Comment by element_4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by element_4 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if I ever thought "hacker" was only a term for someone who has been programming for 10+ years. I'm about to graduate from college, and I started programming my freshman year. I unfortunately never got to see the beauty and joys of programming until then, and it does suck a little bit. But does that automatically not make me a hacker?

Yet, I am arguably successful. I got a job offer from Amazon at the start of my senior year and took it, and of course, I eventually want to start my own company that's why I'm on this site. I understand the stigma because I personally have never told anyone I only started programming in college. I've never been asked either. I love playing around with new languages and learning all I can about software, but I don't feel I'm that far behind people who started programming early if even behind at all.

We need to stop acting like people who have been programming since kids have a huge advantage. It is much more about what you constantly put in, and there are numerous other ways to be a hacker then just programming. Most people who didn't program might already have the "hacker" in them and just need to attach the programming element of it.

People who feel alienated of the unique culture of programming will say anything to change it. They want everything to be normative, everything must be diverse everyone must have the same opportunities and pointing to gifted people and saying hey your a hacker and thats really good is a huge threat to that idea. It is almost like thinly veiled socialism.

You say "socialism" like it's a bad thing. I don't feel "alienated" from hacker culture, everyone I've met seems quite nice and receptive to me (although perhaps I'm in the wrong room).

But perhaps what I see is that this is really nice, and why can't we share it with more people? Hacking isn't a zero-sum game. If we double the number of people trying to write open source, isn't that a win for everybody?

It's not like encouraging somebody else to write code takes my job away, or dilutes the amount of genius to go around.

Think positively, my friend. "Socialism" may or may not work when we're building massive factories built out of atoms, but perhaps the economy of bits works differently than the economy of atoms.

Disclosure: http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/01/03/hello-my-name-is-...

imo "socialism" is bad, except for things like infrastructure and utilities, you could probably make a very convincing case that open source is digital infrastructure, and I would probably agree with you, but we arent talking about open source.

I never suggested that we should'nt be encouraging more hackers, the point I was making is that the article is suggesting that the hacker stereotype is bad because it makes people feel inferior.

I think it's important to pick and choose how we conduct ourselves in life carefully. I have met many smart people. Some do alienate others around them, they are "intellectual bullies." Others are reserved and/or withdrawn, neither encouraging nor discouraging others. And yet others are encouraging to all they meet.

I'm not in the same category at all, but I think of people like Feynman, he was not shy about criticizing policies he disliked, but he also worked tirelessly to bring more people into science.

To be fair, IIRC, you've been programming for longer than many people on this site have been alive.

(I listened to your interview on Javascript Jabber.)

I had some natural advantages, my mother was a systems analyst, and I had some early precocity.

But I also ran into some very encouraging people at key moments in my youth, for example there were various students at UofT who encouraged me to tinker with WATFIV and SNOBOL programs on punch cards. Some even let me use their terminals to play with APL.

I cannot say what would have happened if they had shooed me away and/or called security, but I think that my longevity in programming owes something to people who were welcoming.

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