

The Death Of The Hacker: InfoWorld 1986 - mikecane
http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/the-death-of-the-hacker-infoworld-1986/

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quanticle
What's interesting isn't what the article got wrong. It's what the article got
_right_. A 400k program is insanely difficult to write, if you're working in
straight assembly. What the article misses, though, is that programmers' tools
evolve too. As we're required to do more in less time we abstract away more
and more of the code until the abstractions become incorporated right into the
programming languages we write. In the '80s, you still had to write your own
basic data structures. Making something like a dictionary, or a hash table
might have been an all-day exercise. Today, you can just pull up one of the
many ready-made data structures provided by the standard library of your
favorite programming language.

On a side note, I find it interesting that the author seems to equate
artificial intelligence and e-mail integration as being approximately the same
order of difficulty.

~~~
techdmn
I think part of the problem is that "artificial intelligence" is always being
redefined upward toward areas we don't well understand. If you don't know how
a computer plays chess, it certainly appears intelligent. Once you do
understand it becomes purely mechanical.

~~~
Dn_Ab
I agree and I think the inverse can be said about intelligence. There the
target keeps moving down instead of up. At least for me, the more I learn the
more I appreciate the intelligence of the nematode. I appreciate intelligence
as not some binary human like or not, but a spectrum. The cat is not _not a
human_ it simply has varying levels of what we call human.

Empathy, Sapience, Self Awareness,Consciousness, Sentience, Abstraction,
Awareness, Intentionality, Intelligence. AI only needs the last three to be
useful and the last four to be dangerous. The AI does not need a theory of
mind to collect enough data to be able to produce an accurate distribution of
your actions for all interesting situations and then use it to arrange your
environment so it can exploit you in line with its intentions.

>If you don't know how _the human brain_ plays chess, it certainly appears
intelligent. Once you do understand it becomes purely mechanical.

It is after all bound by the laws of physics.

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babarock
There is something that to me still rings very true, almost 20 years later:
Microcomputers (computing at large) are very appealing to MBAs, today we'd
prefer the term "consultant" or the newly self-appointed Gods of the Software
world, the "VC".

They suck the fun out of it for the most part; they have no passion for
software, clearly they're in it simply because it's a lucrative business.

Academia comes off as an alternative with a whole different set of problems...

It seems that there's little place left for the Wozniaks of this world, true
hackers who write 40K sofware that revolutionize industries, while doing it
for "fun".

~~~
pygy_
While active, _why was a vocal evangelist of that vision.

Camping, for example, is an MVC framework written in less than 4K of Ruby
code. It was at its time the go to microframework in the Ruby world. Then _why
disappeared, and the releases staled for a while, and Sinatra took the spot.

Here's the initial camping announcement, with the full source code included.
The updates were added incrementally, it was hillarious to see them roll
out...
[http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/bits/campingAMicrofr...](http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/bits/campingAMicroframework.html)

The current version has been brought down to less than 3K By judofyr:
[https://github.com/camping/camping/blob/master/lib/camping.r...](https://github.com/camping/camping/blob/master/lib/camping.rb)

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p4lto
I was never really aware of the reason Wozniak left Apple, I figured it was
because Jobs was mostly in it for the money and their relationship inevitably
went downhill. I remember an interview with Wozniak, something I'll always
remember, it went something like this: "I went to Steve and showed him this
awesome new system I had been playing with, 'Isn't this awesome?!', I said and
he replied 'Holy crap, we could make so much money off of this!', 'I suppose
you're right'".

Edit: bad grammar.

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cs702
Interestingly, Y Combinator's approach of working with hackers so that they
can launch, build, and stay in control of new businesses is the _exact
opposite_ of what the article's author said would happen in the future.

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Gorbzel
Wow. Crazy article.

Not sure if the Woz/Jobs intro is exactly apt; hindsight tells us that while
Woz may have been disenchanted (and that as a true uber ultimate hacker, he
probably stumbled upon this decades earlier and significantly harder than most
hackers), it probably did have a bit more to do with the crazy personalities
going on there – Jobs' insanely focused and hurtful drive and Woz's desire to
not be involved with the business of Apple.

Rather, I think the article hits the nail on the head in its conclusion:

"There will always be hackers. We may soon see genetic hackers, organic
computing hackers . . . who knows? They’re the ones on the fringes who push
things a little further and faster. But their role in personal computing has
been forever changed. Now that its big business, they may be happy at that."

Their role changed because computing changed the world and indeed became even
bigger business. Simulatneously, the "creative force" left the room, replaced
with big business and other processes that are entirely disinteresting for a
true hacker.

Now clearly the hacker spirit will endure as long as there are ways to push
things that little bit further/faster. Often times, those improvements are
valuable contributions to be spread, and the hacker spirit meets (in some way)
with the entrepreneurial spirit. This is beneficial and has led to some of the
world's greatest success stories.

But the hacker spirit and the entrepreneurial spirit do have differences;
different goals, priorities and countless other subtleties of art that the
non-hacker might miss. Often times, as businesses grow, that's exactly what
take place.

I definitely can't claim to have the answer, and no one's probably that much
closer to the solution than when the article was written. But it's best to
keep an eye out for the problem and steer clear of it at all possible.

In the meantime, I wish that those in the startup community would avoid
trivializing the term "hack" left and right, omitting the creative force in
the process. Analyzing customer traction and marketing data isn't hacking.
Writing a few lines of code for your run of the mill social networking or
daily deals startup one afternoon isn't hacking. This isn't to say that those
things aren't important. Quite the contrary; teams and structure and 85% of
startup events? Beneficial, but not hacking.

This isn't about making hacking elitist or limited to any technical context;
rather, it's about flashes of brilliance and the gem that emerges. Just like
it was in 1986. Just like it's always been and always will be.

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drostie
It always makes me feel young to read an article that was published before I
was born, and in this case saying that my intended niche is dead. I wish I
knew more of these older, wizened ideas. I will probably never be comfortable
in assembly, and I would seriously enjoy a course entitled, "what we knew
about computing in the 70s which still isn't part of mainstream languages
today."

If I may reappropriate a line from Hopkins, "hackers build--but not I build,
no, but strain, time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes." I guess
it's a broader anxiety for all people working in artistic professions. In any
case, I'm envious of the amazing ability of the past to get work done, and am
surprised that with the huge network of modern coders, modern thinkers, modern
design techniques, we've only elaborated the slightest on what they've done.
They built me the Internet: but I use it to read blogs and get into revert
wars on Wikipedia.

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rickmb
I have found that people who announce things the along the lines of "now it's
serious business, the fun is over" are a) the least creative people who are
only comfortable in a predictable, well organized world and are quietly
praying for the "fun" to be over, and b) almost always wrong.

~~~
demian
The game changed, it went beyond the "microcomputer" concept in ways this guy
couldn't conceive. But that does not mean he was wrong.

The days of the lone hacker writing assembly code for the "microcomputing"
business DID came to an end. So did the days of the lone hardware hacker
building and selling computers from his garage.

And programming did became a generally collaborative effort.

~~~
TelmoMenezes
Lone hackers will always exist. It's just the layers of abstraction that
change. Wozniak worked on top of ICs and electronic components. Now we tend to
work on top of complex kernels, libraries and so on. So what? The stuff below
tends to be a million man-hours achievement, hackers work on the fringe... I
don't think that pattern has changed.

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JVIDEL
I'm intrigued by this "networked electronic mail", maybe it will replace my
steam-powered telegraph automaton?

(J/k)

