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The big ideas of the day is a PHP database CRUD application that displays everyone's colleges and geographical networks, with full names and whose purpose essen

The big ideas of the day is a PHP database CRUD application that displays everyone's colleges and geographical networks, with full names and whose purpose essentially, is a repository for pictures of inebriated hot chicks. Apparently, the new new thing is now this CRUD forum database application that has a character-limit of 120 words per post, but get this, it's written in a really cool language called Ruby on Rails, a la AutoTune in Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak. This really strikes home for me. Hacking used to be very intellectual, especially in the open source world. Robert Morris created the first worm as a test to see how large the Internet was. RMS hacked out Emacs (mostly) on his own to build a Lisp interpreter/text editor. Linus made Linux so he could experiment with Unix for free. Sometimes I get the feeling these days that hacking is becoming too market and business oriented and not about the fun intellectual challenge anymore. That said, I do think that it is really more of an evolution instead of a redefinition. I'm not sure that it's all bad and in some cases it's good; many startups have a really clever idea about software or technology behind them. Maybe it's that hacking is now about finding new and clever ways to integrate technology and computing into our lives instead of finding clever things in technology. In essence, maybe it's about writing for the world instead of writing for the programmer. I'm not sure this is correct, but thoughts/comments are welcome (even from me, I might come back and edit this later as I think about it more).

mechanical_fish 17y ago
Sometimes I get the feeling these days that hacking is becoming too market and business oriented and not about the fun intellectual challenge anymore. There are almost certainly more hackers pursuing intellectual challenges than there have ever been before. What has happened is that the entire rest of the world has arrived on the web, so the intellectuals don't stand out as much. It used to be that more than half the people on the web were pursuing Ph.D-level projects in computer science. But that was because there were only twelve people on the web, and all of them were MIT students or BBN employees. Yours is a very common complaint. You hear it all the time in the sciences: Where (people ask) are the contemporary physicists who would rank with Einstein or Fermi? The answer is that there are more people who understand quantum mechanics and general relativity today than there ever were before, and they have a much better understanding than Einstein or Fermi ever did. But they also aren't famous, because it's a lot more boring to be one of several thousand experts on general relativity than it is to be the very first one. Similarly, I've heard it said that the all-time golden age of mathematics may be... today. There are a lot of mathematicians around. There's more funding than ever before in history.
- silentOpen 17y ago
  This brings up the interesting question of "natural genius". World population for the last several centuries has exploded. Suppose 500 million people lived in Plato's time and there were 50 "natural geniuses". That means 1 per 10 million. Even disregarding technological or social progress and assuming linear scaling, that implies at least 650 "natural geniuses" today. Where are they? Who are they? The sheer number of most-capable individuals has grown enormously.
greendestiny 17y ago
I feel whole cyberpunk aesthetic to be the antithesis of the kind of hacking of RMS and Linus. To me computing was an amazing challenge and opportunity to build things, then cyberpunk came along and it was all about being cool. I feel like where we've reached now is back to focusing on building things. I feel like the term hacker has finally been rehabilitated after being co-opted by cyberpunk bullshit. I like that hacking now days means building something useful with amazingly cool open source tools. The sense of entitlement and angst that went with the cyberpunk movement makes me glad its long gone.
kragen 17y ago
The first sentence of your comment, "This really strikes home for me," may be correct. The rest of it seems to be wrong from beginning to end.

mechanical_fish 17y ago

Sometimes I get the feeling these days that hacking is becoming too market and business oriented and not about the fun intellectual challenge anymore. There are almost certainly more hackers pursuing intellectual challenges than there have ever been before. What has happened is that the entire rest of the world has arrived on the web, so the intellectuals don't stand out as much. It used to be that more than half the people on the web were pursuing Ph.D-level projects in computer science. But that was because there were only twelve people on the web, and all of them were MIT students or BBN employees. Yours is a very common complaint. You hear it all the time in the sciences: Where (people ask) are the contemporary physicists who would rank with Einstein or Fermi? The answer is that there are more people who understand quantum mechanics and general relativity today than there ever were before, and they have a much better understanding than Einstein or Fermi ever did. But they also aren't famous, because it's a lot more boring to be one of several thousand experts on general relativity than it is to be the very first one. Similarly, I've heard it said that the all-time golden age of mathematics may be... today. There are a lot of mathematicians around. There's more funding than ever before in history.

silentOpen 17y ago
This brings up the interesting question of "natural genius". World population for the last several centuries has exploded. Suppose 500 million people lived in Plato's time and there were 50 "natural geniuses". That means 1 per 10 million. Even disregarding technological or social progress and assuming linear scaling, that implies at least 650 "natural geniuses" today. Where are they? Who are they? The sheer number of most-capable individuals has grown enormously.

greendestiny 17y ago

I feel whole cyberpunk aesthetic to be the antithesis of the kind of hacking of RMS and Linus. To me computing was an amazing challenge and opportunity to build things, then cyberpunk came along and it was all about being cool. I feel like where we've reached now is back to focusing on building things. I feel like the term hacker has finally been rehabilitated after being co-opted by cyberpunk bullshit. I like that hacking now days means building something useful with amazingly cool open source tools. The sense of entitlement and angst that went with the cyberpunk movement makes me glad its long gone.

kragen 17y ago

The first sentence of your comment, "This really strikes home for me," may be correct. The rest of it seems to be wrong from beginning to end.