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> Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter. A lot of hackers, including the bl

> Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter. A lot of hackers, including the black hat kind, DGAF about your ideological purity. They get things done with the tools that make it easy. The tools they’re familiar with. Some of the hacker circles I was most familiar with in my younger days primarily used Windows as their OS. They did a lot of reverse engineering using Windows tools. They might have used .NET to write their custom tools because it was familiar and fast. They pulled off some amazing reverse engineering feats. Yet when I tell people they preferred Windows and not Linux you can tell who’s more focused on ideological purity than actual achievements because eww Windows. > Please do no co-opt the term "hacker". Right back at you. To me, hacker is about results, not about enforcing ideological purity about only using the acceptable tools on your computer. In my experience: The more time someone spends identifying as a hacker, gatekeeping the word, and trying to make it a culture war thing about the tools you use, the less “hacker” like they are. When I think of hacker culture I think about the people who accomplish amazing things regardless of the tools or whether HN finds them ideologically acceptable to use.

phil21 1y ago
> To me, hacker is about results Same to me as well. A hacker would "hack out" some tool in a few crazy caffeine fueled nights that would be ridiculed by professional devs who had been working on the problem as a 6 man team for a year. Only the hacker's tool actually worked and saved 8000 man-hours of dev time. Code might be ugly, might use foundational tech everyone sneers at - but the job would be done. Maintaining it left up to the normies to figure out. It implies deep-level expertise about a specific niche in the space they are hacking on. And it implies "getting shit done" - not making things full of design beauty. Of course there are different types of hackers everywhere - but that was the "scene" to me back in the day. Teenage kids running circles around the greybeards clucking at the kids doing it wrong.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > but that was the "scene" to me back in the day. Same. Back then, and even now, the people who were busy criticizing other people for using the wrong programming language, text editor, or operating system were a different set of people than the ones actually delivering results. In a way it was like hacker fashion: These people knew what was hot and what was not. They ran the right window manager on the right hardware and had the right text editor and their shell was tricked out. They knew what to sneer at and what to criticize for fashion points. But actually accomplishing things was, and still is, orthogonal to being fashionable.
  - DennisP 1y ago
    To wit: my brother has never worked as a developer and has just a limited knowledge of python. In the past few days, he's designed, vibe-coded, and deployed a four-player online chess game, in about four hours of actual work, using Google's Antigravity. I looked at the code when it was partly done, and it was pretty good. The gatekeepers wouldn't consider him a hacker, but that's kinda what he is now.
mattgreenrocks 1y ago
Ideological purity is a crutch for those that can't hack it. :) I love it when the .NET threads show up here, people twist themselves in knots when they read about how the runtime is fantastic and ASP.NET is world class, and you can read between the lines of comments and see that it is very hard for people to believe these things while also knowing that "Micro$oft" made them. Inevitably when public opinion swells and changes on something (such as VSCode), all the dissonance just melts away, and they were _always_ a fan. Funny how that works.

phil21 1y ago

> To me, hacker is about results Same to me as well. A hacker would "hack out" some tool in a few crazy caffeine fueled nights that would be ridiculed by professional devs who had been working on the problem as a 6 man team for a year. Only the hacker's tool actually worked and saved 8000 man-hours of dev time. Code might be ugly, might use foundational tech everyone sneers at - but the job would be done. Maintaining it left up to the normies to figure out. It implies deep-level expertise about a specific niche in the space they are hacking on. And it implies "getting shit done" - not making things full of design beauty. Of course there are different types of hackers everywhere - but that was the "scene" to me back in the day. Teenage kids running circles around the greybeards clucking at the kids doing it wrong.

Aurornis 1y ago
> but that was the "scene" to me back in the day. Same. Back then, and even now, the people who were busy criticizing other people for using the wrong programming language, text editor, or operating system were a different set of people than the ones actually delivering results. In a way it was like hacker fashion: These people knew what was hot and what was not. They ran the right window manager on the right hardware and had the right text editor and their shell was tricked out. They knew what to sneer at and what to criticize for fashion points. But actually accomplishing things was, and still is, orthogonal to being fashionable.
- DennisP 1y ago
  To wit: my brother has never worked as a developer and has just a limited knowledge of python. In the past few days, he's designed, vibe-coded, and deployed a four-player online chess game, in about four hours of actual work, using Google's Antigravity. I looked at the code when it was partly done, and it was pretty good. The gatekeepers wouldn't consider him a hacker, but that's kinda what he is now.

mattgreenrocks 1y ago

Ideological purity is a crutch for those that can't hack it. :) I love it when the .NET threads show up here, people twist themselves in knots when they read about how the runtime is fantastic and ASP.NET is world class, and you can read between the lines of comments and see that it is very hard for people to believe these things while also knowing that "Micro$oft" made them. Inevitably when public opinion swells and changes on something (such as VSCode), all the dissonance just melts away, and they were _always_ a fan. Funny how that works.