[absurdo]

For the young players: this is what hacker in “Hacker News” stands for. This is 101 and it’s very simply explained which makes it a great step by step example of a typical journey. Hack-a-day is full of these if you want more.

The author is clearly curious and leads in knowing a lot to begin with.

The work-behind-the-work is looking up data sheets for the chips involved, desoldering them without damaging them, in the case of memory resoldering with hookup wire and hopefully its access is slow enough that it can work fine over the length of the wire, following hunches, trying things, and knowing (for next time) the possibility of using a pinhole camera or something of the sort when drilling shallow holes and looking through for tamper traces to avoid in further drills, if so desired be.

As others have mentioned, it would be interesting if the author stuck in and got past the tamper checks to see if it would work as normal. Oh well!

[aag]

The term "hacker," even in the computer field, originally had a larger scope than computer security. It had a more philosophical definition, too. I host a copy of the Jargon File[1], compiled by Guy Steele et al., on my web site. It defined "hacker" as[2]:

  HACKER [originally, someone who makes furniture with an
  axe] n. 1. A person who enjoys learning the details of
  programming systems and how to stretch their capabilities,
  as opposed to most users who prefer to learn only the
  minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically,
  or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing
  about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating
  hack value (q.v.). 4. A person who is good at programming
  quickly. Not everything a hacker produces is a hack. 5. An
  expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does
  work using it or on it; example: "A SAIL
  hacker". (Definitions 1 to 5 are correlated, and people
  who fit them congregate.) 6. A malicious or inquisitive
  meddler who tries to discover information by poking
  around.  Hence "password hacker", "network hacker".

I'm guessing that PG had this broader definition in mind when Hacker News was started.

No history of the term "hacker," however brief, would be complete with a reference to The UNIX-HATERS Handbook[3].

[1] https://speechcode.com/jargon/

[2] https://speechcode.com/jargon/jargon.info.Hacker.html

[3] https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

[BuildTheRobots]

> The term "hacker," even in the computer field, originally had a larger scope than computer security.

I've been helping run a Hackspace for a few years; I can't tell you how many times (sometimes per week or even day depending on what I'm doing) I have to have this conversation.

I've gotten quite used to going through the patter with non-tech people - try dealing with the local council, or applying for insurance or even personal jobs when it's on your CV. Thankfully a lot of the older people remember the term "hack" meaning "amateur" which eases explanations in a workshop context.

I always assumed IT people would realise the non-negative connotations, but that really isn't the case.

[dhosek]

In the late 80s/early 90s hacker became much less someone doing coding stuff for fun and much more someone trying to break into systems. The main mailing list for TeX related stuff, for example was called TeXHaX and no one assumed people were trying to use TeX to break into the NSA. Similarly, the online space for Perl folks was Perl Hackers (although I see that putting “Perl Hackers” into Google mostly gives results about using Perl as a hacking in the sense of breaking into systems sense and less the programming for the joy of it).

Another word whose change in meaning over the years has resulted in its original sense being effectively erased.

[Suzuran]

Knowing of the non-negative case does not necessarily mean that we refuse to acknowledge that languages evolve and terms gain new meanings and lose old ones.

[bonoboTP]

Or as RMS defines it, playful cleverness.

[echelon_musk]

> would be complete with a reference

's/with/without/'

[zidoo]

Amen for the first sentence. One more LLM wrapper today, and I would die.

[airstrike]

It does feels like a good use of AI (ML, really) would be to write a "disaggregator" for HN that tags submissions by category and lets users browse the bits they care about. Wish I had time to do it....

[kirubakaran]

Here it is ;)

https://histre.com/hn/

[rendaw]

Oh that's great! I wish it kept the HN style, the contrast and density is too low for me

[kirubakaran]

Thanks. I'll create a HN-like theme.

In the meantime, if you install the browser extension, you can get the tags directly in HN itself. Would that address the ui issue?

Source: https://gitlab.com/histre/hn-tags

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-tags/i...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-t...

[airstrike]

Thanks for the reply! The extension seems great at first but it doesn't let me filter out tags and basically just redirects me to your domain, so it's not really how I expect an extension to behave.

[airstrike]

That's awesome! I second the other comment re: density and contrast

[kirubakaran]

Thanks, will do. Please see my cousin comment for a potential workaround.

[DevKoala]

The HN UI is good because in 20 seconds I can assess the full top page.

If you can figure out how to add the tags while keeping down the visual bloat I would consider a switch.

[kirubakaran]

Thanks, I'll create an HN theme for that page. BTW here's more discussion about this, back when I did a "Show HN" : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904988

[miki123211]

And a TL;DR, both for the articles themselves as well as the discussions.

I don't think a TL;DR can replace most articles that appear on HN, but it can certainly tell me whether the article is interesting, much better than any headline ever could. Especially so if the TL;DR is written by a neutral AI with no interest in making me click anything, and hence no qualms about surfacing the most important information to the top.

I actually tried to do this, but it was with GPT-3.5, and I didn't exactly like how it worked. I should look at this again, I wouldn't be surprised if the code I used back then could just be ported over to 2.5 Flash and produce much better results.

[ajsnigrutin]

It's either LLM or "<existing software> written in <languge of the week>"

[DANmode]

Do you know why people started doing rewrites in other languages?

It's usually to help teach them the other language.

The rewrite part makes it easier for observers to learn and compare/contrast techniques in different environments for themselves.

Why this would ever be criticised, I can't imagine.

[ajsnigrutin]

Because the language of the week changes often, and learning can be done by solving the problems of today instead of rewriting software into a version that will never be used. I mean... who still uses all the rewrites to ruby?

Even emacs was rewritten to rust ( https://github.com/remacs/remacs ), many hours were spent, and the last actual code commit was 5 years ago.... why not spend that time by making the "normal" emacs better? Or make something new in rust?

[DANmode]

I'll say it again for the people struggling to hear in the back: it's for the experience.

[Y_Y]

I rewrote J in C, or D in F#, or Whogivesafuck in Rust and it's 8% better but don't ask me for my benchmark because it's secret sauce.

[MyPasswordSucks]

And I ported DOOM to it.

Well, it's actually just a hardcoded slideshow of E1M1 while something vaguely approximating the main riff of At Doom's Gate plays inconsistently in the background, but you'll have to watch all 15 excruciating minutes of this poorly-narrated Youtube video I'm linking to figure that out.

[xarope]

I ported DOOM to it. In 100 LOC. BTW it's just a a line shooting a ball of zero width, at another line. And there's some movement left and right. But not forward, nor backwards. So there's no real strafing. And the other line doesn't shoot a ball of zero width back.

But it's the spirit of DOOM!!!

/s

[ajsnigrutin]

I started reading hackernews from very old posts to new ones, so i'm still rewriting stuff to ruby, because that will definitely be the universal programming language for the future!

[Pulcinella]

"Prompt Kiddie" should be the new "Script Kiddie"

[belter]

Yeah, this has been LLM News for a while...

[ronsor]

50% people shilling LLM products, 50% people complaining about LLMs (or indirectly by complaining about crawlers)

However, this place used to be JS framework news not too long ago

[uoaei]

There's more finance and VC here than anyone wants to acknowledge. But it's not unexpected given that Y Combinator is a VC firm.

However these folks aren't known for their technical expertise so there's a lot of unnecessary noise feeding into the AI hype cycle of late.

[ljlolel]

Almost all YC companies this batch are LLM wrappers

[herval]

and "Crypto News" for a long time too

[bigfatkitten]

And "Why I Left Google" News before that.

[paulddraper]

Or UI pontifications

[account-5]

It's so tiresome and is slowly ruining HN for me personally.

[lucianbr]

Hear hear.

[CooCooCaCha]

Given that this website comes from a VC startup incubator I highly doubt it’s meant to refer to hacking security.

I think it’s meant to mean the “move fast and break things” style hacking. Which basically means churning out code fast and pushing through problems quickly instead of getting stuck on perfectionism.

[wkat4242]

> As others have mentioned, it would be interesting if the author stuck in and got past the tamper checks to see if it would work as normal. Oh well!

That's the kind of thing a lot of guys in suits would take very seriously. After all you have to connect it to the banking network to see if it works as normal. Not advised.

It could also lead to lowlife types putting pressure on you to help them do that. Not the kind of thing to brag about.

[wkat4242]

Ps: like the screenshot says the private keys are already gone so there's no way to get it reactivated on the same account.

[kragen]

> For the young players: this is what hacker in “Hacker News” stands for.

No, it is not, though there is a connection. As it happens, the founder of Hacker News wrote a very inspiring essay shortly before setting up the site on what the word "hacker" means to him, and it's not breaking into computers: https://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

> To the popular press, "hacker" means someone who breaks into computers. Among programmers it means a good programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To programmers, "hacker" connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who can make a computer do what he wants—whether the computer wants to or not.

> To add to the confusion, the noun "hack" also has two senses. It can be either a compliment or an insult. It's called a hack when you do something in an ugly way. But when you do something so clever that you somehow beat the system, that's also called a hack. The word is used more often in the former than the latter sense, probably because ugly solutions are more common than brilliant ones.

...

He goes on to explain in detail how he thinks about the connections between the different senses of the word.

Because it requires no mastery or indeed any special level of ability, finding a passwordless root shell on an exposed serial port does not rise to the level of being a hack in this sense, only in the popular-press sense.

[suobset]

Thank you so much. Been a long time lurker, only recently got an account to start commenting. Posts like this make my entire day: concise, well thought/researched/executed, and they put the "hacker" in HN.

[AaronAPU]

I think this might have been the first post I actually upvoted. I do upvote comments often, but this post itself is actually .. about hacking!

[goodpoint]

"Hacker" news was never about that tho. It came out from SV...