heavily into computers used. Then around the time of War Games it became a more commonly-known word, and connotated breaking in. Over the last couple decades more people became aware that hacking sometimes refers to building technical projects. But it still has a heavy connotation of breaking into a system or program. Hacking became cool once hackers started getting rich and gaining prominence in society. My son is 8, and many of his friends think they're hackers when they use a cheat code on a game. Most of them know they're not writing code and really changing the game, but they all want to think of themselves as hackers so they say they're hacking their games. Very few of them even really know what a line of code looks like yet. Any notion of "true" hacking is bound to be about putting walls up to say who's in and who's out. In reality, there are always people building new things, and there are always people trying to break into systems and programs.
- blihp 7y ago
  I don't think its lost meaning as much as it has a completely different meaning than it used to. It seems pretty common when something goes mainstream, as computing has, for original definitions to be tossed aside while the terms get re-appropriated by/for a more mainstream audience. This happens all the time in other parts of culture whether music, fashion or whatever. So I guess it shouldn't be too surprising that it's happened in tech too. Doesn't mean one needs to like it, just accept it for what it is.
  - AllasAskBar 7y ago
    Yet if you are a conservative you believe that the original meaning is the actual meaning. The uneducated masses of plebs merely utters a word, they do not use it.
rs23296008n1 7y ago
Hackers were like the hotrodders before. Here's a thing. Make it work. Make it faster. Improve it. Change it. Know how it works. Master it. I don't think its died. Its more likely morphed into something you don't recognise because its always been dynamic and now you're attempting to apply a static definition. Then you get frustrated or lament "its not the same as in the good old days". But the reality is that people are tinkering right now with the new tech or the new thing in ways you don't even know about. This is definitely the case with cars, computers, electronics, gardening, clothes, food etc etc. Gardening, clothes? Why did I include those?! "Thats not hacking!" People are tinkering with these things. Making them better. Making them their own. Hacking was never just bits and bytes. Learn how this puzzle works. Change it. Make your own. That hasn't stopped.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  > Make it work. Make it faster. This is not hacking.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Why not?
peteforde 7y ago
There was a time when I used to fret that the era of tinkering was coming to an end. Crypto was going to be illegal, they were going to put DRM on speakers, and our computers are designed to be completely locked down to the degree that you can't even add more RAM to a MacBook Pro. However, I think that the rise of Linux, Raspberry Pi and Arduino, OSS and Github and massive package repos for every language, Adafruit, even 3D printers have replaced stuff that didn't want to be hacked with an endless array of stuff that is literally begging to be hacked. Between YouTube and coding bootcamps, you have to actively not want to learn technical skills. The author also calls out Unity as part of the problem, which pretty much confirms to me that we're not reading advanced analysis. Unity is fucking incredible; not only is it an engineering marvel with cross-platform compilation capacity that makes Babel look like a total joke, but it is probably the single most capable, interesting and fun platform for artistic expression in modern computing. Seriously, the way to get kids to keep interested once Scratch gets dull is to throw them into a AAA 3D engine that lets you build a compelling VR creation in an hour from free, downloadable assets. Unity should be in high school classrooms. The breadth and quality of assets available on their store is shocking. If you have artist's block, just scroll through a few pages of assets. Problem solved. I think what really got to me was the overwhelming sense that the author wasn't talking about hacking but recreating the exact same conditions that existed when he was a young person... while completely ignoring the huge amounts of privilege that he enjoyed to be able to have a computer in the house and have such a incredible headstart on his learning compared to the other 99.99% of the population - many of whom don't look like him or believe the same things. Today, even relatively poor kids have access to tablets which means that they can build games in apps like Roblox. Who makes him the authority on what counts as hacking? If a young woman makes a game where her friends all want to hang out together after school and talk about their lives in a safe space, isn't that the ultimate hack? I really didn't enjoy this op-ed, and I wish people wouldn't bring it a larger audience by posting on HN.
- z3phyr 7y ago
  > The author also calls out Unity as part of the problem I am sorry, where does he do that?
  - 7y ago
pleasecalllater 7y ago
Three things: 1. I have no idea why "hacking" aka "going fast and breaking things" is so glorified while "building good reliable programs" aka "good programming" is not. 2. How come that someone thinks of himself/herself that he/she has the right to say who is a "true hacker" and who is not. 3. AND THIS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX5Xy3a2uJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX5Xy3a2uJU Thank you Jayson.
- lsofzz 7y ago
  > 1. I have no idea why "hacking" aka "going fast and breaking things" is so glorified while "building good reliable programs" aka "good programming" is not. The way I see it, `going fast and breaking things' is an iterative process. IMHO, it should not be viewed as `go fast, break things and _never_ iterate to fix things'. Just thought I'd toss my two cents on it. > 2. How come that someone thinks of himself/herself that he/she has the right to say who is a hacker and who is not. No idea why you feel binary. If you like to call yourself a hacker - fuck it - go for it. The connotation in the beginning were that hackers were pioneers, thinkers, achievers and great motivators. Over time, the meaning has been mutated and engineered by the media to mean `malicious' and `conniving' thieves/criminals. To this day, I still stick to the original definition of a `hacker'. I don't give a two fuck about what the media likes to call it.
  - dijit 7y ago
    There was a term from the early 00's for malicious "hackers", which was crackers. Yes, it doesn't have the same ring to it so I understand why the media didn't latch on to it. But if the media is unwilling to budge should we just make a new word? "Hack" was never a good term to begin with, originating from the model railroad club at MIT.
    - lsofzz 7y ago
      > There was a term from the early 00's for malicious "hackers", which was crackers. Yes. > But if the media is unwilling to budge should we just make a new word? Not sure how that will pan out :-)
adjkant 7y ago
Ignoring defining what "true hacking" is defined as, I'm struggling to pinpoint exactly what has been lost here. Many new things have come into existence, but this feels like a list of laments against the direction technology grew, not something lost. Plenty of people are still tinkerers focused on making small personal projects, and if anything its highest concentration is here on HN. That doesn't mean all of the other things in the tech world are inherently lacking in value though. When focusing on technology why focus on "hacking", a somewhat odd and specific use case as defined here?
pjmlp 7y ago
> Even the Demoscene, one of the last bastions of true hackerism, is completely uninterested in the ideology of software licenses and contracts. Demoscene never cared about this kind of stuff. In fact of the interesting challenges of the Demoscene was trying to find out how competing groups achieved some demos, without having access to the said information, while in process outperforming their demos at parties. This is one of the key differences between Demoscene and anything FOSS related. And also why game developers as offsprings from Demoscene, also don't care about them, rather about IP and how to extract the best experience out of a given piece of hardware, regardless of the OS, API or NDAs that one has to go through.
- userbinator 7y ago
  In fact of the interesting challenges of the Demoscene was trying to find out how competing groups achieved some demos, without having access to the said information, while in process outperforming their demos at parties. The demoscene has its roots in software cracking, where reverse-engineering is the norm and you're not expected to be given source or told but to find out yourself, so that's not too surprising. Of course they don't care about licenses, because from that perspective they are merely arbitrary restrictions to be broken at will.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > Demoscene never cared about this kind of stuff. Well, in a way, they did - they cared a lot (and still care) about credit and reputation, even to the extent of making "not for commercial use" licensing terms quite popular. Someone with an attitude of 'true' openness would simply not care about commercial use 'tainting' one's creative output, and trust that good-enough attribution would be kept most of the time, out of simple reciprocity.
soufron 7y ago
Did it ever existed to begin with? The myth begun with "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" from Steven Levy in 1984, and it was mainly propaganda.
majewsky 7y ago
Other people have already commented on the core message. I have a nitpick instead: > That's probably why we still have textual source (great for git and merging) over more expressive formats or even the old idea of serializing the entire state of a VM (again lisp, smalltalk) which sacrifices merging entirely to make hotpatching (dynamic software updates) trivial. Good. Not being able to merge squarely belongs in the past, where everyone had access to only one machine. I'm incredibly thankful that I can merge the half-finished work on my desktop from last evening with the patches that I just pushed from my notebook while in the train.
- DagAgren 7y ago
  More expressive representations of source code enables better merging. Merging code as opaque strings of text is a bad choice, and causes lots of problems to programmers every day.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    > More expressive representations of source code enables better merging. Merging is usually easy regardless of representation when all changes are comparatively local. The problem is always merging big far-reaching changes like a complete refactoring of an entire module, and I don't immediately see how any non-text representation would do significantly better (by a wide-enough margin to justify changing paradigms) than text at assisting with the merge process in this case.
    - DagAgren 7y ago
      Have you never got large merge conflicts because one branch made some changes to a block of code, and the other left it intact but changed its indentation? That kind of thing would not happen in a better representation.
kart23 7y ago
Graduated high school a couple years ago. Plenty of people coded, but I had only had one friend that actually was interested in doing more with computers. We found some pretty cool stuff on the school network, and ways to screw with our less tech-savvy friends. It even cost me a trip to the principal's office one time, due to my stupidity and inexperience. I guess I'm not part of the right forums or boards, but I just haven't been able to find other people with that same kind of passion. I know I could and should just get started by myself, but I'm the type of person that just loses motivation and the will to keep working if I dont have someone else by my side. And I go to a UC. Sure plenty of people know a bit of linux and networking, but how many people actually want to go past their classes and actually take the time to research and learn more? It's hard to find those people. As a result, I'm moving away from hacking into more normal spaces like appdev and web stuff. Its definitely not as exciting, and I dont think I'll ever again feel that thrill of being called to the principal's office for hacking.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > I go to a UC. Sure plenty of people know a bit of linux and networking, but how many people actually want to go past their classes and actually take the time to research and learn more? It's hard to find those people. Those people do exist, but they’re probably not in a classroom for much longer than it takes to complete the final.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  > I dont think I'll ever again feel that thrill of being called to the principal's office for hacking. Once you become an adult, the "principal's office" is much less interesting place to be. If you still want to do it, though, there are plenty of opportunities to do so on the "white hat" side of things; look into computer security research, "pen testing", and similar stuff - if you can learn that and have a passion for it, you can make some big bucks doing legit legal hacking. Of course - everything you learn can be applied to grey and black-hat activities as well (which can be lucrative as well - up to a point of course).
ww520 7y ago
Yes. It’s dead. Killed by money.
javajosh 7y ago
If you define hacking as gaining access to scarce compute resources, then yes, hacking is dead because compute scarcity is dead. If you define hacking as controlling your computer hardware at the lowest level, then hacking is dead because no-one wants to write device drivers. If you define hacking as *making the lights blink in interesting ways"[1] then hacking is incredibly, richly, and totally alive! You can make the lights blink in so many interesting ways! To sum up, that's one really good change, one somewhat unfortunate but understandable change, and another really incredibly good change. (BTW I don't think the OP's point about complex OSS really fits in this particular essay - minimalism is important topic and deserves it's own essay, but it's not related to hacking, IMHO). [1] I don't recall where I read this, but Feynman wrote about being involved with the Manhattan project, with the simulations they were trying to run on very early, primitive computers, and how one or two scientists put on that part of the project had to be replaced because they got too fascinated with the "blinking lights" to get any work done. I find this anecdote very easy to believe.
- lsofzz 7y ago
  > If you define hacking as controlling your computer hardware at the lowest level, then hacking is dead because no-one wants to write device drivers. This is absurd. Dude, let me be clear - Just because you write Java all day long does not mean that there are hundreds if not thousands of embedded system developers who engineer (quite passionately!) the thing that powers your SSD or your wireless card or the thing that heats your home. We often take these substrates (in this context - the firmware and device drivers etc.) for granted in the modern hardware and often fail to even acknowledge them. I am not one of them and I vehemently defend these silent heroes of our generation.
  - javajosh 7y ago
    You know, I had a moment where I thought "perhaps I should add a disclaimer about what 'no-one' means", but then I decided against proactive defense against a pedantic retort, assuming that HN would understand how tiring it is to qualify statements like that. Clearly I was wrong. Thousands do care. So here's what I mean: When you take the ratio of the thousands that do compared to the millions who don't, you get a number that's pretty close to zero (one tenth of a percent, back of envelope).
_nalply 7y ago
Hacking has changed. I tinker with a homegrown family information and media center with a dis-used Gigabyte BRIX behind an old flat screen running Linux and chromium-browser in kiosk mode. I bought a NES style USB gamepad and use it to make things show. It's a hobby, but it turned out to be nice. For me that's hacking.
brain5ide 7y ago
True hacking is only for true Scotsmen. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
zekrioca 7y ago
Were early hackings done by "fairly despicable a-social people"? Maybe I did not get this.
acoye 7y ago
Maybe "old school hacking" is still present in the "maker" movement. For the pragmatic, practical hands on approach I mean.
mulle_nat 7y ago
Enter Firefox, press CTRL-SHIFT-I. It's pretty much all there.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
KaiserPro 7y ago
Sounds like gatekeeping to me. Hacking of yore largely was like theoretical maths. Isolated from the real world and of little practicable use, yet. It was a closed eco system in the 70s-90s. You either had to steal or be rich to get access to a machine. Yes, real steel from the likes of DEC, IBM, ICL et al were magic. The early days of networked OSs equally wonderful. But. Now, with an ESP I can have a battery powered, wirelessly networked computer to do pretty much anything I want, for $10 and power budget of 100ma. If you want to see where low lever hacking has gone, look at the micro-controllers. They are literally taking over the world, run by no small part, by keen amateurs.
- anthk 7y ago
  I'd setup a micro-controller based BSD 4.4 lite 2, but they are very short in RAM. If they were 4-8MB, they could be my main microPC setup.
mscasts 7y ago
What exactly is "true" hacking and how does it differ from "normal" hacking?
al_form2000 7y ago
<<I don't mean that we should not be political in our actions, today.>> Y not? <<...early hacking was a-political is because hackers were fairly despicable a-social people.>> That is what made it fun.
ddtaylor 7y ago
Does anyone else get a "no true scotsman" vibe?
steven741 7y ago
Moving past the "no true scott's man" fallacy of the title; i feel that this article confuses the act of being a hacker with the tools that people use to hack with. Which is a common thing to do when a concept is new. For me, being a hacker means being able to work at a certain level of abstraction and, not being afraid to "open up the box" and start working at that level of abstraction. For example, being able to work with a raspberry pi loaded with linux and, then being able to start hacking at the linux kernel or libraries when needed is what makes someone a hacker.
- pdonis 7y ago
  I note that the author of the article appears to thing a raspberry pi would work just fine if it booted Windows. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.
luord 7y ago
The point of this article is all the harder to see because there isn't even a definition of what "hacker" means to the author. There are many different definitions. If one subscribes to, say, Eric Raymond's, then there are many more hackers today and hacking itself is more prevalent than ever.
crankylinuxuser 7y ago
So, what does C0DE517E think hacking is? I'm surprised nobody picked up on it... 2/3s of the way down is a link (by the way - wanna see something weird?). That link goes to [0] which is about 'Dark Enlightenment'. The key takeaways here are: democracy is bad, white people are smarter, Urbit, and Yarvin. But surely someone can link without advocating? And then we get to this bit, "Whatever the causes, we have software and hardware systems that strive to be entirely open, yet time and again are closed ones that are more accessible in practice, that drive social revolutions." The author is making a roundabout case for the Dark Enlightenment, and ecosystems like Urbit which enforce a neo-serfdom and elimination of democracy at a technological scale. I'm surprised nobody else picked up on who this person thinks hackers are. It's certainly hidden in plain sight. [0] https://breakermag.com/heres-the-dark-enlightenment-explainer-you-never-wanted/ https://breakermag.com/heres-the-dark-enlightenment-explaine...
- c0de517e 7y ago
  Author here - no, that link was to show something bizzarre, how (some) people lose their minds in weird elucubrations on the politics of software - instead of actual hacking. I am definitely not endorsing in any way ever that cesspool that is D.E., I'm sorry if it wasn't clear from the text.
  - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
    My apologies then. I've dealt with Yarvin's people in person and online. Many a times, they will sneak these kinds of things into conversations and slide these things like DE and Urbit in on the side. Had one, at the hackerspace I used to attend, quote Mussolini about how good an idea the DE was. So yeah I'm a bit on guard.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
Nice ideas. I think that complexity can be the enemy of “hackability.” Some environments like Pharo Smalltalk are simple enough to dig down to see how stuff works, and I would add simple Lisp implementations. When I first started using Ruby and Rails, I kept the source code to Ruby and for Rails available for perusal and it was more or less understandable. Not so much now. Complexity. I think that the Racket ecosystem will get more hackable once the codebase sits on top of Chez Scheme. Racket is well documented: 18 months ago I wanted to import trained weights and biases from a trained Keras/TensorFlow model into Racket and implement a runtime - fairly easy to do with good documentation and good library support for fast linear algebra. Too bad that more people don’t spend more effort on hacking activities because really understanding tools, modifying code, etc. is fun and I would argue a good career move. EDIT: added 1 word for clarity
Ocerge 7y ago
Maybe, but programming now provides a stable income for way more people, whether it's their passion or not. In this day in age, the ability to put food on the table trumps any sort of bit-banging nostalgia IMO. The fewer gates we keep, the better.
erikbye 7y ago
Speaking of books on hackers, I can recommend Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World. I enjoyed it thoroughly despite the title. Did you know Beto O'Rourke was a member?
Annatar 7y ago
"We buy cars and go to mechanics, right? We don't know how to peek inside the engines anymore." I don't know which world you live in, but it sure isn't mine! Even at the height of working as a senior system engineer / technical architect in the heart of Silicon Valley, I regularly wrenched on my car; I even found a self-wrench shop near the Tesla factory in Fremont. In fact I just wrenched on my car this past weekend. I wrench on all my cars. How could I call myself an engineer without understanding what I use?
bregma 7y ago
A hacker is someone who clicks on https://www.sparkfun.com/ https://www.sparkfun.com/ and doesn't come up for air for at least an hour. Can you pass the test?
thrax 7y ago
Git webgl
AnnoyingSwede 7y ago
TL;DR: Hacking is more alive then ever. I might be missing the point of his article, but describing the c64 basic coding movement as a single movement is misunderstanding it gravely. The fact that Basic was licensed by Microsoft didn't stop us, it was the the default interpreter we had to programming, which soon was replaced by masm/tasm or machine code. More so then than today, hackers of all kinds (hackers, crackers, phreakers) were all following their own individual paths and was way less uniformed than todays movements. I believe the main reason most are focusing on OSS today was because of the dis-content we felt with the development of operating systems that slowly but surely locked us in as users.
whatitdobooboo 7y ago
I didn't personally get the sense that the author was reminiscing about the past. I just thought of it more as what he thinks is a lack of ambition and vision in computing today in ways that will solve larger problems rather than going with the closed environments that are available today. tldr; Maybe having an open plane with few imaginative restrictions (as early computing did) allows one to rethink certain patterns we assume as truth today. For example, if no one is working on a new OS because of Linux, Windows - could that be worse for the world in the long run?
ggggtez 7y ago
It's kind of funny. The post thinks wistfully about the "real" hackers that wanted everyone to have access to computers. But that already happened. So is it any wonder that no one really cares about that ideology any more? > [they are] completely uninterested in the ideology of software licenses and contracts. Sure, but who cares exactly? Isn't an interest in legal nuances of contracts rather orthagonal to "hacking"? >Linux didn't change the desktop, nor the way software is made. Here, I'll just flat out disagree. I think saying this is rather blind to history.
stebann 7y ago
Hacking is not dead, but it has become complex because you have to deal with many layers of abstraction. In fact, we have to deal with complex concepts, implementations with different layers of complexity, more protocols... so the knowledge to hack something goes beyond that, because you have to understand how something works, maybe completely, to add something novel to it.
pontifier 7y ago
In some sense, I think that there is something of a tragedy of plenty happening in the maker/hacker community. When options were few, you had dense groups with deep knowledge about different hackable technologies. The abundance of options, while good in general, limits the usefulness of that kind of deep knowledge in favor of a broader kind of knowledge. How many ways are there to blink a light or read a potentiometer? Expanding on a simple project can take hundreds of different paths depending on your hardware and software stack. It's not dead, it's just adapting to the current landscape of abundance.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

255 points by Impossible 7y ago

Management figured out how to manage the "hackers", and the good "hackers" learned how to socialize (what this article calls "politics").

leipert 7y ago

I assume there is the same amount of “true” hackers out there. At least that is my impression from the Chaos Communication Congress and alike. Probably the percentage of “true” hackers is way smaller now as computers became cheap and more accessible. If you look at the “great and true hackers” from the 80s and before, most of them probably come from academia, government agencies or wealthy backgrounds. I for one welcome the change, because I think the entry barrier to become a “true” hacker is probably the same as before, if not easier and we definitely opened the doors for more people.

erikpukinskis 7y ago

We’re still here. More than ever actually. There’s just more noise.

scaryclam 7y ago
Do any communities still exist?
- acoye 7y ago
  Probably somewhere on the other side of the looking glass … I mean freenode.
- tiborsaas 7y ago
  I've heard about an early Silicon Valley accelerator with some geeky name about functional programming has one :)
- r3dk1ng 7y ago
  Yes. Though if they were easy to find they'd be overrun with people who don't feel that what they found is worth protecting.
- acoye 7y ago
  Secret is out, everybody hangs out on twitter nowadays. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCwiZ2dh17Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCwiZ2dh17Q

atq2119 7y ago

I've never understood the appeal of hot-patching and full process image save and restore. Yes, this technology is neat for some use cases, but as a fundamental way of computing it's broken, because it throws reproducibility out of the window. Reproducibility is everything in complex systems, and being able to reset and start fresh is powerful. Evolution figured that out as well. It's why basically all species propagate via the birth of new individuals and the death of the old ones.

heisenbit 7y ago
As soon as one works on a non-trivial piece of software and has a team >2 SCM becomes important. There was one SCM system for PP Smalltalk if memory serves right called Envy but it was quite expensive. But even more important than SCM is a module/library eco system. We can’t trade without reproducibility. Without it we are destined to re-invent the wheel. There is value in reinventing wheel - it is entertaining and stress free - as it does not matter for anyone but yourself.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  You always have a team >2, unless you're just writing a quick throwaway hack. Your future selves are members of the team, and there might be quite a few of them over time as you simply forget what you were working on earlier.
smabie 7y ago
There’s no reason why you couldn’t have an image based system that also supported versioned images. Then you wouldn’t need any source code at all and still rollback changes.
xkriva11 7y ago
You can have the best of both worlds. In some Smalltalks (like Pharo), the image is bootstrapped from the source code but you can still use image persistency.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

entelechy0 7y ago

This title is clickbait af. Who is to say what is and is not 'true' hacking?

tus88 7y ago

> The sad and inspiring story of TempleOS, a.k.a. what the Raspberry Pi should have been. Eh?

solidgriever 7y ago
What the...
cyborgx7 7y ago
Wait, that is actually in there. What the hell does this even mean?
- octotoad 7y ago
  Sounds like they’re referring to characteristics of TempleOS that may have suited the original goals of the Raspberry Pi, which was to be a tinker-friendly device for audiences like school children. Some people lament the fact that it simply ended up with a plain, general purpose Unix-like, rather than something more low level and immediately direct (as in, drop you to a BASIC, not necessarily assembler), ala Commodore 64. The peculiarities of the author aside, a live TempleOS was able to have its running code modified on the fly, and allowed direct low level access to what was under the hood in perhaps a more interesting hacker-ish way than your typical Unix clone/descendant.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    That's a bit silly, tbh. Dropping you straight into BASIC may be appropriate for an 8-bit computer with a few hundred KiB at most of combined RAM and ROM, but the Raspberry Pi is nothing like that. A *nix system is really the closest analogy, since the development tools for that are only an apt-get away! You even get some BASIC implementations, even though it's not very clear how much those help. I'd actually like to see a roughly BASIC-like language that's simply a reasonably light syntax-wrapper over, say, Rust. It might make it easy for novices to get into hacking and software dev with a language that doesn't abstract too much away from the actual system - and then transition to a "real" language like Rust later.
7y ago

sebow 7y ago

A hacker is motivated to hack great software/systems.(Hacking in the "modern" sense has been more about software than hardware, since not as many people have the resources to tinker around with hardware,potentially breaking in the process). I would argue the reason why hacking has kind of "died" is because of the massive amounts of garbage software that gets put out. On top of that, hacking isn't actually dead,it just kind of moved in the shadows.(This has been de facto true after the 2012 "era of big-brother revelations", and shortly when the "big figures" of hacking have jailed.) I'd say firstly modern hackers have to always adapt by "working twice as hard" while having the "penetrating" mindset towards software that becomes increasingly harder to penetrate(through different techniques,which CS has developed firstly at theoretical then practical levels). Secondly,software developers now usually work in groups and are incentivized by money.Even if they're less skilled individually, together they manage to create harder software to penetrate. However,this "brothership" in the hacking community is very hard to acquire,because 90% of the time it is motivated by something other than money: ethics,sense of justice, etc.(What i subjectively consider a "hacker" isn't someone who "hacks" an ATM by putting a cloning device on a facade) On top of this,you add the fact that governments try to gain more and more control over the internet and all-things computing, punishing people who "legally deserved it" but did the society a favor(Snowden,Assange,etc. basically any leak that has been "proven true" but the means of acquiring information left the boot-lickers unsatisfied). On the bright side, i wouldn't exactly say hacking is dead,it's just that the computing sphere is changing so fast, it leaves hackers undecided.Some people don't even bother when in the relatively short future we'll probably see the "downfall" of classical computing as we know it.

buzzkillington 7y ago

>And no, before we keep going, I don't mean that we should not be political in our actions, today. We are social animals and we should care about society and politics, in fact, it would seem to me that the only reason, at least if one is to take the book at its word, why early hacking was a-political is because hackers were fairly despicable a-social people. Fuck you too buddy. The hackers were anti-social because the mob is not a thing to please. It is a plague to avoid. That we let them into our internet to pollute it with twitter, facebook and instagram was the worst mistake of the 21st century. Enough of 'empowering everyone', most people are barely worth keeping alive, let alone being given a voice. It's time that we empowered those that can create beauty. For a start anyone who can't write their own networking software is not someone who should be online. To quote a better man than us both, destroyed by the mob: >Artists have visited despots, not as subjects to be tyrannised over, but as wandering wonder-makers, as fascinating vagrant personalities, to be entertained and charmed and suffered to be at peace, and allowed to create. There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has none. One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud. And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor. In fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all. But there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/ https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-...

ChuckMcM 7y ago

I don't think true hacking is dead, its just lost in a sea of non-hacking. The number of students who could write code in my high school of 2000 was perhaps 35. Those 35 were amazing because they had to work to get access to a computer, so we had already eliminated everyone who was just "oh that's too hard". Of the 35 perhaps a dozen kept at it beyond one class in BASIC. In my daughter's similarly sized highschool 400 to 500 of the students had some proficiency in writing code, and perhaps 200 had the motivation to keep at it on a serious level after graduation. Of those, perhaps a dozen were people who I would equate to the 'hackers' that we had at my high school. This led me to conclude that its a small fraction of the population that has what I think of as the 'compulsive puzzle' gene. That is they find themselves driven to solve puzzles which they understand must have a solution. There are ways to identify them. If you have the ability to give puzzles, leave some around to be found. Watch for the ones who solve them. In the world where 'everyone is a coder' though it is super easy to not see them.

geocar 7y ago
An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do! We were surprised (if also for other reasons) because we confused the product with the means, or to paraphrase Feynman, hacking is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
- atoav 7y ago
  It is a mix of challenge, curiosity and (probably) the will to be in total control of a little subsection of reality. And it certainly isn’t dead.
  - lsofzz 7y ago
    > And it certainly isn’t dead. Or to put it another way, it's alive and kicking ass :-)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

japhyr 7y ago

It feels like the word "hacking" is losing more and more meaning over time. In the beginning it was a word only people heavily into computers used. Then around the time of War Games it became a more commonly-known word, and connotated breaking in. Over the last couple decades more people became aware that hacking sometimes refers to building technical projects. But it still has a heavy connotation of breaking into a system or program. Hacking became cool once hackers started getting rich and gaining prominence in society. My son is 8, and many of his friends think they're hackers when they use a cheat code on a game. Most of them know they're not writing code and really changing the game, but they all want to think of themselves as hackers so they say they're hacking their games. Very few of them even really know what a line of code looks like yet. Any notion of "true" hacking is bound to be about putting walls up to say who's in and who's out. In reality, there are always people building new things, and there are always people trying to break into systems and programs.

blihp 7y ago
I don't think its lost meaning as much as it has a completely different meaning than it used to. It seems pretty common when something goes mainstream, as computing has, for original definitions to be tossed aside while the terms get re-appropriated by/for a more mainstream audience. This happens all the time in other parts of culture whether music, fashion or whatever. So I guess it shouldn't be too surprising that it's happened in tech too. Doesn't mean one needs to like it, just accept it for what it is.
- AllasAskBar 7y ago
  Yet if you are a conservative you believe that the original meaning is the actual meaning. The uneducated masses of plebs merely utters a word, they do not use it.

rs23296008n1 7y ago

Hackers were like the hotrodders before. Here's a thing. Make it work. Make it faster. Improve it. Change it. Know how it works. Master it. I don't think its died. Its more likely morphed into something you don't recognise because its always been dynamic and now you're attempting to apply a static definition. Then you get frustrated or lament "its not the same as in the good old days". But the reality is that people are tinkering right now with the new tech or the new thing in ways you don't even know about. This is definitely the case with cars, computers, electronics, gardening, clothes, food etc etc. Gardening, clothes? Why did I include those?! "Thats not hacking!" People are tinkering with these things. Making them better. Making them their own. Hacking was never just bits and bytes. Learn how this puzzle works. Change it. Make your own. That hasn't stopped.

eeZah7Ux 7y ago
> Make it work. Make it faster. This is not hacking.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Why not?

peteforde 7y ago

There was a time when I used to fret that the era of tinkering was coming to an end. Crypto was going to be illegal, they were going to put DRM on speakers, and our computers are designed to be completely locked down to the degree that you can't even add more RAM to a MacBook Pro. However, I think that the rise of Linux, Raspberry Pi and Arduino, OSS and Github and massive package repos for every language, Adafruit, even 3D printers have replaced stuff that didn't want to be hacked with an endless array of stuff that is literally begging to be hacked. Between YouTube and coding bootcamps, you have to actively not want to learn technical skills. The author also calls out Unity as part of the problem, which pretty much confirms to me that we're not reading advanced analysis. Unity is fucking incredible; not only is it an engineering marvel with cross-platform compilation capacity that makes Babel look like a total joke, but it is probably the single most capable, interesting and fun platform for artistic expression in modern computing. Seriously, the way to get kids to keep interested once Scratch gets dull is to throw them into a AAA 3D engine that lets you build a compelling VR creation in an hour from free, downloadable assets. Unity should be in high school classrooms. The breadth and quality of assets available on their store is shocking. If you have artist's block, just scroll through a few pages of assets. Problem solved. I think what really got to me was the overwhelming sense that the author wasn't talking about hacking but recreating the exact same conditions that existed when he was a young person... while completely ignoring the huge amounts of privilege that he enjoyed to be able to have a computer in the house and have such a incredible headstart on his learning compared to the other 99.99% of the population - many of whom don't look like him or believe the same things. Today, even relatively poor kids have access to tablets which means that they can build games in apps like Roblox. Who makes him the authority on what counts as hacking? If a young woman makes a game where her friends all want to hang out together after school and talk about their lives in a safe space, isn't that the ultimate hack? I really didn't enjoy this op-ed, and I wish people wouldn't bring it a larger audience by posting on HN.

z3phyr 7y ago
> The author also calls out Unity as part of the problem I am sorry, where does he do that?
- 7y ago

pleasecalllater 7y ago

Three things: 1. I have no idea why "hacking" aka "going fast and breaking things" is so glorified while "building good reliable programs" aka "good programming" is not. 2. How come that someone thinks of himself/herself that he/she has the right to say who is a "true hacker" and who is not. 3. AND THIS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX5Xy3a2uJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX5Xy3a2uJU Thank you Jayson.

lsofzz 7y ago
> 1. I have no idea why "hacking" aka "going fast and breaking things" is so glorified while "building good reliable programs" aka "good programming" is not. The way I see it, `going fast and breaking things' is an iterative process. IMHO, it should not be viewed as `go fast, break things and _never_ iterate to fix things'. Just thought I'd toss my two cents on it. > 2. How come that someone thinks of himself/herself that he/she has the right to say who is a hacker and who is not. No idea why you feel binary. If you like to call yourself a hacker - fuck it - go for it. The connotation in the beginning were that hackers were pioneers, thinkers, achievers and great motivators. Over time, the meaning has been mutated and engineered by the media to mean `malicious' and `conniving' thieves/criminals. To this day, I still stick to the original definition of a `hacker'. I don't give a two fuck about what the media likes to call it.
- dijit 7y ago
  There was a term from the early 00's for malicious "hackers", which was crackers. Yes, it doesn't have the same ring to it so I understand why the media didn't latch on to it. But if the media is unwilling to budge should we just make a new word? "Hack" was never a good term to begin with, originating from the model railroad club at MIT.
  - lsofzz 7y ago
    > There was a term from the early 00's for malicious "hackers", which was crackers. Yes. > But if the media is unwilling to budge should we just make a new word? Not sure how that will pan out :-)

adjkant 7y ago

Ignoring defining what "true hacking" is defined as, I'm struggling to pinpoint exactly what has been lost here. Many new things have come into existence, but this feels like a list of laments against the direction technology grew, not something lost. Plenty of people are still tinkerers focused on making small personal projects, and if anything its highest concentration is here on HN. That doesn't mean all of the other things in the tech world are inherently lacking in value though. When focusing on technology why focus on "hacking", a somewhat odd and specific use case as defined here?

pjmlp 7y ago

> Even the Demoscene, one of the last bastions of true hackerism, is completely uninterested in the ideology of software licenses and contracts. Demoscene never cared about this kind of stuff. In fact of the interesting challenges of the Demoscene was trying to find out how competing groups achieved some demos, without having access to the said information, while in process outperforming their demos at parties. This is one of the key differences between Demoscene and anything FOSS related. And also why game developers as offsprings from Demoscene, also don't care about them, rather about IP and how to extract the best experience out of a given piece of hardware, regardless of the OS, API or NDAs that one has to go through.

userbinator 7y ago
In fact of the interesting challenges of the Demoscene was trying to find out how competing groups achieved some demos, without having access to the said information, while in process outperforming their demos at parties. The demoscene has its roots in software cracking, where reverse-engineering is the norm and you're not expected to be given source or told but to find out yourself, so that's not too surprising. Of course they don't care about licenses, because from that perspective they are merely arbitrary restrictions to be broken at will.
zozbot234 7y ago
> Demoscene never cared about this kind of stuff. Well, in a way, they did - they cared a lot (and still care) about credit and reputation, even to the extent of making "not for commercial use" licensing terms quite popular. Someone with an attitude of 'true' openness would simply not care about commercial use 'tainting' one's creative output, and trust that good-enough attribution would be kept most of the time, out of simple reciprocity.

soufron 7y ago

Did it ever existed to begin with? The myth begun with "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" from Steven Levy in 1984, and it was mainly propaganda.

majewsky 7y ago

Other people have already commented on the core message. I have a nitpick instead: > That's probably why we still have textual source (great for git and merging) over more expressive formats or even the old idea of serializing the entire state of a VM (again lisp, smalltalk) which sacrifices merging entirely to make hotpatching (dynamic software updates) trivial. Good. Not being able to merge squarely belongs in the past, where everyone had access to only one machine. I'm incredibly thankful that I can merge the half-finished work on my desktop from last evening with the patches that I just pushed from my notebook while in the train.

DagAgren 7y ago
More expressive representations of source code enables better merging. Merging code as opaque strings of text is a bad choice, and causes lots of problems to programmers every day.
- majewsky 7y ago
  > More expressive representations of source code enables better merging. Merging is usually easy regardless of representation when all changes are comparatively local. The problem is always merging big far-reaching changes like a complete refactoring of an entire module, and I don't immediately see how any non-text representation would do significantly better (by a wide-enough margin to justify changing paradigms) than text at assisting with the merge process in this case.
  - DagAgren 7y ago
    Have you never got large merge conflicts because one branch made some changes to a block of code, and the other left it intact but changed its indentation? That kind of thing would not happen in a better representation.

kart23 7y ago

Graduated high school a couple years ago. Plenty of people coded, but I had only had one friend that actually was interested in doing more with computers. We found some pretty cool stuff on the school network, and ways to screw with our less tech-savvy friends. It even cost me a trip to the principal's office one time, due to my stupidity and inexperience. I guess I'm not part of the right forums or boards, but I just haven't been able to find other people with that same kind of passion. I know I could and should just get started by myself, but I'm the type of person that just loses motivation and the will to keep working if I dont have someone else by my side. And I go to a UC. Sure plenty of people know a bit of linux and networking, but how many people actually want to go past their classes and actually take the time to research and learn more? It's hard to find those people. As a result, I'm moving away from hacking into more normal spaces like appdev and web stuff. Its definitely not as exciting, and I dont think I'll ever again feel that thrill of being called to the principal's office for hacking.

saagarjha 7y ago
> I go to a UC. Sure plenty of people know a bit of linux and networking, but how many people actually want to go past their classes and actually take the time to research and learn more? It's hard to find those people. Those people do exist, but they’re probably not in a classroom for much longer than it takes to complete the final.
cr0sh 7y ago
> I dont think I'll ever again feel that thrill of being called to the principal's office for hacking. Once you become an adult, the "principal's office" is much less interesting place to be. If you still want to do it, though, there are plenty of opportunities to do so on the "white hat" side of things; look into computer security research, "pen testing", and similar stuff - if you can learn that and have a passion for it, you can make some big bucks doing legit legal hacking. Of course - everything you learn can be applied to grey and black-hat activities as well (which can be lucrative as well - up to a point of course).

ww520 7y ago

Yes. It’s dead. Killed by money.

javajosh 7y ago

If you define hacking as gaining access to scarce compute resources, then yes, hacking is dead because compute scarcity is dead. If you define hacking as controlling your computer hardware at the lowest level, then hacking is dead because no-one wants to write device drivers. If you define hacking as *making the lights blink in interesting ways"[1] then hacking is incredibly, richly, and totally alive! You can make the lights blink in so many interesting ways! To sum up, that's one really good change, one somewhat unfortunate but understandable change, and another really incredibly good change. (BTW I don't think the OP's point about complex OSS really fits in this particular essay - minimalism is important topic and deserves it's own essay, but it's not related to hacking, IMHO). [1] I don't recall where I read this, but Feynman wrote about being involved with the Manhattan project, with the simulations they were trying to run on very early, primitive computers, and how one or two scientists put on that part of the project had to be replaced because they got too fascinated with the "blinking lights" to get any work done. I find this anecdote very easy to believe.

lsofzz 7y ago
> If you define hacking as controlling your computer hardware at the lowest level, then hacking is dead because no-one wants to write device drivers. This is absurd. Dude, let me be clear - Just because you write Java all day long does not mean that there are hundreds if not thousands of embedded system developers who engineer (quite passionately!) the thing that powers your SSD or your wireless card or the thing that heats your home. We often take these substrates (in this context - the firmware and device drivers etc.) for granted in the modern hardware and often fail to even acknowledge them. I am not one of them and I vehemently defend these silent heroes of our generation.
- javajosh 7y ago
  You know, I had a moment where I thought "perhaps I should add a disclaimer about what 'no-one' means", but then I decided against proactive defense against a pedantic retort, assuming that HN would understand how tiring it is to qualify statements like that. Clearly I was wrong. Thousands do care. So here's what I mean: When you take the ratio of the thousands that do compared to the millions who don't, you get a number that's pretty close to zero (one tenth of a percent, back of envelope).

_nalply 7y ago

Hacking has changed. I tinker with a homegrown family information and media center with a dis-used Gigabyte BRIX behind an old flat screen running Linux and chromium-browser in kiosk mode. I bought a NES style USB gamepad and use it to make things show. It's a hobby, but it turned out to be nice. For me that's hacking.

brain5ide 7y ago

True hacking is only for true Scotsmen. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

zekrioca 7y ago

Were early hackings done by "fairly despicable a-social people"? Maybe I did not get this.

acoye 7y ago

Maybe "old school hacking" is still present in the "maker" movement. For the pragmatic, practical hands on approach I mean.

mulle_nat 7y ago

Enter Firefox, press CTRL-SHIFT-I. It's pretty much all there.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

KaiserPro 7y ago

Sounds like gatekeeping to me. Hacking of yore largely was like theoretical maths. Isolated from the real world and of little practicable use, yet. It was a closed eco system in the 70s-90s. You either had to steal or be rich to get access to a machine. Yes, real steel from the likes of DEC, IBM, ICL et al were magic. The early days of networked OSs equally wonderful. But. Now, with an ESP I can have a battery powered, wirelessly networked computer to do pretty much anything I want, for $10 and power budget of 100ma. If you want to see where low lever hacking has gone, look at the micro-controllers. They are literally taking over the world, run by no small part, by keen amateurs.

anthk 7y ago
I'd setup a micro-controller based BSD 4.4 lite 2, but they are very short in RAM. If they were 4-8MB, they could be my main microPC setup.

mscasts 7y ago

What exactly is "true" hacking and how does it differ from "normal" hacking?

al_form2000 7y ago

<<I don't mean that we should not be political in our actions, today.>> Y not? <<...early hacking was a-political is because hackers were fairly despicable a-social people.>> That is what made it fun.

ddtaylor 7y ago

Does anyone else get a "no true scotsman" vibe?

steven741 7y ago

Moving past the "no true scott's man" fallacy of the title; i feel that this article confuses the act of being a hacker with the tools that people use to hack with. Which is a common thing to do when a concept is new. For me, being a hacker means being able to work at a certain level of abstraction and, not being afraid to "open up the box" and start working at that level of abstraction. For example, being able to work with a raspberry pi loaded with linux and, then being able to start hacking at the linux kernel or libraries when needed is what makes someone a hacker.

pdonis 7y ago
I note that the author of the article appears to thing a raspberry pi would work just fine if it booted Windows. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.

luord 7y ago

The point of this article is all the harder to see because there isn't even a definition of what "hacker" means to the author. There are many different definitions. If one subscribes to, say, Eric Raymond's, then there are many more hackers today and hacking itself is more prevalent than ever.

crankylinuxuser 7y ago

So, what does C0DE517E think hacking is? I'm surprised nobody picked up on it... 2/3s of the way down is a link (by the way - wanna see something weird?). That link goes to [0] which is about 'Dark Enlightenment'. The key takeaways here are: democracy is bad, white people are smarter, Urbit, and Yarvin. But surely someone can link without advocating? And then we get to this bit, "Whatever the causes, we have software and hardware systems that strive to be entirely open, yet time and again are closed ones that are more accessible in practice, that drive social revolutions." The author is making a roundabout case for the Dark Enlightenment, and ecosystems like Urbit which enforce a neo-serfdom and elimination of democracy at a technological scale. I'm surprised nobody else picked up on who this person thinks hackers are. It's certainly hidden in plain sight. [0] https://breakermag.com/heres-the-dark-enlightenment-explainer-you-never-wanted/ https://breakermag.com/heres-the-dark-enlightenment-explaine...

c0de517e 7y ago
Author here - no, that link was to show something bizzarre, how (some) people lose their minds in weird elucubrations on the politics of software - instead of actual hacking. I am definitely not endorsing in any way ever that cesspool that is D.E., I'm sorry if it wasn't clear from the text.
- crankylinuxuser 7y ago
  My apologies then. I've dealt with Yarvin's people in person and online. Many a times, they will sneak these kinds of things into conversations and slide these things like DE and Urbit in on the side. Had one, at the hackerspace I used to attend, quote Mussolini about how good an idea the DE was. So yeah I'm a bit on guard.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

Nice ideas. I think that complexity can be the enemy of “hackability.” Some environments like Pharo Smalltalk are simple enough to dig down to see how stuff works, and I would add simple Lisp implementations. When I first started using Ruby and Rails, I kept the source code to Ruby and for Rails available for perusal and it was more or less understandable. Not so much now. Complexity. I think that the Racket ecosystem will get more hackable once the codebase sits on top of Chez Scheme. Racket is well documented: 18 months ago I wanted to import trained weights and biases from a trained Keras/TensorFlow model into Racket and implement a runtime - fairly easy to do with good documentation and good library support for fast linear algebra. Too bad that more people don’t spend more effort on hacking activities because really understanding tools, modifying code, etc. is fun and I would argue a good career move. EDIT: added 1 word for clarity

Ocerge 7y ago

Maybe, but programming now provides a stable income for way more people, whether it's their passion or not. In this day in age, the ability to put food on the table trumps any sort of bit-banging nostalgia IMO. The fewer gates we keep, the better.

erikbye 7y ago

Speaking of books on hackers, I can recommend Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World. I enjoyed it thoroughly despite the title. Did you know Beto O'Rourke was a member?

Annatar 7y ago

"We buy cars and go to mechanics, right? We don't know how to peek inside the engines anymore." I don't know which world you live in, but it sure isn't mine! Even at the height of working as a senior system engineer / technical architect in the heart of Silicon Valley, I regularly wrenched on my car; I even found a self-wrench shop near the Tesla factory in Fremont. In fact I just wrenched on my car this past weekend. I wrench on all my cars. How could I call myself an engineer without understanding what I use?

bregma 7y ago

A hacker is someone who clicks on https://www.sparkfun.com/ https://www.sparkfun.com/ and doesn't come up for air for at least an hour. Can you pass the test?

thrax 7y ago

Git webgl

AnnoyingSwede 7y ago

TL;DR: Hacking is more alive then ever. I might be missing the point of his article, but describing the c64 basic coding movement as a single movement is misunderstanding it gravely. The fact that Basic was licensed by Microsoft didn't stop us, it was the the default interpreter we had to programming, which soon was replaced by masm/tasm or machine code. More so then than today, hackers of all kinds (hackers, crackers, phreakers) were all following their own individual paths and was way less uniformed than todays movements. I believe the main reason most are focusing on OSS today was because of the dis-content we felt with the development of operating systems that slowly but surely locked us in as users.

whatitdobooboo 7y ago

I didn't personally get the sense that the author was reminiscing about the past. I just thought of it more as what he thinks is a lack of ambition and vision in computing today in ways that will solve larger problems rather than going with the closed environments that are available today. tldr; Maybe having an open plane with few imaginative restrictions (as early computing did) allows one to rethink certain patterns we assume as truth today. For example, if no one is working on a new OS because of Linux, Windows - could that be worse for the world in the long run?

ggggtez 7y ago

It's kind of funny. The post thinks wistfully about the "real" hackers that wanted everyone to have access to computers. But that already happened. So is it any wonder that no one really cares about that ideology any more? > [they are] completely uninterested in the ideology of software licenses and contracts. Sure, but who cares exactly? Isn't an interest in legal nuances of contracts rather orthagonal to "hacking"? >Linux didn't change the desktop, nor the way software is made. Here, I'll just flat out disagree. I think saying this is rather blind to history.

stebann 7y ago

Hacking is not dead, but it has become complex because you have to deal with many layers of abstraction. In fact, we have to deal with complex concepts, implementations with different layers of complexity, more protocols... so the knowledge to hack something goes beyond that, because you have to understand how something works, maybe completely, to add something novel to it.

pontifier 7y ago

In some sense, I think that there is something of a tragedy of plenty happening in the maker/hacker community. When options were few, you had dense groups with deep knowledge about different hackable technologies. The abundance of options, while good in general, limits the usefulness of that kind of deep knowledge in favor of a broader kind of knowledge. How many ways are there to blink a light or read a potentiometer? Expanding on a simple project can take hundreds of different paths depending on your hardware and software stack. It's not dead, it's just adapting to the current landscape of abundance.

deleted 7y ago

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