6 ms·

I actually have a lot more respect for people who come here and type their heart out in the open for no other reason than bringing in content and sharing their

by pj 17y ago

I actually have a lot more respect for people who come here and type their heart out in the open for no other reason than bringing in content and sharing their ideas. Getting a blog is lame compared to that. You get a blog to get ads and attention and a following. On the contrary, noname123, came here, created an account, and wrote his/her heart out for nothing. Expecting nothing, wanting nothing except to be honest and straight forward with an opinion -- a valid opinion and an astute observation of a topic that the real hackers are feeling inside. Hacking is dying. It has taken an outsider, a liberal artsie fartsie to tell us the truth about it. To point out the absurdity. I went to sxsw interactive this year and was appalled at what I saw. There were few hackers there. Most of them were socialites running around promoting their word press blog or django customization. These people didn't know anything about hacking. Perhaps it was the wrong venue, but the art and the culture and the expertise of real hacking is probably already dead. It's too easy now. You don't have to love hacking to build something with computers. You don't have to have passion to build, you just throw some parts together, copy and paste some graphics and change the colors in photoshop to match a named swatch you found at colourlovers. It's kind of sad.

BrentRitterbeck 17y ago
I've heard this line hundreds of times before. Hacking is not dead. Something can't be killed if you have the ability to turn on your computer and start doing right away. If you are concerned about whether hacking is alive or dead, perhaps you should fire up your computer and bring it back to life. It's that simple.
- noname123 17y ago
  I agree with you completely and my writing was (intentionally) too liberal artsy; so let me put on my technical hat and level with you why hacking is no longer subversive. 1) Growing Complexity of Software Projects: in some sense, it's not about computer programmers "selling out." Because in both FOSS and enterprise software, the code-base has usually third-party dozens if not more dependencies. Writing software is now a team effort, and not a single team effort but more like a company-with-frontend-backend-QA-teams effort. Think back to the day when a individual or two person could write a 2D side-scroller in DOS, with thoughts and stressing even over the monster's sprites and midi soundtrack. Nowadays, an EA game is more like Wikipedia, with many contributors working without being conscious of others. And while Wikipedia is good by itself, but tell me, could Wikipedia contributors by their collective consciousness write War and Peace or Catcher in the Rye? Likewise, Emacs, Linux and Ruby were progenated by single individuals with their respective unfettered individual vision. 2) Compromising Hacking for Hacking's Purpose. Hacking started as an art, without regard for commerce; see RMS as an example of someone who followed his vision without regard for profits or social acceptance. Programming, in its current state, is funny enough the only art form where its leading vanguards and self-processed practitioners openly condone "selling out." I feel that programmers funny enough aren't complete sell-out's but are stuck in the middle ground, the worst of all places. We are told by Paul Graham & Company, that great hackers should be motivated by their craft intrinsically, but should either keep one's day job or start up our own company with an viable business strategy to save up for "fuck you money" (pardon my french). But in reality, having an corporate job or starting a Web 2.0 CRUD start-up makes you beholden to either your boss or your potential customers whom increasingly treat programmers as commodities/assembly-line workers to deliver business requirements. Tell me, did Van Gogh or Sylvia Plath do focus group/market research so that they could decide which colors and content category would be most pleasing to their audience before they set out to compose their painting/poetry? Similarly I'd argue either did Linus/RMS/Wozniak when they set out to hack. Art exists for itself, it serves no purpose. If it does find audience, the best art inspires, challenges and mocks the audience, but it never panders to its audience. 3) Lack of Encouragement in the Community to Buck the Status Quo; I guess that this point is related to my previous point - but I feel the ethos/outlook's of the early 90's at the dawn of personal computing was that anything was possible, whereas today is optimizing on status quo. A survey of new YC startup's include rehashes of social networks/blogs/online music. While occasionally Hacker News feature posts on AI, Bioinformatics, green technology and Arduino. Why is everybody crowded in the web space? Where are the implementation of the next generation's ideas? Ray Kurzweil talks about the coming of Singularity, for instance. I'd argue it is because people are so fixated on monetizing that they no longer push envelope. I just realized that in my zeal, my commentary turned out to be still pretty liberal artsy. Like how Bob Dylan would respond to some heckler at some festival he played at some years back, the heckler said "hey, Bob Dylan your new songs are no longer as relevant as your old songs," to which Dylan responded, "well, I'm at least out here writing songs, what are you doing?" So I'm going to stop now and take OP's advice go hack now.
  - BrentRitterbeck 17y ago
    I wasn't responding to you, but to the post I commented under. I don't think of "hacker" as someone who does most of the stuff found in the first paragraph of your writing that opened this whole thread.
  - kragen 17y ago
    > in both FOSS and enterprise software, the code-base has usually third-party dozens if not more dependencies Lua. ColorForth. STEPS. > Writing software is now a team effort There have always been software teams of many different sizes. But most projects on Sourceforge (or Github, or Freshmeat) are one-person projects. > Think back to the day when a individual or two person could write a 2D side-scroller in DOS It was more common for a group of two to five people to do it, you know, than for one person to do it. And there are any number of popular games these days built by small teams: World of Goo, Mafia Wars, Super Monkey Ball. > as an example of someone who followed his vision without regard for profits or social acceptance. Lots of people still do. > today is optimizing on status quo Most people are always trying to improve the status quo incrementally, except when that's obviously suicidal (e.g. the Ghost Dancers). In the early 90s "everyone" seemed to be working on graphics cards, database software, spreadsheets, word processors, and video games with themes licensed from movies or sports. The internet doesn't even appear in The Road Ahead. But some of us were doing other stuff... we just weren't visible until there was Wired. Working on something new is never a popular activity because most new ideas are worthless. It's a generalization of the thing about 90% of startups failing: the other 10% mostly don't fail because they let their ideas fail and switched to something else. > the only art form where its leading ... practitioners openly condone "selling out." Massage, graphic design, architecture, cooking, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, warfare? There's a lot of stuff going on.
    - ubojan 17y ago
      What is STEPS? I tried googling but it is too generic term.
      - kragen 17y ago
fallentimes 17y ago
I went to sxsw interactive this year... I think you went to the wrong place.
- swolchok 17y ago
  I went to DEFCON. The signal-to-noise ratio is kind of meh.
  - Rantenki 17y ago
    Then you were hanging with the wrong people.
    - shard 17y ago
      If finding the "right" or "wrong" people were so easy, you could go to the circus and find an amazing hacker community. The reason people go to Defcon etc is to be in an environment where the chances of running into the right people are higher. Everyone has a limited amount of time to expend, so they choose the environment which facilitates what they wish to seek out. Saying that he was hanging with the wrong people was glib and not helpful.
    - swolchok 17y ago
      Actually, I sat next to Moxie Marlinspike in a limo. I was referring to attendees in general; a very benign example includes some of my friends who don't really do security but go because it's DEFCON.
ivankirigin 17y ago
Sxsw is an awesome conference full of startup founders. People who make things.
9oliYQjP 17y ago
If you take this perspective, hacking has progressively been dying since 1940. So choosing the prototypical 1990s hacker is quite arbitrary. In the 40s Turing had to make his own electro-mechanical computers from scratch and invent his own statistical techniques. In the 1990s, assembling computers was already vastly simplified. Whereas today you might buy a motherboard with integrated video, audio, and I/O, back then you had separate cards for everything and perhaps a choice of upgrading to 512 kB of L2 cache with a COAST module. In the 1990s you had to worry about IRQs and perhaps roll your own autoexec.bat and config.sys files to make sure you had enough conventional RAM to run your favourite game. This knowledge was much less technical than what our predecessors had to know and I'm sure they were saying the same things about us back then. The thing is, most of the hackers that lament a bygone era have simply had the tasks they knew well made obsolete. They are upset because they learned tasks and not skills. Nobody cares today if you can roll a kick-ass DOS boot disk unless you were skilled enough to translate that knowledge into, say, fitting OS X Leopard onto a 1 GB USB memory stick.
spc476 17y ago
Kids today, no sense of history. The hacking scene was dead by September 1981. Oddly enough, it was marked as dead, again, in February of 1990. The last time the hacking scene was declared dead was April of 2000. We probably have a few months before this hacker scene is also declared dead.
- philwelch 17y ago
  Some more details would make this post informative rather than simply an arcane inside reference.
  - spc476 17y ago
    August, 1981---IBM releases the first IBM PC, legitimizing home computers and killing of a ton of quirky home computers over the next few years. The Homebrew Computer Club was pretty much over at this point in time anyway. January, 1990---Operation Sun Devil goes down, where the Secret Service arrest a bunch of teenagers who have illegally accessed computers and charged with disseminating internal AT&T documents describing how 911 works. The era of the 80s "hackers" ended. March 2000---the tech stock market crases. The Internet craze pretty much tanked at this point. None of this is anything I consider "arcane inside references" but hey, I'm into computer history.
    - koepked 17y ago
      Thanks for responding with these! I share your interest in computer history, and I also enjoy seeing, as best I can, computer culture. Never have I seen such a short summarization of the latter which has given me as much insight as this.
    - HalcyonMuse 17y ago
      I'm surprised you didn't mention September 1993, the neverending September. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September This isn't a big date technologically speaking, but as far as the social history of the internet goes, it was huge. I suspect it's one of the big reasons AOL was so demonized. (There are obviously many others.)
ahoyhere 17y ago
The socialite blog thing will die down. All it takes is for all the herd to realize that there's not money in it, not the way they think, and the social currency you get by being in that crowd will disappear.
scott_s 17y ago
Perhaps you're looking in the wrong places.
jacoblyles 17y ago
>"It's too easy now. You don't have to love hacking to build something with computers. You don't have to have passion to build, you just throw some parts together, copy and paste some graphics and change the colors in photoshop to match a named swatch you found at colourlovers. It's kind of sad." But this is what we've worked for all along. The inevitable result of "Don't Repeat Yourself" and open source. Isn't this what we wanted, to get to a point where programming is easy?

by pj 17y ago

BrentRitterbeck 17y ago

I've heard this line hundreds of times before. Hacking is not dead. Something can't be killed if you have the ability to turn on your computer and start doing right away. If you are concerned about whether hacking is alive or dead, perhaps you should fire up your computer and bring it back to life. It's that simple.

noname123 17y ago
I agree with you completely and my writing was (intentionally) too liberal artsy; so let me put on my technical hat and level with you why hacking is no longer subversive. 1) Growing Complexity of Software Projects: in some sense, it's not about computer programmers "selling out." Because in both FOSS and enterprise software, the code-base has usually third-party dozens if not more dependencies. Writing software is now a team effort, and not a single team effort but more like a company-with-frontend-backend-QA-teams effort. Think back to the day when a individual or two person could write a 2D side-scroller in DOS, with thoughts and stressing even over the monster's sprites and midi soundtrack. Nowadays, an EA game is more like Wikipedia, with many contributors working without being conscious of others. And while Wikipedia is good by itself, but tell me, could Wikipedia contributors by their collective consciousness write War and Peace or Catcher in the Rye? Likewise, Emacs, Linux and Ruby were progenated by single individuals with their respective unfettered individual vision. 2) Compromising Hacking for Hacking's Purpose. Hacking started as an art, without regard for commerce; see RMS as an example of someone who followed his vision without regard for profits or social acceptance. Programming, in its current state, is funny enough the only art form where its leading vanguards and self-processed practitioners openly condone "selling out." I feel that programmers funny enough aren't complete sell-out's but are stuck in the middle ground, the worst of all places. We are told by Paul Graham & Company, that great hackers should be motivated by their craft intrinsically, but should either keep one's day job or start up our own company with an viable business strategy to save up for "fuck you money" (pardon my french). But in reality, having an corporate job or starting a Web 2.0 CRUD start-up makes you beholden to either your boss or your potential customers whom increasingly treat programmers as commodities/assembly-line workers to deliver business requirements. Tell me, did Van Gogh or Sylvia Plath do focus group/market research so that they could decide which colors and content category would be most pleasing to their audience before they set out to compose their painting/poetry? Similarly I'd argue either did Linus/RMS/Wozniak when they set out to hack. Art exists for itself, it serves no purpose. If it does find audience, the best art inspires, challenges and mocks the audience, but it never panders to its audience. 3) Lack of Encouragement in the Community to Buck the Status Quo; I guess that this point is related to my previous point - but I feel the ethos/outlook's of the early 90's at the dawn of personal computing was that anything was possible, whereas today is optimizing on status quo. A survey of new YC startup's include rehashes of social networks/blogs/online music. While occasionally Hacker News feature posts on AI, Bioinformatics, green technology and Arduino. Why is everybody crowded in the web space? Where are the implementation of the next generation's ideas? Ray Kurzweil talks about the coming of Singularity, for instance. I'd argue it is because people are so fixated on monetizing that they no longer push envelope. I just realized that in my zeal, my commentary turned out to be still pretty liberal artsy. Like how Bob Dylan would respond to some heckler at some festival he played at some years back, the heckler said "hey, Bob Dylan your new songs are no longer as relevant as your old songs," to which Dylan responded, "well, I'm at least out here writing songs, what are you doing?" So I'm going to stop now and take OP's advice go hack now.
- BrentRitterbeck 17y ago
  I wasn't responding to you, but to the post I commented under. I don't think of "hacker" as someone who does most of the stuff found in the first paragraph of your writing that opened this whole thread.
- kragen 17y ago
  > in both FOSS and enterprise software, the code-base has usually third-party dozens if not more dependencies Lua. ColorForth. STEPS. > Writing software is now a team effort There have always been software teams of many different sizes. But most projects on Sourceforge (or Github, or Freshmeat) are one-person projects. > Think back to the day when a individual or two person could write a 2D side-scroller in DOS It was more common for a group of two to five people to do it, you know, than for one person to do it. And there are any number of popular games these days built by small teams: World of Goo, Mafia Wars, Super Monkey Ball. > as an example of someone who followed his vision without regard for profits or social acceptance. Lots of people still do. > today is optimizing on status quo Most people are always trying to improve the status quo incrementally, except when that's obviously suicidal (e.g. the Ghost Dancers). In the early 90s "everyone" seemed to be working on graphics cards, database software, spreadsheets, word processors, and video games with themes licensed from movies or sports. The internet doesn't even appear in The Road Ahead. But some of us were doing other stuff... we just weren't visible until there was Wired. Working on something new is never a popular activity because most new ideas are worthless. It's a generalization of the thing about 90% of startups failing: the other 10% mostly don't fail because they let their ideas fail and switched to something else. > the only art form where its leading ... practitioners openly condone "selling out." Massage, graphic design, architecture, cooking, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, warfare? There's a lot of stuff going on.
  - ubojan 17y ago
    What is STEPS? I tried googling but it is too generic term.
    - kragen 17y ago

fallentimes 17y ago

I went to sxsw interactive this year... I think you went to the wrong place.

swolchok 17y ago
I went to DEFCON. The signal-to-noise ratio is kind of meh.
- Rantenki 17y ago
  Then you were hanging with the wrong people.
  - shard 17y ago
    If finding the "right" or "wrong" people were so easy, you could go to the circus and find an amazing hacker community. The reason people go to Defcon etc is to be in an environment where the chances of running into the right people are higher. Everyone has a limited amount of time to expend, so they choose the environment which facilitates what they wish to seek out. Saying that he was hanging with the wrong people was glib and not helpful.
  - swolchok 17y ago
    Actually, I sat next to Moxie Marlinspike in a limo. I was referring to attendees in general; a very benign example includes some of my friends who don't really do security but go because it's DEFCON.

ivankirigin 17y ago

Sxsw is an awesome conference full of startup founders. People who make things.

9oliYQjP 17y ago

If you take this perspective, hacking has progressively been dying since 1940. So choosing the prototypical 1990s hacker is quite arbitrary. In the 40s Turing had to make his own electro-mechanical computers from scratch and invent his own statistical techniques. In the 1990s, assembling computers was already vastly simplified. Whereas today you might buy a motherboard with integrated video, audio, and I/O, back then you had separate cards for everything and perhaps a choice of upgrading to 512 kB of L2 cache with a COAST module. In the 1990s you had to worry about IRQs and perhaps roll your own autoexec.bat and config.sys files to make sure you had enough conventional RAM to run your favourite game. This knowledge was much less technical than what our predecessors had to know and I'm sure they were saying the same things about us back then. The thing is, most of the hackers that lament a bygone era have simply had the tasks they knew well made obsolete. They are upset because they learned tasks and not skills. Nobody cares today if you can roll a kick-ass DOS boot disk unless you were skilled enough to translate that knowledge into, say, fitting OS X Leopard onto a 1 GB USB memory stick.

spc476 17y ago

Kids today, no sense of history. The hacking scene was dead by September 1981. Oddly enough, it was marked as dead, again, in February of 1990. The last time the hacking scene was declared dead was April of 2000. We probably have a few months before this hacker scene is also declared dead.

philwelch 17y ago
Some more details would make this post informative rather than simply an arcane inside reference.
- spc476 17y ago
  August, 1981---IBM releases the first IBM PC, legitimizing home computers and killing of a ton of quirky home computers over the next few years. The Homebrew Computer Club was pretty much over at this point in time anyway. January, 1990---Operation Sun Devil goes down, where the Secret Service arrest a bunch of teenagers who have illegally accessed computers and charged with disseminating internal AT&T documents describing how 911 works. The era of the 80s "hackers" ended. March 2000---the tech stock market crases. The Internet craze pretty much tanked at this point. None of this is anything I consider "arcane inside references" but hey, I'm into computer history.
  - koepked 17y ago
    Thanks for responding with these! I share your interest in computer history, and I also enjoy seeing, as best I can, computer culture. Never have I seen such a short summarization of the latter which has given me as much insight as this.
  - HalcyonMuse 17y ago
    I'm surprised you didn't mention September 1993, the neverending September. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September This isn't a big date technologically speaking, but as far as the social history of the internet goes, it was huge. I suspect it's one of the big reasons AOL was so demonized. (There are obviously many others.)

ahoyhere 17y ago

The socialite blog thing will die down. All it takes is for all the herd to realize that there's not money in it, not the way they think, and the social currency you get by being in that crowd will disappear.

scott_s 17y ago

Perhaps you're looking in the wrong places.

jacoblyles 17y ago

>"It's too easy now. You don't have to love hacking to build something with computers. You don't have to have passion to build, you just throw some parts together, copy and paste some graphics and change the colors in photoshop to match a named swatch you found at colourlovers. It's kind of sad." But this is what we've worked for all along. The inevitable result of "Don't Repeat Yourself" and open source. Isn't this what we wanted, to get to a point where programming is easy?