That’s actually the exact same story of how I ended up in computer science instead of pure mathematics. I was interested in pure logic and set theory, but I could flex the same muscles learning programming language theory and end up with much better odds of paying off student loans by the time I’m 30
People only have so much time in life. If I could enjoy my work 30% more that would be great. Is it worth making less than half income though?
This is so true: as I've made more, my github has grown more silent.
I used to be excellent at kernel hacking, random Linux things that would often be several-weeks trials. Now that I'm not 'in it' constantly, mostly just advising, I've lost a lot of that sharpness
Doesn't help the onslaught of the day really kills my desire to learn/play around
Coding C++ at work all day, maybe not C++ all night at home.
Meetings all day at work? Yeah, I still have code that needs to come out.
one can make the argument "well you have free time on the side, just do it then if youre truly interested" but realistically most people, myself included, are completely braindead after work. i have a lot of interests and hobbies but i can only find 2-3 hours on the weekends to get into them because i am mentally drained and shot after a day of work full of (mostly) pointless meetings. i don't mind work, i NEED work. but, i also need it to be fulfilling, motivating and the function of those is to me at least, seeing a positive effect on society. i imagine most people deep down inside want to help the world in some way.
this is the life we've created for ourselves in the USofA. R&D/curiosity is reserved for certain demographics, and that's not even saying ONLY the privileged or the rich, that includes young people who have energy and drive before it gets hammered in by <insert corporation>, or the people who are willing to load up on methamphetamines, or the select few people who truly are amazing at having a 9-5 and being cognitively healthy enough to do brain intensive tasks after work.
the point i'm making here is that we are frogs in boiling water. i remember the days (a decade ago) when I was working and exploring new personal frontiers of interest. Projects at the startups i worked on were exciting and interesting even if they were failures. Nowadays I work at <bigcorp> where every work stream is defined by some OKR. Product people have moats and act like feudal warlords. Everything is resume driven development, and the common theme here is more money/income and ultimately capitalistic greed being shoved down everyone's throats. It all sucks. Our culture in America revolves around money and greed, and it's getting worse and worse. Everything glows a certain shade of gray, and soon we'll all be indistinguishable from gray goo
I am a huge fan of capitalism and yet I also wish we saw a lot more small-to-medium sized companies where the focus is on a product you can be proud of, satisfied customers, and especially, happy employees. While I'm wishing I might as well add a shorter work week and more time spent on the auxiliary parts of engineering / development (maintenance, training, contributing to OSS dependencies, community service, etc.).
Then again, I've never been employed full time before so I don't know how it is in the industry anyways.
I wish I didn't have to have a day job, but alas, I do. I didn't chase the money earlier in my career and I kind of regret it to be honest. I'm closer to 50 now, and while I don't see myself ever retiring, I definitely don't have the energy to put in a 40 hour week and do another 20 on personal or side projects on top all the time. I do spend a good 10-15 hours a week reading, keeping up and exploring, but I find on my own time I'm more in decision paralysis than actually getting stuff done. There's too many good options to explore.
If that’s the calculation—if you find yourself doing the calculation—probably not. However, if you can’t make yourself not do it (build software, build hardware, figure out maths or better ways to put maths into words, write, ...), if you find yourself doing it even at your most busiest and staying up at night when every other minute of your day is occupied, then... Many such people have found they still need the income, and every one of them that I’ve seen is deeply unhappy because of it.
I've never once thought of it in those terms, but now that you pose the question... for me the answer is "yes, absolutely, no question about it."
If Harvard started admitting 50,000 students a year, the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find.
Unfortunately.
Not sure the concentration of Zuckerbergs and the concentration of hackers is particularly related, except maybe the latter attracts the former.
Zuckerberg's no genius, he was in the right place at the right time near the right people. He's competent, but no more than most of the people here. His morals (or the flexibility thereof) were what made him rich.
Zuckerberg is clearly a not-great guy in some ways, but the reason we're all posting on Hacker News during the workday and he's running a centibillion dollar company is because he's an immensely intelligent and talented and focused man and we are... well, the kind of people who post on internet forums during the workday.
>the reason we're all posting on Hacker News during the workday and he's running a centibillion dollar company is because he's an immensely intelligent and talented and focused man and we are... well, the kind of people who post on internet forums during the workday.
There are people who post regularly in HN (even in the top-50 contributors) who as hackers and programmers (and work ethic) run not just circles, but the 10-dimensional equivalent of a circle, around Zuckenberg, and have no "multi-billion dollar" companies...
But also the dude obviously is a great hacker. There are vanishingly few people who can bootstrap the infrastructure that will let a company grow to Facebook scale -- you need exceptional depth and breadth of computer knowledge, as well as great focus and an ability to prioritize and satisfice.
Well, he didn't do that. He just wrote a crappy basic PHP backend. The "scaling at Facebook scale" part happened later, after people were hired and VC money flew in.
Same like early Twitter was a crap Rails app that they even had to restart a few times a day because of memory leaks. It still got them through to attract users (even though it crashed all the time) and money, so they eventually were able to fix that and grow to Twitter scale.
None of those things happened because of very talented hacker founders. Those kind of apps aren't even very technical or different to the average CRUD app - not until the scale/infrastructure people come in much later: those do the actual hard work.
Cloudflare, Redis, SQLlite, Nginx, ElasticSearch etc, on the other hand, are a different story. Those are absolutely apps/platforms made from scratch by seriously talented hackers, even if others were involved to improve them later on.
lol. citation needed.
Among geniuses who can build a FAANG company from scratch, I'm sure Zuck is not the strongest software engineer or hacker or whatever. Like, Jeff Dean is undoubtedly a better engineer. Craig Silverstein, too. And Bret Taylor. But if you're going to tell me Zuck is a mediocrity -- not just "a lesser light than Jeff Dean" but an actual mediocrity like us rank-and-file HN-posting losers -- then I'm gonna want to see some evidence.
Studying a language daily for four years suggests determination and willpower, yes.
But I would expect most people who have studied a language daily for four years to be able to give a talk in that language if they needed to and knew ahead of time. I'm not sure that's a non-average learning time.
Citations widely available via the obvious web searches. Here are responses on Quora with some details about how the hackers hired by Facebook worked around PHP's limitations.
I'm not aware of any evidence that he was an exceptional engineer. So what? Why would he even care about being that? As long as you can hire engineers that are better than you, you don't need to be a great one to grow a social network. We're not talking about AI here.
Having said that, I think Zuckerberg was a hacker. He made a few small web apps and one took off. His success shouldn't mean he is not a hacker.
That would make him an entrepreneur and a web programmer.
Not a hacker, which (in this context) is about a great relationship with programming than "making a few web apps".
That usually has more to do with machiavellianism than competence
Of course some would consider machiavellianism a kind of talent.
Ew
Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career, with offshoring replacing expensive American engineers.
Believed by whom? Because AFAIR this was never either the general public sentiment or consistent with BLS projections across the fields that CS feeds into.
Post dotcom crash in the early 00's? Everyone was saying this was a dead market. Cost-cutting was everywhere.
The options I was weighing were philosophy, math, or CS. I chose CS because I liked building things. I figured I could at least make minimum wage. If it turned out so terrible I could just go back to school for something else.
Much to my relief, my first job out of college paid me $50k.
The hilarity is that I went into Linguistics instead, and it turns out that in 2023 that is actually very helpful... I'm not the only one either.
I do remember it being a big concern on the part of 9-to-5 coders at large corporations.
Basically I just really like TypeScript. Languages I’ve worked with or tried out for the pure hackery spirit of exploration: assembly, C, C++, Java, Ruby, Python, Clojure(script), Lisp, Elm, C# (did lots of neat stuff with that, thanks Unity!), PHP, scala, go, Pascal, VB, probably a couple more I forget. More tech stacks than I can think of.
FOR ME, TypeScript is just so good for what I want to do that I just don’t want to mess about with other tools or “spend innovation tokens”. I just wanna build stuff!
My take is a bit worse than the GP: Theres people interested in that but nowadays they sell their skills for money. That's why you see lots of ransomware, darkweb sells and whatnot.
Even the torrent-ing has shown the change of culture: back in the Napster, kazaa, imem days, people (layman) shared just because. Now theres not that much interesting material, and a lot of it is behind private trackers that make you jump through hoops to get in the club.
He had some _awesome_ stuff! :-D
There are plenty of hacker culture areas, they just aren't the same as the 90's and 00's. Neither were the 90's the same as the 80's. In fact, I'd argue the 00's were nothing like the 90's either.
The spaces are there. You'll need to abandon the thing you know. (And for many of us, that's hard, because the thing we know is also feeding us - but that, too, was always true)
When computers were small, dumb, and did very little on their own, creative integration of heterogeneous pieces was rewarded and rewarding. Computers are now large, complicated, distributed, and part of a whole ecosystem. The kind of "hacker-shaped" grit that makes someone do something neat gluing a telephone receiver to a TV tuner? Well that's a fun Adafruit demo, but you could have done it easier and faster on a Raspberry Pi, and hell, there's already the scragglypete/tv-phoner repo that you really should have used (if you'd done a bit of research before you whipped out the glue gun, you'd have found the StackOverflow post from three months ago where someone went "Hey, I want to glue my telephone receiver to my TV tuner" and they were directed to that project). And while we're on the subject, that's not nearly as useful as the telephone-receiver-glued-to-a-tv-tuner emulator in this Docker container, because it does exactly what your workbench solution does but you can deploy eighty of them in one minute with a few shell commands and some money thrown at AWS...
Hacking is less cowboy-shaped for the same reason there are fewer cowboys... Eventually, the pioneer towns give way to the skyscrapers and city streets because once the wilderness is tamed, the city is way more powerful, comfortable, and productive than the cowboy life.
It may be difficult for a child to become fascinated with a particular technology once it becomes ubiquitous. It's a testable hypothesis too, because if that were true then you should see hackers appear in different geographic regions at different times due to how unevenly these technologies are distributed.
The confounding factor, I think, for computer technology at least, is that by the time they become ubiquitous in the third world, they may no longer be simple enough to "get started" on.
Anecdata:
I had a job recently that paid competitively, but the boss soon replaced interesting work with boring work (for me: writing boilerplate that's already been solved a thousand times over, or any FE work), so my passion petered out, which was quite obvious to everyone involved, so the relationship ended.
However, I'm with a client now, and we're building something really cool (using LLMs; I get access to H100 soon; etc) and I'm working every spare minute I can get away with, without being paid for overtime.
I feel like a "hacker" again with this role, learning new things, stretching the capabilities of the system given various constraints, and every second link I open in my browser is arxiv.
(That said, I grew up in South Africa, where cyber laws lagged behind the world's for a good few years, so we knew every trick in the book, yet were untouchable, haha!)
How did you make a living?
The moral of my story is that 12 year olds don't think - and maybe always SHOULDN'T think in very practical ways.
To me, bootcamps are a complete red flag when considering candidates. I don't think I ever saw a single good hire out of a bootcamp (and we just flat out stopped interviewing them at one point because the signal to noise ratio just became too low).
Tho, people you call hackers fairly often do not actually like actual work involved in actually doing the programming work. They like tinkering with technology, reading about it, but they do not like creating and maintaining software.
And fairly often, people dismissed by hackers as not passionate, because they are using boring technology, are passionate about actually finishing functional software.
AKA just getting older
This site is a prime example. There can't be a post about a non-mainstream programming language without someone's comment saying "I don't get the point of this, it is really hard to hire for/it would be really hard to pick up for junior developers."
It seems every small project, library, language is evaluated in the context of the average FAANG developer, or whether it would fit in a startup environment. Hacking, as in enjoying the art of programming computers, is going the way of the dodo, especially on this site. The few remaining hackers are massively outranked by the "I only know Javascript" average dev, the Silicon Valley-adjacent MBAs and the huge number of those that somehow are here just to post and comment about non-programming topics.
On the rare occasion there's a post on Lisp or software-defined radios, for example, you often see the same faces. It seems that on here, the nucleus of hackers has remained more or less constant since 2010, while all other demographics flooded in.
As an average hacker, I must say that I don't give a rat's arse anymore about most mainstream programming topic you can find on this site's front page.
I think this also describes those working on software in general. Everyone uses the same interesting-to-hackers low level parts of the stack. But the nature of software is that _use_ scales infinitely, so roughly the same small quantity of developers are needed the same as was needed in the 90s.
But technology use has exploded, so there's huge demand for developers working higher up in the stack, because the need for domain specific apps has exploded and that part doesn't scale. So the 90s hackers continue but are now dwarfed by app developers and web developers are many orders of magnitude more numerous.
Unfortunately because software is a commodity the use of the low level parts of the stack doesn't translate to money for the hackers working on them. Because just as it's a niche interest for developers in that area, so it's a niche business case to make money out of working in that area.
Traditionally, being a hacker is being a person who is very interested in learning how things work, and how to use those things in new ways. Historically, proper hackers have focused on things ranging from model railroads to pay phones to bureaucratic systems, to computers and more.
The most common early sign that a child is a hacker is when the child takes apart every machine they can lay their hands on.
I am aware, and I agree.
> Being a hacker has nothing to do with how far up the stack you operate.
I disagree. The workings further down the stack are interesting only to hackers, and those paid to work in that area. I think that's quite different from the reasons for interest further up the stack.
At any level of the stack, the hacker mindset of "learning how things work...(and utilizing that knowledge)" is generally applicable.
It's arguable that while, say, Steve Jobs wasn't a technically adept hacker, he was a business, product and people/behavior hacker.
I comment way more on non-programming topics because that's where I think I can contribute - most people on here are better programmers than I am but I have life experiences that are fairly unusual for this particular bubble. I do read the technical posts but I don't have much to say.
As for the 'somehow', I was raised by hackers and I used to be one - I'm too much of a generalist to fully commit to it but I'm 'culturally' a hacker/hacker adjacent. I imagine our ranks are growing for various reasons, which might explain some of the shift.
But one of the primary traits of hackers is that they tend to be generalists.
I'm very, very much a generalist. My other hobbies that straddle the line between hobby and professional interest (in that I do them for play but have gotten money for them) include fiction writing, marketing psychology, humanities and qualitative research, and bra fitting.
Currently I'm off on a spree about the physiological nature of emotions and I'm getting really into experiences that are primarily physical and learning about biology in my spare time, which means I don't spend it coding or tinkering.
I can still code/tinker/approach tech problems with a hacker mindset, but I don't like to pretend I'm as good as people who really love it. I'm a dilettante to my core.
I honestly think that one of the things that has diminished the hacker community to a degree is that it has become synonymous in most people's minds with computers. But really, computer hackers are just one subset of the larger hacker community. There are legit hackers who have no interaction with computers beyond what most people do.
By your definition, I would definitely count (as would, say, my cousin who is buying laptops for her kids to take apart and homeschooling them and taking a hacker's approach to parenting or the one who got really into theology for about ten years or my uncle who was obsessed with cameras or...), but I think the prevailing view sees hackerdom as tech (or at the very least mechanical) related and I also believe that hewing closely to a community's default understanding of a term is useful for communication, so I still wouldn't claim the title on HN. In an anthropological/historical/sociological exploration of hackerdom, I probably would. :)
As a hacker, I have a stubbornness and a strong sense of the justice of technical correctness, so I can't help but try keep the larger sense of the word alive. Even if only as part of a background chorus of hackers saying "well, actually..."
But I do try to remember that we're the weirdos here.
I'd like to add that the pipeline for child/adolescent hackers that existed in the pre-00s is basically non-existent. The only major path that still exists that I can think of is game modding.
I'm a third-generation techie on both sides of my family (my paternal grandpa (b. ~1915) got started working with TVs and their mechanical parts and my maternal grandmother (b. mid 1920s) learned C in the 70s) and there are several parts of my upbringing that I don't think could be replicated. For instance, I got started with web work in the 90s, which meant that a.) nobody knew what they were doing and the lack of formal structure combined with the cultural appreciation for competence meant that children could do 'real' work and I loved helping with 'real' work and b.) there was no age limit to participation and no legal liability since most of it wasn't commercial.
There were also child-specific parts of the Web that were built by actual children instead of corporations meant to siphon money from parents. A large draw was being able to act without needing adult intermediaries. I could make a website about Sailor Moon or toys or start a chat/IRC room and control the discussions I had and kick adults or anybody who was inappropriate. (10 year olds are great dictators).
There are almost no pathways into tech now that revolve around tech as play and I think that's where a lot of hackers came from.
For that matter, my great grandfather was the type that actually built cabinets, or did plumbing, electrical, etc in his home. The most I've done is run an ethernet cable or change a light fixture or switch. That's not a critique of younger generations, just pointing out that a desire to learn, understand and do things has always existed. It just presented a bit differently.
The decline in basic mechanical tinkering in the population definitely is a factor if only because the mindset transfers to hacking: "This is a human made tool and I am a human with the right/ability to screw with it/alter it to do what I want". Very few kids now grow up being encouraged to play with and take things apart. Both because the adults don't have the knowledge to put it back together or the tools for the kids to use and because our culture is way more risk averse than it used to be.
I wish I personally had more opportunity to tinker as a child but I'm glad I have a chance to catch up now, though I'm not really sure where to start. (And I don't have as much time to dedicate since I need to find a full-time job)
If anything the problem is that today's kids have too many options. And sure, some are commercial.
TensorFlow probably will lead/is leading to some hackers.
> That has a whole bunch of social baggage attached as well as a 'win' condition set by adults.
I'm not sure what you mean by this? I don't remember anything about winning besides the whole social media aspect of trying to get popular among all the cool projects that other people had by getting the largest number of likes and remixes.
I don't think I agree. Many of the old pathways don'ts exist anymore, but they've been replaced with new ones. Look at the maker community ("makers" are mostly just hackers by a different name), or look at the resurgence of hobbyist electronics.
I think electronics is a great example, actually, because I often hear old electronics nerds lament that hobbyist electronics is essentially impossible because most things a surface-mount these days. But what they don't realize is that designing and assembling circuits with surface-mount components is well within the realm of the hobbyist and is very common. This is proven by the wealth of wonderful projects they are engaging in.
The difference with electronics is that the soldering techniques are different. They're not really any more difficult, but require a different set of skills that the graybeards often haven't learned.
But I don't know. As an old fart, I don't have a great deal of contact with the kids who are programming. I simply assume that they still exist.
And now that I say that out loud -- that's a difference. When I was a kid, the older generations of hackers went out of their way to encourage and support budding young hackers. That's how I got my start. Maybe there's not enough of that these days?
Since I don't know any children programmers, I clearly haven't gotten off my own butt to pass along the gifts the generation before me passed on to me. I need to change that.
It's different now. I'm guessing from your comments you're in your 40s-60s. I'm younger, but from a micro-generation that actually saw how this changed - the adults I talked to at computer shows, game shops, through email/chat/IRC/etc. in the early to mid 90s and before were generally just thrilled when anybody showed any interest in what they were doing because it was so uncommon and not understood that any kindred spirit evoked at least some kind of desire to connect. As the dot-com boom swelled, though, there were a new class of adults who became interested in us and what we were doing: Those who saw us as a way to make money/the wunderkids who 'got' this new hip thing. These are the adults who put together programs for us and wooed our parents with talks about how participating would set us up in life and whose advice all seemed to center around our ambitions rather than our joys. They were panning for gold. Lots of investment on getting us to buy into the business world and puffing up our egos. 'Our' here meaning those of us who were at the intersection of identified as 'gifted' (I tested in the top 0.01 percent in middle school which brought attention) and had some aptitude/desire/knowledge of computers and programming. I found it offputting; I couldn't articulate it then but I'd figured out that those adults saw me as a resource, not a peer/future peer. Now most of the adults techie kids have access to for mentorship are the second kind, not the first.
Now there were drawbacks to the old method and people have good reason to be wary about people wanting to interact with their kids: I'm female and got a really large dose of creepiness once I passed about 11 years old, but I was lucky enough to be a.) gay (so no luring me into just making shit choices/bamboozling me about how 'mature' I was because ew dick) and b.) have parents + an entire extended family of nerd adults to back me up and make sure I knew I didn't have to put up with it.
It's harder to interact with strangers' children now and we're far more risk averse so mentorship in the old way is a huge risk for the older person. Unless said older person is a family member, but tech has grown so much in the past 30 years that most kids who need this kind of mentorship don't come from culturally hacker families.
Which relates to another problem with the transmission of the mindset and cultural knowledge: The numbers are very, very skewed. I had an interesting conversation with one of my cousins last year - he'd just had his first kid a couple of years ago and now he and his siblings are wrestling with an interesting problem: None of them went into tech but they're frequently the only parent in a given group who understands how much of anything works or have any sense of what the recent history of tech looks like. His sister is a hardcore Catholic who runs a farm and homeschools her 9 kids; I guarantee you her kids are the only ones in that community that are given laptops to take apart and are taught at least some basic tech literacy and history.
Even taking something as basic as 'how to grow up online and not lose your mind': I'm 34 and I'm probably one of the first people in the world to have a claim to a true digital childhood. Generously there might be 1000 of us in our 30s with that experience ('true' digital childhood in that digital structures and communities were available and accessible to the same degree or more than analogue ones and that had that access + were able to use the tools young enough to build our heuristics and mental schemas around them as opposed to just grafting them on later). Assuming a conservative estimate of current children who can use the Internet/Web independently is 80% of the population born since the adoption of the smartphone, that's still tens of millions of people. And the oldest of us are still 'baby adults' to the rest of the world: we're barely old enough to be listened to on the basis of our life experience. The ratio of people who have the cultural knowledge to people who could benefit from it is really skewed since the skills have exploded into use but all the cultural and social context was left behind. (Or is turning into some weird post-modern mythos).
Sort of rambling, but I have strong feelings about the experiences of the next generations.
Yes, late 50s. I was introduced to computers when I was about 10 by a hacker who took me (and a few other kids as a group) to play with a mainframe computer every couple of weeks. Since all of us kids were from very, very poor families, this was a particularly incredible opportunity that I didn't fully appreciate until I was an adult.
> These are the adults who put together programs for us and wooed our parents with talks about how participating would set us up in life and whose advice all seemed to center around our ambitions rather than our joys.
I remember seeing that as well. It bothered me a great deal at the time. That sort of thing is career guidance, not encouraging exploration and deep learning.
> It's harder to interact with strangers' children now and we're far more risk averse so mentorship in the old way is a huge risk for the older person.
This is absolutely true, but was a factor when I was a kid as well. The guy who took us to play with the mainframe knew us because he was a teacher in an afterschool latchkey program -- so he wasn't an unknown to our parents.
My daughter (who's just a couple of years younger than you) was the volunteer coordinator at the local science museum. The museum had many programs for young children to teach them various sciency things. Perhaps the way I can give back is to go through them. Maybe start a "hacking program" or something. Seems better than just being a random creepy old guy befriending young children.
Thank you for this discussion, by the way. You may (or may not) have been rambling, but your comments sparked a lot in my brain, brought me a bit of enlightenment, and you have planted a few seeds.
It's interesting having been early and poor (or relatively so), isn't it? We had a computer because my parents were horribly irresponsible and did things like starve themselves and fake weighing enough to give plasma to get money for tech. Grocery budget? Warm coats for our children when we live in MI? NO. Shit food and 10 dollar coats that do nothing. But computers! And we will have sleep for dinner before we cut the amount of Internet hours we pay for!
I was lucky enough to have been born into a hacker family, I can't imagine I'd have had access otherwise since we were rural, poorish, and I was a girl. It definitely made me aware of class issues at a young age.
> That sort of thing is career guidance, not encouraging exploration, play, and deep learning.
Given that making money online wasn't a normal thing at the time, it wasn't even career guidance because none of them knew what a career in Web technologies would look like. It was outright Machiavellian: Cozy up to the kids, see which of them might accept your help to build something, and wait for them to have an idea you think is commercially viable and then swoop in to be on the ground floor. A lot of fake interest in you, a lot of fake emotion. But yes, now it's very much career guidance. "Maximize your earning potential!"
> The guy who took us to play with the mainframe knew us because he was a teacher in an afterschool latchkey program -- so he wasn't an unknown to our parents.
That's part of what makes it harder: The people with tech skills aren't in schools showing 10 year olds around. They aren't doing what my mom did and going to the local elementary school so the 6 year olds can learn to use the computers (because none of the teachers knew how so if the kids wanted lab time, they needed a competent adult and my mom was it). They're on the career ladder, and time spent on intangibles like 'growing community' and 'planting trees whose shade you'll never sit in' will not get you promoted. Nobody who can code now is encouraged to go into teaching. So those connections and those lay experts who held the cultural knowledge so the geniuses could concentrate solely on the work are gone. No teacher messing with a mainframe: The school district contracts out its tech to outside companies whose workers never interact with the children and wouldn't be trusted with them.
> Perhaps the way I can give back is to go through them. Maybe start a "hacking program" or something. Seems better than just being a random creepy old guy befriending young children.
You might want to check out your local library as well.
> Thank you for this discussion, by the way. You may (or may not) have been rambling, but your comments sparked a lot in my brain, brought me a bit of enlightenment, and you have planted a few seeds.
I'm so glad! I feel likewise: I've very much enjoyed this conversation, especially since I often feel crazy. I think we need to decouple our cultural insights from specific tech skills and teach them to everybody. Not everybody can code, but my family is full of non-coders who can still utilize systems-thinking to help them navigate the world and who have good trouble-shooting heuristics. A bonus to this would be that parents could identify hacker children much like they can other types of talent such as athletic ability.
Yes. The older I get, the more I realize how much of a difference that has made in my entire worldview. More importantly, I notice how often differences in childhood socioeconomic status can make real communication and understanding difficult. In both directions.
> That's part of what makes it harder: [...]
Wow.
That hits close to home.
I have never had any interest in climbing career ladders -- I am a professional dev largely because that's the only marketable skill I have as a consequence of my love of computers. The money is certainly nice and I feel gratitude literally every day for it, but it's not even a small factor in why I do what I do.
That said, I have still been focused on my own world to the extent that I have not done as your mom did. I have not planted trees for the next generation to shade in.
Outside of my own children, who all have the hacker spirit even if their interests are in things other than computers, I have been a part of the very trends that we are worrying about here. I can see a little more clearly now. If nothing else, I owe a debt.
> especially since I often feel crazy
The only people I've known who never questioned their sanity were ones who weren't actually all that sane.
> I think we need to decouple our cultural insights from specific tech skills and teach them to everybody.
I could not agree more.
Some things to consider are:
- The age matters. As late as 2000 (so kids born in 1995 who still aren't 30), 25% of 5 year olds used the Internet. At all. And an 'internet user' was usually defined with a minimum of once a week (or even rarer) usage. Not enough to really shape your worldview or how you approach problems.
- Most young (early elementary or younger) kids with internet access pre 1997 would only have it at school. These conditions meant most of the children in this age group would have had very close, direct adult supervision the entire time, which prevents it from being a part of a digital childhood since a digital childhood requires making decisions and acting online.
- To be an early adopter of the Internet at the time as a young child required literacy skills years ahead of your peers. In addition, you needed home computer access and the ability/permission to use it independently. To be so into it that you did enough of your socializing online to assimilate this new method of communicating into your core social programming also meant you needed to possess one of the few interests that the Web at the time was useful for. (I really liked anime, astronomy, video games, and programming so I spent a lot of time online).
Basically a lot of people in their 30s used the Internet before the age of 18, but not often enough at a young enough age for it to have really embedded it as fundamental in the same way. For that I think there's a critical period/age limit of about 7. To use the web between 93 (first home access) and 97 that young required skills/intelligence (literacy being the big one, but also simple things like 'hand eye coordination to deal with old mice' and 'knowledge of how to use a browser' that seem second nature now but when you're 6 with zero experience can be substantial), parents with the wealth and interest to have a home computer, and parents that would let you use said home computer for your own purposes/independently. (As opposed to now where everybody hands their kid a phone). The combination of ability, access, and freedom was rare.
I think a lot of people in their 30s and 40s are sort of in between: They're proficient but it's still learned, not hard wired/unconscious the way it is for those of us who were exposed very young. It's the difference between a habit and an ingrained physical task like walking.
In terms of why it matters, some examples of differences I'd consider are:
* Internalizing that independent authorities exist that you can contact that are outside of your adults' sphere of influence. Or read, or watch, etc.
* Internalizing that information is/should be available in your home/private spaces instead of it being something you had to physically seek out.
* Conceiving of ignorance as rude/willful by default instead of innocuous.
tl;dr: Lots of 80s and 90s kids online once in a while and at older ages, very few truly embedded in it the way kids are now due to resource and skill gates that have since been removed (you can use an iPhone without knowing how to read and there's a lot of multimedia online now + most kids can get their hands on a phone).
Imagine Einstein was told "oh, you have such a nice idea about relativity, let's time frame it to 2 days, and then get back to reviewing patents"
as the total number of programmers grows, so too does the pocket, but at a smaller rate than the rest of the bell
so, numbers-wise, yes, there will be fewer hackers per average programmer. it becomes harder to find them too, since most people will probably spend most of their time swimming around the middle of the curve
but i think their number overall is still increasing. just have to grit your teeth and jump to discord to find them :)
there's enormous pressure to be normal. being weird is... like... someone's going to be uploading video of you and mocking you.
there's also the thing where its more expensive to have a normal life, financial pressures say "do financial things". like... the us world is shaping to be "high road" qua Stewart Brand whereas hackers thrive in "low road" environments.
there's also sort of this ... how do I say it ... hackers & that legendary online culture was sort of a product of a people without obligations. seeing your kids soccer game is much more important than debugging a program for fun. being monks for code & computers is not culturally sustainable.
I think that hackers are still around -- I see them a lot -- but they aren't as publicly visible anymore. They aren't interested in making money, and so they won't be in most mainstream technical fora (including HN), because of the cultural shift that made chasing dollars the main thing.
But they are in more private fora, and they get together in person (at conventions, hackerspaces, etc.).
I don't think the hacker community has grown smaller, but I think most of the web has changed so that it's not as appealing to people who want to talk hacker stuff.
All of which is to say -- like when people ask what happened to the old web, back when it was actually good -- they're still there, but they're harder to see in the increasingly dense forest of commercially-minded places.
Beyond this, priorities shift over time. The priorities of someone in their early 20's that is single will be different than someone in their late 40's with children heading towards college, or even younger children. As you mention, there's also the boot camps and people that simply come in without interest in the technology aspects.
In the end, there's many more people that will get into the gritty details today than decades ago, but there's also many more people that are more concerned about getting work done. This is part of why entropy is really hard to overcome. Trying to get movement in a company towards a new approach can be very hard. If company X is using Java or C#, their developers have likely been using it for many years, know it well and don't see a reason to shift. And for the most part, they are right. You can get work done in many languages, scale and adapt in many ways. Most applications don't even need to scale that much. Most apps are line of business apps that only a few dozen people ever even see and for those that aren't, you can scale vertically quite a bit before you really need to go horizontal.
It's different if you re starting something public facing and want to utilize newer tooling for horizontal scale from the start. Aside: Why CockroachLabs doesn't expose a web api for database queries directly for the likes of Cloudflare Workers or Deno Deploy is beyond me... In the end, it depends on what market you're serving. Getting something working means far more than an optimal approach in one way or aother.
I've seen it as well.
I don't agree with what the author says are reasons for it. They just don't fit.
From what I've seen, hackers (in the truest sense) don't advertise. They have deep knowledge, but you only find how deep when you get into discussions with them, and most of the time they have no goodwill to engage in that because of two things, people who are dunning kruger; and social media.
Many of the learning paths have also been removed and are harder to find, the internet used to be freer than it is now. You have companies that dictate what stays up simply by using the court system as a coercive measure. The recent Quad9 thing shows just how bad this is getting across the board internationally. Copyright is being used to coerce, compulse, and limit actual innovation.
Hackers used to get by with their skills via certifications and jobs, many times they can't get certified now that only a single company handles testing in most places. I can't tell you specifically how they fail you, but its certainly not based upon whether you just have the knowledge.
The number of real hackers out there are significantly less because there has been less opportunity, and less resources that are easily found to get into it.
Many have worked very hard for their knowledge and some volunteer and help others, but there's an active trend to harass those that contribute like that, and volunteer psychology says you stop giving when it starts costing you. Dealing with a high number of deceitful people leads you to test them before providing any goodwill. If they don't like what your response implies they don't engage, and your none the wiser.
Its not about life grinding them down, there are a lot of intelligent people who have stopped giving back because they see what providing that support is doing for society in general, and doing anything else is at a much higher cost to them personally than it ever was before.
Its like that adage that most people know, what you do in small things that don't matter shows what you will do in large things that matter. If you lie cheat and steal in friendly games, do you want them managing your company's finances? A smart person wouldn't.
There are also a lot of crazies out there that are really indoctrinated now too and they don't even realize it. They like the idea of something, but ignore everything else that would be needed to make it work. Completely irrational in some cases and can't even reason or think critically. Its sad.
There’s a huge component of this that’s worth recognizing:
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The current legal landscape and lack of anonymity makes most hacking a non-starter
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In the early days someone could explore really far as long as they didn’t call up a government agency or try to steal property. They could play pranks, hook up Rube-Goldberg call chains that circumnavigated the planet, break apart any hardware they owned and assemble it in to anything else, dig in to the binary of any file on a computer, rip apart the memory of any process, post the results in a magazine or even collaborate openly online.
And most of the world had no idea. The only time they got in trouble was when authorities saw something they didn’t like and even then most of the time they had no laws to leverage (there are some significant notable examples that got the book thrown at them but those were outliers).
Now?
Now you can be retroactively targeted for making an emulator for a decades-old game system.
Or sharing a single piece of copyrighted content.
Or getting close breaking to the DMCA.
Or (insert wacky future laws here).
The risk is extremely high and the rules are way too thorny. Working for a company means you’re going to have clear guidelines about what you can and can’t use and therefore protection from the worst of the legal minefield that is the US. It also means you have a cushion for if/when you’re targeted.
Does anyone know how many true hackers are growing up right now who have already taken their first steps at learning and who have had their posts wiped from the internet or their inboxes “graced” with cease and desist letters (or worse), or their accounts outright terminated? I don’t think there even is a way to know.
How many of those kids would be crazy enough to keep being public, and how many of those would learn enough through private self-discovery that they can significantly contribute to the hacking scene as adults?
Random datapoint, everyone I knew who was deeply passionate about compilers seemed to be going to work for Apple for a while. They could have written a new research compiler in their basement - but Apple is where LLVM was happening.
People are hacking social media a lot for growth and money, but the best secrets are very illusive and flooded out by lies, novice content, boilerplate advice, and outright scams... The actual hackers quietly scrape pennies off of the net in micro-transactions until they start racking up as thousands of dollars, most of the time though it's heavily coordinated group activity rather than the lone kid in his parent's house like it used to be... The hacker kid now is too busy shilling crypto scams, playing video games, revving stonks, or working on yet another GPT tool that no one really needs IMO. :P
Are there any communities and/or forums of people who are passionate about building and hacking purely for the sake of passion that I can join?
The author has a list of reasons (VC money, business culture, managers, fear of the unknown).
I, personally, have observed this reduction over my career, and I have my own idea of why that might be, my own phrasing of it. Perhaps it gets at the same thing as the author from a different angle.
I think the reason, plain and simple, is that most developers aren't really in it for the passion anymore, but rather the money.
When I first started coding, I didn't get paid. I didn't think I ever would. I was just having fun building stuff for myself. I, and the other people like that, moved into the workforce and brought that level of curiosity. Of hacker spirit.
However, as the idea of "programming makes money" became more well known, and bootcamps + college both upped their game, more and more people started coding just with the hopes to make money. To get good enough to make money, not care about "huh, how does the bootloader actually work" or "Why did chrome just crash, let me open up gdb...".
At the same time, I think other people who came into tech when it was a less obvious career path (and thus was something you usually discovered based on having some initial interest outside of "I want a paycheck") are getting older. They're getting older, having kids, and now also have a reason to treat their job as a 9-5. "Chrome crashed, I could open gdb and figure it out... but I'd rather watch my kid's soccer game".
I think new hackers still form, but they're diluted by programming becoming a career path desired for money, not just for a love of programming itself. I think existing hackers, over time, also often become less hacker due to life slowly grinding them down.