Coders are not hackers. Hacker culture is dead and coders have killed it | Hacker News Reader

Coders are not hackers. Hacker culture is dead and coders have killed it

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16 pointsAnon849 comments

I don’t know. This seems overly harsh, and a pretty classic case of othering people who are different than the author.

For example, I’m pretty sure a “hacker” could learn at Khan Academy. In fact, considering anything other than someone’s skill seems somehow anti-hacker.

> In fact, considering anything other than someone’s skill seems somehow anti-hacker.

The term hacker was never about pure skill or knowledge, it's about ethos and mentality. A fast implementation is nothing if it doesn't carry an interesting twist that got it there, for example.

True. Guess I meant that educational background doesn’t seem like an important thing for someone’s “hackerness”. Having the skill/knowledge/experience/taste is more important than how you got it.

Twist, or a lot of trial-and-error, happy accidents and incremental improvements.

Reminds me in undergrad when architecting a MIC-1 microcode implementation:

- I built a macro-instruction profiling emulator to Huffman encode the micro-instructions from all of the sample programs.

- Every micro-instruction served several purposes (it was similar to VLIW but shorter).

- I used progressive decoding to save micro-ops.

Then, the resulting project was not only the shortest micro-code by far (37 micro-ops long) but significantly faster in terms of total micro-ops executed than the next submission.

Note 0: I refuse to call myself a "hacker," it would be like referring to myself with a title like "king" or "lord" in the third-person.

Note 1: I first learned to code without manuals per se or the internet, but sitting in front of the incredibly-complete and useable Turbo Pascal IDE and obsessively trial-and-error-ing. Then adding inline assembly, Borland C++, and so on.

I think the OP is using hyperbole for effect, I don't think that statement is meant to be taken literally. The difference is things like Khan Academy is where hackers start but where coders stop.

Agree with the first sentence if it's read as "they are not equivalent groups". Very much disagree with both halves of the second.

Just because not everyone programming computers is a "hacker" anymore doesn't mean either of those things.

Rhetorical, purist, black-and-white-thinking nonsense.

Step 0. Don't call oneself a "hacker." It's like claiming to be a Navy SEAL. Identity labels are garbage, oversimplified mental shortcuts that trivialize people anyhow.

Step 1. Be infinitely curious and playful without bounds. Try to break things, use things improperly, dig deeper and void warranties. Coloring outside the lines and then some.

Step 2. No odd clothing, jewelry, tats, colored hair or nom de guerre are prerequisite. The better one can blend-in, the better they can hide in plain sight.

Step 3. Find a tribe. If there isn't one, start one.

Step 4. Dent the universe, or at least have a good time and live it up.

The scars on my hands and the memories of high voltage shocks past received digitally or even orally agree with this sentiment.

I'm a shit coder. I'm a great hacker. This weekend I just set up a peertube instance, grabbed some body parts for a project car from the junkyard, and ALMOST got my 3d print recycling machine working (just needs a damned 9mm socket adapter). Ain't a programmer. It's just a thing I do when I have no other alternative. i++

The second tweet might be better expressed as "[h]ackers don't _just_ go to Lambda School or Khan Academy". They do a lot more than that, surely - the creative and aesthetic impulse is quite real.

Of course these things tend to go in cycles - we all remember the dotcom environment of the 1990s, where even "knowing some HTML" was enough to be hired as a coder. Hackerdom will rise again, there's no doubting that.

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