7 ms·

Its likely a combination of many factors. i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever. ii) The fact tha

Its likely a combination of many factors. i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever. ii) The fact that the past keeps growing. The body of interesting developments keeps growing and while some stuff is obsolete / nostalgic, other stuff is totally not. In fact revisiting the mindset and vision of past decades is many times very inspiring and educational. iii) The fact that the present is shrill, exhaustively hyped, manipulated and in a sense damaged. Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available.

starbugs 3y ago
> iii) The fact that the present is shrill, exhaustively hyped, manipulated and in a sense damaged. Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available. I agree with this sentiment to some extent. Yet, I am struggling to identify if it's "just me getting old" or if there is more to it.
- sundvor 3y ago
  Speaking as someone who started working in the mid 90s, we're definitely well past The Internet's "Golden Hour". These days we can see first hand just how much societal degeneracy it has helped facilitate. All the latest Culture Wars, malice, scams, cancellations, filter bubbles, misinformation madness etc would not be possible without the Internet. This easily helps explain the point of looking backwards to when the tech was just just that, tech.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
    > All the latest Culture Wars, malice, scams, cancellations, filter bubbles, misinformation madness etc would not be possible without the Internet. The latest, sure, by definition. But nah, people were plenty good at getting worked up much earlier than the internet.
    - api 3y ago
      Search for “satanic panic” for a TV era example.
      - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        Go back. Search for "yellow journalism".
        JohnFen 3y ago
        "Remember the Maine!"
      - rchaud 3y ago
        Satanic panic happened in the US, UK and that's it. The ills of the modern internet are globally distributed.
    - cassianoleal 3y ago
      Yes but not at this speed and scale.
      - sundvor 3y ago
        Yep, didn't spell that out - but indeed, this.
      - chrisco255 3y ago
        Counter point to this, is that centralized mass media enabled early 20th century fascism and communism to thrive. Hitler's head of propaganda, Goebbels, supplied subsidized radios to the Germans and used it to funnel propaganda into German households at the speed of light. Goebbels had this to say about it: "It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio....It is no exaggeration to say that the German revolution, at least in the form it took, would have been impossible without the airplane and the radio. ...[Radio] reached the entire nation, regardless of class, standing, or religion. That was primarily the result of the tight centralization, the strong reporting, and the up-to-date nature of the German radio....Above all it is necessary to clearly centralize all radio activities, to place spiritual tasks ahead of technical ones,...to provide a clear worldview" While a decentralized internet may host extreme views in certain pockets, it also enables a diversity of viewpoints to be expressed, which more often than not serve to regulate those in power as well as inform those without.
  - arroz 3y ago
    I agree to an extent, especially about misinformation madness Scams however always existed
    - GoblinSlayer 3y ago
      Misinformation existed long before scams: monkeys lie.
  - zabana 3y ago
    [flagged]
- scrollaway 3y ago
  I think it’s both, but ageing plays a significant role. As I have grown older, I am able to both notice and ignore more things. Knowing more about the state of the world means you just hear more, from less. An article that required 10min read and 3 min looking up definitions now requires 3min skim and I can move on to another one. This makes the present “more shrill”. Being able to more quickly identify content of value (or lack thereof) means you trawl more easily through large amounts. Of course, it’s important to remember that we are not infallible and trusting yourself too much with these techniques is an easy way to become disconnected from the real world. Being younger means more easily being able to narrow your focus, and less easily feel like the world is too loud.
CJefferson 3y ago
(i) definitely applies. I often see younger hackers talking about “the orange website”, never in positive tones. HN is seen as older, richer, and with various negative tendencies.
- zokier 3y ago
  Its not just the people who are missing ("young hacksters" as you put it), but also the people who are here; the HN populace is gradually approaching general populace, there are lots of people commenting here who have no connection to the cutting edge tech scene that HN originates from (even if HN never was particularly exclusive club). And to clarify, I'm one of those people, so I'm not saying this to be elitist or anything.
- aikinai 3y ago
  Where do you see that? Just curious.
  - NeutralForest 3y ago
    I see it on Twitter
- tormeh 3y ago
  HN is quite money-oriented and economically liberal, although nothing beats Blind in this regard. Many FOSS developers don't like this. I think it has less to do with age.
  - nologic01 3y ago
    I find various economic views are represented, but the economic discussions are quite a bit less sophisticated than the technical ones. That's a general pattern of techie discourse: see also, e.g., the absurd simplifications around human intelligence and AI.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      HN is a message board on a startup incubator -- no one gets into startups for fun, they do it to get rich. this comes with plenty of other biases. that said, technical or no, the overall level of discourse is still better than mainstream reddit, and light years better than things like the local facebook page. I may disagree with a lot posted here, but I'm willing to consider the posters here to be on the "peer-level" far more than other sites.
Otek 3y ago
(i) Do anyone knows where that would be, or you know specific Discord servers? I would very much like to see how younger generation talk about tech, programming, entrepreneurship
- nologic01 3y ago
  it is a more decentralized pattern as each server has specific focus but they tend to have also "general discussion" / "off topic" kind of channels. people compose their own collection of servers they frequent slightly different decentralization patterns on matrix and discourse so the tech/programming discussion is very much alive, but the entrepreneurship angle quite a bit less so...
- Aromasin 3y ago
  Here are a few STEM focused ones I'm in. Note, that much of the content (due to the younger age demographic) is people asking for homework help and such a lot of the time. Funny enough, that has died down now with the advent of ChatGPT. Equally, I've met many field experts who hang out in these groups too and people I've eventually become friends and colleagues with: Furlough (Great Startup Community): https://discord.gg/furlough https://discord.gg/furlough Science and Math Association: https://discord.gg/Yqf9GGjV https://discord.gg/Yqf9GGjV Mathematics: https://discord.gg/zZ94XYkt37 https://discord.gg/zZ94XYkt37 Control Engineering: https://discord.gg/mPwkRJKG https://discord.gg/mPwkRJKG DIY Tech: https://discord.gg/diytech https://discord.gg/diytech Computer Vision: https://discord.gg/4BXczxNJwK https://discord.gg/4BXczxNJwK Adafruit: https://discord.gg/adafruit https://discord.gg/adafruit Better C++: https://discord.gg/e3aXc2xUWr https://discord.gg/e3aXc2xUWr Python: https://discord.gg/python https://discord.gg/python Unity Discord: https://discord.gg/unity https://discord.gg/unity The Programmers Hangout: https://discord.gg/programming https://discord.gg/programming The Coding Den: https://discord.gg/code https://discord.gg/code Game Dev Network: https://discord.gg/gdn https://discord.gg/gdn Developer-Ecosystem: https://discord.gg/deveco https://discord.gg/deveco OpenAI: https://discord.gg/openai https://discord.gg/openai Makers HQ: https://discord.gg/QWtd5Z6N https://discord.gg/QWtd5Z6N
  - Otek 3y ago
anonzzzies 3y ago
I am old but would talk in discord if it had a better search and if it saved archives online so I can find past convos. It’s painful how much really good conversations and tech info gets lost when someone deletes a channel.
- api 3y ago
  I think we’re partially returning to the ephemeral era of human communication. Discords, slacks, decentralized app channels, and self hosted forums all cease to exist quite easily. The semi-permanence of the web may be remembered as a brief era destroyed by spam and toxic social trends.
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    It's because fat clients (like WLM, which was Discord's DM UX before Discord) lost because they're not profitable. Thin clients, however, mean you're data minable and get to pay for things that, instead of occupying your and your friends' machine (like custom emotes, animated avys, voice clips), now occupy valuable company server space. My historiography here spans from the present to 2000, though; I have no idea how IRC worked or what people did pre-Yahoo! Messenger or WLM.
TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
I hypothesize that a lot of interesting discussion also happens in smaller group chats, where people can be more candid while receiving reasonable responses. Public social media participants are often assholes or have ulterior motives. It takes a lot of courage to discuss a new technology while in its baby form, which can easily be smothered by demands of perfection. A private group chat can do a better job at helping to cultivate an environment for growth.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  I highly doubt that most people on HN are even involved with most immature technologies other than being an end-user of some aspect of it. Ergo, I doubt that an HN discussion would have any significant impact on the growth of any kind of technology. Who needs courage when there's objectivity in facts? Even so, people still rabidly defend the new shiny simply because it's new or something they're heavily invested in, so courage and facts aren't always the whole story either.
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    "I highly doubt x" "facts don't care about feelings" "you're probably just an end-user" "you're probably defending it because it's shitty and you're over invested in" "you're a coward" This is the kind of bullshit commentary people discuss things in private to get away from. Your comment contributes nothing positive, encouraging, no suspension of disbelief, no nurturing environment, only hostile derision and holier-than-thou posturing.
api 3y ago
ii) graph the integral of human population and this is exponentially true. There is exponentially more past every year. iii) I’m convinced that the single worst social/cultural event of the previous 25 years (and maybe longer) was the invention by social media of algorithms that bias what you see toward what maximizes engagement. Think about what this does. I put it this way: one person passes you on street and smiles and says “hi,” then another punches you in the face or publicly urinates themselves. Which maximizes engagement? I’m not totally pessimistic though. I see the above cultural trend peaking. I’m also weirdly optimistic about AI. I say weirdly because I feel contrarian about this. Even super intelligent AGI doesn’t frighten me that much. Let me put it this way: I am less afraid of a superintelligence than I am of mobs of ignorant humans, and I think the superintelligence might have more to fear as well. Neanderthals may have been smarter than us, but I’m sure we had that genocidal mob thing down. Intelligence doesn’t always win.
- tagami 3y ago
  Perhaps the concern should be directed toward mobs of ignorant humans following a new found religion created by AI https://theconversation.com/gods-in-the-machine-the-rise-of-artificial-intelligence-may-result-in-new-religions-201068 https://theconversation.com/gods-in-the-machine-the-rise-of-...
  - api 3y ago
    The most plausible dangerous AI scenario is exactly this, or some version of it; the use of AI by humans to brainwash and manipulate huge numbers of other humans. This isn't autonomous AI takeover. It's humans getting their hands on a brand new kind of rock and bashing each other over the head with it like they have with every previous kind of rock. It's not that I have zero concerns about AI, just that I'm not on the Yudkowski freakout train. There is no such thing as a technology that can't be used for evil.
notacoward 3y ago
> The fact that the past keeps growing. A slightly different twist: an ever increasing fraction of the hacking that we might want to talk about was in the past or is tied to the past (e.g. retrocomputing). The industry has grown, but it has also become more corporate and business-focused. Normal users, and even most programmers, don't "hack" in the traditional sense of finding clever solutions or workarounds to make computers do novel things. Some of it's just plain, fairly obvious programming, fitting pieces together more than actually creating. Even ChadGPT can do that, which is why younger programmers who don't remember real hacking are so easily impressed by it. Then there's a lot that's not technical at all, but more about arbitrage and rent collecting ... oops, sorry, I meant markets and business models. Not about abusing people's privacy or ripping them off, no sir, none of that in VC-fueled Silicon Valley for sure. But it's still not hacking. It's not that hacking doesn't still occur. Plenty still does, perhaps even more than ever, but it's no longer enough to keep up with the ever lengthening arc of computing history. As a proportion it's less, so those who are interested in such things look more and more to the past.
satvikpendem 3y ago
Not sure what you mean by 3, tech is just, well, technology; it can be used for good or bad, just like nuclear bombs. I see a lot of upcoming innovations that will be a net good for humans in the future.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I can't speak for the author, but that comment rings true to me. The tech world did shift at some point from intending to produce things that improve people's lives to intending to produce things that mine people's attention, data, and wallets. The modern tech industry feels much more mercenary and cruel than the tech industry of the past. Whether or not it actually is, or if this is an illusion, could be debated (I personally think that it actually is).
  - throwaway5959 3y ago
    It doesn’t help that we wasted a decade on social and crypto, which have by and large both ended up as duds, if not harmful (see CO2 emissions from Ethereum which ended up going proof of stake anyway).
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    > The modern tech industry feels much more mercenary and cruel than the tech industry of the past. Whether or not it actually is, or if this is an illusion, could be debated (I personally think that it actually is). capitalism took over, and does what capitalism does. I dont know why you think it wouldn't be as ruthless and brutal as other industries, the signs of how vicious it could be were pretty clear even in the late 90s / early 2000s.
  - starbugs 3y ago
    I agree it's not an illusion. And I agree with your first point. At least it feels like there's much less emphasis on improving people's lives. I still believe that a product has to have some perceived positive impact on a user's life to be successful. But nowadays, most of the time, that positive impact seems to be focused on instant gratification rather than long term utility. Since the widespread use of the internet became a thing, the back channel then allowed for treating the user as a commodity. I believe this may be one of the qualitative key differences between "now and then" and, if so, it may be a good answer to OP's question. Better than "we're just getting old, it has always been that way", which I believe is not true.
wkat4242 3y ago
> i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever. Yeah or YouTube or TikTok. > iii) The fact that the present is shrill, exhaustively hyped, manipulated and in a sense damaged. Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available. 100% agreed! We thought we were building a better world. We were so wrong. I'm convinced that what went wrong was monetisation related though. The internet was great when people made things for fun and to educate each other. It was the perverse impulse of monetization that caused recommendation algorithms, the push for 'engagement' caused the bubbles and the inflation of anger posts. The pervasive tracking. The bait and switching. The enshittification. This is one of the reasons why I block all ads and never whitelist anything.
Accujack 3y ago
>Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available. I disagree. Tech was never a "force for good". It's always been a tool, a physical manifestation of the science we pursue as part of our species desire for knowledge of the world around us. It can be used for good or evil, whatever your definitions for those are. Right now it's used for a lot of evil things because the people in charge of using it are not altruistic. By and large, the people in charge of government at all levels in the US are elderly and grew up before the space age began. Their focus is not on bringing technological benefits to anyone. It's on bringing all benefits of any kind to themselves. Tech will be a force for good if we can change ourselves and our country to make it that. It will be used for evil, too. Like any tool, it's on us to use it correctly and wisely.

starbugs 3y ago

> iii) The fact that the present is shrill, exhaustively hyped, manipulated and in a sense damaged. Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available. I agree with this sentiment to some extent. Yet, I am struggling to identify if it's "just me getting old" or if there is more to it.

sundvor 3y ago
Speaking as someone who started working in the mid 90s, we're definitely well past The Internet's "Golden Hour". These days we can see first hand just how much societal degeneracy it has helped facilitate. All the latest Culture Wars, malice, scams, cancellations, filter bubbles, misinformation madness etc would not be possible without the Internet. This easily helps explain the point of looking backwards to when the tech was just just that, tech.
- TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
  > All the latest Culture Wars, malice, scams, cancellations, filter bubbles, misinformation madness etc would not be possible without the Internet. The latest, sure, by definition. But nah, people were plenty good at getting worked up much earlier than the internet.
  - api 3y ago
    Search for “satanic panic” for a TV era example.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Go back. Search for "yellow journalism".
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        "Remember the Maine!"
    - rchaud 3y ago
      Satanic panic happened in the US, UK and that's it. The ills of the modern internet are globally distributed.
  - cassianoleal 3y ago
    Yes but not at this speed and scale.
    - sundvor 3y ago
      Yep, didn't spell that out - but indeed, this.
    - chrisco255 3y ago
      Counter point to this, is that centralized mass media enabled early 20th century fascism and communism to thrive. Hitler's head of propaganda, Goebbels, supplied subsidized radios to the Germans and used it to funnel propaganda into German households at the speed of light. Goebbels had this to say about it: "It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio....It is no exaggeration to say that the German revolution, at least in the form it took, would have been impossible without the airplane and the radio. ...[Radio] reached the entire nation, regardless of class, standing, or religion. That was primarily the result of the tight centralization, the strong reporting, and the up-to-date nature of the German radio....Above all it is necessary to clearly centralize all radio activities, to place spiritual tasks ahead of technical ones,...to provide a clear worldview" While a decentralized internet may host extreme views in certain pockets, it also enables a diversity of viewpoints to be expressed, which more often than not serve to regulate those in power as well as inform those without.
- arroz 3y ago
  I agree to an extent, especially about misinformation madness Scams however always existed
  - GoblinSlayer 3y ago
    Misinformation existed long before scams: monkeys lie.
- zabana 3y ago
  [flagged]
scrollaway 3y ago
I think it’s both, but ageing plays a significant role. As I have grown older, I am able to both notice and ignore more things. Knowing more about the state of the world means you just hear more, from less. An article that required 10min read and 3 min looking up definitions now requires 3min skim and I can move on to another one. This makes the present “more shrill”. Being able to more quickly identify content of value (or lack thereof) means you trawl more easily through large amounts. Of course, it’s important to remember that we are not infallible and trusting yourself too much with these techniques is an easy way to become disconnected from the real world. Being younger means more easily being able to narrow your focus, and less easily feel like the world is too loud.

CJefferson 3y ago

(i) definitely applies. I often see younger hackers talking about “the orange website”, never in positive tones. HN is seen as older, richer, and with various negative tendencies.

zokier 3y ago
Its not just the people who are missing ("young hacksters" as you put it), but also the people who are here; the HN populace is gradually approaching general populace, there are lots of people commenting here who have no connection to the cutting edge tech scene that HN originates from (even if HN never was particularly exclusive club). And to clarify, I'm one of those people, so I'm not saying this to be elitist or anything.
aikinai 3y ago
Where do you see that? Just curious.
- NeutralForest 3y ago
  I see it on Twitter
tormeh 3y ago
HN is quite money-oriented and economically liberal, although nothing beats Blind in this regard. Many FOSS developers don't like this. I think it has less to do with age.
- nologic01 3y ago
  I find various economic views are represented, but the economic discussions are quite a bit less sophisticated than the technical ones. That's a general pattern of techie discourse: see also, e.g., the absurd simplifications around human intelligence and AI.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    HN is a message board on a startup incubator -- no one gets into startups for fun, they do it to get rich. this comes with plenty of other biases. that said, technical or no, the overall level of discourse is still better than mainstream reddit, and light years better than things like the local facebook page. I may disagree with a lot posted here, but I'm willing to consider the posters here to be on the "peer-level" far more than other sites.

Otek 3y ago

(i) Do anyone knows where that would be, or you know specific Discord servers? I would very much like to see how younger generation talk about tech, programming, entrepreneurship

nologic01 3y ago
it is a more decentralized pattern as each server has specific focus but they tend to have also "general discussion" / "off topic" kind of channels. people compose their own collection of servers they frequent slightly different decentralization patterns on matrix and discourse so the tech/programming discussion is very much alive, but the entrepreneurship angle quite a bit less so...
Aromasin 3y ago
Here are a few STEM focused ones I'm in. Note, that much of the content (due to the younger age demographic) is people asking for homework help and such a lot of the time. Funny enough, that has died down now with the advent of ChatGPT. Equally, I've met many field experts who hang out in these groups too and people I've eventually become friends and colleagues with: Furlough (Great Startup Community): https://discord.gg/furlough https://discord.gg/furlough Science and Math Association: https://discord.gg/Yqf9GGjV https://discord.gg/Yqf9GGjV Mathematics: https://discord.gg/zZ94XYkt37 https://discord.gg/zZ94XYkt37 Control Engineering: https://discord.gg/mPwkRJKG https://discord.gg/mPwkRJKG DIY Tech: https://discord.gg/diytech https://discord.gg/diytech Computer Vision: https://discord.gg/4BXczxNJwK https://discord.gg/4BXczxNJwK Adafruit: https://discord.gg/adafruit https://discord.gg/adafruit Better C++: https://discord.gg/e3aXc2xUWr https://discord.gg/e3aXc2xUWr Python: https://discord.gg/python https://discord.gg/python Unity Discord: https://discord.gg/unity https://discord.gg/unity The Programmers Hangout: https://discord.gg/programming https://discord.gg/programming The Coding Den: https://discord.gg/code https://discord.gg/code Game Dev Network: https://discord.gg/gdn https://discord.gg/gdn Developer-Ecosystem: https://discord.gg/deveco https://discord.gg/deveco OpenAI: https://discord.gg/openai https://discord.gg/openai Makers HQ: https://discord.gg/QWtd5Z6N https://discord.gg/QWtd5Z6N
- Otek 3y ago

anonzzzies 3y ago

I am old but would talk in discord if it had a better search and if it saved archives online so I can find past convos. It’s painful how much really good conversations and tech info gets lost when someone deletes a channel.

api 3y ago
I think we’re partially returning to the ephemeral era of human communication. Discords, slacks, decentralized app channels, and self hosted forums all cease to exist quite easily. The semi-permanence of the web may be remembered as a brief era destroyed by spam and toxic social trends.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  It's because fat clients (like WLM, which was Discord's DM UX before Discord) lost because they're not profitable. Thin clients, however, mean you're data minable and get to pay for things that, instead of occupying your and your friends' machine (like custom emotes, animated avys, voice clips), now occupy valuable company server space. My historiography here spans from the present to 2000, though; I have no idea how IRC worked or what people did pre-Yahoo! Messenger or WLM.

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago

I hypothesize that a lot of interesting discussion also happens in smaller group chats, where people can be more candid while receiving reasonable responses. Public social media participants are often assholes or have ulterior motives. It takes a lot of courage to discuss a new technology while in its baby form, which can easily be smothered by demands of perfection. A private group chat can do a better job at helping to cultivate an environment for growth.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
I highly doubt that most people on HN are even involved with most immature technologies other than being an end-user of some aspect of it. Ergo, I doubt that an HN discussion would have any significant impact on the growth of any kind of technology. Who needs courage when there's objectivity in facts? Even so, people still rabidly defend the new shiny simply because it's new or something they're heavily invested in, so courage and facts aren't always the whole story either.
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  "I highly doubt x" "facts don't care about feelings" "you're probably just an end-user" "you're probably defending it because it's shitty and you're over invested in" "you're a coward" This is the kind of bullshit commentary people discuss things in private to get away from. Your comment contributes nothing positive, encouraging, no suspension of disbelief, no nurturing environment, only hostile derision and holier-than-thou posturing.

api 3y ago

ii) graph the integral of human population and this is exponentially true. There is exponentially more past every year. iii) I’m convinced that the single worst social/cultural event of the previous 25 years (and maybe longer) was the invention by social media of algorithms that bias what you see toward what maximizes engagement. Think about what this does. I put it this way: one person passes you on street and smiles and says “hi,” then another punches you in the face or publicly urinates themselves. Which maximizes engagement? I’m not totally pessimistic though. I see the above cultural trend peaking. I’m also weirdly optimistic about AI. I say weirdly because I feel contrarian about this. Even super intelligent AGI doesn’t frighten me that much. Let me put it this way: I am less afraid of a superintelligence than I am of mobs of ignorant humans, and I think the superintelligence might have more to fear as well. Neanderthals may have been smarter than us, but I’m sure we had that genocidal mob thing down. Intelligence doesn’t always win.

tagami 3y ago
Perhaps the concern should be directed toward mobs of ignorant humans following a new found religion created by AI https://theconversation.com/gods-in-the-machine-the-rise-of-artificial-intelligence-may-result-in-new-religions-201068 https://theconversation.com/gods-in-the-machine-the-rise-of-...
- api 3y ago
  The most plausible dangerous AI scenario is exactly this, or some version of it; the use of AI by humans to brainwash and manipulate huge numbers of other humans. This isn't autonomous AI takeover. It's humans getting their hands on a brand new kind of rock and bashing each other over the head with it like they have with every previous kind of rock. It's not that I have zero concerns about AI, just that I'm not on the Yudkowski freakout train. There is no such thing as a technology that can't be used for evil.

notacoward 3y ago

> The fact that the past keeps growing. A slightly different twist: an ever increasing fraction of the hacking that we might want to talk about was in the past or is tied to the past (e.g. retrocomputing). The industry has grown, but it has also become more corporate and business-focused. Normal users, and even most programmers, don't "hack" in the traditional sense of finding clever solutions or workarounds to make computers do novel things. Some of it's just plain, fairly obvious programming, fitting pieces together more than actually creating. Even ChadGPT can do that, which is why younger programmers who don't remember real hacking are so easily impressed by it. Then there's a lot that's not technical at all, but more about arbitrage and rent collecting ... oops, sorry, I meant markets and business models. Not about abusing people's privacy or ripping them off, no sir, none of that in VC-fueled Silicon Valley for sure. But it's still not hacking. It's not that hacking doesn't still occur. Plenty still does, perhaps even more than ever, but it's no longer enough to keep up with the ever lengthening arc of computing history. As a proportion it's less, so those who are interested in such things look more and more to the past.

satvikpendem 3y ago

Not sure what you mean by 3, tech is just, well, technology; it can be used for good or bad, just like nuclear bombs. I see a lot of upcoming innovations that will be a net good for humans in the future.

JohnFen 3y ago
I can't speak for the author, but that comment rings true to me. The tech world did shift at some point from intending to produce things that improve people's lives to intending to produce things that mine people's attention, data, and wallets. The modern tech industry feels much more mercenary and cruel than the tech industry of the past. Whether or not it actually is, or if this is an illusion, could be debated (I personally think that it actually is).
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  It doesn’t help that we wasted a decade on social and crypto, which have by and large both ended up as duds, if not harmful (see CO2 emissions from Ethereum which ended up going proof of stake anyway).
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  > The modern tech industry feels much more mercenary and cruel than the tech industry of the past. Whether or not it actually is, or if this is an illusion, could be debated (I personally think that it actually is). capitalism took over, and does what capitalism does. I dont know why you think it wouldn't be as ruthless and brutal as other industries, the signs of how vicious it could be were pretty clear even in the late 90s / early 2000s.
- starbugs 3y ago
  I agree it's not an illusion. And I agree with your first point. At least it feels like there's much less emphasis on improving people's lives. I still believe that a product has to have some perceived positive impact on a user's life to be successful. But nowadays, most of the time, that positive impact seems to be focused on instant gratification rather than long term utility. Since the widespread use of the internet became a thing, the back channel then allowed for treating the user as a commodity. I believe this may be one of the qualitative key differences between "now and then" and, if so, it may be a good answer to OP's question. Better than "we're just getting old, it has always been that way", which I believe is not true.

wkat4242 3y ago

> i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever. Yeah or YouTube or TikTok. > iii) The fact that the present is shrill, exhaustively hyped, manipulated and in a sense damaged. Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available. 100% agreed! We thought we were building a better world. We were so wrong. I'm convinced that what went wrong was monetisation related though. The internet was great when people made things for fun and to educate each other. It was the perverse impulse of monetization that caused recommendation algorithms, the push for 'engagement' caused the bubbles and the inflation of anger posts. The pervasive tracking. The bait and switching. The enshittification. This is one of the reasons why I block all ads and never whitelist anything.

Accujack 3y ago

>Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available. I disagree. Tech was never a "force for good". It's always been a tool, a physical manifestation of the science we pursue as part of our species desire for knowledge of the world around us. It can be used for good or evil, whatever your definitions for those are. Right now it's used for a lot of evil things because the people in charge of using it are not altruistic. By and large, the people in charge of government at all levels in the US are elderly and grew up before the space age began. Their focus is not on bringing technological benefits to anyone. It's on bringing all benefits of any kind to themselves. Tech will be a force for good if we can change ourselves and our country to make it that. It will be used for evil, too. Like any tool, it's on us to use it correctly and wisely.