>Hacker News all look seriously dated in comparison
Yes please make a movie about your next it projekt ;)
I even hate repair-videos on youtube, it's slow and lame, the fix-it manuals are 1000s times better (since i know what a torx is and that most screws open counter-clock-wise)
>this computer era is problem trying to find its solutions.
I don't think this is true. I watched a local mechanic fixing my car, and YouTube was an important tool for them. Watching someone else fix a car was much more effective than reading a schematic. Finding part numbers was easy. Ordering them was easy. I strongly suspect that health care people do the same thing (but don't want to admit it and do it behind closed doors). Certainly lawyers do this, via Lexis Nexis.
For anyone doing creative technical work, the Internet is wonderful. You can find authors, papers, howtos, videos, etc. Of course a good 80% of this content is awful bordering on harmful, but that 20% is vast. For software, HN manages to capture a large fraction of that 20%, IMHO.
It's also true that smartphones have brought addictive gaming behavior to the masses. But if you can avoid this then you've got a great resource.
> what is there to do but refresh Hacker News or rewatch old shows
This statement boggles my mind. There are so many interesting things in this modern era to do, watch, learn, listen to, participate in that it would take 10 lifetimes just to scratch the surface.
I've had to make brutal cuts to my hobbies in recent years just so I could focus on deep diving into a few and I'm still desperately short on time.
Honestly when I was younger computers were just a lot more fun. You want to do a LAN party? Be prepared for an hour of diagnosing network problems -- and we liked that! Take that one example and multiply it by everything. Tweaking and customizing and finding random cool software was all part of the experience.
Same with smartphones before the iPhone.
These days perhaps products all just too good and too finished. They are just tools now -- they have less intrinsic fun hacker value on their own.
I have gone a little Retro -- picking up old devices and not using them for anything useful.
Yeah, I call BS on that. This bubble us techie live in it paints this sort of boring. Try go on the country side or in another industry and suddenly you are looked upon as some sort of god - it's almost cringy they way they treat you when you spend 5 minutes fixing something that half the village tried to fix it in past year and then they gave up.
> I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded "equations" is used to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well.
>Nothing unusual about it then, maybe a little different now? Not sure.
Like you, I cut my teeth in the 80's .. never trust a coder with a screwdriver, amiright .. but it seems that a rejuvenation of this ethos is upon us, with the Arduino and Maker crowd producing plenty of young developers who know how to burn their fingers ..
>I'm not sure why people struggle so much and fight abstractions so much but I guess that's a sign a techie is getting "old".
Yeah, it's a sign they are older, and have seen the same shit play again and again, and starry eyed newcomers fall for every new fad with shit-eating grins...
> important to not idolize or idealize the particular on-ramp you took X years ago.
I agree tremendously. As I wrote four years ago¹:
It’s not too late in 2015 to get started in computers. People who got started in the 1990’s feel that way because they started in assembly language and compilers and all that, and how could anyone starting now possibly learn all that?
What they don’t realize is that people who got started in computers in the 1960’s feel that since they started with soldering and electronics and radio and circuits, nobody could possibly learn all that.
It’s easy to start in computers at any time. You simply ignore all the stuff that’s too low level to be worth your time to get bogged down in.
And two years ago²:
You were frustrated by Windows 98 because you could not reason about it on the level you were used to. But think back on the earlier electronic enthusiasts who were used to thinking about resistors and voltages – they would have been just as frustrated by your ZX Spectrum because they would not have been able to reason about machine code by thinking about what voltages they mean. The level to reason about Windows 98 would instead be by thinking about installed programs, registry settings, DLLs, etc. If someone came to computers fresh and started with Windows 98, this level is what they would know.
And three months ago³:
[…] Hasn’t it always been the case that the current generation skips learning about useless lower layers used by older generations? How could it be that the layers you grew up are the special ones which are still useful, when all the layers which came before, which people at the time thought essential, have turned out not to be so? […]
> I think Windows taking over the world from 1995 to 2008 has absurdly destroyed lot of hacker interest in computing devices.
I'm 32, so not really falling into your description when it comes to age, but if it weren't for Linux I wouldn't be here today writing code for a living. I was around your age and I was almost illiterate when it came to programming (but very good at maths and all), until I installed a Mandrake Linux distribution on my PC and then discovered Python.
Like you said, even having access to a decent computer terminal can make a huge difference, the difference between just typing "python" and having access to its REPL and on the other hand struggling to set and export some crazy PATHs in DOS (and to this day I'm sure I discovered Copy/Paste into the DOS terminal by mistake).
It's good that Bill Gates does the things he does now and I understand why people would look up to him, but we should also think of the huge opportunity costs that Microsoft's policies imposed on the rest of the world.
>Given this is Hacker News… it was a magical time for technology.
Honestly, I was probably the most "techy" person I knew and I remember spending a lot of time back then messing around configuring memory and what was loaded to get things to run. It was interesting at the time, but I was also young and had nothing better to do.
To me, I find technology today be a lot more magical. I'm really glad I don't have to spend so much time just to get something basic running today.
> Its sad but its true and I wish I knew what to do about it.
For us that have already been spoiled by modern computing, we need to be shown what useful stuff that we can do by learning about computers (obviously we would need to be on a relatively open modern computer). If most people are satisfied with whatever gets them through the more-or-less intuitive GUIs that lets them watch some videos, do they really need to know more? Well yes, when their computer eventually starts behaving strangely and simply restarting it doesn't help... but that kind of frustrating troubleshooting doesn't leave a good taste in many people's mouth when it comes to having to deal with computers.
If they are already used to modern, powerful computing, chances are that they won't be impressed by the usual computer wizardry that programmers are impressed by. Simply because they don't need, or don't see the utility in, shuffling a bunch of text around efficiently. Instead of becoming a wiz at retro computing - which might be in part because you need to be a wiz, simply because it is more primitive - what can we impress people with on modern computers that they can't do themselves easily (and would like to do)? They've already been spoiled by modern computing - for many, there is no turning back.
If the only real allure of being a computer whiz - to most people, anyway - is to be able to operate arcane technology, then the value proposition simply isn't there for people that do not appreciate computing in itself (and even that might be an acquired taste, so sort of a catch 22). It's like a classical guitar virtuoso who can be motivated to learn songs and pieces solely for the technical challenge they pose, while his students just want to gain the skills necessary to learn their favourite band's songs, or the songs that they've written themselves.
> Maybe the magic, the newness, the expensiveness was part of the appeal for me, maybe the kids are just swamped in compute power and touchscreens from birth, it's too normal.
I think so too. In my case, it was all new stuff and everybody was trying to figure it out, myself included. Technology is way more common now than it was then!
> I remember a blog being posted here on HN where a fellow hacker did all of the tech for his family, and he created a bunch of digital illiterates as a results. I'm trying to not fall for that trap at the very least.
> Do you think that all people are born with the innate ability to master computers, programming, and other technical tasks?
No. That is besides the point.
There is a big difference in knowing how to repair a computer, how to program a computer and how to do technical tasks with a computer.
Repairing a computer normally involves identifying the part that is faulty and replacing it. On a desktop PC that is relatively because the components go together like Lego pieces tbh. My father managed to replace the memory in his ageing desktop computer by just looking for what the parts were in the machine and just replacing them. He barely understands how to use a keyboard (he highlights each letter with the mouse and presses delete)
I am good at programming computers but I don't understand how Excel works past very basics. My friend who can't "program" with something like a text editor or IDE, she will quite happily do all sorts of complicated tasks with sheets and cells in it all day.
> Just as not all people are born with innate ability to write a good novel, paint a masterpiece, write a symphony, or lead a nation, I'd say no.
I never claimed the opposite.
However there are plenty of people while they can't write a symphony can start up their own metal tribute band and make quite a lot of money.
You are painting it as a binary of people that can't do something and people that have mastered something. There are plenty room inbetween.
This place is called hackernews and I have explain this point sooo verbosely. This must be satire.
> But all people are born with the ability to live their own life and learn how best to do it in the direction that seems natural for themselves.
Some aren't actually. I have a friend that looks after seriously mentally ill people. They must be cared for almost 24/7. There is one lad he told me about that will masturbate in public because he has no concept of it being socially unacceptable due to having somethign similar to asbergers IIRC.
> The dude's in high school and finds stuff like this?
Man, you should have seen the european demoscene in the 90s, half of the geniuses had the same main obstacle: homework from school.
Despite what it may seem IT is still in its infancy which means that we work in a field where pure affinity for the subject and raw curiosity-driven brain power (or in some case, dedication to the task), as well as a couple hundred euros worth of hardware, is enough to get into the most complex parts and sometime redefine them.
Access to all the papers and education you need is insanly open on the internet (unlike other fields), as well as trillions of line of code for you to explore. The only two limits are yourself, and time.
Which is not to say that training and experience have no role, but IT as a field is extremly large and for many parts we're still in an early uncharted phase, so discovery is made by explorers and dedicated people[1].
Still, most dev would gain a lot by going through a good algorithmic course.
[1] While talking about dedication, special mention to the linux everywhere guys. I will never not smile at the idea that some of the best IT protections in the world, costing millions upon millions, from the Xbox to HD-DVD to whatever, were brought down because someone wanted to run it on linux.
Yes please make a movie about your next it projekt ;)
I even hate repair-videos on youtube, it's slow and lame, the fix-it manuals are 1000s times better (since i know what a torx is and that most screws open counter-clock-wise)
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