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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

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?
- peteforde 7y ago
  Because your Ctrl-F key is broken: > Steam, the Apple store, Microsoft XBLIG, Youtube, Twitch, Spotify... Unity, Pico8, Dreams passing through Minecraft and Roblox and the game modding community. In other words: all of these perfect souls are being captured by less-pure tools before they can make their way to someone experiencing the frustration of learning BASIC on a C64 in the early 1980s.
  - smadge 7y ago
    I think you misinterpreted that passage. The larger context is: > Look at my industry. Videogames. What did make games tinkerable? Liberated individual creativity, art, even the ability to make a living? > Steam, the Apple app store, Microsoft XBLIG, Youtube, Twitch, Spotify, Patreon... Unity, Pico8, Dreams passing through Minecraft and Roblox and the game modding community... Not the blockchain, not linux or torrents and so on. I interpreted this as saying the free software, linux, torrent, blockchain, torrent communities, which are nominally attempting to empower and liberate users ultimately failed to do so, and it was actually these proprietary products which successfully did by focusing on an accessible user experience open to tinkering. He compares these proprietary products to the proprietary C64.
    - c0de517e 7y ago
      Author here - indeed this is the correct interpretation. Sorry if the post isn't clear. I do love Unity (and all the other things listed).
puszczyk 7y ago
I agree with your comment and feel similarly about the piece. The last paragraph though: > I really didn't enjoy this op-ed, and I wish people wouldn't bring it a larger audience by posting on HN. I think it’s good to have it here, even if I disagree with the article it made me think why and started a valuable discussion in the comments.
- scott_s 7y ago
  I mildly disagree. I've been reading variants of this sentiment for over a decade, and I agree with peteforde's take: not only is it not true, it's even less true than ever before, and this statement holds as time goes on.
Heyso 7y ago
Unity is amazing, I agree. Moving from scratch to unity seem like a big step. Why not play with a 2d game library on the browser (with typescript, and a teacher to give a starter project and the basics) ? Making games in 2d is a very similar experience a smaking game in 3d, just easier. Unity can be overhelming with the richness of what it propose.
- atoav 7y ago
  I was getting into games when Unity was around. But I didn’t just wanted to make a game. I wanted to understand how it works. I knew a bit about computers and played games since beeing a child, but could never understand how a computer does games. And Unity would never have been able to teach me that. So the obvious next step was to write my own little sidescroller from the ground up, with naive physics and collision etc. I think the whole discussion about “true” hacking is a generational shift combined with a change of the role technology plays in society. It became bigger and more accessible and that is a good thing. It is just a bad thing in the eyes of people who tie their whole identity to beeing some kind of mysterious tech wizard only to have the kid next to you solve the same problem with some mobile app in a fraction of the time. That must be how those mathematicians who first operated computers must have felt when a ton of people started flooded in who had no or little math knowledge. The thing that worries me more than easy instructions and tutorials on any possible thing is the degree of abstraction. It is necessary to make understanding tech easy, because it is everywhere and it is getting more and more invisible.
- peteforde 7y ago
  I promise you that you can build something interesting in VR in Unity with free assets and without writing a single line of code. The optimal outcome - "can I do X?" - where the young person in question is asking to take it further... that's achieved far faster than anything in a browser context. Keep in mind: kids today are not likely to be so impressed with moving a square up and down in a browser. Maybe interesting, but who cares? vs "wait, you can make this sword into a FIRE SWORD?"
Animats 7y ago
the author wasn't talking about hacking but recreating the exact same conditions that existed when he was a young person... That sums up the article. Kids can do far more today than in the Commodore 64 era. On the other hand, the field is much bigger, so they won't be doing the same thing as their local friends. But there will be someone on the web doing something similar to talk to.
- Cougher 7y ago
  It reminds me of one of the reasons why I stopped using Getoffmylawnbook: far too many of my friends were using it to complain about "kids today". They were angry and indignant about things like kids being allowed to use calculators in math class and not enough kids knowing how to drive a car with a manual transmission. It's like there's this arbitrary "right point" at which kids are supposed to start from and it's coincidentally the same as the point where we started from.
- dep_b 7y ago
  > Kids can do far more today than in the Commodore 64 era. Kids can do far more but they're not instantly warped into a fully programmable environment. You enter the following: POKE 53281,8 And you're immediately changing stuff like the background color, something you also saw happening in turbo loaders or those quick color cycling screens before a game started. You get the feeling that it's possible to achieve anything yourself. It's pretty empowering and a lot of kids knew these kind of "secrets" and some basic BASIC. Nowadays it's actually easier to do a lot of things with autocompleting IDE's and Stack Overflow but you're not exposed to it so directly.
  - peteforde 7y ago
    First, I think you need to be realistic: we're going into the third decade of the 21st century and no kids are going to be POKEing, not even on Facebook. Second, I think you underestimate how tangibly incredible it is to hit play on a basic scene in Unity and see it come to life. I think that this is the reason Roblox is so popular, and Unity is the next step.
scoutt 7y ago
Hacking is just interesting only if you are not following any "tutorial". Today you can run an embedded linux under 10 minutes with less that 20 bucks with a RPI by reading some tutorial or watching a youtube video. What's the fun about that? I remember too hacking my commodore and the only help I had was just a book in a strange language (english in my case) and my dad (he was into 8086 at that time) when I was a kid. Today everyone pretends there should be step-by-step guides on how to do everything. The most similar thing to that hacking feeling I get in the present is implementing some unknown HW component (i.e. a sensor, I2C device, microcontroller) that there is no source code or help for it (of course, when doing it for fun and not work). When the thing starts to work, there is a very little spark similar to those felt when I was a kid.
- 80386 7y ago
  Linux is... a little alienating, isn't it? How many people can hold the whole thing in their head? Not many - and I don't think it's seamless enough to work as another layer of magic, either. People accept OS X because it's another layer of magic. TempleOS was written by one guy, so I assume it can fit inside one head. Linux has been written by a lot of people over several decades. Maybe I'm completely wrong about this, I don't know. But I'm getting old and lazy, so these days I'm on Windows. I'm a little surprised there aren't more weird OSes going around these days, now that everything runs in the browser except text editors and fancy video games.
  - bregma 7y ago
    > I'm a little surprised there aren't more weird OSes going around these days, now that everything runs in the browser except text editors and fancy video games. Don't know what you're talking about, but I've used plenty of text editors and played fancy video games in a browser. The day will come when your can run a hardware emulator in your browser and use to it run your hobby OS or even a C64 image for you to hack on.
  - peteforde 7y ago
    TempleOS was written by one guy. He just happened to be a lunatic who did little else. It was a very sad story, TBH. Thankfully, there's very little about TempleOS that has anything to do with a massive influx of kids hacking.
mntmoss 7y ago
He doesn't call the closed tools part of the problem, rather he asks why it is the case that these tools remain more successful at engaging newcomers than all the open source stuff, and draws a connection between the fully proprietary devices of yesteryear and these modern environments: 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. Linux didn't change the desktop, nor the way software is made. And he suggests the answer that's been in the air lately: open software is now seen as a corporate business strategy, a cost-cutting measure. Which in turn means that proprietary software is now the stuff at the vanguard for the "little guy", creatively speaking, and many of the old hacker credos that correlate with "information wants to be free" are false, are in fact as elitist as you state.
qmmmur 7y ago
God this was a breath of fresh air to read. Can we stop pretending hacking is reading plain-text websites and nerding out on them?
zozbot234 7y ago
Please use Godot rather than Unity. Hackers and educational institutions should not be advocating for proprietary software that locks in its users.
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  This point was made a lot in the article - Hackers didn't care about Open Source or the ideology. I tend to agree with that. First it's "don't use Unity", then it's "don't publish your Godot game for Windows", then it's "don't publish your Godot game in a form that requires proprietary graphics drivers", then it's "don't allow your game to run on Ubuntu", and so on. There's always another step to achieve ideological perfection. Perfect is the enemy of done. Getting stuff done is the important thing. It's much better to raise kids knowing that they can make their own games than not. If that's easier to do on Unity, then that's the way to go.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    If it's easier to do it on Unity, the way to go is to improve Godot until it's even easier to use than Unity! :-) And the actual point of using something open like Godot is to raise kids who will internalize the fact that they could make not just their games, but their game engines as well - indeed, that nothing is 'magic' and anything can be thoroughly understood from first principles if one cares enough to do so. Every hacker knows this already, of course - but normies don't, even though that's the most useful lesson that 'hacking' can teach.
    - z3phyr 7y ago
      On a fundamental problem solving level, open source spoils the part of the fun. I only need the executable file, and part of the fun is figuring out how it works and how can I morph that file to make it do other things, or completely change the functioning of the software. One example I give is rock climbing. Logically, everyone should just take a helicopter to reach the top, or let the community contribute and build the road. But where is fun in that? We are rock climbers and we will rock climb.
    - 7y ago
joezydeco 7y ago
Thank you for mentioning Roblox because I see kids hacking way more interesting stuff there than anything I’ve ever seen done on a Raspberry Pi. And the kids are learning Lua!
Pigo 7y ago
If I'm going to wax nostalgic about what I thought hacking was as a teenager, then I would bemoan the decline of IRC. I know many of us are still on Freenode, but I'm talking about the wild-west days of Undernet and Dalnet. I met some interesting characters back then. And it was my first exposure to people I would describe as hackers, since there were none I knew in real life. I was friends with a guy who was convinced the military was controlling his brain with microwave radiation. He was an amazing coder, and he introduced me to coding actually.

z3phyr 7y ago

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

peteforde 7y ago
Because your Ctrl-F key is broken: > Steam, the Apple store, Microsoft XBLIG, Youtube, Twitch, Spotify... Unity, Pico8, Dreams passing through Minecraft and Roblox and the game modding community. In other words: all of these perfect souls are being captured by less-pure tools before they can make their way to someone experiencing the frustration of learning BASIC on a C64 in the early 1980s.
- smadge 7y ago
  I think you misinterpreted that passage. The larger context is: > Look at my industry. Videogames. What did make games tinkerable? Liberated individual creativity, art, even the ability to make a living? > Steam, the Apple app store, Microsoft XBLIG, Youtube, Twitch, Spotify, Patreon... Unity, Pico8, Dreams passing through Minecraft and Roblox and the game modding community... Not the blockchain, not linux or torrents and so on. I interpreted this as saying the free software, linux, torrent, blockchain, torrent communities, which are nominally attempting to empower and liberate users ultimately failed to do so, and it was actually these proprietary products which successfully did by focusing on an accessible user experience open to tinkering. He compares these proprietary products to the proprietary C64.
  - c0de517e 7y ago
    Author here - indeed this is the correct interpretation. Sorry if the post isn't clear. I do love Unity (and all the other things listed).

puszczyk 7y ago

I agree with your comment and feel similarly about the piece. The last paragraph though: > I really didn't enjoy this op-ed, and I wish people wouldn't bring it a larger audience by posting on HN. I think it’s good to have it here, even if I disagree with the article it made me think why and started a valuable discussion in the comments.

scott_s 7y ago
I mildly disagree. I've been reading variants of this sentiment for over a decade, and I agree with peteforde's take: not only is it not true, it's even less true than ever before, and this statement holds as time goes on.

Heyso 7y ago

Unity is amazing, I agree. Moving from scratch to unity seem like a big step. Why not play with a 2d game library on the browser (with typescript, and a teacher to give a starter project and the basics) ? Making games in 2d is a very similar experience a smaking game in 3d, just easier. Unity can be overhelming with the richness of what it propose.

atoav 7y ago
I was getting into games when Unity was around. But I didn’t just wanted to make a game. I wanted to understand how it works. I knew a bit about computers and played games since beeing a child, but could never understand how a computer does games. And Unity would never have been able to teach me that. So the obvious next step was to write my own little sidescroller from the ground up, with naive physics and collision etc. I think the whole discussion about “true” hacking is a generational shift combined with a change of the role technology plays in society. It became bigger and more accessible and that is a good thing. It is just a bad thing in the eyes of people who tie their whole identity to beeing some kind of mysterious tech wizard only to have the kid next to you solve the same problem with some mobile app in a fraction of the time. That must be how those mathematicians who first operated computers must have felt when a ton of people started flooded in who had no or little math knowledge. The thing that worries me more than easy instructions and tutorials on any possible thing is the degree of abstraction. It is necessary to make understanding tech easy, because it is everywhere and it is getting more and more invisible.
peteforde 7y ago
I promise you that you can build something interesting in VR in Unity with free assets and without writing a single line of code. The optimal outcome - "can I do X?" - where the young person in question is asking to take it further... that's achieved far faster than anything in a browser context. Keep in mind: kids today are not likely to be so impressed with moving a square up and down in a browser. Maybe interesting, but who cares? vs "wait, you can make this sword into a FIRE SWORD?"

Animats 7y ago

the author wasn't talking about hacking but recreating the exact same conditions that existed when he was a young person... That sums up the article. Kids can do far more today than in the Commodore 64 era. On the other hand, the field is much bigger, so they won't be doing the same thing as their local friends. But there will be someone on the web doing something similar to talk to.

Cougher 7y ago
It reminds me of one of the reasons why I stopped using Getoffmylawnbook: far too many of my friends were using it to complain about "kids today". They were angry and indignant about things like kids being allowed to use calculators in math class and not enough kids knowing how to drive a car with a manual transmission. It's like there's this arbitrary "right point" at which kids are supposed to start from and it's coincidentally the same as the point where we started from.
dep_b 7y ago
> Kids can do far more today than in the Commodore 64 era. Kids can do far more but they're not instantly warped into a fully programmable environment. You enter the following: POKE 53281,8 And you're immediately changing stuff like the background color, something you also saw happening in turbo loaders or those quick color cycling screens before a game started. You get the feeling that it's possible to achieve anything yourself. It's pretty empowering and a lot of kids knew these kind of "secrets" and some basic BASIC. Nowadays it's actually easier to do a lot of things with autocompleting IDE's and Stack Overflow but you're not exposed to it so directly.
- peteforde 7y ago
  First, I think you need to be realistic: we're going into the third decade of the 21st century and no kids are going to be POKEing, not even on Facebook. Second, I think you underestimate how tangibly incredible it is to hit play on a basic scene in Unity and see it come to life. I think that this is the reason Roblox is so popular, and Unity is the next step.

scoutt 7y ago

Hacking is just interesting only if you are not following any "tutorial". Today you can run an embedded linux under 10 minutes with less that 20 bucks with a RPI by reading some tutorial or watching a youtube video. What's the fun about that? I remember too hacking my commodore and the only help I had was just a book in a strange language (english in my case) and my dad (he was into 8086 at that time) when I was a kid. Today everyone pretends there should be step-by-step guides on how to do everything. The most similar thing to that hacking feeling I get in the present is implementing some unknown HW component (i.e. a sensor, I2C device, microcontroller) that there is no source code or help for it (of course, when doing it for fun and not work). When the thing starts to work, there is a very little spark similar to those felt when I was a kid.

80386 7y ago
Linux is... a little alienating, isn't it? How many people can hold the whole thing in their head? Not many - and I don't think it's seamless enough to work as another layer of magic, either. People accept OS X because it's another layer of magic. TempleOS was written by one guy, so I assume it can fit inside one head. Linux has been written by a lot of people over several decades. Maybe I'm completely wrong about this, I don't know. But I'm getting old and lazy, so these days I'm on Windows. I'm a little surprised there aren't more weird OSes going around these days, now that everything runs in the browser except text editors and fancy video games.
- bregma 7y ago
  > I'm a little surprised there aren't more weird OSes going around these days, now that everything runs in the browser except text editors and fancy video games. Don't know what you're talking about, but I've used plenty of text editors and played fancy video games in a browser. The day will come when your can run a hardware emulator in your browser and use to it run your hobby OS or even a C64 image for you to hack on.
- peteforde 7y ago
  TempleOS was written by one guy. He just happened to be a lunatic who did little else. It was a very sad story, TBH. Thankfully, there's very little about TempleOS that has anything to do with a massive influx of kids hacking.

mntmoss 7y ago

He doesn't call the closed tools part of the problem, rather he asks why it is the case that these tools remain more successful at engaging newcomers than all the open source stuff, and draws a connection between the fully proprietary devices of yesteryear and these modern environments: 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. Linux didn't change the desktop, nor the way software is made. And he suggests the answer that's been in the air lately: open software is now seen as a corporate business strategy, a cost-cutting measure. Which in turn means that proprietary software is now the stuff at the vanguard for the "little guy", creatively speaking, and many of the old hacker credos that correlate with "information wants to be free" are false, are in fact as elitist as you state.

qmmmur 7y ago

God this was a breath of fresh air to read. Can we stop pretending hacking is reading plain-text websites and nerding out on them?

zozbot234 7y ago

Please use Godot rather than Unity. Hackers and educational institutions should not be advocating for proprietary software that locks in its users.

marcus_holmes 7y ago
This point was made a lot in the article - Hackers didn't care about Open Source or the ideology. I tend to agree with that. First it's "don't use Unity", then it's "don't publish your Godot game for Windows", then it's "don't publish your Godot game in a form that requires proprietary graphics drivers", then it's "don't allow your game to run on Ubuntu", and so on. There's always another step to achieve ideological perfection. Perfect is the enemy of done. Getting stuff done is the important thing. It's much better to raise kids knowing that they can make their own games than not. If that's easier to do on Unity, then that's the way to go.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  If it's easier to do it on Unity, the way to go is to improve Godot until it's even easier to use than Unity! :-) And the actual point of using something open like Godot is to raise kids who will internalize the fact that they could make not just their games, but their game engines as well - indeed, that nothing is 'magic' and anything can be thoroughly understood from first principles if one cares enough to do so. Every hacker knows this already, of course - but normies don't, even though that's the most useful lesson that 'hacking' can teach.
  - z3phyr 7y ago
    On a fundamental problem solving level, open source spoils the part of the fun. I only need the executable file, and part of the fun is figuring out how it works and how can I morph that file to make it do other things, or completely change the functioning of the software. One example I give is rock climbing. Logically, everyone should just take a helicopter to reach the top, or let the community contribute and build the road. But where is fun in that? We are rock climbers and we will rock climb.
  - 7y ago

joezydeco 7y ago

Thank you for mentioning Roblox because I see kids hacking way more interesting stuff there than anything I’ve ever seen done on a Raspberry Pi. And the kids are learning Lua!

Pigo 7y ago

If I'm going to wax nostalgic about what I thought hacking was as a teenager, then I would bemoan the decline of IRC. I know many of us are still on Freenode, but I'm talking about the wild-west days of Undernet and Dalnet. I met some interesting characters back then. And it was my first exposure to people I would describe as hackers, since there were none I knew in real life. I was friends with a guy who was convinced the military was controlling his brain with microwave radiation. He was an amazing coder, and he introduced me to coding actually.