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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 t

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)
dom96 3y ago
As someone that was born in the '90s and didn't really get access to the internet until ~2005 I feel like the "hacker culture" that I saw referenced in movies like Hackers (1995) was just a dream. I continue to feel like I haven't yet met people that even come close and continue to hope I can find them, but perhaps it was all just an illusion (or an over-exaggeration by Hollywood) and they never existed or they became extinct once the 90s ended.
shadowgovt 3y ago
Part of it is that the systems got really complicated, and a complicated system encourages standardization, not specialization. When computers were small, dumb, and did very little on their own, creative integration of heterogeneous pieces was rewarded and rewarding. Computers are now large, complicated, distributed, and part of a whole ecosystem. The kind of "hacker-shaped" grit that makes someone do something neat gluing a telephone receiver to a TV tuner? Well that's a fun Adafruit demo, but you could have done it easier and faster on a Raspberry Pi, and hell, there's already the scragglypete/tv-phoner repo that you really should have used (if you'd done a bit of research before you whipped out the glue gun, you'd have found the StackOverflow post from three months ago where someone went "Hey, I want to glue my telephone receiver to my TV tuner" and they were directed to that project). And while we're on the subject, that's not nearly as useful as the telephone-receiver-glued-to-a-tv-tuner emulator in this Docker container, because it does exactly what your workbench solution does but you can deploy eighty of them in one minute with a few shell commands and some money thrown at AWS... Hacking is less cowboy-shaped for the same reason there are fewer cowboys... Eventually, the pioneer towns give way to the skyscrapers and city streets because once the wilderness is tamed, the city is way more powerful, comfortable, and productive than the cowboy life.
zubairshaik 3y ago
I feel like there's a lot of great stuff going on at https://www.crowdsupply.com https://www.crowdsupply.com but it's very hardware centric.

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)

dom96 3y ago

As someone that was born in the '90s and didn't really get access to the internet until ~2005 I feel like the "hacker culture" that I saw referenced in movies like Hackers (1995) was just a dream. I continue to feel like I haven't yet met people that even come close and continue to hope I can find them, but perhaps it was all just an illusion (or an over-exaggeration by Hollywood) and they never existed or they became extinct once the 90s ended.

shadowgovt 3y ago

Part of it is that the systems got really complicated, and a complicated system encourages standardization, not specialization. When computers were small, dumb, and did very little on their own, creative integration of heterogeneous pieces was rewarded and rewarding. Computers are now large, complicated, distributed, and part of a whole ecosystem. The kind of "hacker-shaped" grit that makes someone do something neat gluing a telephone receiver to a TV tuner? Well that's a fun Adafruit demo, but you could have done it easier and faster on a Raspberry Pi, and hell, there's already the scragglypete/tv-phoner repo that you really should have used (if you'd done a bit of research before you whipped out the glue gun, you'd have found the StackOverflow post from three months ago where someone went "Hey, I want to glue my telephone receiver to my TV tuner" and they were directed to that project). And while we're on the subject, that's not nearly as useful as the telephone-receiver-glued-to-a-tv-tuner emulator in this Docker container, because it does exactly what your workbench solution does but you can deploy eighty of them in one minute with a few shell commands and some money thrown at AWS... Hacking is less cowboy-shaped for the same reason there are fewer cowboys... Eventually, the pioneer towns give way to the skyscrapers and city streets because once the wilderness is tamed, the city is way more powerful, comfortable, and productive than the cowboy life.

zubairshaik 3y ago

I feel like there's a lot of great stuff going on at https://www.crowdsupply.com https://www.crowdsupply.com but it's very hardware centric.