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Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

> To me, this manifesto has little more than historical value. It's more an expression of generic adolescent angst rather than of hacker culture.

Well sure, but let's not discount the historical value of its angsty naïveté. This is an important part of our cultural history -- it helps explain the peculiar contradiction that many of us still feel a sense of persecution even as working in technology has become both lucrative and respectable.

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Computing in general started with such an idealistic, academic mindset. It's important to remember that the "hacker mindset" was really a call to return to that original approach where people would literally hack together on a computer, explore its limits and do it simply for the thrill. By the 80s, there was a business/professionalism that was eating away at that early approach and the "manifesto" is almost a straight lament. Same thing happened to startups, the Web, etc.

I see where you're coming from, but this is an oversimplification. A lot of the early work on and thinking about computers was about the possibility of top-down social control. This features explicitly in Weiner's Cybernetics and at least implicitly in Von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. (The Soviets latched onto the same idea and tried to build a central-planning computer network.) The "hacking" ethic was really part of the counterculture, and like the counterculture, it ultimately dissolved into the mainstream.

> The "hacking" ethic was really part of the counterculture,

Right. And that's often missed. The hacker ethic and the FSF project are fundamentally countercultural to the Big Iron mentality of the 60s-80s. In the 90s it started getting sanitized by the Open Source folks, and the collision of Big Money and Software in the 00s subverted and subsumed the whole business.

But there are still many people who hack for the sake of the hack. They are often looked down on... it's still countercultural to the modern software/VC world. :-)

I agree with your and the parents comments about hacker culture being counterculture. I don't agree that it still is. The countercultural aspect largely disappeared as computers (and software) became cheap and information widely available. I cringe a bit when see modern hackers using their $3k laptops to have fun coding C in a terminal by themselves. Nothing wrong with that of course, but not necessarily something I would say is a good modern representation of the hacker spirit.

Unless they are hacking on shaders, CUDA or deeplearning (which admittedly isn't C most of the time). Although, I admit that a web server is probably more handy if it's not shaders.

I still like terminals; even on my 3k laptop (which is largely for gaming).

^This.

I broke into my first mainframe in 1977 because I had to if I wanted to play Colossal Cave Adventure. :)

I learned to blue box because I had to if I wanted to talk to my friends around the world and couldn't afford the phone bill.

I tell people now that if you want to pen test, cool, grab some VMs and go nuts. You might even get a bug bounty or two...

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