

Hacks Into Hackers - wyclif
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19Essays-HigherEd-t.html?_r=1

======
cperciva
Quoth the article: _People used the left elevator more than the right one_

This makes me wonder: Did people choose the left elevator; or was there a
single-elevator-call button which they pressed, upon which the elevator-
control program preferentially dispatched the left elevator? I wouldn't be
surprised if the elevator-control program always handled the situation with
two equally close available elevators by dispatching elevator #1 rather than
elevator #2.

Is anyone here familiar with the Tisch School of the Arts?

~~~
thristian
The office building I work in has three elevators; my observation has been
that when I call an elevator at high-traffic times such as lunch-time or 5PM I
might get any elevator while at lower-traffic times I tend to be allocated the
left or middle elevator.

My mental model is that an elevator with scheduled destinations (buttons
pressed inside) is 'allocated' and an elevator travelling to service a call is
'allocated', while other elevators are 'free'. If you press 'down' and there
are no elevators above you going down, or if you press 'up' and there are no
elevators below you going up, the left-most free elevator will be dispatched.

It makes sense to wear out elevators unevenly: If two or more elevators were
evenly used, it's more likely they'd break down at the same time, leaving your
building with no elevators at all.

------
LeBlanc
This same logic could apply to everyone; everyone should be hackers.

I really believe we should be educating middle and high school kids about how
to use computers for more than the internet and document processing. Given the
way computers and the internet are everywhere and are used for so much,
computer use / programming / scripting should be a required class like history
and science are.

~~~
edanm
Completely disagree. That's like saying mechanics classes should be required,
since everyone has a car and other machines. Most people can't, or are
incredibly not interested, in being at the level of even simple scripting.

There is only one solution to letting more people do more things with
computers: make things easier. Things that were once impossible are now
incredibly easy for a lot of people, because interfaces are getting better all
the time. _That's_ the way to get more people comfortable with computers, not
forcing them to spend time learning a skill they're not going to learn anyway.

And as a nice side bonus, making interfaces easier to use ends up saving
everyone time, even people who _are_ technically inclined, and makes much
cooler things possible. So everyone comes out a winner.

~~~
avar
That analogy doesn't hold up. If you learn mechanics you can repair and
maintain your car, and even build a new one. But you'll never get your car to
drive your kids to school without you sitting behind the wheel.

But you can do the equivalent of that if you're programming literate. We're
moving to a digital culture, and if you don't know how to program you'll
increasingly only become a consumer of other people's solutions, without the
ability to solve your own problems.

Some people are calling this "procedural literacy".

As an aside I'd argue that computer interfaces have actually gotten somewhat
worse while getting more friendly to newcomers. I think the last major leap in
computer interfaces was cron(1). Unlike most modern interfaces being produced
today you can use it to tell your computer to produce periodic reports and
things like that.

That's where we should be headed with UI's, not aiming to have a monkey
banging at the terminal at all times, but giving the monkey the ability to
dictate things to the computer so he doesn't have to bang at the terminal.

Real computing power is being able to say: "Computer, I'm feeling under the
weather today and I think I'll sleep in. At 9am please start playing 'Daddy's
sick, get up and go to school!' on a loop in the kid's bedroom at 75 dB, and
continue producing noise until they get out the door, engage!".

You can implement those sorts of things if you're a programmer.

~~~
jonsen
There sure is some truth in that procedural awareness should be higher. But I
think the analogy holds. You should not teach mechanics, but you should teach
natural sciences in a way that principles are transferable to mechanics, and
to building, and to a lot of other things.

I think it's deeply wrong to try and raise procedural awareness by forcing the
technicalities of state of the art programming on the common man. You should
find a way to teach algorithmic principles so that they are generally
applicable.

~~~
avar
I think you need to teach these things at an early age, and teaching
"algorithmic principles" while sound in theory is probably also a good way to
make an entire class of children ignore you completely.

The best way to teach people procedural awareness is probably to teach people
to tinker with something they can start using right away.

Things like automatically programming your phone to reply to your parents via
SMS with some plausible responses when you're out drinking, use the Facebook
API to get info about your friends that they thought wasn't accessible etc.
Show how you can use rtmpdump to download your favorite music from some closed
video site, or write a script for uTorrent that'll have downloaded your
favorite TV episode by the time you wake up.

The most important thing is to show people that procedural awareness will be
worthwhile for them in their everyday life. It's easy to demonstrate that, and
it's actually true for most people, unlike other some other subjects at school
which'll probably never be pertinent to the average student.

~~~
hoprocker
> The most important thing is to show people that procedural awareness will be
> worthwhile for them in their everyday life.

Make knowledge acquisition both a) fun and b) timely. Add a motivating
situation that leads people to want/need to learn, and they will.

------
gabrielroth
Am I the only one who was struck by the unqualified use, in a general-audience
publication, of 'hacker' to mean 'programmer' rather than 'one who breaks into
other people's computers over a network'?

~~~
zwetan
a "hacker" is closer to a programmer that think "out of the box"

than to a "cracker" that "breaks into other people computers"

the media has given this defintion to the word "hacker" and I always rejected
it!

~~~
whimsy
Yes, but it's rare seeing it used in the media as we use it outside the media.

------
agentultra
The Knight News Foundation has been trying to stimulate this market for hybrid
programmer/journos for years. I think it's a great idea. Too many stories have
gone to print without any facts to back them up. Many more haven't even been
reported because nobody has the skill to discover them. The Foundation is
funding a sector that the industry has been largely ignoring much to its
detriment.

Most of the information out there is largely electronic. The volumes of it are
too much to handle by a single human. Why not use a computer to parse, munge,
and analyze it?

------
otrooso
The elevator fallacy follows. If you put a lot of sensors in a city you find
many weird things, as there is not a prior hypothesis about what you are
testing what you see as weird is not so much. In order to say that "people use
the left elevator more than the right one" you should start a new experiment
for testing it not using your data for making the hypothesis.

~~~
danohuiginn
True, but it's no worse than traditional journalism based on press releases or
people you meet.

------
bdon
The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern offers a scholarship with
goals similar to the new program at Columbia:

[http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/admissions/page.aspx?id=5...](http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/admissions/page.aspx?id=58645)

------
lachyg
Interesting article, and a great concept. I'd imagine that reporters / journos
would be quite adept with technology, but I wonder if a lot of them have the
ability to be good hackers / programmers. It sounds like their professor has
two very complimentary skills.

------
dmor
imagine the increased quality of news coverage for technical products if more
journalists could code, it would be awesome and they could validate firsthand
a lot of things that have be fed to them by PR agencies (who also struggle a
ton, and would benefit from being more technical)

