re where did the hacker ethic go from article may aurora alaska edu by pstlb aurora alaska edu i put it to you thus where has the hacker ethic gone if it still exists where and if it does exist why are those who call themselves hackers allowing this to perpetuate itself why are they not creating new innovative interesting ideas to stop the sos from maintaining its choke hold on the computer industry since this was posted on comp ai i assume there is an ai angle to this hacking is what ai students do when they re really supposed to be doing something else e g thesis research write up getting their supervisors pet programs to run properly etc no one gets much glory for hacking and no one gets any money out of it producing good free software requires an enormous investment of time resources that not many people can or want to afford particularly during a recession in addition over the last years i think there has been a de emphasis on producing running programs in ai research and a greater emphasis on more formal approaches to problem solving students have been proving theorems instead of writing programs at a conference a year or two ago johann de kleer suggested that everyone should get back to the keyboard and write more programs that demonstrate their ideas and i have to say i m inclined to agree i don t claim to be a superhacker but i don t think that invalidates my remarks and i m sure this isn t the whole story peter jackson dept of electrical computer eng clarkson university opinions expressed are not those of my employer or any other organization second violin fiddling firefighters ensemble rome branch
