Drama and marginal status doesn't make you a hacker. It just makes you a social outcast.

It's true that there are lots of wannabes today, too — more than ever before, now that the richest man in the world got that way by writing a BASIC interpreter, now that Sergey and Larry get to go to Davos.

But you want to see some real hackers? How about http://www.pouet.net/ where the demoscene posts their stuff? Have you not been to a Bar Camp? SuperHappyDevHouse? Hackerspaces like Noisebridge? How about Google, where Rob Pike now works since they've spent 9 years fixing http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/? How about biotech, where they reprogram the very stuff of life itself? How about the Netflix Prize, where AI predicts human preferences for money? How about the algorithmic trading funds that now account for the majority of trading volume on our stock exchanges? Have you been visiting http://www.gpgpu.org/ http://blog.reprap.org/ http://bathsheba.com/ http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/ etc.? How about thirty million people finding one hole after another in the firewall to communicate to each other and the rest of the world, when their election was stolen, through a humble Rails CRUD forum? How about http://vpri.org/html/writings.php, where the objective is to build a whole, modern personal computing environment in under 20 000 lines of code — and they just might do it? How about the OLPC project, where some real hackers — not losers stealing credit card numbers — figured out how to build a machine that would hold up to abuse from kids, in order to revolutionize the world education system (a la Diamond Age), an experiment which is still ongoing? How about Time Magazine listing moot as the most influential person in the world?

Some of these things are good, some are bad, and some are ineffectual. But they are hacking on a scale that you never imagined would be real, in your reclusive vampire credit-card fraud days. These are not people tweaking CSS in yuppie dress shirts, or patching some obsolete proprietary library. These are people pushing the boundaries of the possible.

There's a world of hacking out here.

Open your eyes.

The reason most people want to blog is that they're not smart enough to program for the web.

Getting a blog is lame compared to that. You get a blog to get ads and attention and a following.

On the contrary, noname123, came here, created an account, and wrote his/her heart out for nothing. Expecting nothing, wanting nothing except to be honest and straight forward with an opinion -- a valid opinion and an astute observation of a topic that the real hackers are feeling inside.

Hacking is dying. It has taken an outsider, a liberal artsie fartsie to tell us the truth about it. To point out the absurdity.

I went to sxsw interactive this year and was appalled at what I saw. There were few hackers there. Most of them were socialites running around promoting their word press blog or django customization. These people didn't know anything about hacking. Perhaps it was the wrong venue, but the art and the culture and the expertise of real hacking is probably already dead.

It's too easy now. You don't have to love hacking to build something with computers. You don't have to have passion to build, you just throw some parts together, copy and paste some graphics and change the colors in photoshop to match a named swatch you found at colourlovers.

It's kind of sad.

Then you would know that my "witty comment" was not about Jeff, but about Michael Braude, whose blog Jeff references. Michael also said:

So forgive me for being smarmy and offensive, but I have no interest in being a "web guy".

It wasn't intended as a personal putdown, but a measured response.

Also, get a blog.

I applied to YC and was flown out for an interview in November 2008. I was told that while it was a promising area, YC is reluctant to fund single founders. Fair enough.

A few weeks later, I responded to a technical plea for help from one of GraffitiGeo's founders in this thread a few weeks after that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=413929

When we got in touch, we had a long and frank discussion about Graffitio and the space in general. I told him about the challenges I was facing, and some of my plans for the future. He brought up the idea that we team up, and I said I probably wasn't interested, but I'd let him know.

Then I got the email. He offered me 1.5% of their company for all of my source code, the name, and my 40,000+ users at the time. He went on to use threatening language such as "Graffitio is going to get stomped out of the picture" and "Your financial alternatives are bleak." I chose to pass on the offer.

The first version of GraffitiGeo that came out in the App Store was an _exact_ clone of my app, Graffitio, down to the terminology such as Graffiti and Walls. They started to differentiate themselves with later versions. Some of those differences were novel, but others were features that I'd mentioned to him in our conversation. To be fair, they could have arisen independently.

Graffitio is over a year old now. It was in the App Store on day 1. I should probably be more annoyed than I am, but honestly, I have a lot of reservations about this space now after being here for over a year. Dealing with the App Store is another headache. I haven't been able to get an update through in months. Anyway, the first round of geotagging apps have fallen flat IMO. Turning them into a "game" like Foursquare and GraffitiGeo isn't going to change the fact that they deliver relatively little utility.

There might be a magic combination out there that makes it work, but I don't think GraffitiGeo or Graffitio in their current state is it. I wish them luck in finding it. If anything, they've lit a fire under my ass to spend more time on Graffitio.

The thing is, most of the hackers that lament a bygone era have simply had the tasks they knew well made obsolete. They are upset because they learned tasks and not skills. Nobody cares today if you can roll a kick-ass DOS boot disk unless you were skilled enough to translate that knowledge into, say, fitting OS X Leopard onto a 1 GB USB memory stick.

Before that, I had issues with keeping with the habit of exercising. I think I solved that a month ago by starting to use the Seinfeld method[1] to keep track of it. I will probably try to move everything I have trouble staying with to the calendar.

[1] http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se...