Hackers not in the Cathedral

 I think the success of modern hackers is just another example of the sort of entrepreneurial spirit and risk taking that is present in American culture compared to other cultures, especially European cultures. While Europe has had some notable startups (Skype, others probably), they pale in comparison to the amount of American startups (even Silicon Valley on its own). Part of that is the fact that America more so than other countries rewards risk taking and starting your own business. Part of it is boring and somewhat legal in nature - it is a lot easier to start a company in America, and regulations are very favorable compared to those in other countries. However, a large part of it is cultural in nature. It’s often said that Americans live to work and Europeans work to live, and studies looking at average hours worked by country bear this out. Obviously starting up a company requires massively more work than working at an already established company, so Americans clearly have a...

Language is an incredibly important tool in all facets of life. Different languages have different ways of expressing concepts such as numbers or the future, all of which affect how we think about these concepts. In some languages, the future is described more in vague terms rather than exact terms, which can lead to differences in how cultures that speak that language view the future. In written language, we can see that the Arabic script is far more efficient than the Roman script in terms of numbers, which is the reason we now use Arabic numbers instead of Roman numerals. The same applies to programming languages. Choosing the programming language that you are going to use when starting a project is one of the most important design choices you could make. You must consider the efficiency of the programmer in addition to the efficiency of the program. For a small script that is unlikely to see use past a very few people, it is perfectly fine to choose a language like Python that is ...

Paul Graham sees hacking (and by extension hackers) as closer to an artform than anything else. Paul describes hackers as makers, people who are creating something beautiful, not necessarily something new and original, but something beautiful whether in output or in design. I believe his definition is compatible and in fact fits in very well with Levy’s description of hackers. The hacker ethic even mentions that computers can be used for art and beauty! Additionally, from the stories we have read of early hackers trying to impress other hackers through code shaving to tales of hackers choosing to program an astronomically accurate star chart for the background of a game, we can see that beauty has been part of hacking since it’s very beginning. There are certainly diminishing returns to code shaving - once you’ve reached the point where you are spending hours upon hours to try and shave off a line or two of code, you’re wasting your time if you purely think of your efforts as being to...

I think it’s plainly clear that the Hacker Ethic cannot truly and fully survive in a world of commercial and proprietary software. As we’ve seen in the previous chapter, many hardware hackers found themselves unable to continue to freely spread information once they joined or created their own companies. Even though some of the early video game companies shared information amongst themselves in order to help create better products, this behavior was limited only to those companies and larger companies (like Atari) had the opposite behavior, and tried to keep as much information hidden as possible. In addition, these companies would pursue litigation against the smaller, hacker owned companies. Over time, the hacker companies would eventually be forced to compete like larger companies did, both as the market evolved and as the hackers become more divorced from their roots, either over time or with an influx of new management (we saw the same thing happen with Apple with Wozniak leaving)...

  In this week's reading and discussion, we learned about the second wave of hackers, who were more focused on hardware than just software. These hackers were of a very different type than the hackers who were shaped by the culture of the RLE lab. While the first hackers were systems hackers, who were obsessed far more with the software they could make on the hardware they had, the second wave hardware hackers were very interested in building their own computers, especially with the rise of microprocessors. While they both emphasized the importance of the Hacker Ethic and the hands-on imperative, the main difference was that software was not the end all be all for these hackers. They did write and give away programs for free (at least, in the beginning they did), but they also focused on building their own computers and increasing their performance. The fun for these hackers was often in the actual construction of the machine and knowing why it worked, which was not as important fo...

When I was younger, I thought of a “true hacker” as a young guy in his mid 20s, usually wearing a trench coat and sunglasses (even indoors!), who got into databases or got control of systems  remotely. After taking systems programming, my view shifted more towards a more broad view, that hackers are basically just people who do side projects. However, reading through this week’s reading, I’ve come to think of a “true hacker” as someone who creates something with pure passion, especially if that something is a modification of or interacts with an existing system, and is willing to spend an inordinate amount of time working on their project.    I think especially of the early hackers from MIT of the Tech Model Railroad Club as my example of “true hackers”. When I was reading the stories of how they would spend 30 hours over a weekend just learning about new systems, or that they would stay up until 3 in the morning or switch to 30 hour days just to have more time to play ar...