There has been a change in the community here over the last decade, we've lost a lot of the hacker spirit and have a larger proportion of "chancers", people who are only in tech to "get rich quick". The legacy of ZIRP combined with The Social Network marketing.
> Doesn't that describe SV in general, and big tech in particular?
Absolutely! It's just that the hopeful hacker/nerd culture used to be more dominant here (slashdot had the more cynical types).
Now there are a generation who don't know anything but Javascript but think that they're God's gift to programming. I can understand it as ZIRP resulted in the bar being dropped to the floor for jobs which paid SV salaries. Imagine earning that kind of money straight out of school and all you had to be able to do was implement Fizzbuzz.
The hackers ARE still here as are some really amazing people but this always seems to happen with communities. The only constant is change. And without change communities die.
No. It's reflecting on an overall culture that embraces taking chances. Even if 50% of those chances lead to failure it still beats the paralyzing fear of moving forward.
Corporations and governments are locking computers down. Secure boot. Hardware remote attestation. Think you can have control by installing your own software? Your device is now banned from everything. We eill be ostracized from digital society. Marginalized. Reduced to second class citizens, if that.
Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is being destroyed. I predict one day we'll need licenses to program computers.
It's gotten to the point sacrificing ideals for money has started to make sense for me. The future is too bleak. Might as well try to get rich.
I might get worried when mainstream computers won't be able to run Linux. Until then.. I'm not worried.
Seems there are efforts to bring openness to platforms that inherently have an interest to resist it and while the progress is slow.. there is progress
This is the number one issue in computing today. Everybodys running around trying to get rich building shitty extensions and frameworks without looking at the bigger picture. We need collective action. Imagine a movement where everybody becomes millitant about adblockers. Like install them on every computer and deflate the advertising industry. Smarter people than me can probably think of better ideas
Right now its death by 1000 cuts. There needs to be a big change or we could lose everything in just 20-30 years in my opinion
As a hacker, I don't care about cookies or what the EU thinks about them. Disable them if you really care. Or at least use a browser that blocks 3P cookies (not Chrome).
people still insist on using a browser built by a company that makes money off of ads and act surprised when said company purposefully compromises their privacy and data on said browser.
What about when the lack of cookies makes everything break and you cannot work around it because it's too much JS to reverse-engineer, and/or it's a copyright-felony in your country to develop workarounds?
"I'll use my l33t hacker skillz to avoid it on my own" is a losing strategy in the long run.
A similar thing happens with the proliferation of cameras and license-plate readers.
You can keep them enabled and clear at end of session. I'm not saying this makes you untrackable; that is a losing strategy due to all the non-cookie tracking, but also the cookie popup isn't helping there.
> Hackers should know the government is never on your side
Never is naive. Hackers should understand governments are complex, dynamic and occasionally chaotic systems. Those systems can be influenced and sometimes controlled by various means. And those levers are generally available to anyone with a modicum of intelligence and motivation.
If I am not mistaken, the anarchist school of thought is okay with governance and even governments, but not with the concept of the state - an entity that exists to enforce governance with violence. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy,_State,_and_Utopia
I’m not 100% sure though.
edit - a (vs. the) school of thought is more accurate.
I think of anarchy as a theoretical end state, where power is perfectly distributed among each individual, but that this is less of an actually achievable condition and more of a direction to head in (and away from monarchy, where power is completely centralized).
The ideal of self-governance as opposed to alienated state or institutional governance is quite common in anarchist thought. Some would probably consider it foundational for the tendency.
The thing that anarchists have a problem with is hierarchy, of which states are a manifestation. Most anarchists aren't just "okay" with some kind of government, but believe it to be necessary.
i guess I can see how it might work in a single person's life or small group, but on a large scale doomed to failure because the neighboring country/cit-state/etc will be organized, with and organized army. That group will eventually desire something the anarchist community has and will destroy it.
That is indeed the sticky question, but, again, anarchists aren't opposed to organizing either, even at scale - only that such organizing should be fundamentally egalitarian, not forced.
You can argue that hierarchical organization is fundamentally more efficient, but by the same logic authoritarian governments ought to always outcompete democracies militarily, yet it's clearly not as simple as that.
One could also argue that in a world where anarchist modes of organization are the norm, an attempt by some group to organize for the purpose of conquering neighbors would be treated as a fundamental threat by basically all other groups and treated as an imminent threat that warrants legitimate community self-defense. Of course, then the question is how you get to that state of affairs from the world of nation-states.
I don't have answers to these questions, but it should also be noted that it's not a binary. Look at Rojava for an example of a society that, while not anarchist, is much closer to that, yet has shown itself quite capable of organizing specifically for the purpose of war (they were largely responsible for crushing ISIS, and are still holding against Turkey).
Yep. The FBI swings from lawful good to lawful evil on a case by case basis. Trusting them is dangerous, but a world where they can be ignored is more dangerous.
The reasonable position is that the state exists to propagate and protect itself, which is made up of it's citizens, you included. This is just like any organism or organization works.
Like a company, that doesn't mean they will always make decisions that coincide with what you want or what you think is best. But, it DOES mean they have some goal to keep their people, on the whole, happy, because otherwise they no longer exist.
For example, yes the US government sucks in a lot of ways. The US government ALSO wants you to get an education, and they give it away for free. Because more educated people means a stronger economy, which is good for everyone. You might take this for granted, but: there are many countries where the population, as a whole, cannot read or write. Your literacy is the result of hundreds of years of work and has, essentially, been GIVEN to you. That's not something you just have by nature of being human.
If you were to put a name on your ideological position, what would it be?
It can't be liberalism, since that tradition considers the state separate from society, and the state's purpose to provide liberty to the latter.
Communists of the 'tankie' variety (i.e. 'authoritarian' rather than 'libertarian' or anarchist) believe the state is or ought to be made up of its citizens, but they are aiming for scientific industrial administration and would never describe the state as an organism.
The tendency that does describe the state in that way, is fascism.
If the state inherently wanted all that for its citizens, why have people formed unions and militant organisations and struggled to achieve things like common education and so on?
The state, as like a concept, doesn't 'inherently' want anything, because there's infinite ways to form a state. The organization of human being in which every person has a voice or say, does tend to operate in a certain way.
The main difference between the public sector and the private sector is that the public sector is somewhat of a democracy, and the private sector is much closer to a monarchy. Obviously our democracy is not perfect, but it's a lot better than "the dictator (board and CEO) makes the decisions, you are cog, please comply".
There's market forces to mitigate that, just like we can say there's foreign affairs to mitigate dictatorships in nations, but that doesn't work if you have a lot of power. Exhibit A: Russia. Russia was supposed to be discouraged from invading the Ukraine, but ultimately, there's nothing stopping the King from doing that.
Let's look at Tesla. Elon Musk is supposed to be discouraged from doing a Nazi Salute because free market, but ultimately there's nothing stopping the king from doing that.
For our government, it makes decisions with the coordination of thousands of people, many of them poor and will experience the direct consequences of those decisions. The further we stray away from that core principle, the worse it gets. Just in general, when we talk about human organization.
> But, it DOES mean they have some goal to keep their people, on the whole, happy, because otherwise they no longer exist.
Not really. The goal is to prevent people from being unhappy enough that they revolt. But so long as that is not a real possibility, the company - or the state - is quite willing to make the population less happy if that means more productivity that can be extracted.
The example you gave - free education - is precisely about that. The point of schools is not to make the people happy, it's to make the people productive. But, also, ideally to brainwash them into being "good citizens" (meaning compliant and not causing problems). It can even mean "happy", but that is not necessarily the desirable state of affairs from the citizens' perspective, either - e.g. in USSR under Stalin, the cult of personality was strong enough that many people were genuinely happy to participate in it, and genuinely sad when the guy finally died; but it wasn't actually good for them!
No, the fundamental problem with state is exactly that: it exists to propagate and protect itself, but you, the citizen, are not included. You are a resource, and your well-being and happiness is only incidental, not the actual goal.
The reasonable position then is to demand governance that is actually in the interests of those governed. And one can reasonably argue that the resulting entity is not a state.
> No, the fundamental problem with state is exactly that: it exists to propagate and protect itself, but you, the citizen, are not included. You are a resource, and your well-being and happiness is only incidental, not the actual goal.
Beliefs like that are self-fulfilling prophecies. People who believe in that often give up trying to influence the state and exclude themselves from its interests. If too many people do that, the state will not care about them.
There is a trade-off based on the size of the state. Small states are easier to influence and more likely care about their citizens. Politicians stay more in touch with other citizens, and the average citizen is more likely to know some politicians in their everyday life. But small states often make amateurish mistakes, because they are governed by amateurs without access to sufficient expertise on various topics.
Large states have an easier time finding the expertise they need. But they tend to develop a political class out of touch with ordinary citizens. Political leaders become powerful and important people who mostly associate with other elites.
I believe the ideal size of a state is in single-digit millions, or maybe up to 10 or 20 million. Like most European countries and US states.
Neither are the billionaires and their deputies who both own and run all the megacorps.
99% of the current AI push is entirely anti-hacker ethos. It is a race to consolidate control of the world's computing and its economic surplus to ~5 organizations.
A few people do interesting stuff on the edges of this, but the rest of the work in it is anathema to hacker values.
The client ai push has also enabled people to run local llama models and build products without those companies. Presumably there'll be more of this to come
That's the 1%. It's the hair on the back of the elephant.
Their capabilities will fall further and further behind models that need a billion dollars to train, and a supercomputer to run. You're making a faustian bargain.
In a democracy, the government is its citizen. It sucks when you disagree with the majority of the voters, of course. But it's wrong to say that the government is against the majority of the voters: it was elected by them.
So the people should talk to their representative. A government becomes authoritarian not only because of an authoritarian leader, but also because of the enablers, people like the spineless Mike Johnson.
A hacker should probably know that it's usually trade offs and blanket statements are very useless. Certain tools are good for certain tasks and situations, but bad for others. No free lunch and all that.
If you make that blanket statement, you're definitely not a hacker (or just a novice). But you'd make a heck of a politician or tech bro salesman
And the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. It can be a temporary ally, but you always have to be wary of it becoming strong enough because you can become its enemy tomorrow.
True that. I went to a building in SF that dedicated floor space to every adjacent field like robotics, AI, crypto, etc. Zero hacking or even cyber related space.
I’ve said it before, but the cynicism and weirdness that used to exist here has been gobbled up by a new wave of early stage tech evangelists who are just here to complain about ladders and levels.
It’s honestly been depressing to watch lots of good comments and posts go unnoticed, while the bait comments get all the engagement.
There’s also weirdly (ok, maybe not that weird) amount of casual hate on here now. It’s subtle, but I’ve been seeing a lot of negative karma and rhetorics that never used to exist here. I suppose it’s just “the internet” these days, but I’d wager HN has just grown too much outside the bubble it once was, and now we have a wide open door with lights vs the tiny alley way we once had.
Some of that is attributable to raw inflow/outflow differences, where newer cohorts are bigger and therefore the blend would shifts even if no oldsters ever left.
In the last few years I think sentiment on hacker news has shifted from libertarian leaning to much mored left leaning. The same happened on Reddit a few years before. Anyway, just my gut feeling, nothing scientific.
Keen observation both you and OP. We've gone from a sense of techno optimism to tech blaming.
Valid criticism is OK (I stand by crypto being a scam) but bring up any topic that is neutral to popular(VR, Autonomous Driving, LLM) and people are first to be luddites come out.
> We've gone from a sense of techno optimism to tech blaming.
IMO this is simply because the tech industry isn't what it was 20+ years ago. We didn't have the monopolistic mammoths we have today, such ruthless focus on profiteering, or key figures so disconnected from the layperson.
People hated on Microsoft and they were taken to court for practices that nowadays seem to be commonplace with any of the other big tech companies. A future where everyone has a personal computer was exciting and seemed strictly beneficial; but with time these "futures" the tech industry wants us to imagine have just gotten either less credible, or more dystopic.
A future where everyone is on Facebook for example sounds dystopic, knowing the power that lays on personal data collection, the company's track record, or just what the product actually gives us: an endless feed of low-quality content. Even things that don't seem dystopic like VR seem kinda unnecessary when compared to the very tanginble benefit the personal computer or the internet brought about.
There are more tangible reasons to not be optimistic nowadays.
> A future where everyone has a personal computer was exciting and seemed strictly beneficial
I like to frame it in terms of capital goods, even if I didn't think of it at that time: The personal computer's promise was that everyone would own their own digital foundry and factory, creating value for them, controlled by them, and operating according to their own best interests.
Nowadays, you're just renting whatever-it-is from BigCorp, with massive lock-in. A tool for enacting other people's decisions at you.
I find it really hard to classify myself. I've always called myself a "libertarian" - I believe the best strategy to Civilization is to maximise freedom for anyone. As freedom enables enlightenment an enlightenment drives progress. To actually achieve that, in the real world, means that you have to distribute and limit power. That means limiting not only government power but also corporate power. That means regulation, strong regulators (breaking monopolies), policies to keep prices down (including rent/housing!) and to enable free market competition and innovation. And provide an economic system where risks can be taken, enabled by a social let (and social healthcare).
I felt that that was more common here 15 years ago before Big Tech pivoted into the cynical extractive and, in the case of the socials, net economic drag industry that it is now.
The really weird thing is that my views are considered both very right-wing (free markets, globalisation are great, maximal freedom, maximal responsibility, freedom of religion) and very left wing (strong regulation, policy to minimise rent/house prices, strong social net, progressive taxation and wealth limits, freedom to be LGBTQ+ etc).
This isn't actually unusual in the grand scheme of things, just at the moment. "Libertarian" was originally a word that anarchists came up with to describe themselves for a good reason. Lysander Spooner is famous in right-wing libertarian circles, but the guy also promoted mutualism and was the member of the First International. Today, what you describe goes under the label of "libertarian free-market socialism".
Regarding regulation, I do have to note that in many cases when you try to root-cause corporate power, it turns out that it hinges on active government regulation in practice. For example, consider the fundamentals of capitalism, namely, accumulation of capital. Why do we get those huge monopolies in the first place? Well, because more capital means more way to generate wealth (or, more precisely, to appropriate wealth generated by your workers), which can be invested into more capital etc - there is a natural positive feedback loop here. So at a first glance it feels like you need government to actively do something to prevent companies from becoming too large. But consider: what does it mean for a company to own something? It's not a person, so it can't really have physical possession of things. It's all abstract property rights, and the only reason why that works is because the society as a whole acknowledges those rights and legitimate, and, crucially, because there is a state providing infrastructure (police, courts etc) to enforce them. Now imagine what would happen if, for example, the state simply refused to acknowledge property rights past a certain limit and simply wouldn't enforce them on behalf of the property owners.
>a larger proportion of "chancers", people who are only in tech to "get rich quick"
your complaint was Unassailable Hacker® jwz's complaint about HN more than 10 years ago here's a link (many on HN complain that this is NSFW https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png since there are rarely complaints here that anything else is NSFW, I'd suggest people feel insulted by the message)
the thing that has actually changed since jwz's disgust is the site is now flooded by socialism, the antithesis of get-rich enthusiasm
The hackers are still here, lurking in the shadows. Bananas. They are just tired of being berated by fanboys anytime they criticize the will of the tech bros. There is no fun in typing out a well-researched answer only to face a torrent of one-second "nah, you are wrong" replies mixed in with AI slop. Bananas.
> There is no fun in typing out a well-researched answer only to face a torrent of one-second "nah, you are wrong" replies mixed in with AI slop. Bananas.
That "AI slop replies" excuse you mentioned would only apply to the past 3 years at most (aka ChatGPT 3.5 release on Nov 30th 2022). While the grandparent comment's take felt true to my perception for at least the past 10-15 years, way before "AI slop replies" were even a remote concern.
Am I the victim of the algorithm? Because all I see on HN these days is people pessimistic about tech and society. The tenor here is overwhelmingly negative.
Where are you seeing anyone defend big tech, tech bros, or any tech in general?
This is such a laughable comment. Being in favour of a regulation - any regulation - is not part of the "hacker spirit". A hacker qua a hacker is interested in a regulation insofar as they can work around it, or exploit it to their ends, not to put one in place to directly achieve something. That's not to say all regulations are bad, or even that the GDPR is, just that HN being for or against it isn't proof of some demographic shift.
I don't know if it's a changing of the audience or a change in how people behave generally, but this place has been insufferable lately whenever anything remotely related to Donald Trump's administration comes up.
One of the things that made this place special relative to other online communities is the ethos to interrogate through a lens of curiosity. Now, there's a lot of vitriol that's indistinguishable from any other comment section.
Yeah I still remember my first interaction with a supporter back in 2016. It was startling, and the first hint I had that politics was about to shift abruptly.
My rule for a sane HN experience: avoid and flag any articles related to Trump, Elon, <current culture war topic>, American politics, and anything tangential that summons them.
It’s a difference in values. To some, the ends justify the means and human life has no inherent value and the world is zero sum, and to some, a lying malignant narcissist deciding who lives and who dies is a personification of evil.
To some people, it’s literally a choice between that “lens of curiosity” and their families lives. But people for whom politics has never directly impacted them past a few % up or down in their paychecks can’t understand that, or feel safe in the idea that “they won’t come for me”.
precisely this. cool detachment or disinterested curiosity around political events is the privilege of those comfortable enough to believe current politics won't affect them. These same people are also usually ultimately responsible for the apathy/failure to act and stop meaningful regime change before it's too late.
I'd love to live in a world where one can neatly compartmentalize reality and view life-altering political shifts with "a lens of curiosity", but that isn't how the world works.
