Amish Hackers (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Amish Hackers (2009)

kk.org

129 pointsharryvederci62 comments

The Amish are really misunderstood by people on the outside (myself included). This article does a great job of addressing those misconceptions and I enjoyed reading it after a long afternoon spent talking about the subject with a friend who was a midwife to the Amish community in northern Indiana[0]. My knowledge up to that point was "Those are the folks that I get my turkeys from who ride around in buggies."

The conversation started with an odd statement -- she had 7 children under 18 all home-schooled at least until High School (they were given the choice to attend public school at that point) and is a devout Christian. I was asking her why she allowed them to attend public school in High School given her rigidity on the merits of Home Schooling and her involvement in the Home Schooling movement.

She said "They know enough to graduate by the time I'm done with them, so it's an opportunity for them to evangelize to the other kids and enjoy themselves. I even let them attend an occasional party provided it's not an Amish party"

I chuckled ... wouldn't want to be negatively influenced by The Amish! I had no idea what 'rumspringa' was at that point. She explained and I don't think I blinked the entire time. Her son pointed out "The Amish have the best cars and every hard drug around". Rumspringa[0] is a period of time after age 16 where Amish children are basically allowed to live conventionally in order to make the decision, on their own, if they want to join the community as adults. Many buy (really nice) cars, many -- having experienced freedom for the first time in their lives -- make every mistake a late teenager can make and seem to make it at a level that pales in comparison to my experience as a teenager. The cynical -- and she was one -- believe it is used to encourage children to make every mistake the modern world has to offer so that they are trapped into making the choice to join the Amish community.

Because of my experience buying Amish turkeys, which are sold as cage free, hormone free, and otherwise considered superior from a health-standpoint to conventional turkeys[1]. I was surprised to find out that my midwife friend didn't buy Amish turkeys despite being extremely into the "all natural" way of thinking[2].

The article mentions that the technology choices which are allowed are limited by the parish and are inconsistent among parishes. Gas engines are usually allowed. Electricity is allowed with some restrictions, though AFAIK, being off-grid is required -- if you can generate it from solar/gas generator, it's OK and gas refrigerators or gas generators powering refrigerators were allowed.

While Amish Turkeys may not use conventional methods -- hormone-free/pesticide-free feed -- such is not the case with pretty much anything else. Velveeta, apparently, can be found in large quantities in every Amish kitchen in the community she served and is used in so many meals that she turns down Amish meals. Gelatin (non-desert Jello) is another staple of the diets of the people she served. Her take was "Amish food is unhealthy and disgusting".

Outside of that, she explained to me that literally everything is grown conventionally. The parish she serves has no rules against pesticide use/GMO/conventional fertilizers and the like are common -- basically anything that will keep a plant from dying is common. On the surface, this was a strange thing for me to wrap my brain around given my Amish Turkey experience, however, the explanation she gave was "Velveeta notwithstanding, they rely on their own farming for the majority of their food and use the most effective/least expensive options available in order to make sure there's enough". I still can't get over the Velveeta. Nasty. Her opinion was that among the conventional farms, Amish farms were the worst and she wouldn't consume anything grown on an Amish farm.

As a midwife, though, she had a bit of experience with some of the darker side of Amish life (a lot is explained in The Devil's Playground). Bed Courtship is among the oddest practices for a community that believes per-marital sex is evil. More than a few of her baby-delivery roles were for late teenage girls who became pregnant before they were married. The practice involves, basically, bringing a girl home to lay in the same bed with as part of a date. Sex is forbidden, and it sometimes includes a barrier that is supposed to separate the two participants, but that practice is rare (as is Bed Courtship, in general). Her opinion was that Bed Courtship, much like 'rumspringa', is designed to cause children to make mistakes that result in them feeling forced to stay Amish for life.

A small anecdote I share with people choosing to make a switch to a programming/IT career was that her husband -- an IT systems analyst -- worked with a gentleman who was Amish up until his late 20s[3]. He was a former-Amish software developer. "If that guy can do it, anyone can."

[0] I strongly recommend the documentary The Devil's Playground if you want to learn about 'rumspringa'. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0293088/

[1] I don't challenge those labels, but I also can't validate them.

[2] She refused to buy pasteurized milk, opting for milk from a neighbors farm. Her husband refused to drink it without passing it through their own pasteurizer.

[3] Yes, they do shun family members who leave the community.

This is the kind of stuff I'm talking about in my own comment in this thread. The Amish are not the pious people they're made out to be in popular media. They sin just like you or me.

Rumspringa varies greatly from community to community. I think it would be safe to say that the majority of Amish don't experience rumspringa in the wild way that has been popularized by TV culture.

This link has a sizable section on the topic: https://openworks.wooster.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=ht...

It's not really a surprise that they use conventional agriculture techniques like pesticides instead of going organic. These techniques are the convention because they increase productivity and yield, making food cheaper. If you have to pay for your food using manual labor, then your food is very expensive and it makes an even bigger difference.

I used to be a land surveyor and I did a lot of work in Lancaster County PA. Funny story I still think about sometimes. The Amish have discovered roadside barbecue and many of them have turned it into a cottage business. One afternoon after completing a survey we were hungry to grab some lunch, and we saw a group of Amish women in bonnets on the roadside tending to barbecue over one of those grills made from a sawed-in-half oil barrel. It was on a farm next to a barn and as were pulling around to park our truck we noticed a teenage Amish boy walking while talking on a mobile phone. He noticed we saw him and he immediately picked up his pace and started walking faster in order to get behind the corner of the barn so we couldn't observe him anymore while we parked the truck.

So what I learned from this is that even though the Amish may be allowed to use certain forms of technology, they're not necessarily proud of it or want outsiders to know they're using it.

Easy to mock their ways for being inefficient. That's because efficiency isn't their metric. It's self-sufficiency. To the degree self-sufficiency doesn't become hubris.

So they'll do it themselves if they can. But they'll accept help if that's sensible, because otherwise its arrogance/pride and that's a sin.

An old Amish joke: the young family in the buggy is heading home from Sunday meeting, Father says to Mother "I believe we were the plainest ones there!"

Another example of using a different metric, from Hans Rosling:

>> A decade ago I lectured to the staff of the Ministry of Health in Cuba. After my talk the Minister happily said, this graphs showed that Cuba is the healthiest of the poor countries! On the way out a young staff member whispered in my ear:

>> – He is wrong, Cuba is just the poorest of the healthy countries.

https://www.gapminder.org/news/cuba-poorest-of-the-healthy/

This is such a joke. Stats on Cuba are usually provided by the Cuban government, not a single one international organization have ever made a census, or conducted an independent inspection to prove/disprove any of the government's claims. As someone who grew up in Miami, with many Cuban friends, and who have also been in Cuban, not in the touristy places(varadero, cayo largo, etc...), but where the Cubans actually live, this is disgusting, and a bad analogy. It blows my mind how people here, are always complaining about China, but go alone with the propaganda from the bloody, murderous Cuban dictatorship. There is plenty of info online, from independent sources on Cuba, on how is the healthcare(or the lack of it) over there, go and take a look.

> this is [...] a bad analogy

That's true. The Amish don't live on an island, and haven't been subject to half a century of embargo and economic sanctions. The restrictions on their participation in the wider society and global economy are by choice, and they freely access whatever outside resources are useful to sustain themselves when they decide that it makes sense to do so. The two situations are indeed incomparable.

Cuba is completely free to trade with the other 85% of the world economy that is not the United States, and indeed they've done so since the Soviet Union collapsed. They do quite a bit of trade with various European countries, and in particular Spain.

Interestingly, they're not even 100% cut off from the US- agricultural exports are exempt, and so Cuba imports quite a bit of US foodstuffs like poultry, soybeans and corn. (Farmers generally drive US economic policy!)

Exactly, the "half a decade of embargo" rhetoric come from people who clearly don't live or never have been in Cuba, nor understand the reason for the embargo. I don't blame them tho, they are just victims of decades of propaganda.

This article really resonated for me. I’m thinking back to my undergraduate degree. I didn’t learn about the web until 1994-5 while interning at a computer company in the valley (the browser was Mosaic). Ok. What’s this? Oh. Your personal bio page. And you like carpentry.

During my undergraduate I had learned about the life cycle of technology, and ‘early adopters’. That seemed like the place to be _if you could afford it_.

So on the one hand you don’t know just how little you know when faced with something completely new, and on the other hand you like the latest and greatest cool new thing, but it often takes a great investment of time or money, or both.

And here is the Amish. Putting family and community and their beliefs first, and taking the time to let the rest sort itself out in time.

I also admire Buddhists, but they don’t want to own anything. Amish way of life seems like a middle ground. But this is all just armchair talk. Pay me no mind.

Another joke, this old Slim Jim commercial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5DC5cIbKUU

Sorry, couldn't resist

Golden!

The Amish can evaluate the effects of new technology on their communities by having the rest of the world act as a guinea pig. I think society as a whole could benefit from thinking about the effects of new technology on communities before adopting it, but reasoning about that from first principles seems very hard and putting the genie back into the bottle after a technology has been widely deployed is essentially impossible.

And in another way, the Amish are the guinea pig of their lifestyle. Maybe it will play out that strong, small, local communities have a huge long-term advantage in some important metric.

I think it's very good that we have so many diverse cultures and lifestyles. There are many routes to happiness.

They do have much better healthcare outcomes.

Agreed, perhaps there's a lot we can learn from their experiment. For example, by not using artificial lighting do they have a habit of "two sleeps" like our ancestors did? https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieva...

A society's best shot of protecting itself from the potential negative effects of unknown future technologies is ensuring that everyone's basic needs are met. Desperate people do desperate things.

How would meeting everyone's basic needs help for example against disinformation campaigns on social media destabilizing democracies?

You're confusing "the best thing you can do" with "the only thing you need to do."

If everyone's basic needs are met, they won't be so discontented and thus easily be swayed by destabilising propaganda.

I don't think the article supports that position. Every new tech was evaluated by them based on the experience of people within their community who were approved early adopters. I didn't see any argument of "look what that tech is doing to the world" as factoring into a decision.

Maybe I misread your point, but it seems like you're saying they're free loading off of the rest of society in some fundamentally greater way than other groups. I just don't see that.

To be fair, the rest of the world should be using Silicon Valley the same way. Were I a medium sized city, I would have a group of people looking at things like scooters and private busses that start in the bay area and start thinking about legislation to how to harness the benefits without the chaos.

But this is a very hypochritical way of living in my opinion.

Let's take YouTube as an example: I am not addicted to YouTube; I use it sparingly, without an account, with an extension that blocks related videos and by flushing the cookies each time. I consider it of great value to me because when I need to search for a tutorial or a piece of information I'm almost sure to find a video that will meet my demand. The problem here lies with the fact that the only reason why there are so many videos in the first place is because the majority of the userbase is indeed addicted to the service, so people are highly incentivized to make videos on the platform sharing their knowledge in order to capture a money earning audience. And even if you tell me that the vast majority of content is made without money taken into consideration you still have to admit that the service wouldn't be free if there wasn't that mass of money earning youtubers making the content free for everyone else.

Since I use YouTube in such an Amishly way, I believe I'm not earning people much money so I don't feel that bad perpetuating the cycle, but I still have to admit to myself that if more and more people acted like me YouTube and many other platforms wouldn't exist and my life would be a bit worse as a result. I hope the Amish truly realize how lucky they are that they can exploit the rest of society when it suits their needs (e.g. they have no problem going to the hospital) and check out for the rest of the day unbothered while everyone else slaves away to mainting the system

Most of us aren't working maintaining the system. Developers most of all - we're mostly either working on line of business applications or startups, neither of which, by and large, are structural elements of society. I don't know for sure what percentage of working people are doing the holding-up of modern society, but my estimate is about 20%.

You act as if the Amish produce nothing useful for society. While I see your point, I think making an effort to live more traditionally is a long way off from exploiting society.

> The Amish have the undeserved reputation of being luddites, of people who refuse to employ new technology.

Looks like Amish ARE indeed luddites in original meaning of the word (only accept technology if it's for social good), but current widely believed meaning of "luddite" is just people shunning technology. For more info - you can start with recently posted "Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature"[0] or read "What the Luddites Really Fought Against"[1].

[0] https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-i...

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...

> Like all legends, the Amish myth is based on some facts. The Amish, particular the Old Order Amish [...] really are slow to adopt new things. In contemporary society our default is set to say "yes" to new things, and in Old Order Amish societies the default is set to "no."

> When new things come around, the Amish automatically start by refusing them.

I notice I'm going in this direction more and more. A thought I keep having (especially when reading about IoT and VR) is: "Just because we can, does that mean we should?"

Figure out who benefits and profits from those things.

IoT is largely a "push" system in which hardware is sold for under cost to get it out into people's homes and businesses for data collection, and VR promises to be the sort of thing that will, after some short experimentation, end up in a "Yeah, I mean, we figured out how to make cell phones addictive to maximize user engagement and behavioral surplus for profit, but they're nothing compared to THIS!" state.

I don't like articles about the Amish like this because they only really provide the surface detail.

I grew up around a lot of Amish, knew a few personally. They're ultimately just like everyone else. And by that I mean, they can be real assholes. For whatever prescribed tenets a particular religion may have, there will also be sinners. But for the Amish, they can be really judgemental sinners. They may have their "family values" and close-knit society for themselves, but think nothing of trying to screw over any "English" (their name for us) in business deals. I remember one particular Amish "investing group" back home when I was a kid that ended up going bankrupt because they failed to scam someone who was actually scamming them on a land deal. There was another high-profile case of an Amish drug ring selling to English school kids. And the way they treat women and children would be considered abuse in our society.

Let's not lionize the Amish too much.

I posted the article because I find it an interesting take on technology, restrictions on technology usage, and working around (hacking) the limitations of those restrictions.

I think that's a perfect combination for a Hacker News submission, and it perfectly fits the scope of the article. If the article would have gone into detail about how not all Amish are likeable (I wouldn't know, I've never met one) and whether or not they screwed people over in business deals, it would have made the article less suitable for an HN post, I think.

TL/DR: there's a time and place for anything.

That's fair, and I didn't want to come off as complaining that it had been shared at all. It's just that these sort of articles frequently come up and I've never seen any that show any other side of them than "pious, salt-of-the-earth people". Then the comments roll of the form "the Amish seem to have life figured out".

There's definitely something to be said about being more intentional in technology adoption. I don't think that's the same thing as being slower about adoption. But I also don't think being more intentional is really what's going on with the Amish.

Like all religions, it's a system of control. You'll see people (rightly) criticize the homophobia, misogyny, and anti-intellectualism of Evangelical Christianity and Wahhabism in Islam. And then an article about the Amish shows up--who largely share a lot of those sorts of beliefs--and they're depicted as a quaint, harmless people. Maybe it's because they live in enclaves and don't proselytize, so they aren't harmful to us, but they still inflict those abusive beliefs within their congregation.

IDK, maybe it's no different than articles about how the Taliban weld scrap and guns to Toyota Hyraxes to make technicals. It does feel different, though.

> And if the Amish hackers and early adopters teach us anything, it’s that you have to try things first. Try first and relinquish later if need be.

Wow this reminds me of "break things and fail fast". I used to have a negative-ish opinion about the Amish but the more I learn about them (and other groups such as the Mennonites) the more I appreciate the way the conduct their lives.

I'm am predominantly Pennsylvania Dutch (not Amish or Mennonite) and currently live within a few miles of both Amish and Mennonite farms. What I can tell you is that they are people - if you tell them a (good) joke they'll laugh and if you tell them a joke that's not funny, they'll smile awkwardly. They also have prejudices just like we do (even from one sect to another.) I'm a bit older than most here and what I've learned is that you can have an engaging conversation with almost anyone - take time to listen and you'll probably notice that the other person finds you interesting and curious too.

Thank you for sharing this. I agree with what you said, I think one problem with the current social-media-driven public discourse is that it brings the tendency to "put a label on people" to an extreme. But as you say, if you spend time and have a real conversation with a person you will often find that reality is different from stereotypes.

Maybe we can learn more from them than they can learn from us.

I've liked this article for many years, but it's been hard to focus on it since learning about the dark consequences of the Amish way of life: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a30284631/amish-sexua...

An interesting article, but I am curious about the incident rates and comparison to non-Amish communities. Child abuse is surprisingly common in general and I don't see anything in the article that makes specific claims about its frequency compared to the population in general.

I see from their anecdotes that the culture seems like it tolerates it but there are lots of communities with power imbalances and social pressures that prevent perpetrator from being held accountable. Sometimes a perpetrator has the power or influence or reputation that will cause the community to not believe the victim or to prevent punishment. Is this more prevalent among Amish than among Catholics, or Mainstream Mormons, or Fundamentalist Baptists, or Atheists? The article doesn't even address that. It only makes a very generalized claim about 52 known cases across 2 decades, covering an unspecified population/region, and suggests that the real number must be much higher based on the anecdotes. If there was a link to any real study and I missed it, I apologize.

It is obvious that the Amish churches do not approve of child abuse, in doctrine or in practice. They differ in how they think it should be dealt with for sure, because they generally don't prefer outside courts for anything. Does this result in more abuse? Maybe, but I'd like to know the answer from a scientific analysis rather than an anecdotal one before I write off the Amish people in general.

Yeah, I noticed the lack of quantitative data as well. The biggest qualitative red flag for me in the whole article is sending victims back to live with the abuser very soon after the abuser has been found guilty and served a penalty. Reasonable people can argue about whether the penalty is reasonable, but it's hard to imagine reasonable people arguing that kids should go back to live with a previously abusive parent. And that decision is a straight-line consequence of the Amish belief system as I understand it.

But I can't even tell if that is the norm within Amish communities or if that is just something that some local church decided for one particular case. Another church may have chosen to isolate an abuser from the victim or other potential victims in various ways. A comprehensive study would probably document those things as well.

> “From the tank a series of high-pressure pipes snake off toward every corner of the factory. A hard rubber flexible hose connects each tool to a pipe. The entire shop runs on compressed air. Every piece of machine is running on pneumatic power.”

This was an entirely normal setup for factories and workshops back in the day, certainly not exclusive to the Amish!

Now days, electric tools have become more powerful and more convenient thanks to better batteries etc, so pneumatic isn’t as common as it once was. But pneumatic tools of all kinds are still sold and still used in some shops.

This reminds of old factories that had belt-driven tools running off of a shared axle hanging overhead. The axle would be powered by a combustion motor. Turning on/off your tool meant engaging or disengaging it’s belt from the axle. I’ve only seen these in museums and don’t remember what they’re called.

When my house was being significantly remodeled one of the crews set up shop air every morning using an electric compressor.

One of the crews left behind a battery charger typical of those used for drills, so the building trades are not unanimous on air vs electric.

The comments section is hilarious, some spam bot must have misinterpreted the title:

> searching for a good hacker that could successfully change my university grades [...], a week to graduation i came across [...]

##AmishMacbeth

func changeGrade(toB || !toB);

Some years ago I met a fellow that was former Amish, still lived extremely simple and dressed almost the same. He left because he got the engine bug, ended up becoming a diesel mechanic and pursuing proper degrees in diesel tech/diesel mechanics, was just purely fascinated by machinery. Interesting guy.

While I can appreciate that pockets of this sort of esoteric culture exist in the world, I'm very glad that the situation isn't reversed and we don't have mere pockets of modernity. I would find Amish life suffocating.

I really like that the Amish are slow to adopt new stupid tech, I wish the people here would learn a bit from them.

BUT the first item on that list "Homebuilt gas powered ice cutter to make ice for non-electric icebox." is the most in-denial waste of time/energy I have ever seen:

Earthcellar?

Previous discussion (there are several, but this was the most active) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22324609

Based on the title I was expecting a guy in traditional Amish garb deep in an underground basement somewhere surrounded by 486s and Sinclair ZX Spectrums madly typing away on an IBM model M.

What was he hacking? Mainframes.

Utterly fascinating article. The OG steampunk hackers. I wonder what the latest is in 2021, have they decided that smartphones are anti-community?

What can we learn from them?

> gas powered ice cutter to make ice for non-electric icebox

> The diesel engine burns fuel to drive the compressor that fills the reservoir with pressure. From the tank a series of high-pressure pipes snake off toward every corner of the factory.

> power their combine or threshers with diesel engines, if the engine only drives the threshers but is not self-propelled, so the whole smoking, noisy contraption is pulled by horses

> In their goal to remain off the grid, yet modernize, some Amish have installed inverters on their diesel generators linked to batteries to provide them with off-grid 110 volts. They power specialty appliances at first, like an electric coffee pot.

Just like Shabbat elevators, to me these all sound like weird, hacky, kinda stupid, environmentally unfriendly solutions to problems caused by ridiculous made up rules, that -- ultimately -- don't even matter, because while 50 or so years behind everyone else, the Amish are still going to adopt grid electricity, smartphones and Node.js sooner or later.

You can also find the same amount of hacker DIY ingenuity in places where scarcity is not self-imposed, e.g. rural Russia, and those people get much more respect from me than weird religious communities almost piggybacking on the rest of the society.

> because while 50 or so years behind everyone else, the Amish are still going to adopt grid electricity, smartphones and Node.js sooner or later.

[citation needed]

The last few paragraphs of the article strongly hint at that. With the boy carrying a cellphone and the inverter-for-coffee pot stuff and how the line is moving and how the amish are steadily adopting technology at their pace.

I mean, the boy's father also says that there will always be "horse and buggy" Amish. We are forgetting that there are different Amish orders that lie on a spectrum of conservatism within the Amish community. Even if there are some groups that end up looking more like us there will always be the Amish who don't use the internet, electricity, and probably even diesel power.

You're missing the point almost entirely.

Yes, they're abiding by a weird set of made-up rules, but a set of rules that they've agreed upon as a community in order to preserve a specific set of moral and philosophical imperatives. The rules aren't there just to make life difficult or to exclude technology for no reason, but to preserve a culture which they (and other similar communities) believe is more important than simply adopting any technology without due consideration of its effects.

You can certainly critique individual judgement calls on their so-called "self-sufficiency" - e.g. reliance on external oil mining & refinement does seem an unfortunate choice - but at a high level I think saying their rules "ultimately don't even matter" misses the point a little.

The intent (and benefits) of adopting things late is twofold: it allows more time for judgement calls to be made on impact, and it also instils self-sufficiency in individual members of the community, which ultimately is a pretty large collective benefit in itself when it comes to day-to-day living.

> in places where scarcity is not self-imposed

Not everyone has the freedom & resources to leave home and settle (& succeed) somewhere else, but for those who do, scarcities can be self-imposed by personal decisions on where to stay.

Either way, I'm not sure how someone deserves more or less respect for taking similar approaches just because their situation is either chosen by them or by fate.

I agree that the rules seem completely made up, but I think the most interesting thing in the article is that it makes it clear that there's a lot of Amish geeks, and these people are very curious, like all human beings. The geeks are really drawn to technology, and they find ways to implement more and more technology, despite the byzantine rules.

If they end up switching more to solar (which the article hints at), it will probably help them be more self-sufficient. Even though they have their own convoluted process for approving technologies or not, they will probably converge towards the more efficient and cost effective solution, just much slower.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Also, please keep religious flamebait off HN. It leads to religious flamewars, which are tedious, nasty, and dumb.

They probably won't adopt node.js unless node.js survives for another 50 years. That's the benefit of slow: the stuff that poofs into and out of existence for 5 years or 10 years never even makes it onto the radar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com