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Let's stop with this this 'real hacker' bullshit. There's nothing wrong with being motivated by wealth; gates was and now he's the largest charity on the planet.

To me, there is little difference between the terms "real hacker" and "real American." Both exist for one purpose: to make the elitist feel good about themselves while giving them a chance to look down on plebes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Oh, but "real American" serves the opposite purpose: the whip the ignorant plebes into a frenzy of tribal pride in order to justify policies that serve the elite.

Of course, the question, and the issue of where "real American" comes from is: which elite? "Real American" talk is when the capitalist class talks to the blue-collar working class and demonizes the white-collar working class, the intelligentsia, the professional working class, academia, the culture industry, and any petite bourgeoisie associated with the aforementioned.

There's no need to be confrontational. I agree with the suggestion that wealth is generally not the aim that drives the more knowledgeable minds to long-term effect in our industry.

My theory is that that's because once you have enough to get by, the problem of money goes away and is replaced with competing concerns (ie. curiosity to create, learn or experience new things).

> There's no need to be confrontational.

I disagree, I think that the 'real' anything meme is harmful and should be stopped immediately.

> I agree with the suggestion that wealth is generally not the aim that drives the more knowledgeable minds to long-term effect in our industry.

I agree with this as well, I just didn't like the idea that if you are driven by money then you aren't a hacker.

EDIT: added missing word.

If there are some people who make art for various reasons, and a subset of those people are so driven by the desire to make art that it's almost a compulsion that is more important to them than other things - perhaps even things necessary for survival like eating - and I want to distinguish this subset, how should I do so?

Lots of people would choose to say 'artist' and 'true artist' for those sets of people, and while that might be slightly unfortunate terminology (since those who are not 'true artists' may still be exceptional 'artists'), there is a definite subset of 'artist' that it is useful to identify.

I think the same is true of 'hacker'.

So it's a mental illness now? (Obviously I kid.) but seriously, that excludes hackers from being (for example) parents, because if they aren't eating they aren't paying attention to their kid. I suspect it also means they don't have a social life. If you want to continue the stereotype where hackers are people who care more about their computer work than they do about most other parts of your life (think RMS), then go ahead. I never stopped to think that even though I frequent IRC channels, know words like 'grok' and 'ratfor', and can recite the pdp11 instruction set, I am not a true hacker because even though it's a love of mine, it's still less important to me than things like eating, sleeping, socializing, exercise, friends & family, dating, paying bills, and relaxing. In short, though I call myself a hacker, I am too healthy to be one because I'm not obsessed. However, if someone were to behave as you said, I would refer them to therapy and medication.

I'm not trying to diminish the work of the mentally unsound: some of the greatest hackers and artists, I'm sure, fit your description. But "real" is a horrible word for it in that stinks of elitism and an extremely unhealthy outlook on life. Please don't use it, for the same reason we don't use "real patriot" or "real rock music" or "real literature". It's either subjective or wrong.

Note that its not about getting rich, but about not being broke. A very distinctive difference. Not being broke allows for a good life style. And that's what most of all want.

Unfortunately the economic/political system as we know it isn't good at providing "not being broke" without "being rich".

I agree. The difference between being broke/not broke is the same as being poor/rich. There is no middle class anymore. Which sucks.

So much wrong with this statement I almost threw my monitor out the window. Broke is temporary. Poor is a state of mind and often may be permanent. More importantly, the implication is that without money, your life is meaningless - which is a terrible lie to believe.

There is no middle class anymore: a line created by average folks who earn an average wage and spend too much and make minimum monthly payments on everything and after 20 years of humping the 9-5 or 10-6 or 12-7 wonder why their bank accounts are so anemic and why can't I retire to Hawaii like I planned to when I was 20? "Middle class" is a useless metric anyway, because when pressed to define it nobody can, or they massage the definition as the argument evolves.

Here's the definition: if you qualify for government assistance, you're poor. If you don't have to work for your money - you might choose to, but you don't have to - you're rich. The middle class is right in between. I don't know about you, but I see a huge swath of people in between the states of "waiting in the government cheese line" and "collecting 6/7/8/9-figure interest checks".

You do make valid points. Yet I reason you are reading two much between the lines. My point is that there are less opportunities for people to make a good standard living than there were before. That is simply from my POV, and I can definitely be wrong.

Before when? Maybe a few years ago was better. But 50 years? 100? No way.

Look, I save almost 1/4 of my income and I still feel poor in many ways. It's not about spending habits it's being able to survive bad shit financially. A friend of mine had a single seizure while looking for work and could not drive for 6 months plus significant medical bills. IMO, if you can't survive a minor medical issue financially then your not middle class and it's really hard to get there before 35 or if you have kids young.

Do you feel poor or do you feel not-rich? There's a difference, and not-rich = middle class. Poor is thinking twice before buying a pack of gum. Poor is hand making clothes out of scrap material. Poor is waiting on EBT before doing the grocery shopping.

That really sucks for your friend. But they exemplify the difference between broke and poor -- they were broke, in a bad spot; but I assume they're gainfully employed now and managing well (I hope).

No one is immune to everything forever -- not even billionaire Steve Jobs. your friend wasn't poor before his seizure, but the seizure knocked him down.

And of course several countries in the world do provide for the disabled. Even the US provides some support.

Even the US provides some support. If your heath issue prevents you from working for 7 months you get support but at 6 months you qualify for nothing.

IMO I want to make things, cool things, innovative things, things that add value to peoples lives, things that will save lives, things that others will appreciate, and things that will make me happy and content.

If I could achieve this without having to think about getting rich or becoming broke, I would. I don't want personal fame or appreciation either. I just want to be. I just want to do.

Are you envisioning a monastic-like group dedicated to turning productive making toward eradicating human suffering and the like?

Well, I'm definitely up for being a part of said group

Yeah me too, where's the sign up sheet?

>Are you envisioning a monastic-like group

No, I did not think about it that way. I was thinking more on the lines of honest work and honest pay. Though if money was not a constraint many of us would be monks(as far as work is concerned).

Fully agree. As Kanye said: "Having money aint everything...not having it is."

  prisoners are kept in jail

That's cool, but if you are in the US, given the fairly dumb laws on a lot of things (drugs, mainly), how do you feel about helping to oppress the population? Are you only helping with really violent offenders?

  insurance claims are processed properly

Isn't this just propping up an awful system? Wouldn't it be better to actually try and fix the base system?

~

As for the rest, good work!

...what?

I'm not even going to respond to that troll bait first point of yours, but as for the second, please give some insight as to how a programmer in charge of writing insurance claims processing applications can "fix the base system."

No, think it through.

Poster said, "I've contributed to keeping prisoners in prison."

This is in no way an inherently good thing--especially given the well-documented clusterfuck that is the judicial system in the US. Have you ever been through the wringer?

I don't think that kudos for helping that system is in order, unless it was specifically something like "I wrote software to help schedule inmate times so that violent offenders and trouble inmates were not put in the same areas at the same time as nonviolent or well-behaved inmates."

As for the second point--look, it's insurance claims. Depending on what the poster did, this ranges from "I helped people get the best claims service from their provider" to "I helped the provider service the bare minimum number of claims." Without more information on what was done, that topic has a lot of room for bad.

"Fix the base system" would be something like "I made a simpler marketplace so that care providers (doctors) can directly bill patients, cheaply and transparently."

> "Fix the base system" would be something like "I made a simpler marketplace so that care providers (doctors) can directly bill patients, cheaply and transparently."

... while simultaneously violating the agreements they signed with insurance providers and putting themselves out of business?

I don't know about you, but I want prisoners to stay in prison. To make a blanket statement like "[Contributing to keeping prisoners in prison] is in no way an inherently good thing" is just madness.

"I don't know about you, but I want prisoners to stay in prison."

Even those innocent of any crime?

"To make a blanket statement like "[Contributing to keeping prisoners in prison] is in no way an inherently good thing" is just madness."

His statement isn't a blanket one, for reference the one you used which I quoted above is a blanket statement. For his statement to a blanket statement it would have to be phrased something like "Contributing to keeping prisoners in prison is an evil thing to do". Which is clearly neither what he said nor meant.

It is mere rules fetishism to desire that prisoners be kept in prison without respect to what is just and what is right.

If there's erroneous data getting inserted in a database, you go looking for the broken part of the program that is putting it there. You don't mess with the database.

What if the database results in systematic human rights abuse?

To make a blanket statement like "[Contributing to keeping prisoners in prison] is in no way an inherently good thing" is just madness.

I don't understand this point of view. At least in the US a very large portion of the prison population are in jail for non-violent crimes related to drug sales and/or possession, and are being imprisoned unjustly. Some if not all "white collar" crime prisoners should probably also not be imprisoned. I for one certainly do not see jail as having any sort of innate "goodness" or nobility associated with it. It's a horrible, brutal, inelegant hack at best, and a travesty of justice in many cases.

So basically you are creating your own context based on your biases to paint the OP as evil because he didn't provide a full, encyclopedic accounting of everything he worked on.

gg internet once again.

What are you on about? How is angersock trying to "paint the OP as evil"??? He raised a very interesting and insightful question and provoked a discussion, that's all. Excessive hyperbole here isn't helping the discussion along.

(And this is saying something coming from me, given my well known penchant for using hyperbole to make a point!)

Edit: edited to make less abrasive.

So you have no respect for programmers working in the penal system unless they're actively breaking prisoners out of jail? Please.

Nice straw man.

I think what he is saying is that smart people need to work on fixing the system, for example by making sure people do not get jailed unfairly, rather than propping it up by helping prisoners stay in prison. Personally, I would feel pretty bad if someone who gets jailed for marijuana possession is kept in jail with the use of software I created.

He/she probably worked on the control systems that allow cells to be locked/unlocked from a central point, or something else that mundane. Not some pie-in-the-sky system that determined guilt, which would seem to be where your problem lies.

In what way is "keeping prisoners in prison" related to the "well-documented cluster-fuck that is the judicial system in the US"?

Keeping prisoners in jail is absolutely required. Determining if they should be in there in the first place is not the responsibility of the prison system, it is a responsibility of the judicial system.

It sounds to me like the OP hit the brief on the head.

In the past, jail space limitations have forced states to make hard choices about who they want to keep in jail, with the result that nonviolent offenders are paroled.

OMFG YOU'RE TOTALLY RIGHT.

The op should have just started an insurance industry disrupting medical insurance startup rather than get paid to work at an already established insurance company where he's somewhat guaranteed(by law) to get paid......

I used to work at a telecommunications company. Maybe I should have created my own telco company so consumers could get cheaper mobile phones instead!?!?!?

You sound like a kid.

> prisoners are kept in jail

We need prisons. If you can't put people in jail, what do you do with people who rape or kill innocent people because it's fun and/or profitable to do so?

I assume from the tone of your post that you'd disapprove even more strongly of using torture or a swift and sure death penalty to deal with such people (assuming the specifics were found not to run afoul of the Constitution's prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishment" and were able to get enough political support to be implemented; passing both those hurdles would be extremely unlikely in practice).

So what's your alternative? What "enlightened" country do you live in, and what do they do with criminals?

I agree it would be nice if we could shut down our prisons. It would also be nice if people didn't get sick or die, if nobody was poor or hungry, if we had spaceships that could travel to other stars or galaxies as easily as airplanes travel to other countries or continents. But we can't just ignore the facts and limitations of the real world just because we don't like them.

Kill them, and only kill the people who would rape or kill innocent people or anything to that degree of crime.

> - prisoners are kept in jail

I wouldn't be too proud of that. In fact I would turn down such a job "opportunity" if it ever should come up.

Yes, I know. Prisons are a necessary evil until we come up with a better solution to crime but still they are evil and I don't want to help robbing fellow human beings of their freedom.

I was thinking you'd say along the lines of we're wasting our tax money on prisons.

the issue is that people expect innovation to mean "something new, useful" and it generally actually means "something different" and not necessarily new or useful.

> I disagree with "Because we want to get rich". And I definitely disagree with "of course". Real hackers do this because we just have to.

Ignoring the awful "real hackers" commentary, one has nothing to do with what the article was referencing at the time: starting a company.

At the core, if you start a company, you want to make money. Unless you are going the non-profit route, you are in it to make money, and that means getting rich.

> Unless you are going the non-profit route, you are in it to make money, and that means getting rich.

What a depressing outlook. Is there no room for people who want to make enough money to get by while doing what they love?

Yes, they are called "employees". People inclined to pursue work on what they enjoy are often very happy to achieve a comfortable salary with decent benefits. There is nothing wrong with that. The difference is in depth of passion, and in how much that is part of the individual's identity. I respect entrepreneurs, and I also respect the humble employee. For the entrepreneur, I think it is overly simplistic to say is it solely about greed and wealth. I know some very successful people, and most all tell me that the journey and experience is what drives them.

I remember reading a paper once (no source; it was years ago) that explained innovation versus invention, and that most people confused the two, not realising that innovation is defined as iterating on an existing technology, while invention is creating a new technology. Innovation is NOT creating a new technology.

Seems like you're doing what the OP was trying to inspire others to do. Congrats.

thank you. I was about to post the same. Couldnt agree with you more.

I find the title a nice one-liner, draws attention. But when you think about it, so what? When is something innovation, and when is it iteration anyway? The man didnt land on the moon out of a single project, you know. that classic example was actually iteration ;).

The general statement in there is that of those old guys in every company; "Back than, everything was better.". Nope.

out of curiosity - how did you contribute to these, through your work? open-source contribution? consulting.