Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

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For the longest time I harbored the biggest crush on a girl from my high school. The thing that made me fall in love with her (and it was love -- as much love as a 14-year-old could feel) wasn't that she was pretty or cute or popular -- though she was all these things. (Head cheerleader. Literally. Dated a football player and everything.)

It was that I had the good fortune to peek over her shoulder at some BASIC code she'd written in our completely noddy, intro-to-computers class. She wasn't going to put Grace Hopper to shame, but it was surprisingly well-structured and showed she knew how to reason about causes and effects within the machine. Which is, like, the first skill that you need to be a decent programmer.

But the thing about pretty girls is that they often find it is more immediately profitable to be pretty than to be bright. And staying pretty and popular -- keeping that limelight on you -- is a lot of work. It's a full-time job with potentially ruinous consequences without some sort of balance (look at Miley Cyrus). So she eventually forgot about coding and went on to become a television personality.

My point here is that you become what you invest time in becoming. If you want to ascend to elite-level hackerdom, then you almost have to put things like attractiveness and popularity on the back burner. You don't have to have poor social skills to be a hacker. But the people who are best at being popular and fitting in are the people who invested time and effort into doing just that, just like the best programmers are the ones who invested time and effort into programming. And we only have so much time to give, so yes, you kinda gotta pick and choose.

"My point here is that you become what you invest time in becoming. If you want to ascend to elite-level hackerdom, then you almost have to put things like attractiveness and popularity on the back burner."

No, you really don't. You believe this because it's what you've seen around you, but that's a selection bias. Someone else on this thread pointed out that Von Neumann was an exceptionally stylish guy, but he's far from the only example. Only in the peculiar little world of computer programming do we seem to equate slovenly behavior with competence.

One of the great qualities of smart, capable people is that smart, capable people tend to have a lot of different interests. There's no reason that you can't be attractive and smart.

"Specialization is for insects." -- Heinlein

- Hackers tend to do things sequentially. First get really good at something, look around, become good at something else. Compare that to people who just try to be "good enough" at (a limited scope of) everything.

- Hackers tend to have their own path in doing things.

A teenager hacker might look stange and alien to his peers because they do everything in the same way, extremelly conformist. Same thing for beauty: teenagers care less for beauty, more for copying things they understand.

This means that even social and stylish hacker might seem a freak in their teens.

> Someone else on this thread pointed out that Von Neumann was an exceptionally stylish guy, but he's far from the only example.

So your solution is to suggest everyone be as smart as John von Neumann so they can master subjects while still being a snappy dresser? Does this seem like something people can do?

The proverbial 10k hours of practice have to come from somewhere. Time is limited, activities are zero-sum.

I don’t think anyone was suggesting that.

Many hackers I know do have other hobbies besides hacking and they devote lots of time to those hobbies. Beer brewing, coffee making, writing poetry, music, languages, …

What if one of those hobbies is dressing fashionably? Or makeup? Or whatever?

Beyond a certain point activities are zero sum but do you seriously suggest that to be a proper hacker you have no time at all for anything beside that?

I don’t think anyone should ever feel obligated to be into dressing fashionably or makeup or even just feel obligated to dress a certain way. That’s awful. (I especially hate gender policing.) But telling someone they can only be part of the group if they aren’t into makeup isn’t all that much better than telling someone they should wear makeup to represent women better.

It’s a heuristic for identifying in-group people that makes no sense and to me seems highly destructive.

It’s a heuristic for identifying in-group people that makes no sense and to me seems highly destructive.

I suspect this heuristic started out as a way for the outcast, socially unwelcome hackers to finally find a group to which they could belong, an activity that didn't judge them for their intellect or their appearance.

I further suspect that some of the pushback against lifting this heuristic comes from those same people, who feel that they will lose the only thing that gave them a reason to feel good about themselves in the face of total rejection by their peers. It would be just as tragic to force these people out of programming as it is tragic to prevent others from coming into programming.

Oh man, even more zero sum thinking.

Outcasts making others outcasts, bullied becoming bullies. Nice.

The general point is this: rejection because of the way you dress (no matter how) or look (no matter how) is not cool. The direction doesn’t really matter. But this groupthink is pretty disgustingly exclusionary.

From the article:

Most of all, I'm disappointed. I had a haven, a place where no one cared what I looked like, what my body was like or about any ephemera—they cared about what I could do—and this culture shift has robbed me of my haven. At least I had that haven. The girls who follow me missed out on it.

You know what's disgusting? People getting disgusted over issues that don't warrant disgust.

I’m not sure how exclusionary rhetoric follows from that. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Also, I think that statement is just outright wrong and misleading.

I wrote my first comment before reading the article, and later found that paragraph in which the article's author seemed to share my sentiments.

In my first comment I may have been speculating on the motivations of others, but I did so by drawing in part on my own experiences. Programming, computers, BBSes/online services/Internet, etc. gave me something I could do as a grade school child that didn't depend on other people's approval of my social identity. My point was and is that it would be just as tragic to drive off the social misfits as it would be tragic to exclude the socially adept.

Sadly, sometimes it seems the mainstream have seen how much money can be made by former and present misfits as hackers and want to take ownership of it for themselves.

Edited to add: After rereading the thread, it seems you may have been commenting specifically on the sentence that I quoted. I don't intend to justify the heuristic that leads some to assume non-social-outcasts are non-hackers, only to explain it, and perhaps find a way of bridging the gap between those who use that heuristic, and those who are harmed by it.

I think a lot of programmers and such have bought into a dress code that involves ratty old tshirts and jeans and that kind of thing, c.f. scorn at people who show up to technical interviews in a suit

When you are younger the scarcity is money, not time. When I was younger I would have liked to dress fashionably or go out and do more sociable activities , but it was either that or buy computer parts and software etc. I couldn't have afforded both.

By the time you get a job that lets you afford both you don't necessarily want to learn fashion from scratch.

That seems mostly like a class issue (which is also pretty awful, no doubt, though not something everyone faces). Also: As I said, I know hackers tend to have hobbies. And not cheap ones.

Also, computers have dropped massively in price during the last twenty years. I don’t think becoming a hacker was ever super-expensive compared to many other activities, at least not during the last two decades, but now it’s quite affordable. Always depending on what you want to do, but – just as a point of comparison – I think being serious about PC gaming would likely be much more costly (well, I guess equally as costly if you are really into game development or something of that nature).

Luckily computing has never been as affordable and accessible as today.

When I was learning PC gaming and interest in programming tended to go hand in hand, people wanted to program because they wanted to build games or mod games. Though I guess now it might be social media, iphone apps or something.

As a teenager I didn't exactly grow up poor but my income was restricted to what I could earn by working around my studies, so at most 12 hours a week at minimum wage which for a teenager was something like £3 an hour.

At that sort of income doing things like renting servers , iphone SDKs, decent computers etc start to look more expensive.

> I don’t think becoming a hacker was ever super-expensive compared to many other activities

I disagree. In middle school I had a textbook on assembly language; the first chapters used DEBUG (a 16-bit debugger which came with DOS) but later chapters switched to programming in Microsoft MASM which was $180.

I remember thinking, "There's no way my hacking budget can take that. It'll take me years to save up that kind of money, and when/if I do, I'm definitely gonna blow it on video games."

I learned a lot by writing a QBASIC script which added label functionality to DEBUG to make it more usable assembling large programs.

Also, the only C compiler I had was Turbo C++ Lite for DOS, which came with another textbook I picked up for cheap (I recall $20). It was crippled: You could only run programs from within the IDE. If you used the "compile to EXE" option, it would work but the resulting executable would do nothing, just spitting out an error message along the lines of "Only the full version of the compiler can produce working executables".

But because different programs produced different-sized executables, I figured that meant the EXE file wasn't just a placeholder, it actually contained the compiled code but it was disabled somehow.

I figured out through tracing and in-memory patching (with DEBUG of course!) that there was a conditional branch within the first couple hundred instructions. Replacing it fixed the problem!

Kids these days have it so easy. All of the tools you need have excellent FOSS versions you can instantly download. Online resources are more comprehensive and up-to-date than any textbook. Modern languages have garbage collection and array bounds checking, eliminating entire classes of bugs.

Specialization is almost entirely responsible for all the gains in our standard of living since the stone age. This includes almost every technological advance.

Heinlein is wrong on this and a specialist himself: a writer who requires other specialists to meet his every basic need (water, food, shelter...).

Don't dismiss specialization as it is the key to both past and future success.

Additionally the line is spoken by a character who lives for over 2000 years.[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Long

Maybe the quote would make a bit more sense in context.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

If anecdotes count as evidence, we can point at Erdos for a counterexample (dedicated only to mathematics, could barely dress himself, lived homeless and traveled from friend's house to friend's house to work on mathematics).

So much of this depends on individual interest and temperament.

I agree that it's not a binary situation - I know many people who are capable programmers and have an acceptable sense of style, social skills and other interests. However, time is limited and unless you're exceedingly capable you have to make tradeoffs. It takes an extraordinarily large amount of time to become a truly competent programmer, and if you're spending that time in front a computer you're not actively working at building friendships, thinking about fashion, thinking about music or working on any of the other things that might be equated with being attractive or popular in the vicious world of teenage social structures.

> Von Neumann

You couldn't have picked a more outlying outlier. Von Neumann was one of the most brilliant minds of the century.

>But the thing about pretty girls is that they often find it is more immediately profitable to be pretty than to be bright.

100% agree with you. I also think a lot of the difference in the gender ratio can be attributed to the fact that women simply have far more options.

I wouldn't say more options so much as societally-encouraged options. It's a lot more conforming to expectations to be attractive than it is to be a hacker, so it's easy to leave the less-accepted things by the wayside in a pressuring society.

This is the kind of story that reveals a lot more about the teller than the subject.

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