I'm not sure the author understands the "hacker ethos." (ESR captures all the aspects fairly well: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker-ethic.html )

The author makes a comparison between hackers and counter-culture movements, but doesn't seem to understand that hacking (in all its aspects) is orthogonal to "counter-culture." He also seems to be largely unaware of the ethical hacking (MIT-style). He would do well to read through ESR's page for a while.

That is, you can be a CEO, an investor, and a hacker, if you want to make cool things and give them away for free.

If you want to talk about illicit hacking....that's seen a decline because it got harder. In the 90s, most hackers were kids (Legions of Doom, Control-c, etc). Now most hackers are parts of professional criminal organizations or governments.

What happened was that ultimately people make money from business models, not technology. So, eventually, the cultural attention shifts from the the doers to the sellers.

And every once in a while, we have a little shift in the technological landscape, and for a second or two, a few hackers start making money and getting cultural attention. And this attention society also brings attention from sellers, who come over and make themselves at home.

What he's missed is that hippies and yuppies were the same people. Same self-indulgence combined with bogus philosophy to justify it. From granola to granite countertops in a generation.

Suggested reading: Bobos in Paradise.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobos_in_Paradise

I don't expect much traction with this opinion, but I'd say this change also includes the slow takeover by "brogrammers". It was horrifying watching it start, people who had no real intuitive understanding of technology or interest in it who nonetheless learned enough of the vocation to be able to be effective and get a job. No love for it, no yearn for it, no calling to it. I remember talking to a Google intern who said, "I went into dance but I didn't think it would make a good living so I switched to CS.".

On one hand, I don't want to discourage those people - some of them will find it's their calling and they become passionate about it. Most of them though just clutter up companies with people who can't think all that creatively and are way more interested in their next game of Ultimate or the new bar they're trying tonight than learning a new language or exploring technology. There's no 'itch' when it comes to tech work, just money.

I also feel like it's infected the rest of programming culture in general. Programmers have not traditionally been the sort of people who think you need meetups, whatever-a-thons, code camps, and other social-events-masquerading-as-hacking/tech. And if you apply occam's razor it's much less likely that they've discovered a new, better way of being a hacker/programmer, and more likely they were predisposed to backslapping, social drinking and partying already, so of course that's the kind of stuff they're going to try and spread more of in the industry - just as if you had a more technically-minded person in, say, Sales, who would have a hard time breaking their habits of thinking of things in engineering terms.

It sucks. I thought hacker & nerd culture would grow up and mature, instead it just got squashed out by the brogrammers.

This is pretty far wrong in many respects. The history is wrong: Calling John Draper one of the first phone phreaks, and treating him as representitive of the rest, or even claiming he made the discovery that gave him is nickname is just flat out incorrect. Read "Exploding the Phone," by Phil Lapsley, for a more accurate take on phreaking. Secondly, IMHO, those "sillicon valley types," people begging for capital to build new things, aren't dissimilar to the kind of academic environment the word hacker originated in: clever programmers, working on projects, and trying to get grants or investment. But that's not important.

Most importantly, the definition of hacker is off. Considering how utterly impossible it is to give a good definition - ask 50 hackers what a hacker is, you'll get 50 answers - you can feel free to argue this. But I believe, as, it seems, do many of you, that being a hacker isn't about power, or counterculture, or anything like that. It's about creativity, ingenuity, intelligent problem solving, and it has an element of playfullness about it, and a certain pride, to say that you built it, that you know that it works, that you can trust it, and a determinedness to make that true, to fix it if it's broken, and improve it if it isn't.

To quote Cliff Stoll's exellent book, "The Cuckoo's Egg": "The people I knew who called themselves hackers were software wizards who managed to creatively program their way out of tight corners. They knew all the nooks and crannies of the operating system. Not dull software engineers who put in forty hours a week, but creative programmers who can't leave the computer until the machine's satisfied. A hacker identifies with the computer, knowing it like a friend."

Many will disagree. Feel free to write up or link your favorite definition.

I gotta say, the only thing worse than implicit tribalism is explicit tribalism. I can only imagine what they think about the preps and the cheerleaders.

just take a walk through downtown seattle to see this first hand. all sorts of corporate drones and middle managers with their official "im a hacker" wear with logos for the multinational corporation they work at.

If you are willing to co-opt the word "gentrification" so aggressively than it seems hypocritical to complain about "the man" co-opting the word hacker. Sure, hacker means something different than it used to, but language evolves. I'm sorry that you no longer have a special word that you can use to distinguish yourself from those who are inferior.

Old https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10033969

the author is heaping a lot of meaning on the hacker ethos/culture, and is probably right about how society and the media view "the hacker".

seems to me that for folks who participate in one element or another of this giant range of stuff .. the label is rather annoying.

Calm down with the $5 words.

It isn't that I am stupid but it makes for a really annoying read when I am having to think more about the words than the meaning.

I shouldn't have to re-read this article like it is a research paper just so I can absorb what you are saying.

TL;DR: Capitalism > Hacker Ethos