The Death Of The Hacker: InfoWorld 1986 | Hacker News Reader

The Death Of The Hacker: InfoWorld 1986

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102 pointsmikecane18 comments

What's interesting isn't what the article got wrong. It's what the article got right. A 400k program is insanely difficult to write, if you're working in straight assembly. What the article misses, though, is that programmers' tools evolve too. As we're required to do more in less time we abstract away more and more of the code until the abstractions become incorporated right into the programming languages we write. In the '80s, you still had to write your own basic data structures. Making something like a dictionary, or a hash table might have been an all-day exercise. Today, you can just pull up one of the many ready-made data structures provided by the standard library of your favorite programming language.

On a side note, I find it interesting that the author seems to equate artificial intelligence and e-mail integration as being approximately the same order of difficulty.

artificial intelligence and e-mail integration as being approximately the same order of difficulty.

Interestingly enough, it seems it is the same as we stand today: see gMail, spamassasin, bayes condition. Turing (award), GOOG.

A very senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google told me that Google works and thinks at a higher level of abstraction than Microsoft. "Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement," he said. That's true. -- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/10/17.html

I think part of the problem is that "artificial intelligence" is always being redefined upward toward areas we don't well understand. If you don't know how a computer plays chess, it certainly appears intelligent. Once you do understand it becomes purely mechanical.

When we fully understand how the human brain works, it will probably also seem purely mechanical.

I agree and I think the inverse can be said about intelligence. There the target keeps moving down instead of up. At least for me, the more I learn the more I appreciate the intelligence of the nematode. I appreciate intelligence as not some binary human like or not, but a spectrum. The cat is not not a human it simply has varying levels of what we call human.

Empathy, Sapience, Self Awareness,Consciousness, Sentience, Abstraction, Awareness, Intentionality, Intelligence. AI only needs the last three to be useful and the last four to be dangerous. The AI does not need a theory of mind to collect enough data to be able to produce an accurate distribution of your actions for all interesting situations and then use it to arrange your environment so it can exploit you in line with its intentions.

>If you don't know how the human brain plays chess, it certainly appears intelligent. Once you do understand it becomes purely mechanical.

It is after all bound by the laws of physics.

Maybe the author equated the 2 because in most large organizations both are unsolved. This is part jest and part industry veteran talking.

i found it's exactly the oposite. i think i STARTED right, and then became hogwash of someone that does not understand hacker.

basically i read it as: "hackers laugh at the pace of big corporations, but big corporations will prevail now that we need (gasp) 400k programs"

seems like the journalist started right, and then just wrote whatever the PR guy at IBM told him to write.

There is something that to me still rings very true, almost 20 years later: Microcomputers (computing at large) are very appealing to MBAs, today we'd prefer the term "consultant" or the newly self-appointed Gods of the Software world, the "VC".

They suck the fun out of it for the most part; they have no passion for software, clearly they're in it simply because it's a lucrative business.

Academia comes off as an alternative with a whole different set of problems...

It seems that there's little place left for the Wozniaks of this world, true hackers who write 40K sofware that revolutionize industries, while doing it for "fun".

While active, _why was a vocal evangelist of that vision.

Camping, for example, is an MVC framework written in less than 4K of Ruby code. It was at its time the go to microframework in the Ruby world. Then _why disappeared, and the releases staled for a while, and Sinatra took the spot.

Here's the initial camping announcement, with the full source code included. The updates were added incrementally, it was hillarious to see them roll out... http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/bits/campingAMicrofr...

The current version has been brought down to less than 3K By judofyr: https://github.com/camping/camping/blob/master/lib/camping.r...

i disagree about the "for fun"

they do it because it's obvious and EASY, and yet, not one did. So they do it for satisfaction. Everyone likes low-effort-high-reward tasks.

it may be easy because they used their whole lives preparing for the feat. but for them, it's easy. the main problem is that the MBA types can't see the obvious. there lies all the problems. VCs are just a new name for MBAs of yesterday. a couple of them see past the obvious, but that will go away soon and we will need another nomenclature for the few that still sees past it.

I was never really aware of the reason Wozniak left Apple, I figured it was because Jobs was mostly in it for the money and their relationship inevitably went downhill. I remember an interview with Wozniak, something I'll always remember, it went something like this: "I went to Steve and showed him this awesome new system I had been playing with, 'Isn't this awesome?!', I said and he replied 'Holy crap, we could make so much money off of this!', 'I suppose you're right'".

Edit: bad grammar.

Interestingly, Y Combinator's approach of working with hackers so that they can launch, build, and stay in control of new businesses is the exact opposite of what the article's author said would happen in the future.

Wow. Crazy article.

Not sure if the Woz/Jobs intro is exactly apt; hindsight tells us that while Woz may have been disenchanted (and that as a true uber ultimate hacker, he probably stumbled upon this decades earlier and significantly harder than most hackers), it probably did have a bit more to do with the crazy personalities going on there – Jobs' insanely focused and hurtful drive and Woz's desire to not be involved with the business of Apple.

Rather, I think the article hits the nail on the head in its conclusion:

"There will always be hackers. We may soon see genetic hackers, organic computing hackers . . . who knows? They’re the ones on the fringes who push things a little further and faster. But their role in personal computing has been forever changed. Now that its big business, they may be happy at that."

Their role changed because computing changed the world and indeed became even bigger business. Simulatneously, the "creative force" left the room, replaced with big business and other processes that are entirely disinteresting for a true hacker.

Now clearly the hacker spirit will endure as long as there are ways to push things that little bit further/faster. Often times, those improvements are valuable contributions to be spread, and the hacker spirit meets (in some way) with the entrepreneurial spirit. This is beneficial and has led to some of the world's greatest success stories.

But the hacker spirit and the entrepreneurial spirit do have differences; different goals, priorities and countless other subtleties of art that the non-hacker might miss. Often times, as businesses grow, that's exactly what take place.

I definitely can't claim to have the answer, and no one's probably that much closer to the solution than when the article was written. But it's best to keep an eye out for the problem and steer clear of it at all possible.

In the meantime, I wish that those in the startup community would avoid trivializing the term "hack" left and right, omitting the creative force in the process. Analyzing customer traction and marketing data isn't hacking. Writing a few lines of code for your run of the mill social networking or daily deals startup one afternoon isn't hacking. This isn't to say that those things aren't important. Quite the contrary; teams and structure and 85% of startup events? Beneficial, but not hacking.

This isn't about making hacking elitist or limited to any technical context; rather, it's about flashes of brilliance and the gem that emerges. Just like it was in 1986. Just like it's always been and always will be.

It always makes me feel young to read an article that was published before I was born, and in this case saying that my intended niche is dead. I wish I knew more of these older, wizened ideas. I will probably never be comfortable in assembly, and I would seriously enjoy a course entitled, "what we knew about computing in the 70s which still isn't part of mainstream languages today."

If I may reappropriate a line from Hopkins, "hackers build--but not I build, no, but strain, time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes." I guess it's a broader anxiety for all people working in artistic professions. In any case, I'm envious of the amazing ability of the past to get work done, and am surprised that with the huge network of modern coders, modern thinkers, modern design techniques, we've only elaborated the slightest on what they've done. They built me the Internet: but I use it to read blogs and get into revert wars on Wikipedia.

I have found that people who announce things the along the lines of "now it's serious business, the fun is over" are a) the least creative people who are only comfortable in a predictable, well organized world and are quietly praying for the "fun" to be over, and b) almost always wrong.

The game changed, it went beyond the "microcomputer" concept in ways this guy couldn't conceive. But that does not mean he was wrong.

The days of the lone hacker writing assembly code for the "microcomputing" business DID came to an end. So did the days of the lone hardware hacker building and selling computers from his garage.

And programming did became a generally collaborative effort.

Lone hackers will always exist. It's just the layers of abstraction that change. Wozniak worked on top of ICs and electronic components. Now we tend to work on top of complex kernels, libraries and so on. So what? The stuff below tends to be a million man-hours achievement, hackers work on the fringe... I don't think that pattern has changed.

I'm intrigued by this "networked electronic mail", maybe it will replace my steam-powered telegraph automaton?

(J/k)

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