15 Ways That Google Voice Can Revolutionize Your Communications  - <AUTHOR> http://www.voip-news.com/feature/15-ways-google-voice-033109/

<comment><USER2> _6\. Make sure certain callers only ring certain phones

8\. Never have your dinner interrupted by a telemarketer again

13\. Block your boss from your BlackBerry on the weekends_

These three points assume that your friends, your boss and any telemarketers that call you have all been given your Google Voice number, and have all thrown away your existing office, home and mobile numbers. Or am I missing something? What incentive does your boss have to not call your other numbers?</comment>


Verizon Makes SIM Swapping Hard. Why Doesn't AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile? - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kz438w/verizon-makes-sim-swapping-hard-why-doesnt-atandt-sprint-and-t-mobile <comment><USER2> Same author, but articles are days apart. hmmmm

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywa3dv/t-mobile-has-a- sec...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywa3dv/t-mobile-has-a-secret- setting-to-protect-your-account-from-hackers-that-it-refuses-to-talk-about)</comment>


A CSI-style image enhancement module for Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~yfan/PYRET/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This was presented in one of the PyCon 2010 conference - check out <http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~yfan/PyConPoster.pdf>

for a demo of the library.</comment>


Ask HN: A simple wiki which supports Markdown syntax? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for a wiki which has the following features
* supports markdown syntax * Written in PHP/Python/Ruby/Java * Allows only authenticated and approved users to make edits (approved = all users have to approved by an admin)
* Free
Mediawiki does support all the above with extensions but it is a beast :)
Even if a wiki doesn't support markdown, please do comment. I would like to know of all the alternatives. Any experiences with Docuwiki/TikiWiki/MoinMoin? <comment><USER2> Dokuwiki and pmwiki are both very nice, hackable, lean wikis.

I have a question on this subject, though. For a wiki (not a blog post, etc), do you guys prefer WYSIWYG, markdown, textile, creole (<http://wikicreole.org/>), or something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> I prefer both markdown and WYSIWYG

<comment><USER2> Oh yeah, forgot about WYSIWYG. Definitely my first choice, but it can be very difficult and buggy to implement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Gitit rules; I don't know if it counts as simple, and it certainly doesn't count as "written in PHP/Python/Ruby/Java" -- are you sure you need that?:

"Gitit (<http://gitit.net>) is a wiki backed by a git or darcs filestore. Pages and uploaded files can be modified either directly via the VCS's command-line tools or through the wiki's web interface. Pandoc is used for markup processing, so pages may be written in (extended) markdown, reStructuredText, LaTeX, HTML, or literate Haskell, and exported in ten different formats, including LaTeX, ConTeXt, DocBook, RTF, OpenOffice ODT, and MediaWiki markup."

<comment><AUTHOR> This is awesome and is something that didn't come up while googling. Is there a way to only approved users to edit the wiki? I didn't get that info after reading README

<comment><USER3> There are several ways to adjust access. The easiest way to limit editors is with the 'access-question' field in the configuration file; if you use the field, then the "question" must be answered by anyone setting up an account.

# Example: # access-question: What is the code given to you by Ms. X? # access-question-answers: RED DOG, red dog

See <http://github.com/jgm/gitit/blob/master/data/default.conf>

Or see, e.g. [http://groups.google.com/group/gitit- discuss/msg/e07fcabd70b...](http://groups.google.com/group/gitit- discuss/msg/e07fcabd70bd7495)

On patch-tag.com (which hosts darcs projects) the gitit wikis are set up differently, with the natural default that they are only editable by members of the project. You might sign up there with an arbitrary 'test project' so you could try out the wiki mechanism. (Many users just use it for the wiki, apparently, though I can't point to an example.)

(The patch-tag gitit wikis are the only publicly accessible gitit wikis I've used regularly. I use a git-backed gitit wiki locally for everything; it's awesome because of the connection to Pandoc and the indifference between LaTeX/HTML/RTF output).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> IMO, dokuwiki works fine. Reasonably easy to install as a Ubuntu package, has several authentication plugins. And it doesn't look ugly.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm the creator of Markdoc (<http://markdoc.org/>), which is pretty simple (bias bias bias bias) but it's just plain-text files in a directory, which means you'll need to be comfortable with a text editor and a version control system.

</comment><comment><USER6> On this topic, is there a good place to ask "does this exist?" where you'll get good answers. Like, when I'm about to start hacking on something, I'll Google around a little, but sometimes I find out after I start/finish that it already exists in a reasonably-good form. An Ask HN thread every once in awhile I guess would be ok, but it seems like overkill in many cases, especially if not many people would really be interested in the answer.

I guess ideal would be a piece of HN just for that that doesn't end up on the homepage, but some people would look over them once a day or so and see if they do know of something that exists.

<comment><USER7> I don't think you can really do much better than Google. If the competitor/originator isn't on the first few pages, then you have an advantage even if you weren't the first one to make it.

<comment><USER6> If you're talking startups, I agree. But sometimes it's just some little library/tool that I need, and I'll spend an afternoon writing it and put it on GitHub if it doesn't exist, but if it does, I'd rather just use that than waste my time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ikiwiki uses markdown in plain text files, and can be configured to lock all pages and only allow specific users to edit specific pages (configuration for that would look like locked_pages => "* and !user(foo) and !user(bar) and !admin()"). It's written, unapologetically, in Perl.

It is used as the wiki for projects including Dragonfly BSD, NetBSD, GNU Hurd, Monotone, Cario, etc.

<http://ikiwiki.info/>

</comment><comment><USER9> <http://jottit.com> does all this and more. It's a hosted solution, not sure if you're looking for something to install.

</comment><comment><USER10> Instiki had all those attributes; it's certainly easier to set up than Mediawiki, but there has to be a more recent answer to this problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> I looked at instiki, but it didn't seem like it had a facility where an admin needs to approve the users before they can edit. Is that the case?

<comment><USER10> Our very first revision of Playbook was built on Instiki, and if I remember correctly, it had user registration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A colleague and I are currently working on Noted (<http://notedwiki.com>), which matches what you are looking for, except that we are planning on charging when it launches. It is currently in development, but we are going to be looking for beta testers soon, which may provide an opportunity for a free or discount copy.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anybody know of a markdown git-backed wiki?

<comment><USER3> Gitit (<http://github.com/jgm/gitit>) uses git by default. (But it now also supports darcs and mercurial: the darcs version is used by the wikis on <http://patch-tag.com/> and, unsurprisingly, by the darcs wiki <http://wiki.darcs.net/> )

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> <http://dedawiki.dedasys.com> does: Markdown, is written in Rails and is pretty simple to hack. It's available under the Apache license (BSD style, basically). It could use some work, but it does do what you asked, and is fairly simple to hack on if you need something more.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wrote this one a while ago and still use it for my own projects. Written in Python, uses Markdown syntax, and is fairly easy to hack on and add features. Still haven't gotten around to adding decent version control though.

<http://github.com/synack/nikiwiki>

</comment><comment><USER15> tptacek mentioned <http://instiki.org> which has all your features. It's a good wiki if you're happy with a Ruby solution, and Markdown/Textile formatting is native.

A PHP-solution is PmWiki, and getting Markdown support via plugin is outlined here: <http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/MarkdownMarkupExtension>

</comment><comment><USER16> <http://gist.github.com/363190>

ruby lilwiki.rb

<comment><USER17> nice. was going to comment on it before you shoved it into a gist that you should gist it.

<comment><USER16> :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Are you users computer programmers? If not, I'd suggest avoiding the need to learn markup languages. There are WYSIWYG plugins for most wikis.

<comment><USER3> This is the miracle of Markdown: everyone basically already knows it. I have read more than one story like this

<http://atendesigngroup.com/blog/what-it-not-what-it-looks>

where programmers thought _Of course, these naive non-programmers will want WYSIWYG_ \-- but in fact they preferred Markdown once they found it.

<comment><USER18> Really? I program and I've spent a while fixing non-obvious markdown errors. I believe that was the whole reason it was forked by markdownsharp. How would learning any language be easier than not learning anything at all?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How are you managing sharing your current life / achievements? - <AUTHOR> Obviously we all have landmarks happening all the time. I started with orkut / facebook long ago - posted a bit of funny stuff and life events. Eventually pretty much stopped sharing anything with the massive monetization of the same. My snaps today are test snaps or keeping in touch with folks and stories are small jokes. I use my Whatsapp just to keep in touch with my fellow Indian community.
I have been operating under the assumption that no one really cares about my milestones or my family's for a few years now. But seeing recent christmas cards from friends triggered this thought. I don't want to sound like bragging when I talk about these (which I assume is how it will come off to folks who aren't focusing on the same stuff or are having a hard time), I also am trying to see if being nuclear and insular is the future. As vain as it sounds, I did derive happiness from sharing AND I am happy to see these christmas cards.
Considering I have a lot more like minded folks here rather than reddit and I have a job related interest as well (I work for Snap) figured will ask! How are you sharing your life with friends and family?
Happy Holidays! <comment><USER2> I share the happenings in my life with friends and family by talking to them in person, through email, and/or using SMS.</comment>


Apple Watch Sales Estimates Remain Low - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/21/apple-watch-sales-estimates-remain-low/ <comment><AUTHOR> From the article:

'Fortune compiled a list of individual analysts' estimates, which ranged from a low of 2.85 million to a high of 5.7 million — averaging out at just over 4 million across a panel of 27 individual analysts.'

'Apple is due to report earnings later today and it's unlikely to put analysts' guesswork to bed by breaking out official Watch sales. CEO Tim Cook indicated as much last fall, saying he was not "very anxious" to report them to avoid giving competitors an inside track.'</comment>


Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash, ethereum and litecoin crash on Friday December 22 - <AUTHOR> http://uk.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-bitcoin-cash-ethereum-litecoin-crash-on-friday-december-22-2017-12 <comment><USER2> Got a loan recently with 20% APR and dumped it all in bitcoin when it was at $19k. Super depressed and haven't slept for two days.

<comment><USER3> Borrowing at 20% APR is stupid. Did you think it would end up at $XXk without any corrections along the way?

That said, look back next year and perhaps things won't be as gloomy as they are today.

Edit: I can't believe I'm saying this, but you might want to look at refinancing that debt using a credit card. Their APR tends to be around 10 to 13% per annum. Might as well limit the damage done.

<comment><USER4> Some will even give you 0% for a year and free debt transfers. But yeah seems like a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All coins are dropping not just those 4. This is just history repeating itself. I'm sure it will upset people who are currently losing a lot of money right now, but you'd have to be blind to not see this coming. Investing any significant amount in the last week has been highly foolish.

<comment><USER6> Just mentioned yesterday how all the barbers at the shop I go to were really into bitcoin, which made me think the top was hit. Good thing I got out of there before I was scalped by accident.

<comment> etr-strike Such cliche reasoning. If Bitcoin is going to be a successful currency and/or store of value, everyone and the brother needs to be talking about it (just like they talk about gold or the USD). I bet these same barbers have discussed the S&P500 and index funds, is it time to get out of those too?

<comment><USER7> It's a terrible currency, and I doubt many people are buying it because they believe in the underlying technology. It's all about getting rich quick. It may be a cliche but the logic is sound I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What goes up must come down. Cryptocurrencies have no real economic value other than whatever people think they should be worth (which is interesting by itself). Once people stop believing the emperors not just naked then everyone will see him that way.

<comment> etr-strike Bitcoin has immense economics value. There's no other asset on the planet that allows me to put my faith in logic and mathematics instead of a person or institution.

Meanwhile, there's a lot of people putting their faith in opaque corporations and unelected central bankers. With the markets sitting at all time highs by every historical measure and debt loads higher than ever it'll be interested to see how that works out for them.

<comment><USER8> Actually, you are putting your faith in a few Chinese companies and the Chinese government: [https://medium.com/@homakov/how-to-destroy-bitcoin- with-51-p...](https://medium.com/@homakov/how-to-destroy-bitcoin- with-51-pocked-guide-for-governments-83d9bdf2ef6b)

I'll take US corporations backed by the US government over Chinese ones any day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At the moment, Ethereum is still up 8000+% for the year, Litecoin up 6300+% for the year. I think this is end of year profit taking. I do think these ecurrencies are all speculative (my bias), but today's event doesn't strike me as a crash. When the bubble pops we'll see these currencies in the vicinity of their starting prices.

<comment><USER10> Bitcoin similarly is up 12000+%.

<comment><USER11> Check your math.

<comment><USER10> Doh! You're right. Unfortunately I'm outside the time I can edit. Should have been 1200% (not shabby, but obviously not as good as ETH or LTC)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So, it looks like Bitcoin's price hasn't dropped as far (percentage-wise) than the others - any ideas on why that is?

<comment> etr-strike Bitcoin is the least risky of all the cryptocurrencies. It has the largest user base. It has the most widespread infrastructure. It has financial products and derivatives. Every other coin is unproven, many are mostly unheard of, and are the highest risk.

<comment><USER13> The things you say are true, but it's also suffering the worst from transaction fees, scalability problems and has worse technology and struggles to innovate.

<comment> etr-strike Scalability problems sure, bitcoin is hardly struggling to innovate though. Rootstock, Schnorr signatures, mimble Wimble. These are awesome new technologies. Every coin today would have the same scaling problem bitcoin has if they had the same user base and amount of attacks going on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Exactly the crypto tokens sold on coinbase

<comment><USER15> It's not exclusively those coins; everything is down across the board.

<comment><USER16> Almost everything else is traded against BTC (or ETH on some exchanges), very few of the "shitcoins" can be traded directly for USD (or even USDT). So when BTC and ETH go down in fiat value, so do the shitcoins, even if they might be up in satoshis (or mETH)

Anyways, it's still higher than it was 3 weeks ago and appears to have found supports. Nothing goes straight up forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well, now it is a good time to buy.

</comment><comment><USER18> But remember, it's mathematically impossible for this to be a bubble.</comment>


SurvivorshipBias.Org - <AUTHOR> http://survivorshipbias.org/

<comment><USER2> This link is some kind of redirector with a apparently unaffiliated third party. Hidden registration information for the domain. It then 301 redirects to startupnotes.org. This link should be removed as it is probably just collecting IPs from HN users.</comment>


Examine.com: The only site you need for unbiased information on supplements - <AUTHOR> http://examine.com

<comment><AUTHOR> After seeing positive response on CrowdMed - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9101622](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9101622) \- thought this would be really enjoyed.</comment>


College students are overestimating how much they can make after graduation - <AUTHOR> https://listwithclever.com/real-estate-blog/college-student-salary-expectations-study/ <comment><USER2> In my experience, private schools are responsible because they say "you will make X per year when you'll graduate" and they can charge insane tuition fees because of it. Once the student is in debt and has now graduated, he realises that he makes less than what the school advertised while being in debt. All these young people freshly graduated already took a mental toll before even beginning their career.

</comment><comment><USER3> In other news ...

"borrower are optimist, lenders are pessimists"

If many of these students are left depressed due to unmet expectations it drags the whole economy down - as they cut back on spending.

I feel like inflation would be a good thing, to reduce their debt burden while meeting their physiological expectation.

It would also help everybody if the dollar was weakened ( expect the very rich 20% of americans ).

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd be more interested in seeing this adjusted for school quality and class rank/gpa don't think you can compare without that</comment>


A 1979 War-Game That Takes 1,500 Hours to Complete - <AUTHOR> https://kotaku.com/the-notorious-board-game-that-takes-1500-hours-to-compl-1818510912 <comment><USER2> I have a friend, now retired, who's passion is these kinds of games. When he and his wife retired, they bought a house with a massive basement that he converted into a full-time wargaming room with space for 3 or 4 of these kinds of games setup all at once. Once or twice a week, he and a few other retired friends get together for a few hours and play the game. He has one game that's been going on about 3 years. His library of these games dates back to the early 70s and its really quite majestic.

When you see the giant board laid out in its fullest, and the thousands of pieces each in their individual positions...you get the sense that these would be almost impossible games to really play adequately on a computer -- until maybe the hololens. The need to see the context of the entire battlefield is overwhelming that no amount of scrolling around a screen can really compensate for it.

Another thing that's not clear for people from the outside is in many cases how scripted portions of the game are, and its really up to the players to spend a few hours following the script in between moves. This is supposed to simulate various historic battlefield conditions like new groups of units moving on and off the field as the real battle progressed, and the "play" happens within this framework.

Very deep, very detailed, really fun in a way, and no way could I ever put the kind of time into it that it needs, even for "small" games.

<comment><USER3> Some trivia: TSR, original makers of _Dungeons & Dragons_, stood for Tactical Studies Rules. Rules for the study of tactics, specifically military tactics. They made wargames before they published D&D.

Somewhere, I should still have a copy of _Cavaliers and Roundheads_. At least I believe it has survived all the moves.

<comment><USER4> _Playing at the World_ by Jon Peterson is a fascinating and comprehensive history of the wargames that led to Dungeons & Dragons, and the early years of the roleplaying hobby.

I highly recommend it for anyone that likes painstakingly researched details about the world of games.

<comment><USER3> It just so happens that I need to go into town on Monday. I'll stop by my local bookstore and see if they have a copy or if they can order it.

That probably sounds archaic but I try to purchase all my books there. There aren't many local bookstores left and I'm partial to it, so I hope to help keep them in business.

Much thanks for the recommendation. I've never read it and I am almost done with my current nightstand book. (Battle Cry, Leon Uris.) If they don't have it, they should be able to order it.

<comment><USER5> I use Amazon to look up ISBNs so I can order through my local bookseller, unless it turns out to be a book I can only get through Amazon.

Good for you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to love epic monster board wargames in my teens. Advanced 3rd Reich was my favorite, and when played along with it's companion Empire of the Rising Sun could simulate all of WWII in about 80 hours or so - assuming you were completely familiar with about 2000 pages of rules and moving as fast as possible with little time for strategic thought. Realistically, it could run significantly longer. But still short enough that you could (and might want to) play it multiple times in a lifetime. (The current version, updated over the years, is called A World At War and lists a playtime of 48 hours.)

Some of the very detailed air and naval tactical wargames back then could take an hour or so to simulate a few seconds or minutes of combat. I tried some of those and did not particularly enjoy them, but if a computer could help... My learning to program was significantly driven by making computer-aided- wargaming assistant software. But before long, PC wargames became more playable and I started turning to them instead.

As an adult with work and family, I can't play the monsters or rivet-counters anymore. I have great memories of obsessing over them and all their details and possibilities. But even now that they're computerized, trying to fit all that information in my head, handle all the detail and micromanagement feels too much like work. Such games are works of art that provide a special place and time and some lasting memories for those who can get into them.

</comment><comment><USER7> My favorite story about Campaign for North Africa involves a, uh, 'innovative' solution to the POW problem. As the British roll back the Italians, management of POWs becomes a large problem, requiring the players to create POW camps in empty hexes and allocate units to guard them or else they can revolt (as mentioned in the article). Legend has it that one player was looking over the terrain and weather rules, and realized he could place the POW camps in hexes representing dry riverbeds. Come Springtime the hexes would flood, turning into regular river hexes, and freeing up valuable guard units for other duties...

<comment><USER8> So basically Dwarf Fortress is tapping into something fundamental about simulation gaming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Where does the 1500 hours figure come from?

According to Boardgamegeek, "Playing time with 10 players is listed at 1200 hours." At the top of the BGG page, play time is said to be 1000 hours. There is a thread in their forum asking if anyone has ever finished the game, and the answer seems to be no.

[https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4815/campaign-north- afri...](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4815/campaign-north-africa)

<comment><USER10> Playing time predictions are usually on the low side. If the publisher is claiming 1200 and BGG is claiming 1000, then 1500 is probably a fair guess.

<comment><USER11> I would go so far as to say that playing time predictions are _always_ on the low side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A few years back, some friends and I built a modification for Risk. From my (our) point of view the inherent conceit of Risk is that they more Ts you control, the more power you have, the easier campaigns become. Typical 19th century German thinking. The reality is that as you expand, costs go up not down. With great population comes great Tragedy. So our build included infrastructure and currency. We only tried it once. I have not spoken with one of the co-creators since those fateful three days (trans Arctic railroads, it turns out, are the stuff of ending friendships) but I kept a candle lit for the day when Hegemon would rise again. I have the rule book squirreled away on a HD somewhere. I'd love to give it another go.

The core concept of the game was you go online, download the rule book for free, donate if you want, and use the pieces from other board games to play. If it caught on, we'd create an option to buy a custom made game (utilizing the Dymaxion Map and 3D printed pieces). Such are the dreams of youth.

<comment><USER13> That's the same sort of thing that comes with computer games that have implemented the Risk model, ones such as the Total War series and the Paradox games like Europa Universalis. Effectively there has to be some other mechanic that taxes you the larger you get and the more careful you have to be with expanding as you get some model of "Internal strife" to deal with.

<comment><USER12> Our addition was that you do not have to keep units in acquired territory, and each T gains you one unit per turn. in this way, you can keep one army stationed there free of charge. if you start building up your army, there is a cost to build AND station them. Movement had a cost, so you are motivated to build infrastructure that would reduce this cost. Building a capitol in a T mitigates the cost of storing armies in said T. Capitols were expensive and transferable. Ditto for infrastructure, though not as expensive.

My dreams for the game were to be able to build up scenarios or start from scratch. Each team in Scratch Mode starts with one T, one capitol, and five armies. Certain Ts produce a lot of income (simulating oil, mining value, or agriculture) while other Ts were constant deficits (if they border X+1 other Ts OR if the only had one connection).

I forgot to list the victory conditions: you must control 75% of the economy, territories, or military, or 51% of all three. In my mind, the goal was to form a global coalition and sign a peace treaty (game over... for now...((cue Red Alert HELL MARCH music))) or beat everyone into submission.

We used the Dymaxion Map in our modeling because it was fun and different, but as stated previously, the game was really the Rule Book, so one could conceivably use map, or chess board, or living room with furniture + a ruler/yardstick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It sounds like this game was rushed, but it sounds like an interesting challenge: how do you design a game that takes a significant amount of time to play, while still ensuring that it would be balanced and engaging for all of the players throughout? There'd probably have to be some sort of computer simulation involved or some expedited way to play it, but how would you measure these things? Is it even possible?

<comment><USER15> Well, a certain degenerate case of "balance" can be obtained with simple symmetry. It isn't quite the totality of what people mean by the concept because there are plenty of abstract games in which once one competitor has an advantage, they can inevitably press it home to a victory, and most humans would probably call that "unbalanced", even though in some sense it isn't. But still, a symmetric game certainly starts you off with a solid start in that direction.

(Technically, perfect play in a non-randomized game determines the winner very rapidly, and even in randomized games there's a clear maximum probability path. However, perfect play is generally humanly-infeasible and may even be computationally infeasible; chess is a relatively simple game compared to most and we still don't know who wins or draws with perfect play.)

Engaging 10 people for 1500 hours is probably effectively impossible, though. At that point you'd basically be selecting the people and building the game to match, if a solution even existed.

(You may be thinking "Oh, but jerf, there are people who play 1500 hours of Team Fortress 2 and stuff", but my reply is that if you designed TF2 for this use case and picked 10 random people, even 10 random TF2 players, you'd have to be pretty lucky to get 1500 hours for all 10 of them. I'm sure there's well more than 10 people with that much time clocked but they're still the outliers, and you'd have a hard time naming them before the fact. Even with prior information about their addictiveness and tendency to stick with games.)

<comment><USER16> Funny that you picked TF2 as an example.

From my experience with the game over the course of several years, TF2 becomes insanely addictive only after you overcome the horrendous learning curve.

This takes around 50-100 hours of pure playtime on average.

Once you understand the game mechanics, how to play the classes reasonably well (fully mastering a class can take 100+ hours), how trading works, and how to play the most popular game modes (including duos, 4v4, dodgeball, bball, MGE, surf, etc.), you're basically set for life!

For those who overcome the curve, the retention rate is quite high, from my experience at least. The release of Overwatch probably pulled quite a few people over though. This is primarily due to how Valve has treated the game over the years.

I have over 1000 hours, my brother has twice that (at least), and I know several people I played with regularly who had 4000+. Keep in mind that the country that I was living in had an absurdly small TF2 community.

I don't play anymore because: (1) I don't have a good PC, and (2) grad school sucks.

<comment><USER15> "I have over 1000 hours, my brother has twice that (at least), and I know several people I played with regularly who had 4000+."

Oh, I picked that carefully. TF2, Starcraft, Diablo, the more successful MMOs... certainly people can pour thousands into those.

First, I guarantee you that for every person you can find with 1000 hours in TF2, there are dozens or possibly even hundreds of people who installed it, screwed around for a few dozen hours or fewer, and then left. So if you randomly select 10 TF2 players, even if I spot you "from the set of all people with more than 5 hours in the game", the odds that you'll come up with a set of 10 people who are ready to put 1500 hours into "one game" are actually pretty dismal.

Secondly, I'd also very, very seriously question whether that constitutes "one game" in the way that this game really is _one_ game, with one team winning, after 1500 hours. TF2 is more a series of games that last about an hour. I've played far less than 1500 hours on TF2, and I "won" and "lost" dozens of times each. MMOs may lack quite the same degree of clarity but one could probably say that "one quest" is a game, or some other larger subdivision like "all the quests in one area" or "a single raid", but generally if an MMO does have a quest that lasts for even a hundred hours it's going to be considered by the players as a long-term adjunct quest rather than "the thing I do for 100 hours". There have been enough MMOs out there that somebody might be able to cite a counterexample, but it would be rare. At the very least an MMO player playing one MMO for 1500 hours is probably going to be running multiple characters, which would be reasonably called "separate games".

There may be individual Civ games that ran that long, like maybe the Eternal War: [https://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar/](https://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar/) (The original post the guy doesn't claim a game time, just that he'd been playing for 10 years.) But, again, trying to get 10 such people together would be a challenge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow, and I thought our 8 hour games of Axis & Allies or Shogun were epic. I do remember one game of A&A which went for 3 days once.

But a big factor of all those games was the banter and chatter that took place in between the play rounds - which easily took up >50% of 'game time'.

Discussions about famous war heroes, tactics, politics, geography and purely made up stories to rationalise our game play was what made those sessions special, and stand out in my mind FAR more than the die rolls, cards or token that we had...

<comment><USER18> Shogun was the best and the worst of those gamemaster games. I thought the flexibility of the rules (bidding for turn order, the ninja, experience for generals, etc) was way ahead of its time. But in our games, whichever player left the early game with the right side of the board was almost guaranteed to win.

<comment><USER17> I always found that an odd number of players yielded best result with Shogun. With 4 players, it always became a 2 on 2 situation. With 3 or 5, there was far more interesting conflict and changing of fortune.

I loved that every game was so different, but yes, the initial random deal of starting provinces could make or break the entire game. Also found that it made a huge difference if you went first in the first round, then last on every round afterwards.

But even with all that, Shogun is still one of my favourite board war games ever. Still have my original set from >30 years ago, back when I think it was still a Milton Bradley game(?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 1,500 hours? That's nothing! These guys should give Civilization a go. (I say this only partially in jest. I've logged a few thousand hours playing the various Civs over the years. And, I'm not even a heavy player, compared to many.)

<comment><USER20> It does tell the tale of how gaming has changed over time -- 1500 hours was truly considered a lifetime of play a few decades ago. The article itself laid out what was considered reasonable - 3 hour sessions twice a month, with friends. Today, people can do 3 hour sessions twice a day. Alone.

<comment><USER21> Would things have been different 40 years ago if solo gaming was practical? Getting half a dozen people together for 3 hour sessions is difficult to do once a week, never mind twice a day. Playing these board games alone would have been more of a research project than entertainment.

I recall bringing a then-obsolete Mac SE into a private student lounge about 20 years ago. One of the games installed on it was Harpoon, which seems to be in the spirit of these old board games. Almost no one was interested in it. I had installed it because it was a novelty. One student played it ravenously. It leaves me wondering what computer gaming would be like if it focused upon detailed simulations rather than graphics and reflexes.

<comment><USER20> If you think solo gaming wasn't practical 40 years ago, you weren't around 40 years ago. Those Atari 2600s rocked our world, man.

But the change that really started to make people put games first in their lives was when it became social -- MUDs/MUSHes. When you could interact with other people through the game, that is when people started to play them all night and fail out of school because of them, etc.

<comment><USER22> Well, the games on the 2600 were simple shootemups and the like requiring little AI, not solo play of serious games like this. But by the mid 1980s wargames with reasonably capable computer opponents were available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Yep we enjoy our pasta, a bit sad that we're always caged into this "pasta, pizza, mafia" storytelling :/ but probably it's our fault!

<comment><USER24> I always thought it was kind of funny that Italy was famous for new-world and relatively recent concepts. Tomatoes definitively didn't exist in the old world before 1500ad and _la Cosa Nostra_ only emerged in the 18th century, in the same vein as the Bow Street Runners in the UK.

Of course pasta existed before tomatoes were available, as in things like Bolognese sauce, but it's still a strong association.

<comment><USER25> Well, Italy is also a new and recent country.

<comment><USER23> Yep, only if you really believe that Italy's "birthday" is 1861... :) I humbly suggest that there's something more than that if you look closely!

<comment><USER26> 1870 is the real one, with the Capture of Rome when Rome was annexed to kingdom of Italy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Universalis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Universalis) is a slightly more approachable (and very slightly shorter) game along these lines.

<comment><USER28> Before i clicked, i thought you might be referring to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Longest_Day_%28game%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Longest_Day_%28game%29)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Would this be less or more insane if transfered to a computer? It sounds like most of the tedium is computing and tabulating, but is that also most of the draw?

<comment><USER30> Far less. It does not seem any more complex than something like Gary Gigsby's War in the West and while it has a hill to climb if you want to learn how to play it, it is far from a 1500 hour game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > _they said 'but we're still playtesting it! We don't know if it's balanced > or not. It's gonna take seven years to play!' And I said 'you know what, if > someone tells you it's unbalanced, tell them 'we think it's your fault, play > it again.'"_

I wonder if "have you tried turning it off and back on again" was in popular use for computers at this time.

<comment><USER32> Well for home computers at least the way to get it to load a new program was to kill the power.

The institutional ones probably had uptimes measured in months though.

You didn't just reboot something that multiple people, including senior staff and tenured professors, may be using...

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I really want the rights to this so I can make it a videogame that only takes a few hundred hours to complete.

<comment><USER34> Someone already beat you to it. It's called Hearts of Iron 4: [http://store.steampowered.com/app/394360/Hearts_of_Iron_IV/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/394360/Hearts_of_Iron_IV/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> And here I thought the article would be about Monopoly.

<comment><USER31> Please, no family play-through of Monopoly lasts for longer than three hours - that's the _maximum_ amount of time before mom locks herself in the bathroom to chainsmoke, and dad begins to angrily saw apart random wood in the garage, leaving the children to form grudges that will last well into their 40s.

<comment><USER36> The game's popularity is sort of ironic. It was designed to be unfair, in order to demonstrate the harmful power that monopolists accrue. That it results in the situations you describe could also be said to be by design.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Linux for normal people - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mike-u/linux-for-normals <comment><AUTHOR> I made this to collect all the first-party applications available for Linux that aren't directly focused on development. I'd like to see Linux being treated as a regular OS by companies, and not have them ignore it or rely on third party alternatives. I'd really appreciate any feedback or if you have any recommendations for apps to add. Thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: I need someone who is 100 times better than me - <AUTHOR>

Basically I am a programming novice and I am wondering if I can work with some great programmers. What is the best way to get such opportunity? <comment><USER2> 1) Open source

2) Got Money?

3) Got passion to work for next to nothing on something that will probably fail?

4) You don't even need someone "better" than you to learn, just be deliberate about learning what you can from your peers. If you get stuck, find a new gig.

I struggled with the same thing in the past, and thinking I couldn't learn from people just because I thought I was smarter than them really held me back (Also working on municipal tax collection software as a city employee, but I'm pretty sure being less of a cocky prick would have helped)

<comment><AUTHOR> Realistically would any programmer want a novice to contribute other than documentation? Edit: I have already been doing the things you are saying (learning from everyone) but I feel I am not progressing fast enough.

<comment><USER3> On just about any project basic bug fixes would be good. You know the easy noncritical stuff that tends to get overlooked. Fix up the slapdash UIs open source apps tend to have. Tests, beat on a library's interface in a way that someone too close to the code base might not think of. Depending on the app, data import\export might be a good place to start. It rather depends on one's area of interest.

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to focus on deliberate practice by choosing projects that is relevent to my weakness. Right now I want to master C. Do you know a good projects for this?

<comment><USER3> Open source projects written in C. That is like shooting fish in a barrel made out of fish, on a floor made out of fish, with a gun made out of fish, with big fish for bullets.

You might try Redis, MongoDb, the Linux kernel, One of the BSD's kernels, Python, mongrel 2....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not to be too self-promotional, but I built a site called HackerBuddy.com that could help you find a mentor (it's all free).

A lot of the advice here is about learning to code by building something for yourself, I completely agree with that approach. Pick a small web app that you'd like to build and try to build it yourself - when you get stuck, StackOverflow can usually help. I know that I learned much more by building something than I did being shown how to build something. And good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm sort of in the same place. I've been working on making my own blogging system that can house various projects I'm working on and it's been going... slowly. I'm nearly done with the first iteration of it though. I've rewritten it maybe 3 times, but I've learned a lot about coding while making it. Its current iteration is made so that I can extend it in various ways and once I get a few extensions I plan on open-sourcing it. It's been good to have a pet project to work on.

I would love to have someone with a lot more programming talent/knowledge than myself to show me what I'm doing wrong and how to do it better. Is there some way I could submit it when I get the basic structure finished (should be within the next week or two) and get someone to look at it? Is this the kind of thing I could bring to a hackerspace to show off and get ideas from?

</comment><comment><USER6> Download Wordpress and try making a plugin. Play around with it and see what good programmers have done. You can try this for other software too (pick your language). It's one way of working with great programmers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now my main interest is mastering C or C++. Do you know a good open source project I could get started with?

<comment><USER7> Some thoughts off the top of my head (hopefully accurate):

      - Do you use Vim? I believe it's written in C
      - Apache web server - written in C (I believe)
      - Mozilla Firefox - written in C++

These above would have the advantage that they might be programs you are already using, and thus somewhat familiar with.

For something smaller:

      - Aspell is a clone of ispell that is written in C++
        I believe they were looking for a new maintainer of
        the Windows port a while back.

      - Also, mongrel2 (by Zed Shaw) is a new web server written
        in C that seems well thought out. And since it is new,
        it may be more understandable than some of the larger
        programs above. Also, the ZeroMQ infrastructure that
        it uses seems interesting and useful to know about.

<comment><AUTHOR> How do I go about understanding the internals of Fire fox or GNU emacs? Do I need to understand the entire thing to contribute? If not what should I do?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Short answer: Contribute to open-source.</comment>


The Fall of Hacking - <AUTHOR> Please first excuse my liberal arts sensibilities in a technical forum; but I figure out there might be some like-minded people out there who feel the same way I do ... that the hacker culture is dying out.
Before anyone jumps in to say that I've jumped the shark, let me quickly jump to elaborate:
The ideal of the hacker a la early 90's, Ghost in the Shell, Hacker and Cyberpunk; a cowboy on the electronic frontier typing silently the night away to a CRT monitor but the internals (of man and machine) is intense full of drama. Better yet, a reclusive vampire in the cyberworld, dialing up the BBS where people went by handles and the text file on packet sniffing taught me the hacking techniques and text file called "subverting American lower-education" taught me the hacking ethos and attitude. Hacking was punk-rock (a la the Ramones, pre-Blink182 and Sum41): marginal and subversive, exploiting buffer overflow vulnerabilities on remote servers, warez, BIOS viruses, and automatic credit card number generators in Visual Basic 3.0 to get free Internet access via AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve, pirated Turbo C++ with DJGPP writing a 2D DOS sidescroller. But I do not really do justice to the description of hacker, pre the dot-com boom - but I think you know what I mean.
Fast forward to the 2009, a hacker has become the anti-thesis to the hacker of early 90's. The new "hacker" go to websites such as YCombinator and have snazzy wordpress blogs with rounded corner designers with full names and locations and snazzy job titles, and geek-chic photo of the said hacker in yuppie dress-shirts smiling, "Software Visionaire/Ruby Ninja; come hit me up on Facebook, let's meet up and talk about business ideas!" The big ideas of the day is a PHP database CRUD application that displays everyone's colleges and geographical networks, with full names and whose purpose essentially, is a repository for pictures of inebriated hot chicks. Apparently, the new new thing is now this CRUD forum database application that has a character-limit of 120 words per post, but get this, it's written in a really cool language called Ruby on Rails, a la AutoTune in Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak.
Everywhere in the IT/engineering department, no one gets to write anything from scratch but have to write plugins/patches for a legacy platform, uses third party libraries that have ten plus layers abstraction between the meta-code and the actual code. Does anyone really understand the internal's of Ruby on Rails, the Linux kernel or know what YCombinator mean? The worst insult to an engineer is to tell her that she isn't technical enough. But in the designation of "frontend engineer," "backend enginner," "overseas team," I feel more like working on an Henry Ford's assembly-line, efficient and cheap, an assembly-line worker bolting nuts not an craftsman working on the engine, the suspension, the dashboard, the big picture.
Like hip hop/punk rock/grunge, hacking has been overran by marketing guru's (Seth Godin), overzealous self-promoters (Timonthy Ferris), business executives driven by the bottom line (Steve Ballmer/Carol Bartz) and its own narcissism (TechCrunch). It has devolved to become a caricature of its former self. Worst of it all, it has become mainstream - it's no longer subversive. <comment><USER3> _The big ideas of the day is a PHP database CRUD application that displays everyone's colleges and geographical networks, with full names and whose purpose essentially, is a repository for pictures of inebriated hot chicks. Apparently, the new new thing is now this CRUD forum database application that has a character-limit of 120 words per post, but get this, it's written in a really cool language called Ruby on Rails, a la AutoTune in Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak._

This really strikes home for me. Hacking used to be very intellectual, especially in the open source world. Robert Morris created the first worm as a test to see how large the Internet was. RMS hacked out Emacs (mostly) on his own to build a Lisp interpreter/text editor. Linus made Linux so he could experiment with Unix for free.

Sometimes I get the feeling these days that hacking is becoming too market and business oriented and not about the fun intellectual challenge anymore.

That said, I do think that it is really more of an evolution instead of a redefinition. I'm not sure that it's all bad and in some cases it's good; many startups have a really clever idea about software or technology behind them. Maybe it's that hacking is now about finding new and clever ways to integrate technology and computing into our lives instead of finding clever things in technology. In essence, maybe it's about writing for the world instead of writing for the programmer.

I'm not sure this is correct, but thoughts/comments are welcome (even from me, I might come back and edit this later as I think about it more).

<comment><USER4> _Sometimes I get the feeling these days that hacking is becoming too market and business oriented and not about the fun intellectual challenge anymore._

There are almost certainly more hackers pursuing intellectual challenges than there have ever been before. What has happened is that _the entire rest of the world_ has arrived on the web, so the intellectuals don't stand out as much.

It used to be that more than half the people on the web were pursuing Ph.D-level projects in computer science. But that was because there were only twelve people on the web, and all of them were MIT students or BBN employees.

Yours is a very common complaint. You hear it all the time in the sciences: Where (people ask) are the contemporary physicists who would rank with Einstein or Fermi? The answer is that there are more people who understand quantum mechanics and general relativity today than there ever were before, and they have a much _better_ understanding than Einstein or Fermi ever did. But they also aren't famous, because it's a lot more boring to be one of several thousand experts on general relativity than it is to be the very first one.

Similarly, I've heard it said that the all-time golden age of mathematics may be... today. There are a lot of mathematicians around. There's more funding than ever before in history.

<comment><USER5> This brings up the interesting question of "natural genius".

World population for the last several centuries has exploded. Suppose 500 million people lived in Plato's time and there were 50 "natural geniuses". That means 1 per 10 million. Even disregarding technological or social progress and assuming linear scaling, that implies at least 650 "natural geniuses" today. Where are they? Who are they? The sheer number of most- capable individuals has grown enormously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People who got their internet access by credit card fraud were never hackers in the first place. They were just cheats and wannabe hackers.

Drama and marginal status doesn't make you a hacker. It just makes you a social outcast.

It's true that there are lots of wannabes today, too — more than ever before, now that the richest man in the world got that way by writing a BASIC interpreter, now that Sergey and Larry get to go to Davos.

But you want to see some real hackers? How about <http://www.pouet.net/> where the demoscene posts their stuff? Have you not been to a Bar Camp? SuperHappyDevHouse? Hackerspaces like Noisebridge? How about Google, where Rob Pike now works since they've spent 9 years fixing <http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/>? How about biotech, where they reprogram the very stuff of life itself? How about the Netflix Prize, where AI predicts human preferences for money? How about the algorithmic trading funds that now account for the majority of trading volume on our stock exchanges? Have you been visiting <http://www.gpgpu.org/> <http://blog.reprap.org/> <http://bathsheba.com/> <http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/> etc.? How about thirty million people finding one hole after another in the firewall to communicate to each other and the rest of the world, when their election was stolen, through a humble Rails CRUD forum? How about <http://vpri.org/html/writings.php>, where the objective is to build a whole, modern personal computing environment in under 20 000 lines of code — and they just might do it? How about the OLPC project, where some real hackers — not losers stealing credit card numbers — figured out how to build a machine that would hold up to abuse from kids, in order to revolutionize the world education system (a la Diamond Age), an experiment which is still ongoing? How about Time Magazine listing moot as the most influential person in the world?

Some of these things are good, some are bad, and some are ineffectual. But they are _hacking_ on a scale that you never imagined would be real, in your reclusive vampire credit-card fraud days. These are not people tweaking CSS in yuppie dress shirts, or patching some obsolete proprietary library. These are people pushing the boundaries of the possible.

There's a world of hacking out here.

Open your eyes.

<comment><USER7> Yeah real hacking is still around, just take a look at any torrent tracker to find pretty much any app/game hacked. Or better yet how about all those security breaches at Pentagon and NASA.

The reason you don't see "real" hackers hacking, is because they aren't eager to have public identities, since they don't feel like getting arrested/sued into oblivion.

<comment> loup-vaillant Err, isn't there a little confusion between hacker and _cracker_ here?

<comment><USER8> In the post, noname123 says "hacker," but the areas of endeavor he's discussing cross that boundary. More importantly, the activities he talks about were always restricted to small, secretive communities--I had no idea that stuff was going on 'til the early 90s.

And guess what? The original set of activities, with the original motivation, is still going on in small, secretive communities. It's just hard to tell when your particular community dissolved long ago, and you haven't run across any others in a very obvious way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Everything you've written would have been just as true in the 1980s, with a few of the names changed. Then too there were authentic hackers, glib fakers, and corporate drones.

The great majority of the computer world in the 1980s was profoundly unsubversive. The smart, subversive people were a tiny minority. They seem a larger proportion when you look back from 30 years later, because the fakers and PHBs had no lasting effects.

<comment><USER10> For the young programmer 12 years ago it was still easier to get absorbed in a "hacking" culture - or so it was for me. At that time I thought linux, assembly and writing a virus in Pascal were very cool things, and I didn't have a problem getting my friends to agree. It seemed very natural then.

I admit I don't know many high-schoolers now, but my feeling is they really are less hacking-inclined, at least around here (Eastern Europe). I'd guess the main difference is access to information. Then it was very rationed - <USER2> remember learning assembly from a reference manual. Now Internet offers a lot less obstacles, so I don't really see a point for "subversiveness", at least in mainstream programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Those people are still out there; you just don't hear as much about Real Hacking as about more accessible, mainstream stuff.

Also, get a blog.

<comment><USER12> I actually have a lot more respect for people who come here and type their heart out in the open for no other reason than bringing in content and sharing their ideas.

Getting a blog is lame compared to that. You get a blog to get ads and attention and a following.

On the contrary, noname123, came here, created an account, and wrote his/her heart out for nothing. Expecting nothing, wanting nothing except to be honest and straight forward with an opinion -- a valid opinion and an astute observation of a topic that the real hackers are feeling inside.

Hacking is dying. It has taken an outsider, a liberal artsie fartsie to tell us the truth about it. To point out the absurdity.

I went to sxsw interactive this year and was appalled at what I saw. There were few hackers there. Most of them were socialites running around promoting their word press blog or django customization. These people didn't know anything about hacking. Perhaps it was the wrong venue, but the art and the culture and the expertise of _real_ hacking is probably already dead.

It's too easy now. You don't have to _love_ hacking to build something with computers. You don't have to have passion to build, you just throw some parts together, copy and paste some graphics and change the colors in photoshop to match a named swatch you found at colourlovers.

It's kind of sad.

<comment><USER13> I've heard this line hundreds of times before. Hacking is not dead. Something can't be killed if you have the ability to turn on your computer and start doing right away. If you are concerned about whether hacking is alive or dead, perhaps you should fire up your computer and bring it back to life. It's that simple.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you completely and my writing was (intentionally) too liberal artsy; so let me put on my technical hat and level with you why hacking is no longer subversive.

1) _Growing Complexity of Software Projects_ : in some sense, it's not about computer programmers "selling out." Because in both FOSS and enterprise software, the code-base has usually third-party dozens if not more dependencies. Writing software is now a team effort, and not a single team effort but more like a company-with-frontend-backend-QA-teams effort. Think back to the day when a individual or two person could write a 2D side-scroller in DOS, with thoughts and stressing even over the monster's sprites and midi soundtrack. Nowadays, an EA game is more like Wikipedia, with many contributors working without being conscious of others. And while Wikipedia is good by itself, but tell me, could Wikipedia contributors by their collective consciousness write _War and Peace_ or _Catcher in the Rye_? Likewise, Emacs, Linux and Ruby were progenated by single individuals with their respective unfettered individual vision.

2) _Compromising Hacking for Hacking's Purpose_. Hacking started as an art, without regard for commerce; see RMS as an example of someone who followed his vision without regard for profits or social acceptance. Programming, in its current state, is funny enough the only art form where its leading vanguards and self-processed practitioners openly condone "selling out." I feel that programmers funny enough aren't complete sell-out's but are stuck in the middle ground, the worst of all places. We are told by Paul Graham & Company, that great hackers should be motivated by their craft intrinsically, but should either keep one's day job or start up our own company with an _viable business strategy_ to save up for "fuck you money" (pardon my french). But in reality, having an corporate job or starting a Web 2.0 CRUD start-up makes you beholden to either your boss or your potential customers whom increasingly treat programmers as commodities/assembly-line workers to deliver business requirements. Tell me, did Van Gogh or Sylvia Plath do focus group/market research so that they could decide which colors and content category would be most pleasing to their audience before they set out to compose their painting/poetry? Similarly I'd argue either did Linus/RMS/Wozniak when they set out to hack. Art exists for itself, it serves no purpose. If it does find audience, the best art inspires, challenges and mocks the audience, but it never panders to its audience.

3) _Lack of Encouragement in the Community to Buck the Status Quo_ ; I guess that this point is related to my previous point - but I feel the ethos/outlook's of the early 90's at the dawn of personal computing was that anything was possible, whereas today is optimizing on status quo. A survey of new YC startup's include rehashes of social networks/blogs/online music. While occasionally Hacker News feature posts on AI, Bioinformatics, green technology and Arduino. Why is everybody crowded in the web space? Where are the implementation of the next generation's ideas? Ray Kurzweil talks about the coming of Singularity, for instance. I'd argue it is because people are so fixated on monetizing that they no longer push envelope.

I just realized that in my zeal, my commentary turned out to be still pretty liberal artsy. Like how Bob Dylan would respond to some heckler at some festival he played at some years back, the heckler said "hey, Bob Dylan your new songs are no longer as relevant as your old songs," to which Dylan responded, "well, I'm at least out here writing songs, what are you doing?" So I'm going to stop now and take OP's advice go hack now.

<comment><USER6> > in both FOSS and enterprise software, the code-base has usually third-party > dozens if not more dependencies

Lua. ColorForth. STEPS.

> Writing software is now a team effort

There have always been software teams of many different sizes. But most projects on Sourceforge (or Github, or Freshmeat) are one-person projects.

> Think back to the day when a individual or two person could write a 2D side- > scroller in DOS

It was more common for a group of two to five people to do it, you know, than for one person to do it. And there are any number of popular games these days built by small teams: World of Goo, Mafia Wars, Super Monkey Ball.

> as an example of someone who followed his vision without regard for profits > or social acceptance.

Lots of people still do.

> today is optimizing on status quo

Most people are always trying to improve the status quo incrementally, except when that's obviously suicidal (e.g. the Ghost Dancers). In the early 90s "everyone" seemed to be working on graphics cards, database software, spreadsheets, word processors, and video games with themes licensed from movies or sports. The internet doesn't even appear in The Road Ahead. But some of us were doing other stuff... we just weren't visible until there was Wired.

Working on something new is never a popular activity because most new ideas are worthless. It's a generalization of the thing about 90% of startups failing: the other 10% mostly don't fail because they let their ideas fail and switched to something else.

> the only art form where its leading ... practitioners openly condone > "selling out."

Massage, graphic design, architecture, cooking, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, warfare?

There's a lot of stuff going on.

<comment><USER14> What is STEPS? I tried googling but it is too generic term.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, I was referring to VPRI's project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hackers were the children of a certain generation, who spent their adolescence tinkering with systems and prodding networks, hiding their identities because of a lack of confidence that their "true self-image" had value. They instead created alter-egos that did amazing things, and participated in spreading a mythology so they could feel the same twinge of celebrity and status that the real, socially-connected people felt when they left their basements.

Then those hackers grew up, got jobs, and started making real social connections. They learned that it's much more fun when people get to know the real you, when you can cooperate on projects with other brilliant minds instead of competing in secret, and that the UI (or even marketing) of something can affect its contextual "meaning" just as much as its technical design does (e.g. text messages and IM conversations are basically the same thing—but you _use_ them for different things, at different times. This is, oddly, a sort of postmodernism.)

Inspired by their newly discovered social reality, and the suddenly-available power of the Internet to achieve it, the focus of hacking turned from "technical hacks", (which stood on their own and, as much as they positively benefitted you, never benefitted anyone else, and possibly _harmed_ them) to "social hacks", which revealed that it was possible to have a non-zero-sum game, a program that benefits both you, and other people, because of the new interactions conceivable through it.

</comment><comment><USER16> There's a difference between the word "hacking" as defined by mainstream culture and the concept/ethos of hacking.

The former has definitely been diluted. But the latter is an idea, and ideas are bulletproof (apologies to Alan Moore).

If you want to know the internals of a project/framework, other people's perceptions of what 'hacking' means doesn't stop you from looking at the code (assuming foss).

You say "Does anyone really understand the internals of Ruby on Rails". Well, go look at it and understand it. Then look at the MRI and JVM implementations of Ruby -- and understand those. You can keep drilling all the way down until you're generating assembly.

The majority of your complaints is that the industry has moved in the direction of the assembly line. That may be the natural gravitation, and you may just be filling in a spot at work. But no one can stop you from learning the lower level details on your own time.

Read the linux and bsd kernel mailing lists. Find some irc channels for embedded systems. Check out what people are doing with CUDA. By definition, the mainstream will always bubble up on social aggregators. If you look elsewhere, you'll find the hacker culture is alive and well.

</comment><comment><USER17> I love Fall. All the colors and a bit of a cold nip in the air ... the really unusual lights ... yellows and darks ... uncommon moods ... brown packages of straw, too.

<comment><USER18> My apologies for being slow on the uptake, but is there an analogy here or is this just a simple pun?

<comment><USER19> (t)he (r)eally (u)nusual (l)ights ... (y)ellows (a)nd (d)arks ... (u)ncommon (m)oods ... (b)rown (p)ackages (o)f (s)traw, (t)oo.

You missed it, but no harm done - it was not very interesting to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Since you use music analogies...

I don't know that I agree with you. I think the term "hacker" is being mis- applied to a large group that sort-of, but not quite, embodies that which is "hacker".

Much like rap/hip-hop was once underground but is now mainstream. The mainstream stuff that you see out in the open everyday is a non-authentic watered down version of that which is real, and which still lurks in the underbelly clubs of the cities.

The hackers of the early 90's learned computers somewhere in mid to late adolescence. The hackers today grew up with computers, but they are not the same thing.

Interesting and well thought out post, but I don't think it really stands up to scrutiny, except to expose the fact that the definition of hacker has warped and changed over time.

</comment><comment><USER21> What this really sounds like is a rant about how Hacker News is not a very precisely named website.

Hacker culture is alive and well, and there are plenty of heroes hacking the night away staring at their monitors (though LCD these days), just as there 'always' has been. There are probably more now than there ever has been, actually. There's just a lot more parasites and poseurs around, because computers are mainstream now and there's a lot more money around.

There is a lot more to hacker culture than web startup culture! I don't even consider virtually anything you mentioned a part of hacker culture. PHP and databases? "Software Visionaire/Ruby Ninja"? (bad) business ideas?

Of course people understand the internals of the Linux kernel. You think the people working on it don't understand it? That's a pretty good example of an island in contemporary hacker culture. You don't have to look far in a sea of recreational kernel hackers to find... hackers. The associated mailing lists generate quite a bit more discussion than HN does...

There have always been poseurs and businessman hangers-on, and there always will be. They are obviously not hackers.

Hacker culture, and the existence of true hackers, can never die out. It's hard wired in.

</comment><comment><USER22> Hacking is a human activity and as such will follow the same patterns and cultural cycles you would expect.

1\. A Space Becomes Wide Open.

2\. Legends Are Made Taming The Space.

3\. Others Rush In And Establish A Second Tier.

4\. Then A Third Tier.

5\. Then A Fourth Tier.

6\. Then A Fifth Tier.

7\. Eventually, A New Crop Decides They Don't Want To be Tier 6 Because They Hate The Output Of Tier 5.

8\. A Few Brilliant Minds Focus The General Angst Into "The Better Way" aka "A Space Becomes Wide Open"

GOTO 1;

Good, bad - this is how it has and will always work. Good output is rare and imitated to death over time. Every genre exists because someone did good work in it. Someone, somewhere, once wrote a good country western song. :)

I've been thinking of this in the context of YCombinator. The cost of launching a start up is low with a mix of wise guidance and smart, talented, relentlessly resourceful founders. So the space is wide open. PG and co are taming it and building legend and second tier imitators in the process. This is good. Why? Solely because the work coming out of the companies they fund is good.

The second tier companies are producing good work too. However, there will be a third and then a fourth and eventually the quality will dip. It won't be about building, it'll be about flipping - and flipping will fall in on itself in time.

At that point, either the whole thing becomes a smoking hole in the ground (unlikely) or there will be a reaction against it by the best and brightest. They will accomplish a piece of what PG and co set out to do, but couldn't because their structure didn't inherently support it. The "reaction against" will accomplish it, even though it will itself be flawed in some way and sow the seeds of its eventual demise as it ascends.

I think lamenting a decline is the wrong focus. Do good work yourself. Be the change you want to see, or be the spirit of what you value. So long as you are, it can't die. If it is dying and its outside of you, what was it to you anyway?

<comment><USER5> <http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So, you're saying, "I liked you better before you sold out?" There's a t-shirt for that: [http://store.dieselsweeties.com/products/liked-you-better- be...](http://store.dieselsweeties.com/products/liked-you-better-before-you- sold-out-shirt)

<comment><USER24> > There's a t-shirt for that...

... which is a little bit ironic, in its own way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Surprised no one has posted this link yet: <http://hackingisnotcracking.com/>

It's only 100 days old on HN. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577224>

I found the link memorable, anyway. I've been sharing it with my "liberal arts friends" when they talk about hacking as if the sum of its parts resulted in the OP's third paragraph.

</comment><comment><USER25> Not to sound dismissive but honestly who cares if most hackers have sold out? Who cares if the culture is changing? Hacking was never about a culture, it was about making cool stuff because you feel like it. Hackers don't need cultures, they don't need main stream media attention. The beauty of the "culture" (for want of a better term) is that it is really a culture of one, however you decide to define it is ok. Hacker really is a loose phrase for anyone who makes cool stuff for no other reason than they want to.

This is just my definition but I will admit I missed the 80's and most of the 90's.

</comment><comment><USER26> The group you've identified as modern "hackers" aren't the descendants of the "real hackers" of the 80s and 90s, but are instead members of the web startup scene. The real hackers haven't changed and are still doing what they always have done: learning about and hacking on cool/interesting/challenging stuff, and, in contrast to the web startup crowd, they generally don't really care to self-promote (and that might be a bug, but it's how they usually are). They are just driven by their curiosity to build and explore. What you're pointing out is that there's now a hugely hyped group of web programmers and startup- founder-wannabes who are now self-identifying as "hackers", but hype is not value. The web startup folk seem to be sourced from a different slice of society than where "real hackers" come from. I don't know the exact difference between the two, but I think the main thing is that hackers are driven primarily to _understand_ , but the startup founder type is driven to _create_. Both groups do have both traits in abundance of course, but there definitely seems to be a difference in the primary focus/emphasis. There also seems to be a difference in how the groups treat social status: hackers mostly don't care, and are almost exclusively interested in their projects and the opinion of those who are qualified to judge their work (i.e. other hackers in their domain). But compared to the hacker, the web startup founder cares a lot more about the external social rewards of his actions, and cares about social standing as judged by society at large.

</comment><comment><USER27> What it boils down to, is that systems programming is no longer a necessity for certain kind of start-ups. The applications most people were writing in Turbo C++ were, in some cases, simpler than CRUD screens in PHP. If anything, PHP _is_ today's Basic: the language that kids start with.

There's still however systems programming going on, but in the area of client- server communications (RPC/serialization frameworks), distributed computing, storage systems. There's also great deal of algorithm development going on in the areas of machine learning and information retrieval. Just these challenges don't always occur in early-stage companies.

On the other hand, people are also doing a lot more than the early 90s/late 80s hackers couldn't on personal PCs: domain specific languages, functional programming.

<comment><USER28> Today's basic is Python.

It's even more portable than Java (runs on ARM-based platforms).

<comment><USER27> I meant in the sense of not promoting structured programming and being many people's first (and only) exposure to programming.

Python very much promotes a certain style of programming (object oriented, with some functional elements). I.e. I can write Basic in PHP (especially after the decision to add goto) but not in Python (which is a benefit; also important to me is the fact I can't write Perl in Python).

Most _every_ managed web hosting provider has PHP integration enabled in their product. If a kid is building a website for their boy scout troop which needs an email feedback or guest book form, they will use PHP.

What's also fascinating is relational databases are a part of the "make a simple web application" stack as well. So you have people with very little exposure to computing using _very complex_ environments with very strong abstraction layers. There's many many years of hard-core hacking that enabled that to happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like we all grew up and most of us got day jobs.

EDIT: That sounds more dismissive than I meant. The post is a great read, I miss the old days too.

<comment><USER30> Well, it's a combination of that and of the amount of content respective groups generate - hackers don't have self-indulgent blogs, facebook pages, or youtube channels, and they never did. All that might have changed are the population and diversity if the internet population.

<comment><USER31> Absolutely. The smartest hackers I know don't even have something as self- indulgent as a public web site.

In my experience, hackers have always been the quiet type. Now some loud ones have changed what it means to be a hacker through popularity.

<comment><USER19> On the other hand, by dint of being so loud, they've given even the quiet hackers some well-deserved recognition. Intellectualism has too long been shunned in the main stream. It's finally become sort of (dare I say it?) cool to be a hacker.

Thus, their volume has contributed some social capital to us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Thank you and your liberal arts sensibilities for capturing one perspective of this moment in time - the zeitgeist, if you will. It is good to remember where we came from, better still to know where we are.

The real hackers are still out there and because of the prevalence of the tools of the trade and the complexity of systems compared to 20 years ago, there are 10 times as many of them. Unless you travel to their places and learn their language you won't know they're there. They (generally) don't have blogs.

</comment><comment><USER33> It is the hackers who embrace technology a long time before it goes mainstream. Why should I sit in a dark room, with a dialup connection to a BBS (where I can talk to other hackers) when I can access a site like HN and do the same thing, while also not being limited by the inherent capabilities of a BBS???

Also, why should I not have a snazzy job title??? You make it sound as though hackers should be recluses from the society. Also, you seem to be talking of hackers only in the sense that 'hackers are people who break into computers and modify computer programs' - which is just total BS.

A hacker is an extremely curios person. In the 90's buffer overflows and credit card number generators piqued the interest of hackers. Now there are other stuff which do. Besides wouldn't it be really stupid if hackers were stuck in the the 90's??? Who would lead innovation then???

</comment><comment><USER34> Words change meaning. It doesn't mean the underlying realities have changed. (Though it doesn't disprove it, either.)

I mean, I almost feel bad obviating your entire post, but you're just playing games with the semantics of the word "hacker", not observing useful phenomena. I even think that part of the semantic drift is quite possibly just reflecting a drift in the places _you_ hang out, rather than fundamental changes in the real world.

If you want to go find those hackers, I'm sure you can still find them. I'm not very interested, myself, but I'm pretty sure they're still out there. Not so much on web forums, though.

In the meantime, if you want to do "hackery" things by pretty much any definition, you can find people to do it with online. The existence of "posers" doesn't make the real people go away.

</comment><comment><USER35> Don't forget that the legal system started updating itself and now has laws on the books more akin to being charged with terrorism. Another thing to consider is people getting threatened with bogus associations to organized crime.

People keep a low profile and things are more implicitly communicated when out in the open. A good hacker is creative, so a creative individual can just as easily imagine the "alternate" possibilities of a particular technology.

Are you interested in Setec Astronomy? :D

</comment><comment><USER36> I agree...but we are still out there. I think one of the problems is that "hacking" / "hacker" has become a synonym for "programmer" / "software engineer".

But there are still real hackers out there; like people that sell 0days just to eat and buy new fancy toys and such.

<comment><USER37> Putting aside the security aspect, I think that the terms hacker and programmer as still disparate. They're separated by structure.

If you still through and design something you're programming - putting a fair amount of thought and structure in it before you hit the editor. Just coding and coding is probably closer to hacking to me - it's a messy art but capable of brilliance.

On the security side of things there seems to be a split between 'white hat' security professionals which includes a few blowhards by all accounts, and 'black hats' who have changed from just mischief to working for nefarious types for money. Supposedly there are still quite a few 'grey hats' who are just about playing around and finding out interesting new things while ignoring the black and white side of things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I myself participated in the hacking cult noname123 refers to and i can clearly understand his statement. If you haven't been there, you just can't get it.

"Get a `blog'" haha this is so freaking hilarious and irritating at the same time .. clueless people that have only recently started using computers.

IT today is all about a bunch of business morons abusing the poor text-based HTTP protocol, reinventing user interfaces rendered through an overloaded browser process. An enormous number of levels of abstraction just to display a single facebook button.

They insist on pushing it even further .. every single f __day .. polluting the field with buzzwords, overaplying relational databases where they are actually completely useless! It's all about making simple things look complex, as more and more clueless people get involved in the IT "business".

Thank god we still have OpenBSD and Plan9 and the old phrack articles around.

PS: address space randomization is a lame-ass countermeasure.

</comment><comment><USER39> Great post - i loved the analogies. I grew up on BBS's and VB. In my 20's, I moved into the wild-wild-web. PHP was my first inkling of becoming a programmer, but I soon learned to appreciate the history - teaching myself C/C++, learning design principles, etc., etc., because I needed to know more about the craft.

Now I've gone 'corporate' and my job entails a lot of what you've described aptly as the new new thing. For me hacking has always been about putting the many pieces together. The challenges, more than ever, are still there - it's the nature of them that have changed. Because of the many levels of abstraction, as you've noted, today's hacker needs a broader view and wider skill-set to find those big, big challenges. That's why I still love what I do.

</comment><comment><USER40> Did you miss this gem? - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976>

<comment><USER41> I remember this one. I've never felt more mediocre than I did after reading that write-up. I don't consider myself a hacker or even much of a programmer. I simply make tools to eliminate the boring and monotonous parts of my job. I tinker a bit at home (when I have time), but I have yet to make anything worth showing off.

If I personally had to define what it means to be a hacker this would be on the (very) short list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I believe that you're diluting the word "hacker" and putting it into a stereotype you have either only seen on tv shows or heard your friends ranting about. "Hackers" are just programmers that love to code and solve problems, and they do it well. BSS and buffer overflows and the such were just interesting problems/challenges that they found interesting ways to overcome or dominate.

The closest thing I can put to your description of "hacker" is the ZF0. <http://r00tsecurity.org/files/zf05.txt> . They "hack" as you say, it's a great read.

And guess where i found it? HN :P

</comment><comment><USER43> There's a car analogy here; let's see if I can do it right, considering I just woke up 20 minutes ago.

Before WWII, the automobile was something a fair amount of people owned, but didn't do much with by way of "hacking". The real automotive hacking was done to just keep the damn thing running and reliable.

Post WWII is when the kids of the day started hacking their cars to build hot rods, and they did it to get girls and show off. Most of them, though, tweaked their hardware and horsepower simply to see how far they could push the machine.

By the '60s, hot rods had evolved into muscle cars. Horsepower purists were applying what they knew about hacking the previous generation of automotive technology to the next generation, and managed to Frankenstein a whole new animal--some of these cars could get you killed if you didn't know what you were doing.

Detroit took notice. Fifteen-plus years of kids hacking their engines defined a trend--a trend which said, "give me more horsepower!" Chrysler, in particular, took this to heart and made the Barracuda barely street legal right off the assembly line. All it took was a few small tweaks to turn your showroom car into a full-blown monster of a muscle car.

Chevys took a little more work, but the replacement parts required were dirt cheap, and remained so for a very long time.

By the 80s (or thereabouts) imports were gaining a foothold in the American market, and the muscle car was slowly being phased out for the Ricer. It didn't help that the cars which used to be so easily modified were now rolling off the assembly line with computers under the hood.

Nowadays, cars aren't nearly as easy to tweak as they once were, partly because of the computers, but mostly because they now come with most of the tweaks pre-installed. So, what you get nowadays are the old, die-hard muscle car enthusiasts (who have been pushed well out of the spotlight), the "I live my life a quarter-mile at a time" Ricer morons (who tweak their car with ridiculous body kits and the occasional nitrous oxide bottle, rather than any meaningful auto hack) and the crazy, wild-eyed guy who lives 20 miles out of town and spends his weekends trying to get his old Accord to give him 100 miles per gallon.

The hot-rod kids are still out there, they're just older, wiser and overshadowed by the Fast and the Furious.

</comment><comment><USER44> i too thought 80's and 90's hacker culture might have subsided. and not to be a fanboy or anything, but then i actually read the arc source yesterday.

<http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=10254>

loaded it up like the 'how-to-run-news' file mentions. and it worked. and when you start reading the actual arc and scheme source, you may notice there is like an entire language in one file. it's crazy. it's like how your average non technical person might imagine it: there's this 'programming language file'. the whole source is like a dozen files (forget line count, the fact that you can even conceptually organize it that well is crazy). and then you start to re-read 'on lisp' -- and it's like holy crap, why was i not paying attention, and then maybe you're rewriting your code from whatever other project you were working on and basically you're happy and hacking again....

true story. i only mention it here because obviously this is hacker news and so people might be interested in hacker news.

</comment><comment><USER45> When were media publications about hacker culture so popular anyways? It's true that there has been a boom is online social interaction even among the more "secluded geeky" types in the recent years, but it's also true that "black hat" hackers are now more sophisticated than ever: never before have we heard of things like automated patch-diffing exploits.

This "evolution" doesn't just apply to criminals. in the scholar community, there are plenty of security researchers writing all sorts of papers on the most obscure aspects of computing, and even outside that, there are still those hobbyists who passionately like to explore the limits of our systems, even if only on their spare time. The magnitude and scope of our systems may have become more accomodating to the mainstream culture, but the hacker culture continues to live just as strong, as you put it, "typing silently the night away".

</comment><comment><USER46> _but I think you know what I mean_

No, I have no idea what you mean.

 _it's no longer subversive._

It never was. Some criminal acts involved computers, I guess crime is subversive.

At most you could say there was little demand for hacking skills back in the day. Where's today they'll get a good paycheck.

It's hard to feel cool and subversive when you're paid well. Tough cookies kid, grow up.

</comment><comment><USER47> There is clearly a subset of hackers that is intelligent, thoughtful, logical, motivated, resourceful, and creative. If you go to TechCrunch and read the articles and comments, that subset is either diluted or non-existant. On the other hand, Hacker News is filled with that subset. It's amazing. So while the hacker culture as you describe it may indeed be dying out, I think that the real hacker is thriving, as evidenced through the community here. Let that old hacker culture die out. Let us build a new hacker culture that emphasizes that way of thought. And hope that this way of thought becomes mainstream.

Honestly, for me, increasing the number of Americans (and people elsewhere too) who can think more intelligently would be the holy grail of hacking problems. Can we create more hackers from modern society?

</comment><comment><USER48> You've just hit the malaise called "the passage of time". Things change and things look different. This becomes upsetting if you stand still as you witness the passage of time. A lot of us have seen it in the music industry, remember the 90's where pop and porn pretty much became synonymous? Move sticks, find different communities. A change of scenery will help you find what you are looking for again.

Complaining about people talking business is in conflict with your IT department woes. If you run your own business you get to see the big picture. The reason you'll see so much "business" in hacking is because people grow up and need jobs. For hackers the BEST jobs are startups OR starting your own company. Think about it, would a rebel just take some random job or forge their own path?

</comment><comment><USER49> If you think that an hacker is a criminal that hides behind its CRT monitor, than you never knew what being a hacker means.

You're just mad because those damn kids stole your cool.

"I was really into Nirvana but then MTV came along and made it mainstream so I stopped listening to them. Sellouts!"

</comment><comment><USER50> Fonzie jumped the shark because the show was running out of ideas. We won't ever be out of ideas for software.

Sure, at work I dig around lots of legacy stuff and stitch it together. But it never feels assembly line to me even when I'm not thrilled about a specific task. I'm always solving the most important problem of the moment and trying to think about the best way to do it (in terms of balancing time, knowledge, clarity, efficiency, etc...).

Only in the last few years I've seen some of the best software I've ever encountered. Ableton Live is unbelievably insanely great. Max/Msp/Jitter is an inspiring playground I could stay in forever. There is some great hacking out there and plenty of culture to support it.

</comment><comment><USER51> Hacking is far from being dead.

I would say that it has never been so alive and well since now is so much easier to find the information to get you started (and as a result it is no longer as elitist as it used to be).

What you're talking about is the stuff that goes mainstream.

If your references are newspapers, tv news and now even (most) blogs, you get a distorted picture.

Of course twitter is just marketing (and very little hacking). And that's why everybody knows it (and use it).

Real hacking doesn't break the news because few people are able to understand it. And journalists (sadly) aren't paid to understand what they're talking about or to spread knowledge. They're paid to sell copies (and/or ads).

It has always been like this.

</comment><comment><USER52> I wouldn't worry too much about the future of hacking. As an example, HAR 2009 is going on right now. Take a look at the program:

<https://har2009.org/program/events.en.html>

I've been to the previous edition and let me tell you, there's plenty of tinkering and subverting going on in there.

Here's a selection: "Eyeborg project", "Protheses for $50 instead of $250.000", "Electrical enginering with free/libre open source software", "DNS Security In The Broadest Sense", "A workshop on the ethics of piracy"

</comment><comment><USER53> "a cowboy on the electronic frontier typing silently the night away to a CRT monitor but the internals (of man and machine) is intense full of drama"

Life in a startup company is similar to this sometimes :-)

Conceiving and executing a successful technology startup, is quite a rare ability and to me, is like the "ultimate hack". Twitter and Facebook don't quite count because I don't understand how they are making money or what their product even is.

But there are also plenty of posers who talk the talk and have pretty blogs and like to talk business ideas.

</comment><comment><USER54> I wouldn't call myself a hacker simply because I don't like being labeled. I like being different, for better or for worse.

</comment><comment><USER55> You have to realize: the hackers before us lamented _our_ arrival. And the Real Programmers lamented _theirs_. If anything, it's only right and proper to steal the term and make it suck in a new way. The point is, it doesn't matter: the real ones walk like ducks, quack like ducks.

</comment><comment><USER56> IMO being a hacker has nothing to do with computers. Also, I'm amazed that people here are still making the mistake of conflating crackers - those who make unauthorised access to [computer] systems - with hackers. Presumably you think you're breaking the law by coming on "Hacker News"?

</comment><comment><USER57> Very well done. I loved the paragraph that began with "Fast forward to 2009..." in particular.

</comment><comment><USER58> I really don't think that hacking has actually jumped the shark so to say. More like the community has diversified from purely academic hackers and crackers to more corporate hackers and entrepreneurs.

</comment><comment><USER59> Hackers have never been visible.

They still aren't. A ton of fantastic hackers just do what they love: hack. They don't write about it or have a blog. I know a bunch of hackers, and none of them flaunt it.

</comment><comment><USER60> You can still hack today like they did in the 90's. You just need to smile and wear a suit. Adapt, don't die. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER61> Surely anyone who has been on a Computer Science degree knows what the fixed point finder is!

</comment><comment><USER62> stand up and take your laptop to come to Hacker Camps/Conf, you'll meet 70-90's hackers there:

* <http://har2009.org>

* <http://events.ccc.de/congress/>

* ...

</comment><comment><USER63> In the nineties, "hacking" meant "hackey sack" to me.

</comment><comment><USER64> hacking != cracking

</comment><comment><USER65> I miss Flooz too.

</comment><comment><USER66> Things have always been getting worse.

</comment><comment><USER67> Hear Hear !

</comment><comment><USER28> Nothing is permanent. I still remember the time when I got one of my first jobs for something like $30/mo. only to have an access to personal computer. I remember the first i486 PCs running SCO Open Server (what a mess!) and Informix, I remember FreeBSD 1.x.x and so on.

It was the golden times. Everyone on that field was a hacker. There was no such thing as _apt-get_ or _yum_ which were downgraded sysadmin's level to almost zero. There were even no _./configure && make && make install_ mantra and you were required to understand what you were doing and why.

But today IT is a mainstream and even in decline. It lost its novelty and romance decade ago, and people involved in it nowadays are mere ordinary factory workers.

Of course, there are still great engineers and programmers (not coders) around, and some new fields like ARM-based consumer devices emerged, but I think there are no such feelings like when you saw first ZX Spectrum or Atary or heard its 8-bit sound.

</comment><comment><USER68> Yeah, yeah... In the past everything was better. The trees where more green, the summers where more sunny. Even the women looked better in the 90s. I am sure you had more hair in the 90s (or from personally guessing your age, maybe you have more hair now. Congratulations!)

What I want to say? Every generation wants a "new thing". And if the "new thing" from 20 years ago would be the "new thing" from today, it would not be the ->new<\- thing, right? Be assured, that the new generations can have the same happy time you had, but with their own "new thing" and because it is theirs.

</comment><comment><USER69> To be fair, the early hackers didn't really have an aura of cool, except to other hackers. Popular opinion painted them as basement dwellers (many of them were) and maladjusted youth (script kiddies - many of them were that, too).

The fictionalized stuff didn't reflect reality. Just a little bit more extreme than the fictionalized stuff now (big payouts, glamourous parties, etc).

</comment><comment><USER70> the movie "hackers". that was some good shit. good times, good times.

<comment><USER3> I'd probably argue that it was "bad shit," good times ;)

I know hackers is basically a bad movie, but it does have a special place in my heart. I'm not exactly sure why....

<comment><USER37> It's the mythos - breaking out hackers as something 'cool' - despite all the dumb hollywood stuff in the movie.

<comment><USER71> Dumb hollywood stuff that, funny enough, seems to be praised when it comes in dead tree format (eg. Neuromancer).

Thing is, cyberpunk is not hacking. Buffer overflows are not hacking. It never was, actually. Hacking is about building and learning, not about showing off your skills (which in most cases aren't really there).</comment></comment></comment></comment>