
Probably not for hackers - dkuntz2
http://essays.kuntz.co/you-re-probably-not-for-hackers/
======
gue5t
"Hacker News" exhibits this pretty badly. Where do you guys suggest to hear
about interesting hacks instead of politics and startups?

~~~
trobertson
Honestly, I would pay for a site that was only hard-core tech articles. Hacker
News' guidelines are decent, but are incredibly open. Citing sentence 3 of the
guidelines:

    
    
        If you had to reduce [what's on topic] to a sentence,
        the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's
        intellectual curiosity.
    

That's a vast, vast pit of 'anything goes'.

~~~
samweinberg
Lobste.rs is pretty much what you're describing here.

~~~
jw_
lobste.rs seems like what I'm looking for too. I don't suppose you have an
invite handy?

~~~
Locke1689
I would also like one if you ever get more information.

~~~
t0
Sent. Leave your email if you'd like one!

~~~
junkblocker
I've been waiting for a long while for a lobste.rs account invite thread.
Email in profile if I can have one too, please. Thanks.

~~~
junkblocker
Invited. Thanks!

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serf
Agreed. I thought that immediately when Logdown was being shown off.

I feel like 'hacker' is being turned into a market, and that very concept
brings about a certain amount of sleaze(marketing).

I thought a hacker was someone that made the tools available work for them;
not someone that used something tailored to them perfectly..not that a hacker
would be against such a thing -- but rarely does the capability of a tool also
meet the flexibility requirements of a hacker without further modification.

~~~
davidw
Because "marketing" == "sleaze"...

I used to have those kinds of ideas about marketing, but I realized they are
close-minded and not very productive. I've met some very good, and very smart
marketers. Maybe the field attracts a wider range of bozos, because it's less
'concrete' than other things, but that doesn't mean it's all bunk.

Here's a great book about marketing and how to do it _wrong_ :

[http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001C6MQA8/?tag=dedasys-20](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001C6MQA8/?tag=dedasys-20)

~~~
Schiphol
The question is not whether you can do good marketing (you surely can) but
what _counts_ as good marketing: identifying and exploiting dispositions to
behave irrationally in your target. A very good and very smart marketer will
do this very well. It will still be sleaze.

~~~
davidw
> what counts as good marketing: identifying and exploiting dispositions to
> behave irrationally in your target.

It sounds like you don't know much about marketing.

~~~
Schiphol
You probably believe it's all about leveraging deep consumer insights in the
creation of Unique Selling Propositions?

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GuiA
"If you quibble about what makes you and what doesn't make you a hacker,
you're probably not a hacker"

~~~
lsc
>"If you quibble about what makes you and what doesn't make you a hacker,
you're probably not a hacker"

have you ever been to a D&D game? rules lawyering is _central_ to nerd social
interactions.

~~~
saraid216
"Gaming the system".

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bhauer
Wow. I'm not even sure how to process this.

I'll keep it short: I'm all for ranting. I love ranting. But give the guy(s) a
break. Just ignore it if it doesn't meet your definition of a tool crafted for
hackers.

~~~
efa
Thank you! Man, some people have way too much time on their hands. Stop
writing your stupid blog and get some real work done!

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fergal
Probably wouldn't have down well in the media if Obama correctly said "I'm not
going to scramble drones to catch a 29 year old cracker".

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jmcdonald-ut
I don't know the specifics, but perhaps the company's target market isn't
hackers in the true sense of the word. Example: many people are "techies" but
when you push their knowledge a bit further most of what they know comes down
to trivial knowledge about product specs between two or three devices.

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hardwaresofton
Hey <sup>&#8482;</sup> would have gotten you that trademark logo

~~~
dkuntz2
The larger issue was that I thought my generator had some flags set that
weren't set. But, thanks, I didn't even notice that it wasn't superscripting
things in ^().

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diziet
Octopress, on the other hand, is for hackers.

~~~
dkuntz2
Well, sure, but I'd think that Jekyll is to a larger extent, because Octopress
is just a collection of plugins for Jekyll...

~~~
diziet
The combination of Octopress being built on top of Jekyll and the fact that
Octopress is much faster/easier to jump into and do things with makes
Octopress more hacker friendly in the "get things done" hacking way.

~~~
dkuntz2
Have you looked at vanilla Jekyll recently? There have been a whole lot of
changes. Sure, when you type `jekyll new x` you don't get as much, but it
still gives you a very acceptable starting point.

I realize that my first sentence may come across as harsh, but I mean it in a
'look, this is cool' way, and not an incredulous way.

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gmac
I disagree. Normal people overwhelmingly (and often annoyingly) want WYSIWYG,
so I think relying on Markdown warrants the "for hackers" claim.

If they'd said "perfectly addresses every hacker's every need" — that would
have been over-reach.

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fsqcds
Looks like stupid paid prose.io clone.

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alan_cx
I'm confused.

As I understand it, HN is a news forum associated with ycombinator, which I
understand is all about startups, VCs, and business building. "Hacking" has
little to do with that at all, except the programmers who make the bones of
these internet businesses may well consider themselves "Hackers". But what
about the rest of the team? Sales, marketing, accounts, admin etc. None of
them are considered hackers. But even then I don't quite get it. Such
programmers "create" primarily. They are not hacking, unless they want to
admit to using other's work and hacking it to re-purpose it (which I have no
problem with). But they aren't really hacking as such at all. They are
building and creating.

Having read the definition of a "hacker", Im even more confused. To me,
hacking is not about intimate knowledge, depth, deep interest, or even
computer systems. Hacking to me is about knowing enough about something to fix
or re-tasking it, even create something new from it. In the case of a media or
Hollywood hacker, such a person is not a deep in-depth knowledge person, they
are some one who knows the part of the system well enough to attack. That does
not mean they know the whole system. Tech wise, I think of something like
installing Linux on a PSP, or non IT, the way people in the third world use
everything and anything to keep cars going. You don't need in depth knowledge
at all. You just need enough knowledge to get the part fixed, or shoe horned
in. The modification and re-tasking of open source software is also hacking.
Or even something like scrapheap challenge is hacking. Surely all this comes
from writing, where a poor journalist or writer is known as a "hack". Not
suggesting my definition is universal, its just how I personally see it.

Then, as per the article's 3 bullet points, I dont see how providing
flexibility is servicing hackers. All that is doing providing more flexibility
as a part of the service or website. So, using such functions is just using
the site as designed and intended. Not hacking. Hacking would be getting round
problems with such a site, or using the site for something it wasn't
originally intended. Although, such tool provided would allow fixing or re-
tasking. I accept a fine line there, but I hope one sees the point.

So, to me sites like hackaday and instructables are actual hacking sites,
where as this site is a great niche news aggregation site, with a great user
base for decent, intelligent discussion, about anything of interest to it's
users. HN is certainly not my first point of call for "hacking" at all. Its my
first port of call for interesting news and discussion.

Cant help thinking that half the problem here is that this YC news site is
called "Hacker News". I think that confuses people.

~~~
Dylan16807
The best definition of hacker uses the word 'ingenuity'. It's true that you
can do clever things with limited knowledge, but the best and most impressive
hacks require deep knowledge. It follows from that that a site for hackers
will encourage system knowledge and clever, unexpected adjustments. And if
you're following complete instructions you're not hacking.

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ronaldsvilcins
100% Agreed.

