I originally wrote this in response to Alex Payne; I emailed him an off-the-cuff response, then decided it might be worth revising a little and publishing. He wrote: <i>Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the “hacker era” of digital history.</i> I disagreed with the sentiment. So, not killing programming, but killing the hacker era.<p><i>On Hacker News, you call people who love to tinker with computers obsessive and label what they do "fucking around" and "non meaningful" (as judged by your Omniscient Wisdom?) and still claim not to be trolling?</i><p>I'm in the community because I think people here know what they're talking about, not because I agree with their life views. In a past life (by which I mean last year) I got engulfed in a huge and marvelous debate here over that. I don't like the hacker mindset here and I think the entrepreneurial one we see here is sadly limited in scope. A lot of the things HN really enjoys I find a little disturbing and sad.<p>I'm not pretending my opinion is Omniscient Wisdom. Your saying it makes the both of us looks silly. I don't come from quite the background a lot of this community does, and my worldviews are slightly different, but I don't lash out at people that disagree with me — unless it's a debate happening about something I wrote, in which case I maintain the tone I started in the article to help and elucidate things.<p>If we want to make this a discussion of the worldview in question, and of exactly what I believe about what, then by all means we can have that, but the fact that your attitude's more snark than it is polite engagement suggested to me that you're more into shooting me down under false pretenses.