
The Fall of Hacking - noname123
Please first excuse my liberal arts sensibilities in a technical forum; but I figure out there might be some like-minded people out there who feel the same way I do ... that the hacker culture is dying out.<p>Before anyone jumps in to say that I've jumped the shark, let me quickly jump to elaborate:<p>The ideal of the hacker a la early 90's, Ghost in the Shell, Hacker and Cyberpunk; 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. Better yet, a reclusive vampire in the cyberworld, dialing up the BBS where people went by handles and the text file on packet sniffing taught me the hacking techniques and text file called "subverting American lower-education" taught me the hacking ethos and attitude. Hacking was punk-rock (a la the Ramones, pre-Blink182 and Sum41): marginal and subversive, exploiting buffer overflow vulnerabilities on remote servers, warez, BIOS viruses, and automatic credit card number generators in Visual Basic 3.0 to get free Internet access via AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve, pirated Turbo C++ with DJGPP writing a 2D DOS sidescroller. But I do not really do justice to the description of hacker, pre the dot-com boom - but I think you know what I mean.<p>Fast forward to the 2009, a hacker has become the anti-thesis to the hacker of early 90's. The new "hacker" go to websites such as YCombinator and have snazzy wordpress blogs with rounded corner designers with full names and locations and snazzy job titles, and geek-chic photo of the said hacker in yuppie dress-shirts smiling, "Software Visionaire/Ruby Ninja; come hit me up on Facebook, let's meet up and talk about business ideas!" 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 &#38; Heartbreak.<p>Everywhere in the IT/engineering department, no one gets to write anything from scratch but have to write plugins/patches for a legacy platform, uses third party libraries that have ten plus layers abstraction between the meta-code and the actual code. Does anyone really understand the internal's of Ruby on Rails, the Linux kernel or know what YCombinator mean? The worst insult to an engineer is to tell her that she isn't technical enough. But in the designation of "frontend engineer," "backend enginner," "overseas team," I feel more like working on an Henry Ford's assembly-line, efficient and cheap, an assembly-line worker bolting nuts not an craftsman working on the engine, the suspension, the dashboard, the big picture.<p>Like hip hop/punk rock/grunge, hacking has been overran by marketing guru's (Seth Godin), overzealous self-promoters (Timonthy Ferris), business executives driven by the bottom line (Steve Ballmer/Carol Bartz) and its own narcissism (TechCrunch). It has devolved to become a caricature of its former self. Worst of it all, it has become mainstream - it's no longer subversive.
======
Locke1689
_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).

~~~
mechanical_fish
_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.

~~~
silentOpen
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.

------
kragen
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.

~~~
vaksel
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.

~~~
loup-vaillant
Err, isn't there a little confusion between hacker and _cracker_ here?

~~~
khafra
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.

------
pg
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.

~~~
radu_floricica
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.

------
wmf
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.

~~~
pj
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.

~~~
BrentRitterbeck
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.

~~~
noname123
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.

~~~
kragen
> 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.

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

~~~
kragen
Sorry, I was referring to VPRI's project.

------
derefr
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.

------
keyist
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.

------
rman666
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.

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

~~~
HalcyonMuse
(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.

------
brk
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.

------
drobilla
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.

------
johnnyg
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?

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

------
ph0rque
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...](http://store.dieselsweeties.com/products/liked-you-better-before-you-
sold-out-shirt)

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

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

------
HalcyonMuse
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.

------
schrieaj
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.

------
noname456
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.

------
strlen
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.

~~~
c00p3r
Today's basic is Python.

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

~~~
strlen
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.

------
KiwiNige
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.

~~~
andreyf
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.

~~~
irrelative
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.

~~~
HalcyonMuse
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.

------
Diogenes
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.

------
chaosprophet
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???

------
jerf
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.

------
le_dominator
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

------
p01nd3xt3r
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.

~~~
redcap
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.

------
phsoftnet
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.

------
n8tron
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.

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

~~~
etravers
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.

------
OwlHuntr
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

------
indigoshift
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.

------
tmsh
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.

------
lhorie
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".

------
biohacker42
_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.

------
eel
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?

------
Quarrelsome
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?

------
marcocampos
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!"

------
quizzical
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.

------
cesare
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.

------
shykes
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"

------
Andys
"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.

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

------
thunk
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.

------
pbhjpbhj
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"?

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

------
zitterbewegung
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.

------
endlessvoid94
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.

------
tsally
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. ;-)

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

------
alx
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/>

* ...

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

------
ttam
hacking != cracking

------
tptacek
I miss Flooz too.

------
gruseom
Things have always been getting worse.

------
coretx
Hear Hear !

------
c00p3r
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.

------
erikb85
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.

------
ahoyhere
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).

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

~~~
Locke1689
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....

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

~~~
CrLf
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).

