Don’t get me wrong, but from your posts you seem to be really tired of and/or upset about the US startup/tech scene. Did you consider just leaving your natural habitat for a while and work in another (perhaps more egalitarian) country to get a fresh/more joyful perspective on things? For instance, in Europe there are many small and mid-size family companies with strong values (ethics, environmental, etc.).

Something like Fog Creek? At least in the pre-Stackoverflow times. It was bootstrapped via consulting income.

Why doesn’t a bank loan work for this segment?

I always think of “The Vulgar Unicorn”, the tavern where most of the action in Robert Asprin shared world begins.

VC throw-shit-at-the-wall / see-what-sticks game

It’s not “sticking” that they are looking for, it’s exponential growth they are looking for.

There’s a different kind of Unicorn in the bay area. https://twitter.com/isislovecruft/status/382922302716801024

X201. ThinkPad power management, unless you micromanage via TLP/TVPM, will cause the battery to decay from its original capacity rapidly. This is even worse if you’re using one of the smaller batteries.

The screen on my X201 is unusable outdoors (even with max brightness) and barely usable indoors. Its dim with poor viewing angles and resolution.

My X201 just sits in the dock nowadays. When I need a laptop, I just use my jailbroken Surface RT - it actually gets good battery life despite its age, as well as a screen you can see outside. The subset of applications I’d use when out and about is small enough to fit in with the recompiled Win32 apps available.

Amen to this. I will also accept “Lisp hacker”.

Everyone else is a posing douche.

My sincere question is why not X Y Hacker ? Where X can stand for skill and Y for domain of expertise ?

We can’t use the word Engineer in an absolute absolute sense because code can handle such a thing as currency now. Currency is not an Engineering Feat. Code can lie to a pollution test i.e, … again unheard of in Engineering …

If not a “Hacker” then are we willing to be relegated to being a profession of technicians ?

Has there ever been a rock star trained in ninjitsu? Just curious.

(Shhh, Lobste.rs is an anti-HN circlejerk <.<)

I used to subscribe to that, until I frequently ran into the problem that in the absence of additional information, people used to assume one implicitly. Usually, they assume somewhere in the US.

This means that I get frequently explained how things in Germany are, though being from there. Sometimes even using “well, that’s how things in Germany are” (well, discussion partner, that’s why I know them!). Since then, I usually try to make my location and background clear as much as possible.

No, honestly, it’s not about avoiding preconceptions, it’s that I strongly don’t identify with the place I have citizenship, since I find my interests completely ignored by its politics. I do identify with the place I met everyone important to me.

People asking introductory questions sometimes want to hear a real story, but they’re the minority. When I start explaining things like that, I usually get cut off. So I don’t bother trying to be polite, and just answer their question tersely according to what I believe instead of what they want to hear.

I agree that listening to others is important, though conversational niceties are not the place where they’re likely to say anything that matters to them. These niceties are about snap judgements, not important things.

I guess there are about a dozen different answers you could receive here. And there are dozens of traditions (best thought of as like philosophical traditions than religious ones, IMO, although there is certainly religious buddhisms - but harder to find in the more straightforward & to the point Vipassna or Zen lineages - but just like every walk of life - there are crazies about too :) What follows is just my opinion..

As a person who has never meditated,

I wouldn’t be so sure of this. It might be that when you find out what ‘it’ is, you find that experience matches experiences you’ve had before, or not - everything changes.

“The empty mind is the mind of compassion.” S. Suzuki. [1]

I don’t know about meditating in order to gain something or something else. I’m a beginner with a practice known as Shikentaza, aka “Just sitting”,“Sit & face the wall. Sit sincerely.” From the Soto Zen tradition - I’m not kidding when I say this is the practice, it’s amazing anything has been written about it at all.

“Zazen that makes your life busier, that’s ridiculous!” - S.Suzuki.

Meditation is “good for nothing”.

And yet, in the form of djhana/chan/zen - buddhism - a 2500 year old tradition,

How is something a 2500 year old tradition that amounts to “Sit. Sit sincerely.”

“To assume the Zazen posture is itself enlightenment.” - S. Suzuki

Recommend reading:

• Three Pillars of Zen: Philip Kapleau

• Robert Aiken

• “Zen Mind, Beginners Mind.” - S. Suzuki.

Maybe it’s not for you, who knows. You know what is for you.

what would this (a week of silent meditation) entail

A person sitting, facing a wall.

“People say Zazen is difficult, but there’s a misunderstanding as to why. It’s not difficult because it’s difficult to sit in the cross legged posture or attain enlightenment. It’s difficult because it’s difficult to get rid of "something extra” from our practice.“ - S. Suzuki in "Zen Mind, Beginners Mind” (paraphrased from memory)

Essentially the goal of Shikentaza is to sit, “just sit”, until there is a person sitting facing a wall. Watch your thoughts come & go, etc, in the midst of all of this, a person sitting and facing a wall, but how sincere & close can you be to just sitting and facing the wall - this is an experience of reality, as it is, unpoluted by notions, thoughts and ideas - just A person sitting facing a wall. You’ll see the truth of how exactly “the mind of emptiness is the mind of compassion” but until you see this, it all sounds like new age woo woo, probably.

Other Zen practices involve Koans: “What did your face look like before your parents were born?”

Anyway, all of this is “just my opinion, man”. :)

The way I got here was actually listening to the talks of Joseph Goldstein on youtube, but in the end I’ve found the Soto Zen tradition is more concise & vivid for me. YMMV.

So what do you do? Look up the Zazen posture - there’s a few, pick which is most comfortable. Set a timer - perhaps 10 minutes at first. Count the breath, 1 to 10, counting on the exhalation. If you find you’ve lost count or go over, or counting on the inhalation go back to 1. “Sit. Just sit. Sit sincerely.” and “Let it go.” don’t “stop” thoughts, don’t suppress: instead, acknowledge & let go. Other words might be “accept things as they come, and as they go” or instead of trying to stop or look for anything in particular, “put it down” and simply return to focusing on the breath & sitting sincerely.

Notice how thoughts come & go, just like sensations. “Everything changes.”

When the time is up, the time is up.

“Don’t be too interested in Zen. Interest in Zen that involves some excitement or adds some busyness to your life is not true interest.” - S.Suzuki :)

Oops!

[1] In all the statements I’ve heard, this particular statement is the one that on the surface, seems to posit two ideas that are unconnected “empty mind” and “compassion” but, through experience, is true. This is the “theory” if you will, that can only be found true in the light of experience & experiment. The experiment? “Sit & face the wall”. But its worth noting expecting anything is not a very skillful way of finding what ‘empty mind’ is :) So, in this case, it’s an introspective psychology - something for which there’s a 2500 year history in the east, but in the west we have, perhaps the Stoic tradition, some of the medieval theologian system builders & William James, others, perhaps.

The one I did, having not really meditated before, was a week long one from dharma.org.

There are daily sittings / lectures about random stuff. Chas had some good ones, although they are a little abstract: http://dharmaseed.org/teacher/43/

In between daily sittings, you can walk around the woods nearby or sit around in gazebos or benches. There are lots of people there, but almost no talking between students. “Almost” because there are chores that everyone gets assigned (cleaning, cooking, waking people up), some of which, e.g. pot duty, involve talking quietly if you can get away with it ;)

The most intense and enlightening part for me was being completely separated from all of the stimulus I’m used to throughout the day for a whole week. There’s no reading or writing or music allowed, and a lot of stuff “comes up” when you’re just thinking by yourself all that time — from memories to melodies. I recommend it.

I suspect this is a classic case of the original never going away, but something new coming along, appropriating the name, and then people complaining it’s not what it used to be. Like oh noes, punk is dead. No, you’re just calling the wrong things punk. Whatever “real” punk is/was, there’s still people doing it. Don’t obsess over the label.

In this case, the seven real hackers who used to post to Usenet are still around, hacking up whatever they’re hacking up. With all the same ideals and culture as before. The label just happens to be expanded to include a lot of “phonies” now.

Personally, I don’t care much about the labels and would prefer not to argue about what constitutes real hacking or not. But the point is that whatever you think you miss, it’s still out there. You’re looking for it in the wrong places. You didn’t go to a random Starbucks in Cleveland to meet hackers in 1985, either, so one shouldn’t expect to find hackers there today.

Or for instance, deacon or CCC camp/congress. There were X hackers at the first one (out of X people). Now there’s 100X people attending total, but “only” X hackers. The hackers didn’t go anywhere. It’s just other people showed up too. But nothing has died.

Possibly, but consider: the HN/stars culture pervasive or simply more visible? How much hacking gets done under the radar? Much of my work is OSS but not hyped; I do it out of curiosity. Does this satisfy the hacker ethic? I’ve talked to a fair few people who are the same (and a few that aren’t).

I wouldn’t look to HN for hacker culture. HN is run by YC. YC is VC, and VC is a sort of dual to hacker culture: surface-level similarity of results (new cool stuff, often exploring how things can be made to work together), but different mechanisms and motivations.

We have to be careful: we can’t proclaim the decline of hacker culture based on the visibility of the antithesis of it. Hacker culture has always seemed very quiet to me. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe I’m not. I think it still lives and is doing quite well, but has simply been obscured by a different culture that has coopted the name.

meaningless tripe as Internet points.

upvotes

Or for instance, deacon or CCC camp/congress. There were X hackers at the first one (out of X people). Now there’s 100X people attending total, but “only” X hackers. The hackers didn’t go anywhere. It’s just other people showed up too. But nothing has died.

Where do you draw the line between the “real” hackers on CCCamp/Congress and “the others”? Most people I spoke to basically only have the definition “not my peer group” (no hardware, not the right software, too young, too much walking around).

I found CCCamp a very hacky event and hacker culture is very much alive.

Why do you think so? That sounds counterintuitive to me.