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Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes, around hackers being less common? The author has a list of reasons (VC money, business culture, m

Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes, around hackers being less common? The author has a list of reasons (VC money, business culture, managers, fear of the unknown). I, personally, have observed this reduction over my career, and I have my own idea of why that might be, my own phrasing of it. Perhaps it gets at the same thing as the author from a different angle. I think the reason, plain and simple, is that most developers aren't really in it for the passion anymore, but rather the money. When I first started coding, I didn't get paid. I didn't think I ever would. I was just having fun building stuff for myself. I, and the other people like that, moved into the workforce and brought that level of curiosity. Of hacker spirit. However, as the idea of "programming makes money" became more well known, and bootcamps + college both upped their game, more and more people started coding just with the hopes to make money. To get good enough to make money, not care about "huh, how does the bootloader actually work" or "Why did chrome just crash, let me open up gdb...". At the same time, I think other people who came into tech when it was a less obvious career path (and thus was something you usually discovered based on having some initial interest outside of "I want a paycheck") are getting older. They're getting older, having kids, and now also have a reason to treat their job as a 9-5. "Chrome crashed, I could open gdb and figure it out... but I'd rather watch my kid's soccer game". I think new hackers still form, but they're diluted by programming becoming a career path desired for money, not just for a love of programming itself. I think existing hackers, over time, also often become less hacker due to life slowly grinding them down.

jdm2212 3y ago
There are just a lot more programmers today. All the same hackers and stuff who used to be there are still there, but there's a lot more of everyone else. If Harvard started admitting 50,000 students a year, the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find.
- goodpoint 3y ago
  Zuckerbergs?! What the hell?
  - ahartmetz 3y ago
    Growth "hacker", I guess Ew
  - jdm2212 3y ago
    I was using that as a shorthand for "geniuses who found multi-billion dollar companies".
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      I think I agree with goodpoint and I also think that my own usage of "Zuckerberg" is the exact opposite of yours.
    - throwmeaaayayy 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - goodpoint 3y ago
      Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg and Jobs are notoriously not hackers nor even software developers and even less so geniuses. They are businessmen.
- margalabargala 3y ago
  > They'd still be there Unfortunately. Not sure the concentration of Zuckerbergs and the concentration of hackers is particularly related, except maybe the latter attracts the former. Zuckerberg's no genius, he was in the right place at the right time near the right people. He's competent, but no more than most of the people here. His morals (or the flexibility thereof) were what made him rich.
  - jdm2212 3y ago
    I really wish I was so brimming with self-confidence as to say that I'm just as competent as the guy who founded the eighth or so most valuable company on Earth, and he was just in the right place at the right time. Zuckerberg is clearly a not-great guy in some ways, but the reason we're all posting on Hacker News during the workday and he's running a centibillion dollar company is because he's an immensely intelligent and talented and focused man and we are... well, the kind of people who post on internet forums during the workday.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      I with I was as starry-eyed as to think he did it because of his "hacker skills"... >the reason we're all posting on Hacker News during the workday and he's running a centibillion dollar company is because he's an immensely intelligent and talented and focused man and we are... well, the kind of people who post on internet forums during the workday. There are people who post regularly in HN (even in the top-50 contributors) who as hackers and programmers (and work ethic) run not just circles, but the 10-dimensional equivalent of a circle, around Zuckenberg, and have no "multi-billion dollar" companies...
      - jdm2212 3y ago
        so in the original context of my post... Zuckerberg : Harvard :: hacker : software industry. it's an analogy. I wasn't saying he's a great hacker. But also the dude obviously is a great hacker. There are vanishingly few people who can bootstrap the infrastructure that will let a company grow to Facebook scale -- you need exceptional depth and breadth of computer knowledge, as well as great focus and an ability to prioritize and satisfice.
- 908B64B197 3y ago
  > the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find. Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career, with offshoring replacing expensive American engineers.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career Believed by whom? Because AFAIR this was never either the general public sentiment or consistent with BLS projections across the fields that CS feeds into.
    - 908B64B197 3y ago
      > this was never either the general public sentiment Post dotcom crash in the early 00's? Everyone was saying this was a dead market. Cost-cutting was everywhere.
      - zorked 3y ago
        Not sure of what the downvote is about because this is an accurate representation of the post-dotcom time. Enrollments in CS went down, programmers would be offshored to India, nobody wanted to be in tech anymore, unemployment was high. Hard to belive now but people enrolling in CS at this time were mocked and ridiculed.
        bcrosby95 3y ago
        Yep. I decided upon my major in a similar time period. People thought I was stupid, and my advisor advised me against it. There was a lot of doom and gloom on the internet - way more than any downturn since then. Way more than what you see about ChatGPT replacing programmers. The options I was weighing were philosophy, math, or CS. I chose CS because I liked building things. I figured I could at least make minimum wage. If it turned out so terrible I could just go back to school for something else. Much to my relief, my first job out of college paid me $50k.
davedx 3y ago
(Can only speak for myself). I’ve a bit of a hacker. To be honest lately, I just find the languages I know are so nice and powerful (enough) that I spend time building interesting and cool things (a AC power flow solver; a networked 3D roguelike game) than hacking around with new shiny languages. Basically I just really like TypeScript. Languages I’ve worked with or tried out for the pure hackery spirit of exploration: assembly, C, C++, Java, Ruby, Python, Clojure(script), Lisp, Elm, C# (did lots of neat stuff with that, thanks Unity!), PHP, scala, go, Pascal, VB, probably a couple more I forget. More tech stacks than I can think of. FOR ME, TypeScript is just so good for what I want to do that I just don’t want to mess about with other tools or “spend innovation tokens”. I just wanna build stuff!
confoundcofound 3y ago
I think the hacker culture of the ‘90s to early ‘00s is behind us, and it really saddens me. I’ve yet to find a corner of the current tech / startup landscape that ignites the same excitement I felt over a decade ago. It’s too commercial now.
- drones 3y ago
  Isn't the startup landscape inherently commercial?
- xtracto 3y ago
  I grew in the 80s 90s. The culture of phrack, 2600, Fravia, phrozen crew, etc was absolutely phenomenal. My take is a bit worse than the GP: Theres people interested in that but nowadays they sell their skills for money. That's why you see lots of ransomware, darkweb sells and whatnot. Even the torrent-ing has shown the change of culture: back in the Napster, kazaa, imem days, people (layman) shared just because. Now theres not that much interesting material, and a lot of it is behind private trackers that make you jump through hoops to get in the club.
  - mech422 3y ago
    Dam...I haven't thought of Fravia in ages... He had some _awesome_ stuff! :-D
- explorer83 3y ago
  Definitely the culture has changed as tech has become a mainstream career path. Also I think there used to be a sense of the "wild west" where you could push the boundaries while hacking and get away with it. Now someone smart enough to hack is probably smart enough to realize how much of their activities are logged somewhere.
- groby_b 3y ago
  I think you'll find that to some extent in the manufacture-on-demand scene. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening. Same goes for custom electronics, there's a lot of really interesting hobbyist projects. Biotech is on the edge of getting there. The ML scene is currently absolutely bonkers. There are plenty of hacker culture areas, they just aren't the same as the 90's and 00's. Neither were the 90's the same as the 80's. In fact, I'd argue the 00's were nothing like the 90's either. The spaces are there. You'll need to abandon the thing you know. (And for many of us, that's hard, because the thing we know is also feeding us - but that, too, was always true)
helen___keller 3y ago
Also: potential hackers might never really form into hackers because there’s a strong career path and financial incentive to work on big boring software engineering using the same skills That’s actually the exact same story of how I ended up in computer science instead of pure mathematics. I was interested in pure logic and set theory, but I could flex the same muscles learning programming language theory and end up with much better odds of paying off student loans by the time I’m 30 People only have so much time in life. If I could enjoy my work 30% more that would be great. Is it worth making less than half income though?
- Xeoncross 3y ago
  > financial incentive to work on big boring software engineering using the same skills This is so true: as I've made more, my github has grown more silent.
  - bravetraveler 3y ago
    Similarly, as I've been promoted (and spend more time advising), my skills have atrophied I used to be excellent at kernel hacking, random Linux things that would often be several-weeks trials. Now that I'm not 'in it' constantly, mostly just advising, I've lost a lot of that sharpness Doesn't help the onslaught of the day really kills my desire to learn/play around
    - knorker 3y ago
      As I've gotten more senior my need for coding has not gone away, so I may even be doing more opensource coding now, on my free time. Coding C++ at work all day, maybe not C++ all night at home. Meetings all day at work? Yeah, I still have code that needs to come out.
    - volkk 3y ago
      not to beat the constant drum of anti-capitalism, but this is the effect that we get when every company is for-profit and massive growth. curiosity doesn't have a direct path to profit, and so most people are stuck working on moving metrics, and nothing else. one can make the argument "well you have free time on the side, just do it then if youre truly interested" but realistically most people, myself included, are completely braindead after work. i have a lot of interests and hobbies but i can only find 2-3 hours on the weekends to get into them because i am mentally drained and shot after a day of work full of (mostly) pointless meetings. i don't mind work, i NEED work. but, i also need it to be fulfilling, motivating and the function of those is to me at least, seeing a positive effect on society. i imagine most people deep down inside want to help the world in some way. this is the life we've created for ourselves in the USofA. R&D/curiosity is reserved for certain demographics, and that's not even saying ONLY the privileged or the rich, that includes young people who have energy and drive before it gets hammered in by <insert corporation>, or the people who are willing to load up on methamphetamines, or the select few people who truly are amazing at having a 9-5 and being cognitively healthy enough to do brain intensive tasks after work. the point i'm making here is that we are frogs in boiling water. i remember the days (a decade ago) when I was working and exploring new personal frontiers of interest. Projects at the startups i worked on were exciting and interesting even if they were failures. Nowadays I work at <bigcorp> where every work stream is defined by some OKR. Product people have moats and act like feudal warlords. Everything is resume driven development, and the common theme here is more money/income and ultimately capitalistic greed being shoved down everyone's throats. It all sucks. Our culture in America revolves around money and greed, and it's getting worse and worse. Everything glows a certain shade of gray, and soon we'll all be indistinguishable from gray goo
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
We've seen this historically with other technologies. There was a short-lived era when people knew how to repair cars. To tune and modify engines. But as automobiles became ever more of a commodity, that population seemed to shrink too. It may be difficult for a child to become fascinated with a particular technology once it becomes ubiquitous. It's a testable hypothesis too, because if that were true then you should see hackers appear in different geographic regions at different times due to how unevenly these technologies are distributed. The confounding factor, I think, for computer technology at least, is that by the time they become ubiquitous in the third world, they may no longer be simple enough to "get started" on.
2devnull 3y ago
I think two factors matter: lack of housing and shift to service sector. The lack of housing forces people to prioritize money, just Maslow's hierarchy. Because many jobs now involve sitting at a computer screen for 60 hours a week, not many (healthy/sane) people who want to add even more hours at the computer on top of their 60 hour a week 9to5, or 7to7, or whatever most people now work).
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  >implying hackers were ever healthy/sane
nogridbag 3y ago
Yeah I think you nailed it. I think there's also different levels of hacker culture. I couldn't tell you a thing about golang's GC, but as a young kid I was absolutely fascinated by computers and learning at such an extreme pace. I was much more of a hacker type than I am now. And much of that is because I had basically unlimited time to learn. And you had to have a passion for it because there was typically no one to help you back then. Some of the stuff I coded as a kid I would struggle to make even now!
opyate 3y ago
> I think the reason, plain and simple, is that most developers aren't really in it for the passion anymore, but rather the money. Anecdata: I had a job recently that paid competitively, but the boss soon replaced interesting work with boring work (for me: writing boilerplate that's already been solved a thousand times over, or any FE work), so my passion petered out, which was quite obvious to everyone involved, so the relationship ended. However, I'm with a client now, and we're building something really cool (using LLMs; I get access to H100 soon; etc) and I'm working every spare minute I can get away with, without being paid for overtime. I feel like a "hacker" again with this role, learning new things, stretching the capabilities of the system given various constraints, and every second link I open in my browser is arxiv. (That said, I grew up in South Africa, where cyber laws lagged behind the world's for a good few years, so we knew every trick in the book, yet were untouchable, haha!)
dingledork69 3y ago
Exactly this. No one cares anymore, they just want $$$
justinator 3y ago
>When I first started coding, I didn't get paid. I didn't think I ever would. How did you make a living?
- jstanley 3y ago
  Not the person you're responding to, but I didn't make a living because I was 12. I also didn't think it was practical to get paid for programming, except in extreme outlier cases.
  - justinator 3y ago
    When I was 12, I would fly paper airplanes of my own design outside on the front lawn in hopes someone from Pratt and Whitney would happen to drive by and notice my obvious brilliance and hire me to design jet engines. The moral of my story is that 12 year olds don't think - and maybe always SHOULDN'T think in very practical ways.
908B64B197 3y ago
> However, as the idea of "programming makes money" became more well known, and bootcamps + college both upped their game, more and more people started coding just with the hopes to make money. To get good enough to make money, not care about "huh, how does the bootloader actually work" or "Why did chrome just crash, let me open up gdb...". To me, bootcamps are a complete red flag when considering candidates. I don't think I ever saw a single good hire out of a bootcamp (and we just flat out stopped interviewing them at one point because the signal to noise ratio just became too low).
- manicennui 3y ago
  Really depends on what your company does. Many (most?) companies are creating some pretty basic CRUD applications. Bootcamp grads are often fine as junior devs at these companies.
watwut 3y ago
> I think the reason, plain and simple, is that most developers aren't really in it for the passion anymore, but rather the money. Tho, people you call hackers fairly often do not actually like actual work involved in actually doing the programming work. They like tinkering with technology, reading about it, but they do not like creating and maintaining software. And fairly often, people dismissed by hackers as not passionate, because they are using boring technology, are passionate about actually finishing functional software.
activiation 3y ago
> often become less hacker due to life slowly grinding them down. AKA just getting older
sph 3y ago
> I think the reason, plain and simple, is that most developers aren't really in it for the passion anymore, but rather the money. This site is a prime example. There can't be a post about a non-mainstream programming language without someone's comment saying "I don't get the point of this, it is really hard to hire for/it would be really hard to pick up for junior developers." It seems every small project, library, language is evaluated in the context of the average FAANG developer, or whether it would fit in a startup environment. Hacking, as in enjoying the art of programming computers, is going the way of the dodo, especially on this site. The few remaining hackers are massively outranked by the "I only know Javascript" average dev, the Silicon Valley-adjacent MBAs and the huge number of those that somehow are here just to post and comment about non-programming topics. On the rare occasion there's a post on Lisp or software-defined radios, for example, you often see the same faces. It seems that on here, the nucleus of hackers has remained more or less constant since 2010, while all other demographics flooded in. As an average hacker, I must say that I don't give a rat's arse anymore about most mainstream programming topic you can find on this site's front page.
- rlpb 3y ago
  > It seems that on here, the nucleus of hackers has remained more or less constant since 2010, while all other demographics flooded in. I think this also describes those working on software in general. Everyone uses the same interesting-to-hackers low level parts of the stack. But the nature of software is that _use_ scales infinitely, so roughly the same small quantity of developers are needed the same as was needed in the 90s. But technology use has exploded, so there's huge demand for developers working higher up in the stack, because the need for domain specific apps has exploded and that part doesn't scale. So the 90s hackers continue but are now dwarfed by app developers and web developers are many orders of magnitude more numerous. Unfortunately because software is a commodity the use of the low level parts of the stack doesn't translate to money for the hackers working on them. Because just as it's a niche interest for developers in that area, so it's a niche business case to make money out of working in that area.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Being a hacker has nothing to do with how far up the stack you operate. It even has nothing to do with software or computers specifically. Traditionally, being a hacker is being a person who is very interested in learning how things work, and how to use those things in new ways. Historically, proper hackers have focused on things ranging from model railroads to pay phones to bureaucratic systems, to computers and more. The most common early sign that a child is a hacker is when the child takes apart every machine they can lay their hands on.
Mezzie 3y ago
This is very astute. I'd like to add that the pipeline for child/adolescent hackers that existed in the pre-00s is basically non-existent. The only major path that still exists that I can think of is game modding. I'm a third-generation techie on both sides of my family (my paternal grandpa (b. ~1915) got started working with TVs and their mechanical parts and my maternal grandmother (b. mid 1920s) learned C in the 70s) and there are several parts of my upbringing that I don't think could be replicated. For instance, I got started with web work in the 90s, which meant that a.) nobody knew what they were doing and the lack of formal structure combined with the cultural appreciation for competence meant that children could do 'real' work and I loved helping with 'real' work and b.) there was no age limit to participation and no legal liability since most of it wasn't commercial. There were also child-specific parts of the Web that were built by actual children instead of corporations meant to siphon money from parents. A large draw was being able to act without needing adult intermediaries. I could make a website about Sailor Moon or toys or start a chat/IRC room and control the discussions I had and kick adults or anybody who was inappropriate. (10 year olds are great dictators). There are almost no pathways into tech now that revolve around tech as play and I think that's where a lot of hackers came from.
- tracker1 3y ago
  Pre 00's hackers, or pre 80's for that matter, mostly tinkered with physical things... pulling apart a radio, remote controlled toy or reading popular mechanics. Now, you can do so much in pure software, and it's far easier and less expensive that it's the direction most will go. That doesn't mean there weren't hackers or nearly as proportionate an amount of them before the 00's. For that matter, my great grandfather was the type that actually built cabinets, or did plumbing, electrical, etc in his home. The most I've done is run an ethernet cable or change a light fixture or switch. That's not a critique of younger generations, just pointing out that a desire to learn, understand and do things has always existed. It just presented a bit differently.
  - Mezzie 3y ago
    Yeah, a part of it is that there's not really a mechanic class in the way that there used to be. I mentioned that's how my grandpa got his start: He was obsessed with TVs and repaired them/made his own FrankenTVs as a side from his automotive job, which in turn meant that when the computer and arcade revolution hit my dad had the tools and expertise to get really into things like pinball machines, Pong, and Atari leading him to programming which in turn meant I (born in 1988) was raised in a household where pulling apart machines and doing what you want with them (rather than what was taught or what they were 'made' for) was normal. The decline in basic mechanical tinkering in the population definitely is a factor if only because the mindset transfers to hacking: "This is a human made tool and I am a human with the right/ability to screw with it/alter it to do what I want". Very few kids now grow up being encouraged to play with and take things apart. Both because the adults don't have the knowledge to put it back together or the tools for the kids to use and because our culture is way more risk averse than it used to be.
ihateyouall123 3y ago
[dead]
lethuel 3y ago
Current culture of squeezing every bit of productivity out of programmers is absolute cancer. In many companies practices like scrum actively discourage spending more time on research / refactoring. "Of course you can spend some time on this task! Also you have the other five to complete. And the sprint ends in two weeks". Imagine Einstein was told "oh, you have such a nice idea about relativity, let's time frame it to 2 days, and then get back to reviewing patents"
- imbnwa 3y ago
  Its insane how popular it is, when it comes to the decline of the true hacker/engineer, to blame individuals for systemtic changes in process and environment
jareklupinski 3y ago
i think there's always going to be a bell curve of programmers: say those in the pocket on the left are interested in the "soil" as the author put it as the total number of programmers grows, so too does the pocket, but at a smaller rate than the rest of the bell so, numbers-wise, yes, there will be fewer hackers per average programmer. it becomes harder to find them too, since most people will probably spend most of their time swimming around the middle of the curve but i think their number overall is still increasing. just have to grit your teeth and jump to discord to find them :)
pnathan 3y ago
oh yes. there's enormous pressure to be normal. being weird is... like... someone's going to be uploading video of you and mocking you. there's also the thing where its more expensive to have a normal life, financial pressures say "do financial things". like... the us world is shaping to be "high road" qua Stewart Brand whereas hackers thrive in "low road" environments. there's also sort of this ... how do I say it ... hackers & that legendary online culture was sort of a product of a people without obligations. seeing your kids soccer game is much more important than debugging a program for fun. being monks for code & computers is not culturally sustainable.
JohnFen 3y ago
> Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes, around hackers being less common? I think that hackers are still around -- I see them a lot -- but they aren't as publicly visible anymore. They aren't interested in making money, and so they won't be in most mainstream technical fora (including HN), because of the cultural shift that made chasing dollars the main thing. But they are in more private fora, and they get together in person (at conventions, hackerspaces, etc.). I don't think the hacker community has grown smaller, but I think most of the web has changed so that it's not as appealing to people who want to talk hacker stuff. All of which is to say -- like when people ask what happened to the old web, back when it was actually good -- they're still there, but they're harder to see in the increasingly dense forest of commercially-minded places.
tracker1 3y ago
I think it's more about the culture and circle you are in. When you are in education, first starting out, or in irc/slack support channels, you're much more likely to see people with more passion about the technology. If you're in an office or working on a team in an established business it's much more about getting the work done. Beyond this, priorities shift over time. The priorities of someone in their early 20's that is single will be different than someone in their late 40's with children heading towards college, or even younger children. As you mention, there's also the boot camps and people that simply come in without interest in the technology aspects. In the end, there's many more people that will get into the gritty details today than decades ago, but there's also many more people that are more concerned about getting work done. This is part of why entropy is really hard to overcome. Trying to get movement in a company towards a new approach can be very hard. If company X is using Java or C#, their developers have likely been using it for many years, know it well and don't see a reason to shift. And for the most part, they are right. You can get work done in many languages, scale and adapt in many ways. Most applications don't even need to scale that much. Most apps are line of business apps that only a few dozen people ever even see and for those that aren't, you can scale vertically quite a bit before you really need to go horizontal. It's different if you re starting something public facing and want to utilize newer tooling for horizontal scale from the start. Aside: Why CockroachLabs doesn't expose a web api for database queries directly for the likes of Cloudflare Workers or Deno Deploy is beyond me... In the end, it depends on what market you're serving. Getting something working means far more than an optimal approach in one way or aother.
kvathupo 3y ago
I'd echo this. I'd also add (perhaps prematurely as a gen-z) that I see a lot less playfulness when it comes to side-projects. Rather, it seems projects start with monetary or career motives. Nothing wrong with this, but I'd like to see more fun!
_siis 3y ago
> Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes around hackers being less common? I've seen it as well. I don't agree with what the author says are reasons for it. They just don't fit. From what I've seen, hackers (in the truest sense) don't advertise. They have deep knowledge, but you only find how deep when you get into discussions with them, and most of the time they have no goodwill to engage in that because of two things, people who are dunning kruger; and social media. Many of the learning paths have also been removed and are harder to find, the internet used to be freer than it is now. You have companies that dictate what stays up simply by using the court system as a coercive measure. The recent Quad9 thing shows just how bad this is getting across the board internationally. Copyright is being used to coerce, compulse, and limit actual innovation. Hackers used to get by with their skills via certifications and jobs, many times they can't get certified now that only a single company handles testing in most places. I can't tell you specifically how they fail you, but its certainly not based upon whether you just have the knowledge. The number of real hackers out there are significantly less because there has been less opportunity, and less resources that are easily found to get into it. Many have worked very hard for their knowledge and some volunteer and help others, but there's an active trend to harass those that contribute like that, and volunteer psychology says you stop giving when it starts costing you. Dealing with a high number of deceitful people leads you to test them before providing any goodwill. If the hacker's don't like what your response implies they don't engage, and you are none the wiser. Its not about life grinding them down, there are a lot of intelligent people who have stopped giving back because they see what providing that support is doing for society in general, its going in a direction that will inevitably fail because life will be intolerable, and volunteering is at a much higher cost to them personally than it ever was before. Its like that adage that most people know, what you do in small things that don't matter shows what you will do in large things that matter. If you lie cheat and steal in friendly games, do you want them managing your company's finances? A smart person wouldn't. There are also a lot of crazies out there that are really indoctrinated now too and they don't even realize it. They like the idea of something, but ignore everything else that would be needed to make it work. Completely irrational in some cases and can't even reason or think critically. Its sad.
joshspankit 3y ago
I tried to read through all the direct replies to this comment and I didn’t see this (apologies if I missed it). There’s a huge component of this that’s worth recognizing: — The current legal landscape and lack of anonymity makes most hacking a non-starter — In the early days someone could explore really far as long as they didn’t call up a government agency or try to steal property. They could play pranks, hook up Rube-Goldberg call chains that circumnavigated the planet, break apart any hardware they owned and assemble it in to anything else, dig in to the binary of any file on a computer, rip apart the memory of any process, post the results in a magazine or even collaborate openly online. And most of the world had no idea. The only time they got in trouble was when authorities saw something they didn’t like and even then most of the time they had no laws to leverage (there are some significant notable examples that got the book thrown at them but those were outliers). Now? Now you can be retroactively targeted for making an emulator for a decades-old game system. Or sharing a single piece of copyrighted content. Or getting close breaking to the DMCA. Or (insert wacky future laws here). The risk is extremely high and the rules are way too thorny. Working for a company means you’re going to have clear guidelines about what you can and can’t use and therefore protection from the worst of the legal minefield that is the US. It also means you have a cushion for if/when you’re targeted. Does anyone know how many true hackers are growing up right now who have already taken their first steps at learning and who have had their posts wiped from the internet or their inboxes “graced” with cease and desist letters (or worse), or their accounts outright terminated? I don’t think there even is a way to know. How many of those kids would be crazy enough to keep being public, and how many of those would learn enough through private self-discovery that they can significantly contribute to the hacking scene as adults?
ip26 3y ago
My suspicion is it boils down to maturity and scope of the domain. When it is brand-new, one guy can change the world in his garage in a few months. As it matures, you start to need large teams to build the next incredible thing. Even if you are passionate and ambitious, tinkering in your garage simply will not allow you to realize your vision. So you join a large company where you can. Random datapoint, everyone I knew who was deeply passionate about compilers seemed to be going to work for Apple for a while. They could have written a new research compiler in their basement - but Apple is where LLVM was happening.
winternett 3y ago
The stakes are much higher now with new security methods like Zero Trust around. On vital systems, logs aren't stored directly on the same infrastructure as host infra... That means more footprints that can snitch on a hacker, and the penalties are much higher for hacking offenses because so much more is riding on key systems now... Mitnick got a job instead of jail... That won't really happen now because there are simply too many wildly different frameworks. It also explains why most breaches are state sponsored, well funded, wide scale, and from overseas... ;\ People are hacking social media a lot for growth and money, but the best secrets are very illusive and flooded out by lies, novice content, boilerplate advice, and outright scams... The actual hackers quietly scrape pennies off of the net in micro-transactions until they start racking up as thousands of dollars, most of the time though it's heavily coordinated group activity rather than the lone kid in his parent's house like it used to be... The hacker kid now is too busy shilling crypto scams, playing video games, revving stonks, or working on yet another GPT tool that no one really needs IMO. :P
Decabytes 3y ago
Part of reason why I started my Substack DeusInMachina is because I felt like my coworkers weren’t as into programming, and technology as I was. More of a clock in clock out thing for them. Which is totally fine except I actually felt really lonely about wanting to geek out about AI, Niche programming languages, and programmer culture, but not having anyone to talk to
jingxiangmo 3y ago
I'm a new (and young) hacker and I agree with what you are saying. Are there any communities and/or forums of people who are passionate about building and hacking purely for the sake of passion that I can join?

jdm2212 3y ago

There are just a lot more programmers today. All the same hackers and stuff who used to be there are still there, but there's a lot more of everyone else. If Harvard started admitting 50,000 students a year, the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find.

goodpoint 3y ago
Zuckerbergs?! What the hell?
- ahartmetz 3y ago
  Growth "hacker", I guess Ew
- jdm2212 3y ago
  I was using that as a shorthand for "geniuses who found multi-billion dollar companies".
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    I think I agree with goodpoint and I also think that my own usage of "Zuckerberg" is the exact opposite of yours.
  - throwmeaaayayy 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg and Jobs are notoriously not hackers nor even software developers and even less so geniuses. They are businessmen.
margalabargala 3y ago
> They'd still be there Unfortunately. Not sure the concentration of Zuckerbergs and the concentration of hackers is particularly related, except maybe the latter attracts the former. Zuckerberg's no genius, he was in the right place at the right time near the right people. He's competent, but no more than most of the people here. His morals (or the flexibility thereof) were what made him rich.
- jdm2212 3y ago
  I really wish I was so brimming with self-confidence as to say that I'm just as competent as the guy who founded the eighth or so most valuable company on Earth, and he was just in the right place at the right time. Zuckerberg is clearly a not-great guy in some ways, but the reason we're all posting on Hacker News during the workday and he's running a centibillion dollar company is because he's an immensely intelligent and talented and focused man and we are... well, the kind of people who post on internet forums during the workday.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    I with I was as starry-eyed as to think he did it because of his "hacker skills"... >the reason we're all posting on Hacker News during the workday and he's running a centibillion dollar company is because he's an immensely intelligent and talented and focused man and we are... well, the kind of people who post on internet forums during the workday. There are people who post regularly in HN (even in the top-50 contributors) who as hackers and programmers (and work ethic) run not just circles, but the 10-dimensional equivalent of a circle, around Zuckenberg, and have no "multi-billion dollar" companies...
    - jdm2212 3y ago
      so in the original context of my post... Zuckerberg : Harvard :: hacker : software industry. it's an analogy. I wasn't saying he's a great hacker. But also the dude obviously is a great hacker. There are vanishingly few people who can bootstrap the infrastructure that will let a company grow to Facebook scale -- you need exceptional depth and breadth of computer knowledge, as well as great focus and an ability to prioritize and satisfice.
908B64B197 3y ago
> the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find. Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career, with offshoring replacing expensive American engineers.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career Believed by whom? Because AFAIR this was never either the general public sentiment or consistent with BLS projections across the fields that CS feeds into.
  - 908B64B197 3y ago
    > this was never either the general public sentiment Post dotcom crash in the early 00's? Everyone was saying this was a dead market. Cost-cutting was everywhere.
    - zorked 3y ago
      Not sure of what the downvote is about because this is an accurate representation of the post-dotcom time. Enrollments in CS went down, programmers would be offshored to India, nobody wanted to be in tech anymore, unemployment was high. Hard to belive now but people enrolling in CS at this time were mocked and ridiculed.
      - bcrosby95 3y ago
        Yep. I decided upon my major in a similar time period. People thought I was stupid, and my advisor advised me against it. There was a lot of doom and gloom on the internet - way more than any downturn since then. Way more than what you see about ChatGPT replacing programmers. The options I was weighing were philosophy, math, or CS. I chose CS because I liked building things. I figured I could at least make minimum wage. If it turned out so terrible I could just go back to school for something else. Much to my relief, my first job out of college paid me $50k.

davedx 3y ago

(Can only speak for myself). I’ve a bit of a hacker. To be honest lately, I just find the languages I know are so nice and powerful (enough) that I spend time building interesting and cool things (a AC power flow solver; a networked 3D roguelike game) than hacking around with new shiny languages. Basically I just really like TypeScript. Languages I’ve worked with or tried out for the pure hackery spirit of exploration: assembly, C, C++, Java, Ruby, Python, Clojure(script), Lisp, Elm, C# (did lots of neat stuff with that, thanks Unity!), PHP, scala, go, Pascal, VB, probably a couple more I forget. More tech stacks than I can think of. FOR ME, TypeScript is just so good for what I want to do that I just don’t want to mess about with other tools or “spend innovation tokens”. I just wanna build stuff!

confoundcofound 3y ago

I think the hacker culture of the ‘90s to early ‘00s is behind us, and it really saddens me. I’ve yet to find a corner of the current tech / startup landscape that ignites the same excitement I felt over a decade ago. It’s too commercial now.

drones 3y ago
Isn't the startup landscape inherently commercial?
xtracto 3y ago
I grew in the 80s 90s. The culture of phrack, 2600, Fravia, phrozen crew, etc was absolutely phenomenal. My take is a bit worse than the GP: Theres people interested in that but nowadays they sell their skills for money. That's why you see lots of ransomware, darkweb sells and whatnot. Even the torrent-ing has shown the change of culture: back in the Napster, kazaa, imem days, people (layman) shared just because. Now theres not that much interesting material, and a lot of it is behind private trackers that make you jump through hoops to get in the club.
- mech422 3y ago
  Dam...I haven't thought of Fravia in ages... He had some _awesome_ stuff! :-D
explorer83 3y ago
Definitely the culture has changed as tech has become a mainstream career path. Also I think there used to be a sense of the "wild west" where you could push the boundaries while hacking and get away with it. Now someone smart enough to hack is probably smart enough to realize how much of their activities are logged somewhere.
groby_b 3y ago
I think you'll find that to some extent in the manufacture-on-demand scene. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening. Same goes for custom electronics, there's a lot of really interesting hobbyist projects. Biotech is on the edge of getting there. The ML scene is currently absolutely bonkers. There are plenty of hacker culture areas, they just aren't the same as the 90's and 00's. Neither were the 90's the same as the 80's. In fact, I'd argue the 00's were nothing like the 90's either. The spaces are there. You'll need to abandon the thing you know. (And for many of us, that's hard, because the thing we know is also feeding us - but that, too, was always true)

helen___keller 3y ago

Also: potential hackers might never really form into hackers because there’s a strong career path and financial incentive to work on big boring software engineering using the same skills That’s actually the exact same story of how I ended up in computer science instead of pure mathematics. I was interested in pure logic and set theory, but I could flex the same muscles learning programming language theory and end up with much better odds of paying off student loans by the time I’m 30 People only have so much time in life. If I could enjoy my work 30% more that would be great. Is it worth making less than half income though?

Xeoncross 3y ago
> financial incentive to work on big boring software engineering using the same skills This is so true: as I've made more, my github has grown more silent.
- bravetraveler 3y ago
  Similarly, as I've been promoted (and spend more time advising), my skills have atrophied I used to be excellent at kernel hacking, random Linux things that would often be several-weeks trials. Now that I'm not 'in it' constantly, mostly just advising, I've lost a lot of that sharpness Doesn't help the onslaught of the day really kills my desire to learn/play around
  - knorker 3y ago
    As I've gotten more senior my need for coding has not gone away, so I may even be doing more opensource coding now, on my free time. Coding C++ at work all day, maybe not C++ all night at home. Meetings all day at work? Yeah, I still have code that needs to come out.
  - volkk 3y ago
    not to beat the constant drum of anti-capitalism, but this is the effect that we get when every company is for-profit and massive growth. curiosity doesn't have a direct path to profit, and so most people are stuck working on moving metrics, and nothing else. one can make the argument "well you have free time on the side, just do it then if youre truly interested" but realistically most people, myself included, are completely braindead after work. i have a lot of interests and hobbies but i can only find 2-3 hours on the weekends to get into them because i am mentally drained and shot after a day of work full of (mostly) pointless meetings. i don't mind work, i NEED work. but, i also need it to be fulfilling, motivating and the function of those is to me at least, seeing a positive effect on society. i imagine most people deep down inside want to help the world in some way. this is the life we've created for ourselves in the USofA. R&D/curiosity is reserved for certain demographics, and that's not even saying ONLY the privileged or the rich, that includes young people who have energy and drive before it gets hammered in by <insert corporation>, or the people who are willing to load up on methamphetamines, or the select few people who truly are amazing at having a 9-5 and being cognitively healthy enough to do brain intensive tasks after work. the point i'm making here is that we are frogs in boiling water. i remember the days (a decade ago) when I was working and exploring new personal frontiers of interest. Projects at the startups i worked on were exciting and interesting even if they were failures. Nowadays I work at <bigcorp> where every work stream is defined by some OKR. Product people have moats and act like feudal warlords. Everything is resume driven development, and the common theme here is more money/income and ultimately capitalistic greed being shoved down everyone's throats. It all sucks. Our culture in America revolves around money and greed, and it's getting worse and worse. Everything glows a certain shade of gray, and soon we'll all be indistinguishable from gray goo

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

We've seen this historically with other technologies. There was a short-lived era when people knew how to repair cars. To tune and modify engines. But as automobiles became ever more of a commodity, that population seemed to shrink too. It may be difficult for a child to become fascinated with a particular technology once it becomes ubiquitous. It's a testable hypothesis too, because if that were true then you should see hackers appear in different geographic regions at different times due to how unevenly these technologies are distributed. The confounding factor, I think, for computer technology at least, is that by the time they become ubiquitous in the third world, they may no longer be simple enough to "get started" on.

2devnull 3y ago

I think two factors matter: lack of housing and shift to service sector. The lack of housing forces people to prioritize money, just Maslow's hierarchy. Because many jobs now involve sitting at a computer screen for 60 hours a week, not many (healthy/sane) people who want to add even more hours at the computer on top of their 60 hour a week 9to5, or 7to7, or whatever most people now work).

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
>implying hackers were ever healthy/sane

nogridbag 3y ago

Yeah I think you nailed it. I think there's also different levels of hacker culture. I couldn't tell you a thing about golang's GC, but as a young kid I was absolutely fascinated by computers and learning at such an extreme pace. I was much more of a hacker type than I am now. And much of that is because I had basically unlimited time to learn. And you had to have a passion for it because there was typically no one to help you back then. Some of the stuff I coded as a kid I would struggle to make even now!

opyate 3y ago

> I think the reason, plain and simple, is that most developers aren't really in it for the passion anymore, but rather the money. Anecdata: I had a job recently that paid competitively, but the boss soon replaced interesting work with boring work (for me: writing boilerplate that's already been solved a thousand times over, or any FE work), so my passion petered out, which was quite obvious to everyone involved, so the relationship ended. However, I'm with a client now, and we're building something really cool (using LLMs; I get access to H100 soon; etc) and I'm working every spare minute I can get away with, without being paid for overtime. I feel like a "hacker" again with this role, learning new things, stretching the capabilities of the system given various constraints, and every second link I open in my browser is arxiv. (That said, I grew up in South Africa, where cyber laws lagged behind the world's for a good few years, so we knew every trick in the book, yet were untouchable, haha!)

dingledork69 3y ago

Exactly this. No one cares anymore, they just want $$$

justinator 3y ago

>When I first started coding, I didn't get paid. I didn't think I ever would. How did you make a living?

jstanley 3y ago
Not the person you're responding to, but I didn't make a living because I was 12. I also didn't think it was practical to get paid for programming, except in extreme outlier cases.
- justinator 3y ago
  When I was 12, I would fly paper airplanes of my own design outside on the front lawn in hopes someone from Pratt and Whitney would happen to drive by and notice my obvious brilliance and hire me to design jet engines. The moral of my story is that 12 year olds don't think - and maybe always SHOULDN'T think in very practical ways.

908B64B197 3y ago

> However, as the idea of "programming makes money" became more well known, and bootcamps + college both upped their game, more and more people started coding just with the hopes to make money. To get good enough to make money, not care about "huh, how does the bootloader actually work" or "Why did chrome just crash, let me open up gdb...". To me, bootcamps are a complete red flag when considering candidates. I don't think I ever saw a single good hire out of a bootcamp (and we just flat out stopped interviewing them at one point because the signal to noise ratio just became too low).

manicennui 3y ago
Really depends on what your company does. Many (most?) companies are creating some pretty basic CRUD applications. Bootcamp grads are often fine as junior devs at these companies.

watwut 3y ago

> I think the reason, plain and simple, is that most developers aren't really in it for the passion anymore, but rather the money. Tho, people you call hackers fairly often do not actually like actual work involved in actually doing the programming work. They like tinkering with technology, reading about it, but they do not like creating and maintaining software. And fairly often, people dismissed by hackers as not passionate, because they are using boring technology, are passionate about actually finishing functional software.

activiation 3y ago

> often become less hacker due to life slowly grinding them down. AKA just getting older

sph 3y ago

> I think the reason, plain and simple, is that most developers aren't really in it for the passion anymore, but rather the money. This site is a prime example. There can't be a post about a non-mainstream programming language without someone's comment saying "I don't get the point of this, it is really hard to hire for/it would be really hard to pick up for junior developers." It seems every small project, library, language is evaluated in the context of the average FAANG developer, or whether it would fit in a startup environment. Hacking, as in enjoying the art of programming computers, is going the way of the dodo, especially on this site. The few remaining hackers are massively outranked by the "I only know Javascript" average dev, the Silicon Valley-adjacent MBAs and the huge number of those that somehow are here just to post and comment about non-programming topics. On the rare occasion there's a post on Lisp or software-defined radios, for example, you often see the same faces. It seems that on here, the nucleus of hackers has remained more or less constant since 2010, while all other demographics flooded in. As an average hacker, I must say that I don't give a rat's arse anymore about most mainstream programming topic you can find on this site's front page.

rlpb 3y ago
> It seems that on here, the nucleus of hackers has remained more or less constant since 2010, while all other demographics flooded in. I think this also describes those working on software in general. Everyone uses the same interesting-to-hackers low level parts of the stack. But the nature of software is that _use_ scales infinitely, so roughly the same small quantity of developers are needed the same as was needed in the 90s. But technology use has exploded, so there's huge demand for developers working higher up in the stack, because the need for domain specific apps has exploded and that part doesn't scale. So the 90s hackers continue but are now dwarfed by app developers and web developers are many orders of magnitude more numerous. Unfortunately because software is a commodity the use of the low level parts of the stack doesn't translate to money for the hackers working on them. Because just as it's a niche interest for developers in that area, so it's a niche business case to make money out of working in that area.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Being a hacker has nothing to do with how far up the stack you operate. It even has nothing to do with software or computers specifically. Traditionally, being a hacker is being a person who is very interested in learning how things work, and how to use those things in new ways. Historically, proper hackers have focused on things ranging from model railroads to pay phones to bureaucratic systems, to computers and more. The most common early sign that a child is a hacker is when the child takes apart every machine they can lay their hands on.

Mezzie 3y ago

This is very astute. I'd like to add that the pipeline for child/adolescent hackers that existed in the pre-00s is basically non-existent. The only major path that still exists that I can think of is game modding. I'm a third-generation techie on both sides of my family (my paternal grandpa (b. ~1915) got started working with TVs and their mechanical parts and my maternal grandmother (b. mid 1920s) learned C in the 70s) and there are several parts of my upbringing that I don't think could be replicated. For instance, I got started with web work in the 90s, which meant that a.) nobody knew what they were doing and the lack of formal structure combined with the cultural appreciation for competence meant that children could do 'real' work and I loved helping with 'real' work and b.) there was no age limit to participation and no legal liability since most of it wasn't commercial. There were also child-specific parts of the Web that were built by actual children instead of corporations meant to siphon money from parents. A large draw was being able to act without needing adult intermediaries. I could make a website about Sailor Moon or toys or start a chat/IRC room and control the discussions I had and kick adults or anybody who was inappropriate. (10 year olds are great dictators). There are almost no pathways into tech now that revolve around tech as play and I think that's where a lot of hackers came from.

tracker1 3y ago
Pre 00's hackers, or pre 80's for that matter, mostly tinkered with physical things... pulling apart a radio, remote controlled toy or reading popular mechanics. Now, you can do so much in pure software, and it's far easier and less expensive that it's the direction most will go. That doesn't mean there weren't hackers or nearly as proportionate an amount of them before the 00's. For that matter, my great grandfather was the type that actually built cabinets, or did plumbing, electrical, etc in his home. The most I've done is run an ethernet cable or change a light fixture or switch. That's not a critique of younger generations, just pointing out that a desire to learn, understand and do things has always existed. It just presented a bit differently.
- Mezzie 3y ago
  Yeah, a part of it is that there's not really a mechanic class in the way that there used to be. I mentioned that's how my grandpa got his start: He was obsessed with TVs and repaired them/made his own FrankenTVs as a side from his automotive job, which in turn meant that when the computer and arcade revolution hit my dad had the tools and expertise to get really into things like pinball machines, Pong, and Atari leading him to programming which in turn meant I (born in 1988) was raised in a household where pulling apart machines and doing what you want with them (rather than what was taught or what they were 'made' for) was normal. The decline in basic mechanical tinkering in the population definitely is a factor if only because the mindset transfers to hacking: "This is a human made tool and I am a human with the right/ability to screw with it/alter it to do what I want". Very few kids now grow up being encouraged to play with and take things apart. Both because the adults don't have the knowledge to put it back together or the tools for the kids to use and because our culture is way more risk averse than it used to be.

ihateyouall123 3y ago

[dead]

lethuel 3y ago

Current culture of squeezing every bit of productivity out of programmers is absolute cancer. In many companies practices like scrum actively discourage spending more time on research / refactoring. "Of course you can spend some time on this task! Also you have the other five to complete. And the sprint ends in two weeks". Imagine Einstein was told "oh, you have such a nice idea about relativity, let's time frame it to 2 days, and then get back to reviewing patents"

imbnwa 3y ago
Its insane how popular it is, when it comes to the decline of the true hacker/engineer, to blame individuals for systemtic changes in process and environment

jareklupinski 3y ago

i think there's always going to be a bell curve of programmers: say those in the pocket on the left are interested in the "soil" as the author put it as the total number of programmers grows, so too does the pocket, but at a smaller rate than the rest of the bell so, numbers-wise, yes, there will be fewer hackers per average programmer. it becomes harder to find them too, since most people will probably spend most of their time swimming around the middle of the curve but i think their number overall is still increasing. just have to grit your teeth and jump to discord to find them :)

pnathan 3y ago

oh yes. there's enormous pressure to be normal. being weird is... like... someone's going to be uploading video of you and mocking you. there's also the thing where its more expensive to have a normal life, financial pressures say "do financial things". like... the us world is shaping to be "high road" qua Stewart Brand whereas hackers thrive in "low road" environments. there's also sort of this ... how do I say it ... hackers & that legendary online culture was sort of a product of a people without obligations. seeing your kids soccer game is much more important than debugging a program for fun. being monks for code & computers is not culturally sustainable.

JohnFen 3y ago

> Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes, around hackers being less common? I think that hackers are still around -- I see them a lot -- but they aren't as publicly visible anymore. They aren't interested in making money, and so they won't be in most mainstream technical fora (including HN), because of the cultural shift that made chasing dollars the main thing. But they are in more private fora, and they get together in person (at conventions, hackerspaces, etc.). I don't think the hacker community has grown smaller, but I think most of the web has changed so that it's not as appealing to people who want to talk hacker stuff. All of which is to say -- like when people ask what happened to the old web, back when it was actually good -- they're still there, but they're harder to see in the increasingly dense forest of commercially-minded places.

tracker1 3y ago

I think it's more about the culture and circle you are in. When you are in education, first starting out, or in irc/slack support channels, you're much more likely to see people with more passion about the technology. If you're in an office or working on a team in an established business it's much more about getting the work done. Beyond this, priorities shift over time. The priorities of someone in their early 20's that is single will be different than someone in their late 40's with children heading towards college, or even younger children. As you mention, there's also the boot camps and people that simply come in without interest in the technology aspects. In the end, there's many more people that will get into the gritty details today than decades ago, but there's also many more people that are more concerned about getting work done. This is part of why entropy is really hard to overcome. Trying to get movement in a company towards a new approach can be very hard. If company X is using Java or C#, their developers have likely been using it for many years, know it well and don't see a reason to shift. And for the most part, they are right. You can get work done in many languages, scale and adapt in many ways. Most applications don't even need to scale that much. Most apps are line of business apps that only a few dozen people ever even see and for those that aren't, you can scale vertically quite a bit before you really need to go horizontal. It's different if you re starting something public facing and want to utilize newer tooling for horizontal scale from the start. Aside: Why CockroachLabs doesn't expose a web api for database queries directly for the likes of Cloudflare Workers or Deno Deploy is beyond me... In the end, it depends on what market you're serving. Getting something working means far more than an optimal approach in one way or aother.

kvathupo 3y ago

I'd echo this. I'd also add (perhaps prematurely as a gen-z) that I see a lot less playfulness when it comes to side-projects. Rather, it seems projects start with monetary or career motives. Nothing wrong with this, but I'd like to see more fun!

_siis 3y ago

> Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes around hackers being less common? I've seen it as well. I don't agree with what the author says are reasons for it. They just don't fit. From what I've seen, hackers (in the truest sense) don't advertise. They have deep knowledge, but you only find how deep when you get into discussions with them, and most of the time they have no goodwill to engage in that because of two things, people who are dunning kruger; and social media. Many of the learning paths have also been removed and are harder to find, the internet used to be freer than it is now. You have companies that dictate what stays up simply by using the court system as a coercive measure. The recent Quad9 thing shows just how bad this is getting across the board internationally. Copyright is being used to coerce, compulse, and limit actual innovation. Hackers used to get by with their skills via certifications and jobs, many times they can't get certified now that only a single company handles testing in most places. I can't tell you specifically how they fail you, but its certainly not based upon whether you just have the knowledge. The number of real hackers out there are significantly less because there has been less opportunity, and less resources that are easily found to get into it. Many have worked very hard for their knowledge and some volunteer and help others, but there's an active trend to harass those that contribute like that, and volunteer psychology says you stop giving when it starts costing you. Dealing with a high number of deceitful people leads you to test them before providing any goodwill. If the hacker's don't like what your response implies they don't engage, and you are none the wiser. Its not about life grinding them down, there are a lot of intelligent people who have stopped giving back because they see what providing that support is doing for society in general, its going in a direction that will inevitably fail because life will be intolerable, and volunteering is at a much higher cost to them personally than it ever was before. Its like that adage that most people know, what you do in small things that don't matter shows what you will do in large things that matter. If you lie cheat and steal in friendly games, do you want them managing your company's finances? A smart person wouldn't. There are also a lot of crazies out there that are really indoctrinated now too and they don't even realize it. They like the idea of something, but ignore everything else that would be needed to make it work. Completely irrational in some cases and can't even reason or think critically. Its sad.

joshspankit 3y ago

I tried to read through all the direct replies to this comment and I didn’t see this (apologies if I missed it). There’s a huge component of this that’s worth recognizing: — The current legal landscape and lack of anonymity makes most hacking a non-starter — In the early days someone could explore really far as long as they didn’t call up a government agency or try to steal property. They could play pranks, hook up Rube-Goldberg call chains that circumnavigated the planet, break apart any hardware they owned and assemble it in to anything else, dig in to the binary of any file on a computer, rip apart the memory of any process, post the results in a magazine or even collaborate openly online. And most of the world had no idea. The only time they got in trouble was when authorities saw something they didn’t like and even then most of the time they had no laws to leverage (there are some significant notable examples that got the book thrown at them but those were outliers). Now? Now you can be retroactively targeted for making an emulator for a decades-old game system. Or sharing a single piece of copyrighted content. Or getting close breaking to the DMCA. Or (insert wacky future laws here). The risk is extremely high and the rules are way too thorny. Working for a company means you’re going to have clear guidelines about what you can and can’t use and therefore protection from the worst of the legal minefield that is the US. It also means you have a cushion for if/when you’re targeted. Does anyone know how many true hackers are growing up right now who have already taken their first steps at learning and who have had their posts wiped from the internet or their inboxes “graced” with cease and desist letters (or worse), or their accounts outright terminated? I don’t think there even is a way to know. How many of those kids would be crazy enough to keep being public, and how many of those would learn enough through private self-discovery that they can significantly contribute to the hacking scene as adults?

ip26 3y ago

My suspicion is it boils down to maturity and scope of the domain. When it is brand-new, one guy can change the world in his garage in a few months. As it matures, you start to need large teams to build the next incredible thing. Even if you are passionate and ambitious, tinkering in your garage simply will not allow you to realize your vision. So you join a large company where you can. Random datapoint, everyone I knew who was deeply passionate about compilers seemed to be going to work for Apple for a while. They could have written a new research compiler in their basement - but Apple is where LLVM was happening.

winternett 3y ago

The stakes are much higher now with new security methods like Zero Trust around. On vital systems, logs aren't stored directly on the same infrastructure as host infra... That means more footprints that can snitch on a hacker, and the penalties are much higher for hacking offenses because so much more is riding on key systems now... Mitnick got a job instead of jail... That won't really happen now because there are simply too many wildly different frameworks. It also explains why most breaches are state sponsored, well funded, wide scale, and from overseas... ;\ People are hacking social media a lot for growth and money, but the best secrets are very illusive and flooded out by lies, novice content, boilerplate advice, and outright scams... The actual hackers quietly scrape pennies off of the net in micro-transactions until they start racking up as thousands of dollars, most of the time though it's heavily coordinated group activity rather than the lone kid in his parent's house like it used to be... The hacker kid now is too busy shilling crypto scams, playing video games, revving stonks, or working on yet another GPT tool that no one really needs IMO. :P

Decabytes 3y ago

Part of reason why I started my Substack DeusInMachina is because I felt like my coworkers weren’t as into programming, and technology as I was. More of a clock in clock out thing for them. Which is totally fine except I actually felt really lonely about wanting to geek out about AI, Niche programming languages, and programmer culture, but not having anyone to talk to

jingxiangmo 3y ago

I'm a new (and young) hacker and I agree with what you are saying. Are there any communities and/or forums of people who are passionate about building and hacking purely for the sake of passion that I can join?