Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

Always a fun read. The Hacker Manifesto reminds us that computing culture stands at a crossroads: between hobbyists and academia, between bedroom programmers and industry, between hackers, and, well, hackers, although both appear on either side of the fence.

While sinister and angsty in tone, this is ultimately a tale of someone discovering the wonders of computing, much as I, and many others did - although I never broke into anything, save my iPod.

From the FSF to MS to the demoscene, we're all computing, and many of us have a spark of feelings this piece evokes - a natural curiosity, a desire to push the boundaries, to see what's possible, and a bit of rebeliousness. It's what separates the hackers (both kinds) and the hobbyists and the wannabes, from those who don't have that feeling, the people for whom this is a 9-5 job, who grind out StrategyObjectFactoryFactorySingletonFactories, and when they get home want to think about anything but programming.

In short, that spark is what separates those who really care about computing from those who just want to get their job done and forget about it.

As usual with any broad, sweeping statements I make, I may be wrong.

Maybe I'm bitter for my age, but I feel that the culture has already gone through the crossroads. I do get what you're trying to say, though, but I believe that it's the industry that finds it self at the crossroads, not the culture. The culture itself has largely been co-opted by business concerns.

I'm unconvinced. All the wacky projects that usually pop up on show HN are pretty strong signs of a culture that encourages things that don't necessarily make business sense.

Yet so many of those projects, when submitted, attract comments on HN from people who just don't get it. The culture is still there, but it's not as uniformly concentrated anywhere anymore. It's hard to tell what that really means. In absolute numbers there are probably more hackers with the spark now than ever, but you wouldn't be able to tell by just casually sampling the computing industry both professional and non-professional.

Yeah. This blog post sold that for me: https://eviltrout.com/2015/06/29/an-emulator-for-tis-100.htm...

Particularly this bit:

  Them: “So, it’s a game about programming…”

  Me: “Yes, it’s so much fun!”

  Them: “But I program all day.”

  Me: “Me too!”

  Them: “The last thing I want to do when I come home is program again”

  awkward silence

  Them: “You’re nuts.”

The number of times I show or talk about a side project with business people and they start talking about it as something I built to generate income rather than just for my own curiousity is quite amusing. I think for certain groups of people the idea of creating for purely intellectual purposes is completely alien. It is part of the reason many companies can't hold onto real technical talent. At a cerain point intellectual richness becomes the main priority in a hackers life and the only thing that will keep them around is challenging new problems to solve.

You know, Bryan Cantrill kind of did a talk on this...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI

Why do Bryan's talks keep being relevant to my discussions on HN? This is the second time I've linked one in two days.

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