
Is true hacking dead? What we lost - Impossible
http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2019/12/is-true-hacking-dead-what-we-lost.html
======
ChuckMcM
I don't think true hacking is dead, its just lost in a sea of non-hacking.

The number of students who could write code in my high school of 2000 was
perhaps 35. Those 35 were amazing because they had to work to get access to a
computer, so we had already eliminated everyone who was just "oh that's too
hard". Of the 35 perhaps a dozen kept at it beyond one class in BASIC.

In my daughter's similarly sized highschool 400 to 500 of the students had
some proficiency in writing code, and perhaps 200 had the motivation to keep
at it on a serious level after graduation. Of those, perhaps a dozen were
people who I would equate to the 'hackers' that we had at my high school.

This led me to conclude that its a small fraction of the population that has
what I think of as the 'compulsive puzzle' gene. That is they find themselves
driven to solve puzzles which they understand must have a solution.

There are ways to identify them. If you have the ability to give puzzles,
leave some around to be found. Watch for the ones who solve them.

In the world where 'everyone is a coder' though it is super easy to not see
them.

~~~
geocar
An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in
the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they
want the computer to do!

We were surprised (if also for other reasons) because we confused the product
with the means, or to paraphrase Feynman, hacking is like sex: sure, it may
give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone
> in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what
> they want the computer to do!_

I'm not sure if that's true all that much, if you take into account the scary
things regular people do with Excel and Access, or did in the past with
HyperCard.

I think a big part is that as an industry, we've told people that the right
way to use a computer to solve your problem is to _track down and buy_ some
piece of software that does it (proliferation of open source merely made the
"buy" part optional). We then proceeded to take away the means of self-
sufficiency, widening the initially small gap between "end-user" and
"programmer" into a chasm and hollowing out the middle. It's no surprise
people only consume apps, when solving any problem yourself without an off-
the-shelf solution requires you to become a programmer. And now the final nail
is driven into the coffin with proliferation of SaaS which take away both your
data _and_ any ability to control and modify the behavior of an application.

~~~
yoz-y
But excel, google sheets, IFTTT and other tools still exist. Some of them are
just more successful than others. There is still a lot of people out there who
can access computers and before couldn't, but have no interest in automating
any of the work.

Case in point: a lot of people don't even use keyboard shortcuts, why would
they use a hypercard clone?

~~~
bambataa
Discoverability. Knowing how to connect together multiple services isn't
obvious. What kind of information can IFTTT take in and what does google
sheets output? That's not obvious. I use Beorg (an org-mode interface) on my
iPhone and I still look up recipes the developer puts online showing how to
hook it up with the Shortcuts app and do clever things. Mostly because I don't
have a good idea of what interfaces between things are available on my phone.

The time of hoping that non-technical users would write little things on the
command line seems to have past. I recently read an interview where Aho said
that in the beginning awk was used by non-technical people. Now awk usage is
probably even on the technical end of technical.

But I'm betting that there are plenty of savvy users who could put together
complex automation workflows if they had a unifying tool that demonstrated the
potential.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Right. Discoverability. And I'd also add, paradox of choice. If you have 20
different ways you could use to automate some things you need (but not all,
and solutions only partially overlap in the problem space), you may as well
have none. Defaults matter. I doubt we would be able to have a third-party
solution reach ubiquity again, the way e.g. Flash had, so having powerful
functionality integrated at the OS level would be very helpful, as it would
remove the problem of figuring out what to use.

~~~
yoz-y
macOS had automator for a long time and even usage of that must have went
quite down for them to let Sal go. It's quite sad because as others have said
I think the percentage went down mostly because of more people coming in.

Now that they have introduced Shortcuts to iOS I would be curious about how
many people use them and to what extent.

------
peteforde
There was a time when I used to fret that the era of tinkering was coming to
an end. Crypto was going to be illegal, they were going to put DRM on
speakers, and our computers are designed to be completely locked down to the
degree that you can't even add more RAM to a MacBook Pro.

However, I think that the rise of Linux, Raspberry Pi and Arduino, OSS and
Github and massive package repos for every language, Adafruit, even 3D
printers have replaced stuff that didn't want to be hacked with an endless
array of stuff that is literally begging to be hacked. Between YouTube and
coding bootcamps, you have to actively not want to learn technical skills.

The author also calls out Unity as part of the problem, which pretty much
confirms to me that we're not reading advanced analysis. Unity is fucking
incredible; not only is it an engineering marvel with cross-platform
compilation capacity that makes Babel look like a total joke, but it is
probably the single most capable, interesting and fun platform for artistic
expression in modern computing.

Seriously, the way to get kids to keep interested once Scratch gets dull is to
throw them into a AAA 3D engine that lets you build a compelling VR creation
in an hour from free, downloadable assets. Unity should be in high school
classrooms. The breadth and quality of assets available on their store is
shocking. If you have artist's block, just scroll through a few pages of
assets. Problem solved.

I think what really got to me was the overwhelming sense that the author
wasn't talking about hacking but recreating the exact same conditions that
existed when he was a young person... while completely ignoring the huge
amounts of privilege that he enjoyed to be able to have a computer in the
house and have such a incredible headstart on his learning compared to the
other 99.99% of the population - many of whom don't look like him or believe
the same things.

Today, even relatively poor kids have access to tablets which means that they
can build games in apps like Roblox. Who makes him the authority on what
counts as hacking? If a young woman makes a game where her friends all want to
hang out together after school and talk about their lives in a safe space,
isn't that the ultimate hack?

I really didn't enjoy this op-ed, and I wish people wouldn't bring it a larger
audience by posting on HN.

~~~
scoutt
Hacking is just interesting only if you are not following any "tutorial".
Today you can run an embedded linux under 10 minutes with less that 20 bucks
with a RPI by reading some tutorial or watching a youtube video. What's the
fun about that?

I remember too _hacking_ my commodore and the only help I had was just a book
in a strange language (english in my case) and my dad (he was into 8086 at
that time) when I was a kid. Today everyone pretends there should be step-by-
step guides on how to do everything.

The most similar thing to that _hacking_ feeling I get in the present is
implementing some unknown HW component (i.e. a sensor, I2C device,
microcontroller) that there is no source code or _help_ for it (of course,
when doing it for fun and not work). When the thing starts to work, there is a
very little _spark_ similar to those felt when I was a kid.

~~~
80386
Linux is... a little alienating, isn't it? How many people can hold the whole
thing in their head? Not many - and I don't think it's seamless enough to work
as another layer of magic, either. People accept OS X because it's another
layer of magic.

TempleOS was written by one guy, so I assume it can fit inside one head. Linux
has been written by a lot of people over several decades.

Maybe I'm completely wrong about this, I don't know. But I'm getting old and
lazy, so these days I'm on Windows.

I'm a little surprised there aren't more weird OSes going around these days,
now that everything runs in the browser except text editors and fancy video
games.

~~~
bregma
> I'm a little surprised there aren't more weird OSes going around these days,
> now that everything runs in the browser except text editors and fancy video
> games.

Don't know what _you 're_ talking about, but I've used plenty of text editors
and played fancy video games in a browser.

The day will come when your can run a hardware emulator in your browser and
use to it run your hobby OS or even a C64 image for you to hack on.

------
javajosh
If you define hacking as gaining access to scarce compute resources, then yes,
hacking is dead because _compute scarcity is dead_.

If you define hacking as controlling your computer hardware at the lowest
level, then hacking is dead because _no-one wants to write device drivers_.

If you define hacking as *making the lights blink in interesting ways"[1] then
hacking is incredibly, richly, and totally alive! You can make the lights
blink in so many interesting ways!

To sum up, that's one really good change, one somewhat unfortunate but
understandable change, and another really incredibly good change. (BTW I don't
think the OP's point about complex OSS really fits in this particular essay -
minimalism is important topic and deserves it's own essay, but it's not
related to hacking, IMHO).

[1] I don't recall where I read this, but Feynman wrote about being involved
with the Manhattan project, with the simulations they were trying to run on
very early, primitive computers, and how one or two scientists put on that
part of the project had to be replaced because they got too fascinated with
the "blinking lights" to get any work done. I find this anecdote very easy to
believe.

~~~
pjc50
I think people _do_ sometimes want to "communicate directly with the machine",
but they don't want to deal with the huge and often crufty layers of
abstraction that are currently in the way.

In the AT era, reading a byte from the keyboard could be done with a single IN
instruction. In the present PC era, the bare minimum for doing that is a
multitasking operating system capable of enumerating USB. Or indirecting it
through something huge and opaque like UEFI.

I see this occasionally on electronics.stackexchange: "how do I attach a light
to the end of a USB cable and turn it on and off from the computer". The
answer to that is astonishingly complicated.

~~~
spookthesunset
Right this instant you can talk to the bare metal of a computer with more
power than anything you had way back when C64's roamed the planet. Get
yourself an ESP32 and you can talk directly to the metal with no OS to get in
your way. Get two, they only cost a few bucks each.

> I see this occasionally on electronics.stackexchange: "how do I attach a
> light to the end of a USB cable and turn it on and off from the computer".
> The answer to that is astonishingly complicated.

It is astonishingly complicated because what they are asking the wrong
question.

~~~
pjc50
> It is astonishingly complicated because what they are asking the wrong
> question.

No, I see this argument a lot on electronics.stackexchange and I think it's
over-used. That's _their_ question. They have some larger objective in mind,
which it may be useful to know; if they want to control the light from UI on
the PC then that's a natural way of phrasing the question.

If you want to do this over the ESP, sure, then you've got to get networking
involved, and that's how you end up with all the usual IOT disasters. How do
you "securely pair" an ESP32 with a PC? Again it involves a huge amount of
software. Whereas if you just had a wire you wouldn't have to worry about
security.

Answers of the form "buy a different computer" or "install a different OS"
serve to make the answerer feel smug without usually helping the questioner at
all.

------
rs23296008n1
Hackers were like the hotrodders before. Here's a thing. Make it work. Make it
faster. Improve it. Change it. Know how it works. Master it.

I don't think its died. Its more likely morphed into something you don't
recognise because its always been dynamic and now you're attempting to apply a
static definition. Then you get frustrated or lament "its not the same as in
the good old days". But the reality is that people are tinkering right now
with the new tech or the new thing in ways you don't even know about.

This is definitely the case with cars, computers, electronics, gardening,
clothes, food etc etc. Gardening, clothes? Why did I include those?! "Thats
not hacking!" People are tinkering with these things. Making them better.
Making them their own.

Hacking was never just bits and bytes. Learn how this puzzle works. Change it.
Make your own. That hasn't stopped.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
> Make it work. Make it faster.

This is not hacking.

~~~
saagarjha
Why not?

------
KaiserPro
Sounds like gatekeeping to me.

Hacking of yore largely was like theoretical maths. Isolated from the real
world and of little practicable use, yet.

It was a closed eco system in the 70s-90s. You either had to steal or be rich
to get access to a machine.

Yes, real steel from the likes of DEC, IBM, ICL et al were magic. The early
days of networked OSs equally wonderful.

But.

Now, with an ESP I can have a battery powered, wirelessly networked computer
to do pretty much anything I want, for $10 and power budget of 100ma.

If you want to see where low lever hacking has gone, look at the micro-
controllers. They are literally taking over the world, run by no small part,
by keen amateurs.

~~~
anthk
I'd setup a micro-controller based BSD 4.4 lite 2, but they are very short in
RAM. If they were 4-8MB, they could be my main microPC setup.

------
atq2119
I've never understood the appeal of hot-patching and full process image save
and restore. Yes, this technology is neat for _some_ use cases, but as a
fundamental way of computing it's broken, because it throws reproducibility
out of the window. Reproducibility is _everything_ in complex systems, and
being able to reset and start fresh is powerful.

Evolution figured that out as well. It's why basically all species propagate
via the birth of new individuals and the death of the old ones.

~~~
heisenbit
As soon as one works on a non-trivial piece of software and has a team >2 SCM
becomes important. There was one SCM system for PP Smalltalk if memory serves
right called Envy but it was quite expensive. But even more important than SCM
is a module/library eco system. We can’t trade without reproducibility.
Without it we are destined to re-invent the wheel.

There is value in reinventing wheel - it is entertaining and stress free - as
it does not matter for anyone but yourself.

~~~
zozbot234
You _always_ have a team >2, unless you're just writing a quick throwaway
hack. Your future selves are members of the team, and there might be quite a
few of them over time as you simply forget what you were working on earlier.

------
pjmlp
> Even the Demoscene, one of the last bastions of true hackerism, is
> completely uninterested in the ideology of software licenses and contracts.

Demoscene never cared about this kind of stuff.

In fact of the interesting challenges of the Demoscene was trying to find out
how competing groups achieved some demos, without having access to the said
information, while in process outperforming their demos at parties.

This is one of the key differences between Demoscene and anything FOSS
related.

And also why game developers as offsprings from Demoscene, also don't care
about them, rather about IP and how to extract the best experience out of a
given piece of hardware, regardless of the OS, API or NDAs that one has to go
through.

~~~
userbinator
_In fact of the interesting challenges of the Demoscene was trying to find out
how competing groups achieved some demos, without having access to the said
information, while in process outperforming their demos at parties._

The demoscene has its roots in software cracking, where reverse-engineering is
the norm and you're not expected to be given source or told but to find out
yourself, so that's not too surprising. Of course they don't care about
licenses, because from that perspective they are merely arbitrary restrictions
to be broken at will.

------
pleasecalllater
Three things:

1\. I have no idea why "hacking" aka "going fast and breaking things" is so
glorified while "building good reliable programs" aka "good programming" is
not.

2\. How come that someone thinks of himself/herself that he/she has the right
to say who is a "true hacker" and who is not.

3\. AND THIS:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX5Xy3a2uJU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX5Xy3a2uJU)
Thank you Jayson.

~~~
username90
> I have no idea why "hacking" aka "going fast and breaking things" is so
> glorified while "building good reliable programs" aka "good programming" is
> not.

Going fast is revered, breaking things is not. And why is going fast so
important? It is because an individual can't accomplish much when going slow.
Why are individual works important? Because individuals do things that would
never get funding, they make decisions that would never pass a committee and
they can pivot the entire direction of a project many times in a single hour
without any issues. Therefore many problems can only be solved by hackers as
large teams are too restricted to do them.

~~~
atoav
It is entirely possible to do something slow and well and still do it alone
and esentially without funding. As a film maker this is one of the things I
love about writing and programming: there is no money needed only your time
(which of course also costs you something). But it is perfectly possible to
sit alone in your chamber and write a great piece of software that competes
with the best out there. Try doing that in Film. This would be _really_ a
field where you wouldn’t get far without people and money.

Whether you hack it together quickly or meditate on it for ages doesn’t has
much to do with it, I’ve seen both. Maybe the person with the quick hack just
tries to solve a problem while the slow person likes the intellectual
challenge of solving it in a “good” way.

~~~
Avamander
> It is entirely possible to do something slow and well and still do it alone
> and essentially without funding.

Like?

~~~
atoav
Horizon EDA was started by a guy who didn’t want to use a closed source EDA
tool like Altium for his final university electronics project and wasn’t happy
with KiCAD.

He planned it very carefully (so I wouldn’t call it a _hack_ ) and years after
it is still going without any funding. This isn’t that uncommon in open source
IMO.

Of course this is not a value judgement, there are quick hacks that work
perfectly well and slower more planned out projects that never work at all —
each aproach has it’s pros and cons.

------
japhyr
It feels like the word "hacking" is losing more and more meaning over time.

In the beginning it was a word only people heavily into computers used. Then
around the time of War Games it became a more commonly-known word, and
connotated breaking in. Over the last couple decades more people became aware
that hacking sometimes refers to building technical projects. But it still has
a heavy connotation of breaking into a system or program.

Hacking became cool once hackers started getting rich and gaining prominence
in society. My son is 8, and many of his friends think they're hackers when
they use a cheat code on a game. Most of them know they're not writing code
and really changing the game, but they all want to think of themselves as
hackers so they say they're hacking their games. Very few of them even really
know what a line of code looks like yet.

Any notion of "true" hacking is bound to be about putting walls up to say
who's in and who's out. In reality, there are always people building new
things, and there are always people trying to break into systems and programs.

~~~
blihp
I don't think its lost meaning as much as it has a completely different
meaning than it used to. It seems pretty common when something goes
mainstream, as computing has, for original definitions to be tossed aside
while the terms get re-appropriated by/for a more mainstream audience.

This happens all the time in other parts of culture whether music, fashion or
whatever. So I guess it shouldn't be too surprising that it's happened in tech
too. Doesn't mean one needs to like it, just accept it for what it is.

------
mark_l_watson
Nice ideas. I think that complexity can be the enemy of “hackability.”

Some environments like Pharo Smalltalk are simple enough to dig down to see
how stuff works, and I would add simple Lisp implementations.

When I first started using Ruby and Rails, I kept the source code to Ruby and
for Rails available for perusal and it was more or less understandable. Not so
much now. Complexity.

I think that the Racket ecosystem will get more hackable once the codebase
sits on top of Chez Scheme. Racket is well documented: 18 months ago I wanted
to import trained weights and biases from a trained Keras/TensorFlow model
into Racket and implement a runtime - fairly easy to do with good
documentation and good library support for fast linear algebra.

Too bad that more people don’t spend more effort on hacking activities because
really understanding tools, modifying code, etc. is fun and I would argue a
good career move.

EDIT: added 1 word for clarity

------
crankylinuxuser
So, what does C0DE517E think hacking is? I'm surprised nobody picked up on
it...

2/3s of the way down is a link (by the way - wanna see something weird?). That
link goes to [0] which is about 'Dark Enlightenment'. The key takeaways here
are: democracy is bad, white people are smarter, Urbit, and Yarvin. But surely
someone can link without advocating?

And then we get to this bit, "Whatever the causes, we have software and
hardware systems that strive to be entirely open, yet time and again are
closed ones that are more accessible in practice, that drive social
revolutions." The author is making a roundabout case for the Dark
Enlightenment, and ecosystems like Urbit which enforce a neo-serfdom and
elimination of democracy at a technological scale.

I'm surprised nobody else picked up on who this person thinks hackers _are_.
It's certainly hidden in plain sight.

[0] [https://breakermag.com/heres-the-dark-enlightenment-
explaine...](https://breakermag.com/heres-the-dark-enlightenment-explainer-
you-never-wanted/)

~~~
c0de517e
Author here - no, that link was to show something bizzarre, how (some) people
lose their minds in weird elucubrations on the politics of software - instead
of actual hacking. I am definitely not endorsing in any way ever that cesspool
that is D.E., I'm sorry if it wasn't clear from the text.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
My apologies then.

I've dealt with Yarvin's people in person and online. Many a times, they will
sneak these kinds of things into conversations and slide these things like DE
and Urbit in on the side. Had one, at the hackerspace I used to attend, quote
Mussolini about how good an idea the DE was. So yeah I'm a bit on guard.

------
leipert
I assume there is the same amount of “true” hackers out there. At least that
is my impression from the Chaos Communication Congress and alike. Probably the
percentage of “true” hackers is way smaller now as computers became cheap and
more accessible. If you look at the “great and true hackers” from the 80s and
before, most of them probably come from academia, government agencies or
wealthy backgrounds.

I for one welcome the change, because I think the entry barrier to become a
“true” hacker is probably the same as before, if not easier and we definitely
opened the doors for more people.

------
adjkant
Ignoring defining what "true hacking" is defined as, I'm struggling to
pinpoint exactly what has been lost here. Many new things have come into
existence, but this feels like a list of laments against the direction
technology grew, not something lost. Plenty of people are still tinkerers
focused on making small personal projects, and if anything its highest
concentration is here on HN. That doesn't mean all of the other things in the
tech world are inherently lacking in value though. When focusing on technology
why focus on "hacking", a somewhat odd and specific use case as defined here?

------
majewsky
Other people have already commented on the core message. I have a nitpick
instead:

> That's probably why we still have textual source (great for git and merging)
> over more expressive formats or even the old idea of serializing the entire
> state of a VM (again lisp, smalltalk) which sacrifices merging entirely to
> make hotpatching (dynamic software updates) trivial.

Good. Not being able to merge squarely belongs in the past, where everyone had
access to only one machine. I'm incredibly thankful that I can merge the half-
finished work on my desktop from last evening with the patches that I just
pushed from my notebook while in the train.

~~~
DagAgren
More expressive representations of source code enables _better_ merging.
Merging code as opaque strings of text is a bad choice, and causes lots of
problems to programmers every day.

~~~
majewsky
> More expressive representations of source code enables _better_ merging.

Merging is usually easy regardless of representation when all changes are
comparatively local. The problem is always merging big far-reaching changes
like a complete refactoring of an entire module, and I don't immediately see
how any non-text representation would do significantly better (by a wide-
enough margin to justify changing paradigms) than text at assisting with the
merge process in this case.

~~~
DagAgren
Have you never got large merge conflicts because one branch made some changes
to a block of code, and the other left it intact but changed its indentation?

That kind of thing would not happen in a better representation.

------
tus88
> The sad and inspiring story of TempleOS, a.k.a. what the Raspberry Pi should
> have been.

Eh?

~~~
adrianN
TempleOS is a really cool system to hack. You should watch some of the live
coding videos the author did. It's really much more of a tinkerer's system
than the stock Linux that runs on most Pis.

~~~
bencollier49
More people should use RISC OS with the Pi.

------
erikpukinskis
We’re still here. More than ever actually. There’s just more noise.

~~~
scaryclam
Do any communities still exist?

~~~
r3dk1ng
Yes. Though if they were easy to find they'd be overrun with people who don't
feel that what they found is worth protecting.

------
kart23
Graduated high school a couple years ago. Plenty of people coded, but I had
only had one friend that actually was interested in doing more with computers.
We found some pretty cool stuff on the school network, and ways to screw with
our less tech-savvy friends. It even cost me a trip to the principal's office
one time, due to my stupidity and inexperience.

I guess I'm not part of the right forums or boards, but I just haven't been
able to find other people with that same kind of passion. I know I could and
should just get started by myself, but I'm the type of person that just loses
motivation and the will to keep working if I dont have someone else by my
side. And I go to a UC. Sure plenty of people know a bit of linux and
networking, but how many people actually want to go past their classes and
actually take the time to research and learn more? It's hard to find those
people. As a result, I'm moving away from hacking into more normal spaces like
appdev and web stuff. Its definitely not as exciting, and I dont think I'll
ever again feel that thrill of being called to the principal's office for
hacking.

~~~
saagarjha
> I go to a UC. Sure plenty of people know a bit of linux and networking, but
> how many people actually want to go past their classes and actually take the
> time to research and learn more? It's hard to find those people.

Those people do exist, but they’re probably not in a classroom for much longer
than it takes to complete the final.

------
AnnoyingSwede
TL;DR: Hacking is more alive then ever.

I might be missing the point of his article, but describing the c64 basic
coding movement as a single movement is misunderstanding it gravely. The fact
that Basic was licensed by Microsoft didn't stop us, it was the the default
interpreter we had to programming, which soon was replaced by masm/tasm or
machine code.

More so then than today, hackers of all kinds (hackers, crackers, phreakers)
were all following their own individual paths and was way less uniformed than
todays movements. I believe the main reason most are focusing on OSS today was
because of the dis-content we felt with the development of operating systems
that slowly but surely locked us in as users.

------
steven741
Moving past the "no true scott's man" fallacy of the title; i feel that this
article confuses the act of being a hacker with the tools that people use to
hack with. Which is a common thing to do when a concept is new. For me, being
a hacker means being able to work at a certain level of abstraction and, not
being afraid to "open up the box" and start working at that level of
abstraction. For example, being able to work with a raspberry pi loaded with
linux and, then being able to start hacking at the linux kernel or libraries
when needed is what makes someone a hacker.

~~~
pdonis
I note that the author of the article appears to thing a raspberry pi would
work just fine if it booted Windows. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.

------
pontifier
In some sense, I think that there is something of a tragedy of plenty
happening in the maker/hacker community. When options were few, you had dense
groups with deep knowledge about different hackable technologies. The
abundance of options, while good in general, limits the usefulness of that
kind of deep knowledge in favor of a broader kind of knowledge.

How many ways are there to blink a light or read a potentiometer? Expanding on
a simple project can take hundreds of different paths depending on your
hardware and software stack.

It's not dead, it's just adapting to the current landscape of abundance.

------
ggggtez
It's kind of funny. The post thinks wistfully about the "real" hackers that
wanted everyone to have access to computers. But that already happened. So is
it any wonder that no one really cares about that ideology any more?

> [they are] completely uninterested in the ideology of software licenses and
> contracts.

Sure, but who cares exactly? Isn't an interest in legal nuances of contracts
rather orthagonal to "hacking"?

>Linux didn't change the desktop, nor the way software is made.

Here, I'll just flat out disagree. I think saying this is rather blind to
history.

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Annatar
"We buy cars and go to mechanics, right? We don't know how to peek inside the
engines anymore."

I don't know which world you live in, but it sure isn't mine! Even at the
height of working as a senior system engineer / technical architect in the
heart of Silicon Valley, I regularly wrenched on my car; I even found a self-
wrench shop near the Tesla factory in Fremont. In fact I just wrenched on my
car this past weekend. I wrench on all my cars. How could I call myself an
engineer without understanding what I use?

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acoye
Maybe "old school hacking" is still present in the "maker" movement. For the
pragmatic, practical hands on approach I mean.

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stebann
Hacking is not dead, but it has become complex because you have to deal with
many layers of abstraction. In fact, we have to deal with complex concepts,
implementations with different layers of complexity, more protocols... so the
knowledge to hack something goes beyond that, because you have to understand
how something works, maybe completely, to add something novel to it.

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luord
The point of this article is all the harder to see because there isn't even a
definition of what "hacker" means to the author.

There are many different definitions. If one subscribes to, say, Eric
Raymond's, then there are many more hackers today and hacking itself is more
prevalent than ever.

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_nalply
Hacking has changed.

I tinker with a homegrown family information and media center with a dis-used
Gigabyte BRIX behind an old flat screen running Linux and chromium-browser in
kiosk mode. I bought a NES style USB gamepad and use it to make things show.
It's a hobby, but it turned out to be nice.

For me that's hacking.

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zekrioca
Were early hackings done by "fairly despicable a-social people"? Maybe I did
not get this.

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Ocerge
Maybe, but programming now provides a stable income for way more people,
whether it's their passion or not. In this day in age, the ability to put food
on the table trumps any sort of bit-banging nostalgia IMO. The fewer gates we
keep, the better.

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erikbye
Speaking of books on hackers, I can recommend Cult of the Dead Cow: How the
Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World. I enjoyed it thoroughly
despite the title.

Did you know Beto O'Rourke was a member?

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brain5ide
True hacking is only for true Scotsmen.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman)

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al_form2000
<<I don't mean that we should not be political in our actions, today.>>

Y not?

<<...early hacking was a-political is because hackers were fairly despicable
a-social people.>>

That is what made it fun.

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soufron
Did it ever existed to begin with? The myth begun with "Hackers: Heroes of the
Computer Revolution" from Steven Levy in 1984, and it was mainly propaganda.

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ddtaylor
Does anyone else get a "no true scotsman" vibe?

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mscasts
What exactly is "true" hacking and how does it differ from "normal" hacking?

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bregma
A hacker is someone who clicks on
[https://www.sparkfun.com/](https://www.sparkfun.com/) and doesn't come up for
air for at least an hour. Can you pass the test?

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whatitdobooboo
I didn't personally get the sense that the author was reminiscing about the
past. I just thought of it more as what he thinks is a lack of ambition and
vision in computing today in ways that will solve larger problems rather than
going with the closed environments that are available today.

tldr; Maybe having an open plane with few imaginative restrictions (as early
computing did) allows one to rethink certain patterns we assume as truth
today. For example, if no one is working on a new OS because of Linux, Windows
- could that be worse for the world in the long run?

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mulle_nat
Enter Firefox, press CTRL-SHIFT-I. It's pretty much all there.

------
thrax
Git webgl

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ww520
Yes. It’s dead. Killed by money.

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sebow
A hacker is motivated to hack great software/systems.(Hacking in the "modern"
sense has been more about software than hardware, since not as many people
have the resources to tinker around with hardware,potentially breaking in the
process).

I would argue the reason why hacking has kind of "died" is because of the
massive amounts of garbage software that gets put out.

On top of that, hacking isn't actually dead,it just kind of moved in the
shadows.(This has been de facto true after the 2012 "era of big-brother
revelations", and shortly when the "big figures" of hacking have jailed.)

I'd say firstly modern hackers have to always adapt by "working twice as hard"
while having the "penetrating" mindset towards software that becomes
increasingly harder to penetrate(through different techniques,which CS has
developed firstly at theoretical then practical levels). Secondly,software
developers now usually work in groups and are incentivized by money.Even if
they're less skilled individually, together they manage to create harder
software to penetrate.

However,this "brothership" in the hacking community is very hard to
acquire,because 90% of the time it is motivated by something other than money:
ethics,sense of justice, etc.(What i subjectively consider a "hacker" isn't
someone who "hacks" an ATM by putting a cloning device on a facade)

On top of this,you add the fact that governments try to gain more and more
control over the internet and all-things computing, punishing people who
"legally deserved it" but did the society a favor(Snowden,Assange,etc.
basically any leak that has been "proven true" but the means of acquiring
information left the boot-lickers unsatisfied).

On the bright side, i wouldn't exactly say hacking is dead,it's just that the
computing sphere is changing so fast, it leaves hackers undecided.Some people
don't even bother when in the relatively short future we'll probably see the
"downfall" of classical computing as we know it.

