Hackers are not anti-social, we're just a subculture. Hacking itself is ultimately a community activity. You want others to appreciate this cool thing you've made, or share tips about it, or just in general provide people connection. People buy plane tickets and conference tickets, pick their university/major, accept materially non-optimal job offers, just to seek out other members of this culture.
And for programmers that aren't hackers, they just appreciate the practical upsides of having mature humans that can take accountability for decisions that affect your work as coworkers.
> Hacking itself is ultimately a community activity. You want others to appreciate this cool thing you've made, or share tips about it, or just in general provide people connection.
It's single player in the same way painting is. The process of painting is done by a single artist, but the broader context of art is defined by a community people. Without them you wouldn't have a rich history of ideas to draw from, peers to discuss your work, or an audience to appreciate it.
Neither do I. But what I suspect is that the unpleasantness of too much forced social interaction, which dominated discussions in times past, was also associated with the begrudgingly-acknowledged good it did, even for us introverts. Hey, I'm like that too. But AI has taken that away for many people, who are now realizing that occasionally eating those dark greens actually did some good and now they're gone, life is actually worse.
This stereotype of "hackers" feels very rooted in the late-90s/early-2000s. Ever since mid-2000s the prominent "hackers" have been collaborating in the open and chasing VC funding...
I've discovered that I either want to have no interaction with people, or I want to have real human interactions. I don't want the shitty half measure where my manager sends me whatever Claude sent them, or gives me instructions like I was a prompt ("do X now").
Not every hacker fits the stereotype of "guy typing fast in a basement filled with screens and terminals".
People are people, all different, some hackers enjoy the solitude of doing their project by themselves with no human interaction whatsoever, others enjoy and thrive with a collaborative setting, spitting ideas, showing code, and getting feedback to iterate on and improve them.
I've belonged to the latter camp most of my life even though I acted like the first when I was learning how to program (and on my first job); I'm not a stereotypical extrovert but love nerding about stuff together with someone: coding an idea, making music, working on wood, for me those are all more enjoyable with another human sharing the same passion.
hacking something alone is fun, but maintaining something that’s being hacked by someone else without coordination has always been a shitty experience.
Even those that have less bandwidth for human interaction value being in the loop.
Presumably the people who loved interacting with humans were too busy interacting to show up on forums. And now that interactions are being curtailed they do end up here.
When I read Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, I got the sense that the story was all about community: disaffected nerds suddenly finding each other through the emerging medium of personal computing — in the halls of MIT, at Homebrew Computer Club meetings, through interactions with Community Memory.
> I'm surprised by this sudden "I love interacting with humans" surge.
This exists on a spectrum for both interactor and interactee: some folks are more introverted than others, some folks don't mind talking shop with fellow hackers but don't want to get into business-y stuff with PMs.
Hacker news has long drifted from being purely hacker-related content, if it ever was. From my experience, it's a melting-pot of stuff related to entrepreuneurship, IT, VCs, and stuff that happens around silicon valley.
