Hacker News Reader

The big ideas of the day is a PHP database CRUD application that displays everyone's colleges and geographical networks, with full names and whose purpose essentially, is a repository for pictures of inebriated hot chicks. Apparently, the new new thing is now this CRUD forum database application that has a character-limit of 120 words per post, but get this, it's written in a really cool language called Ruby on Rails, a la AutoTune in Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak.

This really strikes home for me. Hacking used to be very intellectual, especially in the open source world. Robert Morris created the first worm as a test to see how large the Internet was. RMS hacked out Emacs (mostly) on his own to build a Lisp interpreter/text editor. Linus made Linux so he could experiment with Unix for free.

Sometimes I get the feeling these days that hacking is becoming too market and business oriented and not about the fun intellectual challenge anymore.

That said, I do think that it is really more of an evolution instead of a redefinition. I'm not sure that it's all bad and in some cases it's good; many startups have a really clever idea about software or technology behind them. Maybe it's that hacking is now about finding new and clever ways to integrate technology and computing into our lives instead of finding clever things in technology. In essence, maybe it's about writing for the world instead of writing for the programmer.

I'm not sure this is correct, but thoughts/comments are welcome (even from me, I might come back and edit this later as I think about it more).

Sometimes I get the feeling these days that hacking is becoming too market and business oriented and not about the fun intellectual challenge anymore.

There are almost certainly more hackers pursuing intellectual challenges than there have ever been before. What has happened is that the entire rest of the world has arrived on the web, so the intellectuals don't stand out as much.

It used to be that more than half the people on the web were pursuing Ph.D-level projects in computer science. But that was because there were only twelve people on the web, and all of them were MIT students or BBN employees.

Yours is a very common complaint. You hear it all the time in the sciences: Where (people ask) are the contemporary physicists who would rank with Einstein or Fermi? The answer is that there are more people who understand quantum mechanics and general relativity today than there ever were before, and they have a much better understanding than Einstein or Fermi ever did. But they also aren't famous, because it's a lot more boring to be one of several thousand experts on general relativity than it is to be the very first one.

Similarly, I've heard it said that the all-time golden age of mathematics may be... today. There are a lot of mathematicians around. There's more funding than ever before in history.

This brings up the interesting question of "natural genius".

World population for the last several centuries has exploded. Suppose 500 million people lived in Plato's time and there were 50 "natural geniuses". That means 1 per 10 million. Even disregarding technological or social progress and assuming linear scaling, that implies at least 650 "natural geniuses" today. Where are they? Who are they? The sheer number of most-capable individuals has grown enormously.

I feel whole cyberpunk aesthetic to be the antithesis of the kind of hacking of RMS and Linus. To me computing was an amazing challenge and opportunity to build things, then cyberpunk came along and it was all about being cool. I feel like where we've reached now is back to focusing on building things.

I feel like the term hacker has finally been rehabilitated after being co-opted by cyberpunk bullshit. I like that hacking now days means building something useful with amazingly cool open source tools. The sense of entitlement and angst that went with the cyberpunk movement makes me glad its long gone.

The first sentence of your comment, "This really strikes home for me," may be correct. The rest of it seems to be wrong from beginning to end.

People who got their internet access by credit card fraud were never hackers in the first place. They were just cheats and wannabe hackers.

Drama and marginal status doesn't make you a hacker. It just makes you a social outcast.

It's true that there are lots of wannabes today, too — more than ever before, now that the richest man in the world got that way by writing a BASIC interpreter, now that Sergey and Larry get to go to Davos.

But you want to see some real hackers? How about http://www.pouet.net/ where the demoscene posts their stuff? Have you not been to a Bar Camp? SuperHappyDevHouse? Hackerspaces like Noisebridge? How about Google, where Rob Pike now works since they've spent 9 years fixing http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/? How about biotech, where they reprogram the very stuff of life itself? How about the Netflix Prize, where AI predicts human preferences for money? How about the algorithmic trading funds that now account for the majority of trading volume on our stock exchanges? Have you been visiting http://www.gpgpu.org/ http://blog.reprap.org/ http://bathsheba.com/ http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/ etc.? How about thirty million people finding one hole after another in the firewall to communicate to each other and the rest of the world, when their election was stolen, through a humble Rails CRUD forum? How about http://vpri.org/html/writings.php, where the objective is to build a whole, modern personal computing environment in under 20 000 lines of code — and they just might do it? How about the OLPC project, where some real hackers — not losers stealing credit card numbers — figured out how to build a machine that would hold up to abuse from kids, in order to revolutionize the world education system (a la Diamond Age), an experiment which is still ongoing? How about Time Magazine listing moot as the most influential person in the world?

Some of these things are good, some are bad, and some are ineffectual. But they are hacking on a scale that you never imagined would be real, in your reclusive vampire credit-card fraud days. These are not people tweaking CSS in yuppie dress shirts, or patching some obsolete proprietary library. These are people pushing the boundaries of the possible.

There's a world of hacking out here.

Open your eyes.

Yeah real hacking is still around, just take a look at any torrent tracker to find pretty much any app/game hacked. Or better yet how about all those security breaches at Pentagon and NASA.

The reason you don't see "real" hackers hacking, is because they aren't eager to have public identities, since they don't feel like getting arrested/sued into oblivion.

Err, isn't there a little confusion between hacker and cracker here?

In the post, noname123 says "hacker," but the areas of endeavor he's discussing cross that boundary. More importantly, the activities he talks about were always restricted to small, secretive communities--I had no idea that stuff was going on 'til the early 90s.

And guess what? The original set of activities, with the original motivation, is still going on in small, secretive communities. It's just hard to tell when your particular community dissolved long ago, and you haven't run across any others in a very obvious way.

It's not about the effects, it's about the drive and the feel. A new place, alien and exciting, and you knew, you suspected, you had no idea what could happen there. The things you did, the community you found, all very pure, like thinking code for three days straight. You'd cut your identity down to six characters or so. You could earn your stay, picking off a national company, with the cheapest of your tools. It's not about the effects, yet now you look back and see a petty thief.

Now, the land is settled, everyone and their grandchildren are here, skyscrapers everywhere. You talk to everyone here, you talk business. You use your name - why wouldn't you? Once almost everywhere had the feel. Now, we look for its analogue in dead musicians, business, pleasure - dressed in not-suits, slurping whole-grain ramen, in our exclusive club, HN, no memes allowed.

Like noname123, I'm not sure if I'm doing justice. I think my point is that it's not about what people accomplish. Great and not-so-great people have been doing amazing things for a while now. Once, though, there was a place that seemed to force you to drop that extra crap - your name, your latest grab for cash, your ego. Usenet before the Eternal September, programming before dot-com, the internet before social networking. Now everyone's here, no effort, no stigma, business as usual.

It's not our fault, we didn't mess this up. It's just what happens, after a while. That frontier feel isn't dead though - it's just waiting for us to start going up into space, filtering reality through wearables, hooking circuits into our heads.

Everything you've written would have been just as true in the 1980s, with a few of the names changed. Then too there were authentic hackers, glib fakers, and corporate drones.

The great majority of the computer world in the 1980s was profoundly unsubversive. The smart, subversive people were a tiny minority. They seem a larger proportion when you look back from 30 years later, because the fakers and PHBs had no lasting effects.

For the young programmer 12 years ago it was still easier to get absorbed in a "hacking" culture - or so it was for me. At that time I thought linux, assembly and writing a virus in Pascal were very cool things, and I didn't have a problem getting my friends to agree. It seemed very natural then.

I admit I don't know many high-schoolers now, but my feeling is they really are less hacking-inclined, at least around here (Eastern Europe). I'd guess the main difference is access to information. Then it was very rationed - I remember learning assembly from a reference manual. Now Internet offers a lot less obstacles, so I don't really see a point for "subversiveness", at least in mainstream programming.

> the fakers and PHBs had no lasting effects

How I wish you were right!

Their lasting effects are evident in the brokenness of all current computing systems.

Those people are still out there; you just don't hear as much about Real Hacking as about more accessible, mainstream stuff.

Also, get a blog.

I actually have a lot more respect for people who come here and type their heart out in the open for no other reason than bringing in content and sharing their ideas.

Getting a blog is lame compared to that. You get a blog to get ads and attention and a following.

On the contrary, noname123, came here, created an account, and wrote his/her heart out for nothing. Expecting nothing, wanting nothing except to be honest and straight forward with an opinion -- a valid opinion and an astute observation of a topic that the real hackers are feeling inside.

Hacking is dying. It has taken an outsider, a liberal artsie fartsie to tell us the truth about it. To point out the absurdity.

I went to sxsw interactive this year and was appalled at what I saw. There were few hackers there. Most of them were socialites running around promoting their word press blog or django customization. These people didn't know anything about hacking. Perhaps it was the wrong venue, but the art and the culture and the expertise of real hacking is probably already dead.

It's too easy now. You don't have to love hacking to build something with computers. You don't have to have passion to build, you just throw some parts together, copy and paste some graphics and change the colors in photoshop to match a named swatch you found at colourlovers.

It's kind of sad.

I went to sxsw interactive this year...

I think you went to the wrong place.

I went to DEFCON. The signal-to-noise ratio is kind of meh.

Then you were hanging with the wrong people.

If finding the "right" or "wrong" people were so easy, you could go to the circus and find an amazing hacker community. The reason people go to Defcon etc is to be in an environment where the chances of running into the right people are higher. Everyone has a limited amount of time to expend, so they choose the environment which facilitates what they wish to seek out. Saying that he was hanging with the wrong people was glib and not helpful.

Actually, I sat next to Moxie Marlinspike in a limo. I was referring to attendees in general; a very benign example includes some of my friends who don't really do security but go because it's DEFCON.

I've heard this line hundreds of times before. Hacking is not dead. Something can't be killed if you have the ability to turn on your computer and start doing right away. If you are concerned about whether hacking is alive or dead, perhaps you should fire up your computer and bring it back to life. It's that simple.

I agree with you completely and my writing was (intentionally) too liberal artsy; so let me put on my technical hat and level with you why hacking is no longer subversive.

1) Growing Complexity of Software Projects: in some sense, it's not about computer programmers "selling out." Because in both FOSS and enterprise software, the code-base has usually third-party dozens if not more dependencies. Writing software is now a team effort, and not a single team effort but more like a company-with-frontend-backend-QA-teams effort. Think back to the day when a individual or two person could write a 2D side-scroller in DOS, with thoughts and stressing even over the monster's sprites and midi soundtrack. Nowadays, an EA game is more like Wikipedia, with many contributors working without being conscious of others. And while Wikipedia is good by itself, but tell me, could Wikipedia contributors by their collective consciousness write War and Peace or Catcher in the Rye? Likewise, Emacs, Linux and Ruby were progenated by single individuals with their respective unfettered individual vision.

2) Compromising Hacking for Hacking's Purpose. Hacking started as an art, without regard for commerce; see RMS as an example of someone who followed his vision without regard for profits or social acceptance. Programming, in its current state, is funny enough the only art form where its leading vanguards and self-processed practitioners openly condone "selling out." I feel that programmers funny enough aren't complete sell-out's but are stuck in the middle ground, the worst of all places. We are told by Paul Graham & Company, that great hackers should be motivated by their craft intrinsically, but should either keep one's day job or start up our own company with an viable business strategy to save up for "fuck you money" (pardon my french). But in reality, having an corporate job or starting a Web 2.0 CRUD start-up makes you beholden to either your boss or your potential customers whom increasingly treat programmers as commodities/assembly-line workers to deliver business requirements. Tell me, did Van Gogh or Sylvia Plath do focus group/market research so that they could decide which colors and content category would be most pleasing to their audience before they set out to compose their painting/poetry? Similarly I'd argue either did Linus/RMS/Wozniak when they set out to hack. Art exists for itself, it serves no purpose. If it does find audience, the best art inspires, challenges and mocks the audience, but it never panders to its audience.

3) Lack of Encouragement in the Community to Buck the Status Quo; I guess that this point is related to my previous point - but I feel the ethos/outlook's of the early 90's at the dawn of personal computing was that anything was possible, whereas today is optimizing on status quo. A survey of new YC startup's include rehashes of social networks/blogs/online music. While occasionally Hacker News feature posts on AI, Bioinformatics, green technology and Arduino. Why is everybody crowded in the web space? Where are the implementation of the next generation's ideas? Ray Kurzweil talks about the coming of Singularity, for instance. I'd argue it is because people are so fixated on monetizing that they no longer push envelope.

I just realized that in my zeal, my commentary turned out to be still pretty liberal artsy. Like how Bob Dylan would respond to some heckler at some festival he played at some years back, the heckler said "hey, Bob Dylan your new songs are no longer as relevant as your old songs," to which Dylan responded, "well, I'm at least out here writing songs, what are you doing?" So I'm going to stop now and take OP's advice go hack now.

I wasn't responding to you, but to the post I commented under. I don't think of "hacker" as someone who does most of the stuff found in the first paragraph of your writing that opened this whole thread.

> in both FOSS and enterprise software, the code-base has usually third-party dozens if not more dependencies

Lua. ColorForth. STEPS.

> Writing software is now a team effort

There have always been software teams of many different sizes. But most projects on Sourceforge (or Github, or Freshmeat) are one-person projects.

> Think back to the day when a individual or two person could write a 2D side-scroller in DOS

It was more common for a group of two to five people to do it, you know, than for one person to do it. And there are any number of popular games these days built by small teams: World of Goo, Mafia Wars, Super Monkey Ball.

> as an example of someone who followed his vision without regard for profits or social acceptance.

Lots of people still do.

> today is optimizing on status quo

Most people are always trying to improve the status quo incrementally, except when that's obviously suicidal (e.g. the Ghost Dancers). In the early 90s "everyone" seemed to be working on graphics cards, database software, spreadsheets, word processors, and video games with themes licensed from movies or sports. The internet doesn't even appear in The Road Ahead. But some of us were doing other stuff... we just weren't visible until there was Wired.

Working on something new is never a popular activity because most new ideas are worthless. It's a generalization of the thing about 90% of startups failing: the other 10% mostly don't fail because they let their ideas fail and switched to something else.

> the only art form where its leading ... practitioners openly condone "selling out."

Massage, graphic design, architecture, cooking, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, warfare?

There's a lot of stuff going on.

What is STEPS? I tried googling but it is too generic term.

Sorry, I was referring to VPRI's project.

I disagree with your points 1 and 2.

Complexity of enterprise software engineering has grown, but you're making the wrong comparison as the hackers of the 1990s or 80s didn't work on anything remotely enterprisy. The effect you can have today as an individual hacker is greater than in the 80s or 90s, not smaller, simply because there are more programmable things in the world.

You're complaining about commercialization and you're making the assumption that artists and other people driven only by intrinsic values never wasted a thought on how to sell things. Historically, I think, that's not true, but I do get your point that commercial interests were certainly not the primary motivator. I think that still holds for most hackers today. Just look at all those "my 10 biggest startup mistakes" lists. Many of those mistakes stem from following technical interests instead of commercial logic.

I agree with your third point. There is a huge stinking excuse for hackers working on trivial boring things like Facebook or Twitter. That excuse is scalability. Yes scalability causes complex problems and solving them is difficult. BUT solving interesting problems comes with even greater scalability issues. Solving a difficult problem AND making it scale is worth much more in a technical as well as in a commercial sense.

I'm not saying Facebook or Twitter are useless. Apparently many people have fun using them. But making something like that is not hacking. Just look at the technologies and approaches they used in the beginning and you know that solving interesting technology problems surely was not the original motivation.

Tell me, did Van Gogh or Sylvia Plath do focus group/market research so that they could decide which colors and content category would be most pleasing to their audience before they set out to compose their painting/poetry?

There's nothing to prevent you from becoming the Van Gogh of programming, so there's no need to bemoan the mundanity of corporate coding either. It's obviously not your cup of tea, so do something wonderful instead.

If you want to do something amazing, just pick an amazing project and go crazy.

Maybe you'll start the next Google, or maybe you'll struggle to get by for 35 years in a row. Life is a series of compromises, disappointments, challenges, and all kinds of weird and wonderful things sprinkled in between. Pick your poison.

> 3) Lack of Encouragement in the Community to Buck the Status Quo

If you have to be encouraged to buck the status quo, you're not really bucking the status quo. You cannot be invited to be an iconoclast.

You are truly oblivious, just blind to what exists in the world.

You're setting up an impossibly strict definition of a word whose definition is not widely agreed upon ("hacker"/"hacking"), then listing things that don't fall under the definition. Good for you. Bad for argument.

> Hacking started as an art, without regard for commerce

How far do you want to trace it back? 60's, 40's? How about a few hundred BC? Doing more with less, finding one's ways around limits has always been around and will always continue to be around.

Dipshit posers wiping their buddies hard drives will always be around, too. Does this make you happy? Is this what you want to be a part of? Would the world be a better place if we were all doing this?

> Writing software is now a team effort

WTF? Lots of stuff is a team effort. Lots of stuff is not a team effort. Don't join a team if you think it'll hold you back. What's your point?

Newton, "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." He was just some dilettante using the knowledge discovered and shared by the folks who came before him in a new and interesting way, I guess. Not much effort, there, just a bunch of cut-and-paste of existing code (ideas).

> having an corporate job or starting a Web 2.0 CRUD start-up makes you beholden to either your boss or your potential customers

And turning your computer on makes you beholden to Apple (or Lenovo, or Dell, or ...) and your power and data providers. It's turtles all the way down.

> van Gogh

Are you serious? Yes he did seek commercial approval of his art (Nuenen (1883–1885)) and yes he did choose colors based on what was popular and appearing in the museums of his time (Antwerp (1885–1886)). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh

> the best art inspires, challenges and mocks the audience, but it never panders to its audience

[citation needed]. "Art" is a lot bigger than you're allowing for. Define it however you like. Put that definition in your wallet and show it to people at parties, but please don't assume your definition is bigger, better, or more perfect than everyone else's (says the little postmodernist living in my brain).

> Lack of Encouragement in the Community to Buck the Status Quo

Now you're taking the thing that defines the status quo--"Community"--and then complaining that it wants to follow what it defines? By definition, that's what the community does. Or do you mean that someone whom you believe should be encouraging you to do interesting things is not doing so? What, precisely, is it that "the community" owes you?

> early 90's at the dawn of personal computing

You mean almost 20 years after the introduction of the Apple II (in 1977)? Was that just pre-dawn? Early 90's already had Microsoft running more PCs than any other OS on the planet. That was pretty awesome for innovation and "anything's possible", huh?

> While occasionally Hacker News feature posts

Now you're just whining. If you want the HN scene to be more awesome for you then hang out, post more, and make it awesome. Otherwise, go back to your "real hacking is dead" sub-reddit and mope around there. This is what it is. Hacking is what it is. If your blinders prevent you from seeing awesome, take them off. You are info-rich and thought-poor, you are not entitled to have others filter the world in whatever way you want. If the community you find here isn't the community you want to be a part of, then run away like you're on fire.

> Where are the implementation of the next generation's ideas?

"Where's my flying car?" amiright? Implementations of "the next generation of ideas" are constantly fomenting. Many try, many fail. You've been reading too much futurist sci-fi.

> my commentary turned out to be still pretty liberal artsy

More "trolly" than liberal arts, I'd say.

> Why is everybody crowded in the web space?

What did you expect to find on the web if not the web itself?

People in hordes flock to latest web 2.0 place for another doze of ferret shock. That alas is just a nature.

Sxsw is an awesome conference full of startup founders. People who make things.

If you take this perspective, hacking has progressively been dying since 1940. So choosing the prototypical 1990s hacker is quite arbitrary. In the 40s Turing had to make his own electro-mechanical computers from scratch and invent his own statistical techniques. In the 1990s, assembling computers was already vastly simplified. Whereas today you might buy a motherboard with integrated video, audio, and I/O, back then you had separate cards for everything and perhaps a choice of upgrading to 512 kB of L2 cache with a COAST module. In the 1990s you had to worry about IRQs and perhaps roll your own autoexec.bat and config.sys files to make sure you had enough conventional RAM to run your favourite game. This knowledge was much less technical than what our predecessors had to know and I'm sure they were saying the same things about us back then.

The thing is, most of the hackers that lament a bygone era have simply had the tasks they knew well made obsolete. They are upset because they learned tasks and not skills. Nobody cares today if you can roll a kick-ass DOS boot disk unless you were skilled enough to translate that knowledge into, say, fitting OS X Leopard onto a 1 GB USB memory stick.

Kids today, no sense of history. The hacking scene was dead by September 1981. Oddly enough, it was marked as dead, again, in February of 1990. The last time the hacking scene was declared dead was April of 2000.

We probably have a few months before this hacker scene is also declared dead.

Some more details would make this post informative rather than simply an arcane inside reference.

August, 1981---IBM releases the first IBM PC, legitimizing home computers and killing of a ton of quirky home computers over the next few years. The Homebrew Computer Club was pretty much over at this point in time anyway.

January, 1990---Operation Sun Devil goes down, where the Secret Service arrest a bunch of teenagers who have illegally accessed computers and charged with disseminating internal AT&T documents describing how 911 works. The era of the 80s "hackers" ended.

March 2000---the tech stock market crases. The Internet craze pretty much tanked at this point.

None of this is anything I consider "arcane inside references" but hey, I'm into computer history.

Thanks for responding with these! I share your interest in computer history, and I also enjoy seeing, as best I can, computer culture. Never have I seen such a short summarization of the latter which has given me as much insight as this.

I'm surprised you didn't mention September 1993, the neverending September.

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

This isn't a big date technologically speaking, but as far as the social history of the internet goes, it was huge. I suspect it's one of the big reasons AOL was so demonized. (There are obviously many others.)

The socialite blog thing will die down.

All it takes is for all the herd to realize that there's not money in it, not the way they think, and the social currency you get by being in that crowd will disappear.

Perhaps you're looking in the wrong places.

>"It's too easy now. You don't have to love hacking to build something with computers. You don't have to have passion to build, you just throw some parts together, copy and paste some graphics and change the colors in photoshop to match a named swatch you found at colourlovers. It's kind of sad."

But this is what we've worked for all along. The inevitable result of "Don't Repeat Yourself" and open source. Isn't this what we wanted, to get to a point where programming is easy?

Kragen started blogging about 5 years before blogs were invented:

http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/mailing-lists.html

edit: oops, I thought you were responding to Kragen's comment. Read his 'blog' anyways, it's awesome :)

Hey, blogs had already been invented, they just weren't called that yet. And it wouldn't surprise me if Wes were already a subscriber, although I haven't looked :)

Hackers were the children of a certain generation, who spent their adolescence tinkering with systems and prodding networks, hiding their identities because of a lack of confidence that their "true self-image" had value. They instead created alter-egos that did amazing things, and participated in spreading a mythology so they could feel the same twinge of celebrity and status that the real, socially-connected people felt when they left their basements.

Then those hackers grew up, got jobs, and started making real social connections. They learned that it's much more fun when people get to know the real you, when you can cooperate on projects with other brilliant minds instead of competing in secret, and that the UI (or even marketing) of something can affect its contextual "meaning" just as much as its technical design does (e.g. text messages and IM conversations are basically the same thing—but you use them for different things, at different times. This is, oddly, a sort of postmodernism.)

Inspired by their newly discovered social reality, and the suddenly-available power of the Internet to achieve it, the focus of hacking turned from "technical hacks", (which stood on their own and, as much as they positively benefitted you, never benefitted anyone else, and possibly harmed them) to "social hacks", which revealed that it was possible to have a non-zero-sum game, a program that benefits both you, and other people, because of the new interactions conceivable through it.

There's a difference between the word "hacking" as defined by mainstream culture and the concept/ethos of hacking.

The former has definitely been diluted. But the latter is an idea, and ideas are bulletproof (apologies to Alan Moore).

If you want to know the internals of a project/framework, other people's perceptions of what 'hacking' means doesn't stop you from looking at the code (assuming foss).

You say "Does anyone really understand the internals of Ruby on Rails". Well, go look at it and understand it. Then look at the MRI and JVM implementations of Ruby -- and understand those. You can keep drilling all the way down until you're generating assembly.

The majority of your complaints is that the industry has moved in the direction of the assembly line. That may be the natural gravitation, and you may just be filling in a spot at work. But no one can stop you from learning the lower level details on your own time.

Read the linux and bsd kernel mailing lists. Find some irc channels for embedded systems. Check out what people are doing with CUDA. By definition, the mainstream will always bubble up on social aggregators. If you look elsewhere, you'll find the hacker culture is alive and well.

I love Fall. All the colors and a bit of a cold nip in the air ... the really unusual lights ... yellows and darks ... uncommon moods ... brown packages of straw, too.

I'm with you

Cider, fire, thick clothes, squash, haunted houses, corn mazes, mmmm

My apologies for being slow on the uptake, but is there an analogy here or is this just a simple pun?

(t)he (r)eally (u)nusual (l)ights ... (y)ellows (a)nd (d)arks ... (u)ncommon (m)oods ... (b)rown (p)ackages (o)f (s)traw, (t)oo.

You missed it, but no harm done - it was not very interesting to begin with.

My comment above was code for "truly a dumb post". Geez.

Since you use music analogies...

I don't know that I agree with you. I think the term "hacker" is being mis-applied to a large group that sort-of, but not quite, embodies that which is "hacker".

Much like rap/hip-hop was once underground but is now mainstream. The mainstream stuff that you see out in the open everyday is a non-authentic watered down version of that which is real, and which still lurks in the underbelly clubs of the cities.

The hackers of the early 90's learned computers somewhere in mid to late adolescence. The hackers today grew up with computers, but they are not the same thing.

Interesting and well thought out post, but I don't think it really stands up to scrutiny, except to expose the fact that the definition of hacker has warped and changed over time.

What this really sounds like is a rant about how Hacker News is not a very precisely named website.

Hacker culture is alive and well, and there are plenty of heroes hacking the night away staring at their monitors (though LCD these days), just as there 'always' has been. There are probably more now than there ever has been, actually. There's just a lot more parasites and poseurs around, because computers are mainstream now and there's a lot more money around.

There is a lot more to hacker culture than web startup culture! I don't even consider virtually anything you mentioned a part of hacker culture. PHP and databases? "Software Visionaire/Ruby Ninja"? (bad) business ideas?

Of course people understand the internals of the Linux kernel. You think the people working on it don't understand it? That's a pretty good example of an island in contemporary hacker culture. You don't have to look far in a sea of recreational kernel hackers to find... hackers. The associated mailing lists generate quite a bit more discussion than HN does...

There have always been poseurs and businessman hangers-on, and there always will be. They are obviously not hackers.

Hacker culture, and the existence of true hackers, can never die out. It's hard wired in.

Hacking is a human activity and as such will follow the same patterns and cultural cycles you would expect.

1. A Space Becomes Wide Open.

2. Legends Are Made Taming The Space.

3. Others Rush In And Establish A Second Tier.

4. Then A Third Tier.

5. Then A Fourth Tier.

6. Then A Fifth Tier.

7. Eventually, A New Crop Decides They Don't Want To be Tier 6 Because They Hate The Output Of Tier 5.

8. A Few Brilliant Minds Focus The General Angst Into "The Better Way" aka "A Space Becomes Wide Open"

GOTO 1;

Good, bad - this is how it has and will always work. Good output is rare and imitated to death over time. Every genre exists because someone did good work in it. Someone, somewhere, once wrote a good country western song. :)

I've been thinking of this in the context of YCombinator. The cost of launching a start up is low with a mix of wise guidance and smart, talented, relentlessly resourceful founders. So the space is wide open. PG and co are taming it and building legend and second tier imitators in the process. This is good. Why? Solely because the work coming out of the companies they fund is good.

The second tier companies are producing good work too. However, there will be a third and then a fourth and eventually the quality will dip. It won't be about building, it'll be about flipping - and flipping will fall in on itself in time.

At that point, either the whole thing becomes a smoking hole in the ground (unlikely) or there will be a reaction against it by the best and brightest. They will accomplish a piece of what PG and co set out to do, but couldn't because their structure didn't inherently support it. The "reaction against" will accomplish it, even though it will itself be flawed in some way and sow the seeds of its eventual demise as it ascends.

I think lamenting a decline is the wrong focus. Do good work yourself. Be the change you want to see, or be the spirit of what you value. So long as you are, it can't die. If it is dying and its outside of you, what was it to you anyway?

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

So, you're saying, "I liked you better before you sold out?" There's a t-shirt for that: http://store.dieselsweeties.com/products/liked-you-better-be...

> There's a t-shirt for that...

... which is a little bit ironic, in its own way.

Surprised no one has posted this link yet: http://hackingisnotcracking.com/

It's only 100 days old on HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577224

I found the link memorable, anyway. I've been sharing it with my "liberal arts friends" when they talk about hacking as if the sum of its parts resulted in the OP's third paragraph.

Not to sound dismissive but honestly who cares if most hackers have sold out? Who cares if the culture is changing? Hacking was never about a culture, it was about making cool stuff because you feel like it. Hackers don't need cultures, they don't need main stream media attention. The beauty of the "culture" (for want of a better term) is that it is really a culture of one, however you decide to define it is ok. Hacker really is a loose phrase for anyone who makes cool stuff for no other reason than they want to.

This is just my definition but I will admit I missed the 80's and most of the 90's.

The group you've identified as modern "hackers" aren't the descendants of the "real hackers" of the 80s and 90s, but are instead members of the web startup scene. The real hackers haven't changed and are still doing what they always have done: learning about and hacking on cool/interesting/challenging stuff, and, in contrast to the web startup crowd, they generally don't really care to self-promote (and that might be a bug, but it's how they usually are). They are just driven by their curiosity to build and explore. What you're pointing out is that there's now a hugely hyped group of web programmers and startup-founder-wannabes who are now self-identifying as "hackers", but hype is not value. The web startup folk seem to be sourced from a different slice of society than where "real hackers" come from. I don't know the exact difference between the two, but I think the main thing is that hackers are driven primarily to understand, but the startup founder type is driven to create. Both groups do have both traits in abundance of course, but there definitely seems to be a difference in the primary focus/emphasis. There also seems to be a difference in how the groups treat social status: hackers mostly don't care, and are almost exclusively interested in their projects and the opinion of those who are qualified to judge their work (i.e. other hackers in their domain). But compared to the hacker, the web startup founder cares a lot more about the external social rewards of his actions, and cares about social standing as judged by society at large.

What it boils down to, is that systems programming is no longer a necessity for certain kind of start-ups. The applications most people were writing in Turbo C++ were, in some cases, simpler than CRUD screens in PHP. If anything, PHP is today's Basic: the language that kids start with.

There's still however systems programming going on, but in the area of client-server communications (RPC/serialization frameworks), distributed computing, storage systems. There's also great deal of algorithm development going on in the areas of machine learning and information retrieval. Just these challenges don't always occur in early-stage companies.

On the other hand, people are also doing a lot more than the early 90s/late 80s hackers couldn't on personal PCs: domain specific languages, functional programming.

Today's basic is Python.

It's even more portable than Java (runs on ARM-based platforms).

I meant in the sense of not promoting structured programming and being many people's first (and only) exposure to programming.

Python very much promotes a certain style of programming (object oriented, with some functional elements). I.e. I can write Basic in PHP (especially after the decision to add goto) but not in Python (which is a benefit; also important to me is the fact I can't write Perl in Python).

Most every managed web hosting provider has PHP integration enabled in their product. If a kid is building a website for their boy scout troop which needs an email feedback or guest book form, they will use PHP.

What's also fascinating is relational databases are a part of the "make a simple web application" stack as well. So you have people with very little exposure to computing using very complex environments with very strong abstraction layers. There's many many years of hard-core hacking that enabled that to happen.

Sounds like we all grew up and most of us got day jobs.

EDIT: That sounds more dismissive than I meant. The post is a great read, I miss the old days too.

Well, it's a combination of that and of the amount of content respective groups generate - hackers don't have self-indulgent blogs, facebook pages, or youtube channels, and they never did. All that might have changed are the population and diversity if the internet population.

Absolutely. The smartest hackers I know don't even have something as self-indulgent as a public web site.

In my experience, hackers have always been the quiet type. Now some loud ones have changed what it means to be a hacker through popularity.

On the other hand, by dint of being so loud, they've given even the quiet hackers some well-deserved recognition. Intellectualism has too long been shunned in the main stream. It's finally become sort of (dare I say it?) cool to be a hacker.

Thus, their volume has contributed some social capital to us.

Thank you and your liberal arts sensibilities for capturing one perspective of this moment in time - the zeitgeist, if you will. It is good to remember where we came from, better still to know where we are.

The real hackers are still out there and because of the prevalence of the tools of the trade and the complexity of systems compared to 20 years ago, there are 10 times as many of them. Unless you travel to their places and learn their language you won't know they're there. They (generally) don't have blogs.

It is the hackers who embrace technology a long time before it goes mainstream. Why should I sit in a dark room, with a dialup connection to a BBS (where I can talk to other hackers) when I can access a site like HN and do the same thing, while also not being limited by the inherent capabilities of a BBS???

Also, why should I not have a snazzy job title??? You make it sound as though hackers should be recluses from the society. Also, you seem to be talking of hackers only in the sense that 'hackers are people who break into computers and modify computer programs' - which is just total BS.

A hacker is an extremely curios person. In the 90's buffer overflows and credit card number generators piqued the interest of hackers. Now there are other stuff which do. Besides wouldn't it be really stupid if hackers were stuck in the the 90's??? Who would lead innovation then???

Words change meaning. It doesn't mean the underlying realities have changed. (Though it doesn't disprove it, either.)

I mean, I almost feel bad obviating your entire post, but you're just playing games with the semantics of the word "hacker", not observing useful phenomena. I even think that part of the semantic drift is quite possibly just reflecting a drift in the places you hang out, rather than fundamental changes in the real world.

If you want to go find those hackers, I'm sure you can still find them. I'm not very interested, myself, but I'm pretty sure they're still out there. Not so much on web forums, though.

In the meantime, if you want to do "hackery" things by pretty much any definition, you can find people to do it with online. The existence of "posers" doesn't make the real people go away.

Don't forget that the legal system started updating itself and now has laws on the books more akin to being charged with terrorism. Another thing to consider is people getting threatened with bogus associations to organized crime.

People keep a low profile and things are more implicitly communicated when out in the open. A good hacker is creative, so a creative individual can just as easily imagine the "alternate" possibilities of a particular technology.

Are you interested in Setec Astronomy? :D

I agree...but we are still out there. I think one of the problems is that "hacking" / "hacker" has become a synonym for "programmer" / "software engineer".

But there are still real hackers out there; like people that sell 0days just to eat and buy new fancy toys and such.

Putting aside the security aspect, I think that the terms hacker and programmer as still disparate. They're separated by structure.

If you still through and design something you're programming - putting a fair amount of thought and structure in it before you hit the editor. Just coding and coding is probably closer to hacking to me - it's a messy art but capable of brilliance.

On the security side of things there seems to be a split between 'white hat' security professionals which includes a few blowhards by all accounts, and 'black hats' who have changed from just mischief to working for nefarious types for money. Supposedly there are still quite a few 'grey hats' who are just about playing around and finding out interesting new things while ignoring the black and white side of things.

I myself participated in the hacking cult noname123 refers to and i can clearly understand his statement. If you haven't been there, you just can't get it.

"Get a `blog'" haha this is so freaking hilarious and irritating at the same time .. clueless people that have only recently started using computers.

IT today is all about a bunch of business morons abusing the poor text-based HTTP protocol, reinventing user interfaces rendered through an overloaded browser process. An enormous number of levels of abstraction just to display a single facebook button.

They insist on pushing it even further .. every single f day .. polluting the field with buzzwords, overaplying relational databases where they are actually completely useless! It's all about making simple things look complex, as more and more clueless people get involved in the IT "business".

Thank god we still have OpenBSD and Plan9 and the old phrack articles around.

PS: address space randomization is a lame-ass countermeasure.

Great post - i loved the analogies. I grew up on BBS's and VB. In my 20's, I moved into the wild-wild-web. PHP was my first inkling of becoming a programmer, but I soon learned to appreciate the history - teaching myself C/C++, learning design principles, etc., etc., because I needed to know more about the craft.

Now I've gone 'corporate' and my job entails a lot of what you've described aptly as the new new thing. For me hacking has always been about putting the many pieces together. The challenges, more than ever, are still there - it's the nature of them that have changed. Because of the many levels of abstraction, as you've noted, today's hacker needs a broader view and wider skill-set to find those big, big challenges. That's why I still love what I do.

Did you miss this gem? - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976

Wow, thanks for pointing that out - it was fascinating to read.

I remember this one. I've never felt more mediocre than I did after reading that write-up. I don't consider myself a hacker or even much of a programmer. I simply make tools to eliminate the boring and monotonous parts of my job. I tinker a bit at home (when I have time), but I have yet to make anything worth showing off.

If I personally had to define what it means to be a hacker this would be on the (very) short list.

I believe that you're diluting the word "hacker" and putting it into a stereotype you have either only seen on tv shows or heard your friends ranting about. "Hackers" are just programmers that love to code and solve problems, and they do it well. BSS and buffer overflows and the such were just interesting problems/challenges that they found interesting ways to overcome or dominate.

The closest thing I can put to your description of "hacker" is the ZF0. http://r00tsecurity.org/files/zf05.txt . They "hack" as you say, it's a great read.

And guess where i found it? HN :P

There's a car analogy here; let's see if I can do it right, considering I just woke up 20 minutes ago.

Before WWII, the automobile was something a fair amount of people owned, but didn't do much with by way of "hacking". The real automotive hacking was done to just keep the damn thing running and reliable.

Post WWII is when the kids of the day started hacking their cars to build hot rods, and they did it to get girls and show off. Most of them, though, tweaked their hardware and horsepower simply to see how far they could push the machine.

By the '60s, hot rods had evolved into muscle cars. Horsepower purists were applying what they knew about hacking the previous generation of automotive technology to the next generation, and managed to Frankenstein a whole new animal--some of these cars could get you killed if you didn't know what you were doing.

Detroit took notice. Fifteen-plus years of kids hacking their engines defined a trend--a trend which said, "give me more horsepower!" Chrysler, in particular, took this to heart and made the Barracuda barely street legal right off the assembly line. All it took was a few small tweaks to turn your showroom car into a full-blown monster of a muscle car.

Chevys took a little more work, but the replacement parts required were dirt cheap, and remained so for a very long time.

By the 80s (or thereabouts) imports were gaining a foothold in the American market, and the muscle car was slowly being phased out for the Ricer. It didn't help that the cars which used to be so easily modified were now rolling off the assembly line with computers under the hood.

Nowadays, cars aren't nearly as easy to tweak as they once were, partly because of the computers, but mostly because they now come with most of the tweaks pre-installed. So, what you get nowadays are the old, die-hard muscle car enthusiasts (who have been pushed well out of the spotlight), the "I live my life a quarter-mile at a time" Ricer morons (who tweak their car with ridiculous body kits and the occasional nitrous oxide bottle, rather than any meaningful auto hack) and the crazy, wild-eyed guy who lives 20 miles out of town and spends his weekends trying to get his old Accord to give him 100 miles per gallon.

The hot-rod kids are still out there, they're just older, wiser and overshadowed by the Fast and the Furious.

i too thought 80's and 90's hacker culture might have subsided. and not to be a fanboy or anything, but then i actually read the arc source yesterday.

http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=10254

loaded it up like the 'how-to-run-news' file mentions. and it worked. and when you start reading the actual arc and scheme source, you may notice there is like an entire language in one file. it's crazy. it's like how your average non technical person might imagine it: there's this 'programming language file'. the whole source is like a dozen files (forget line count, the fact that you can even conceptually organize it that well is crazy). and then you start to re-read 'on lisp' -- and it's like holy crap, why was i not paying attention, and then maybe you're rewriting your code from whatever other project you were working on and basically you're happy and hacking again....

true story. i only mention it here because obviously this is hacker news and so people might be interested in hacker news.

When were media publications about hacker culture so popular anyways? It's true that there has been a boom is online social interaction even among the more "secluded geeky" types in the recent years, but it's also true that "black hat" hackers are now more sophisticated than ever: never before have we heard of things like automated patch-diffing exploits.

This "evolution" doesn't just apply to criminals. in the scholar community, there are plenty of security researchers writing all sorts of papers on the most obscure aspects of computing, and even outside that, there are still those hobbyists who passionately like to explore the limits of our systems, even if only on their spare time. The magnitude and scope of our systems may have become more accomodating to the mainstream culture, but the hacker culture continues to live just as strong, as you put it, "typing silently the night away".

but I think you know what I mean

No, I have no idea what you mean.

it's no longer subversive.

It never was. Some criminal acts involved computers, I guess crime is subversive.

At most you could say there was little demand for hacking skills back in the day. Where's today they'll get a good paycheck.

It's hard to feel cool and subversive when you're paid well. Tough cookies kid, grow up.

There is clearly a subset of hackers that is intelligent, thoughtful, logical, motivated, resourceful, and creative. If you go to TechCrunch and read the articles and comments, that subset is either diluted or non-existant. On the other hand, Hacker News is filled with that subset. It's amazing. So while the hacker culture as you describe it may indeed be dying out, I think that the real hacker is thriving, as evidenced through the community here. Let that old hacker culture die out. Let us build a new hacker culture that emphasizes that way of thought. And hope that this way of thought becomes mainstream.

Honestly, for me, increasing the number of Americans (and people elsewhere too) who can think more intelligently would be the holy grail of hacking problems. Can we create more hackers from modern society?

You've just hit the malaise called "the passage of time". Things change and things look different. This becomes upsetting if you stand still as you witness the passage of time. A lot of us have seen it in the music industry, remember the 90's where pop and porn pretty much became synonymous? Move sticks, find different communities. A change of scenery will help you find what you are looking for again.

Complaining about people talking business is in conflict with your IT department woes. If you run your own business you get to see the big picture. The reason you'll see so much "business" in hacking is because people grow up and need jobs. For hackers the BEST jobs are startups OR starting your own company. Think about it, would a rebel just take some random job or forge their own path?

If you think that an hacker is a criminal that hides behind its CRT monitor, than you never knew what being a hacker means.

You're just mad because those damn kids stole your cool.

"I was really into Nirvana but then MTV came along and made it mainstream so I stopped listening to them. Sellouts!"

Fonzie jumped the shark because the show was running out of ideas. We won't ever be out of ideas for software.

Sure, at work I dig around lots of legacy stuff and stitch it together. But it never feels assembly line to me even when I'm not thrilled about a specific task. I'm always solving the most important problem of the moment and trying to think about the best way to do it (in terms of balancing time, knowledge, clarity, efficiency, etc...).

Only in the last few years I've seen some of the best software I've ever encountered. Ableton Live is unbelievably insanely great. Max/Msp/Jitter is an inspiring playground I could stay in forever. There is some great hacking out there and plenty of culture to support it.

Hacking is far from being dead.

I would say that it has never been so alive and well since now is so much easier to find the information to get you started (and as a result it is no longer as elitist as it used to be).

What you're talking about is the stuff that goes mainstream.

If your references are newspapers, tv news and now even (most) blogs, you get a distorted picture.

Of course twitter is just marketing (and very little hacking). And that's why everybody knows it (and use it).

Real hacking doesn't break the news because few people are able to understand it. And journalists (sadly) aren't paid to understand what they're talking about or to spread knowledge. They're paid to sell copies (and/or ads).

It has always been like this.

I wouldn't worry too much about the future of hacking. As an example, HAR 2009 is going on right now. Take a look at the program:

https://har2009.org/program/events.en.html

I've been to the previous edition and let me tell you, there's plenty of tinkering and subverting going on in there.

Here's a selection: "Eyeborg project", "Protheses for $50 instead of $250.000", "Electrical enginering with free/libre open source software", "DNS Security In The Broadest Sense", "A workshop on the ethics of piracy"

"a cowboy on the electronic frontier typing silently the night away to a CRT monitor but the internals (of man and machine) is intense full of drama"

Life in a startup company is similar to this sometimes :-)

Conceiving and executing a successful technology startup, is quite a rare ability and to me, is like the "ultimate hack". Twitter and Facebook don't quite count because I don't understand how they are making money or what their product even is.

But there are also plenty of posers who talk the talk and have pretty blogs and like to talk business ideas.

I wouldn't call myself a hacker simply because I don't like being labeled. I like being different, for better or for worse.

You have to realize: the hackers before us lamented our arrival. And the Real Programmers lamented theirs. If anything, it's only right and proper to steal the term and make it suck in a new way. The point is, it doesn't matter: the real ones walk like ducks, quack like ducks.

IMO being a hacker has nothing to do with computers. Also, I'm amazed that people here are still making the mistake of conflating crackers - those who make unauthorised access to [computer] systems - with hackers. Presumably you think you're breaking the law by coming on "Hacker News"?

Very well done. I loved the paragraph that began with "Fast forward to 2009..." in particular.

I really don't think that hacking has actually jumped the shark so to say. More like the community has diversified from purely academic hackers and crackers to more corporate hackers and entrepreneurs.

Hackers have never been visible.

They still aren't. A ton of fantastic hackers just do what they love: hack. They don't write about it or have a blog. I know a bunch of hackers, and none of them flaunt it.

You can still hack today like they did in the 90's. You just need to smile and wear a suit. Adapt, don't die. ;-)

Surely anyone who has been on a Computer Science degree knows what the fixed point finder is!

stand up and take your laptop to come to Hacker Camps/Conf, you'll meet 70-90's hackers there:

* http://har2009.org

* http://events.ccc.de/congress/

* ...

In the nineties, "hacking" meant "hackey sack" to me.

hacking != cracking

I miss Flooz too.

Things have always been getting worse.

Hear Hear !

Nothing is permanent. I still remember the time when I got one of my first jobs for something like $30/mo. only to have an access to personal computer. I remember the first i486 PCs running SCO Open Server (what a mess!) and Informix, I remember FreeBSD 1.x.x and so on.

It was the golden times. Everyone on that field was a hacker. There was no such thing as apt-get or yum which were downgraded sysadmin's level to almost zero. There were even no ./configure && make && make install mantra and you were required to understand what you were doing and why.

But today IT is a mainstream and even in decline. It lost its novelty and romance decade ago, and people involved in it nowadays are mere ordinary factory workers.

Of course, there are still great engineers and programmers (not coders) around, and some new fields like ARM-based consumer devices emerged, but I think there are no such feelings like when you saw first ZX Spectrum or Atary or heard its 8-bit sound.

Yeah, yeah... In the past everything was better. The trees where more green, the summers where more sunny. Even the women looked better in the 90s. I am sure you had more hair in the 90s (or from personally guessing your age, maybe you have more hair now. Congratulations!)

What I want to say? Every generation wants a "new thing". And if the "new thing" from 20 years ago would be the "new thing" from today, it would not be the ->new<- thing, right? Be assured, that the new generations can have the same happy time you had, but with their own "new thing" and because it is theirs.

To be fair, the early hackers didn't really have an aura of cool, except to other hackers. Popular opinion painted them as basement dwellers (many of them were) and maladjusted youth (script kiddies - many of them were that, too).

The fictionalized stuff didn't reflect reality. Just a little bit more extreme than the fictionalized stuff now (big payouts, glamourous parties, etc).

the movie "hackers". that was some good shit. good times, good times.

I'd probably argue that it was "bad shit," good times ;)

I know hackers is basically a bad movie, but it does have a special place in my heart. I'm not exactly sure why....

It's the mythos - breaking out hackers as something 'cool' - despite all the dumb hollywood stuff in the movie.

Dumb hollywood stuff that, funny enough, seems to be praised when it comes in dead tree format (eg. Neuromancer).

Thing is, cyberpunk is not hacking. Buffer overflows are not hacking. It never was, actually. Hacking is about building and learning, not about showing off your skills (which in most cases aren't really there).

two words: angelina jolie

The Fall of Hacking