Every time I read this I hear it read in the voice of the villain from the movie Hackers. Which I have to admit was totally a guilty pleasure of my teenage years.
Why only your teenage years? It can still be a guilty pleasure today!
The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
81–90 of 155 posts
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#82> we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak Still has a familiar ring.
Unfortunately as I study higher level mathematics on my own, I hunger to be in a graduate program where the eagerness to learn and sharing of profundity and boundless energy to crack the truths of pure logic buzz around departments and campuses. It sucks to be in solace with knowledge. I wish I realized earlier that higher education was far more matched to skills needed for research. I would have majored in math inst…
> a graduate program where the eagerness to learn and sharing of profundity and boundless energy to crack the truths of pure logic buzz
Do such things exist? I chose not to continue my studies beyond high school graduation, but from my experience around academics and academia, the sort of program you describe seems at the very least well away from the norm.
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I've been observing him for longer and more closely than you have. Using the word "thug" in a conversation about street fighters is one thing. But using it to viciously attack people in the open source community who take offense at an idiotic click-bait essay entitled "Blacks are Lazy" that you happen to agree with is something else entirely. With dog whistles, context matters. You have read the essay, haven't…
I'm a bit confused about what you're trying to achieve here. Out of curiosity I just headed over to ESR's blog. The thing that stands out most is that 95% of the commenters there are uninformed nutcases (and I mean this literally). On the other hand you seem to cherry pick some incidents and exaggerate/misrepresent the facts. Today is the first time ever that I've heard the claim that "thug" has the "n-word" connotat…
> The thing that stands out most is that 95% of the commenters there are uninformed nutcases (and I mean this literally).
You mean, they are literally containers filled with "fruit consisting of a hard or tough shell around an edible kernel"?
> Today is the first time ever that I've heard the claim that "thug" has the "n-word" connotation.
And you're accusing other people of being uninformed?
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, I was pretty damn angsty at the time :) Always exciting to see this pop up someplace new. It's being translated into Polish for a textbook this year as well.
Where else can you get a reply from the Hacker that wrote the Hackers Manifesto.
It's slightly anticlimactic when the comment being responded to is a casual dismissal completely missing the context of the text. I've seen plenty of stories on HN where there's some random flamewar on top and the authors insightful comments are at the bottom. For the backstory by the author you're better off with the talk given at HOPE in 2002.
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#85Always a fun read. The Hacker Manifesto reminds us that computing culture stands at a crossroads: between hobbyists and academia, between bedroom programmers and industry, between hackers, and, well, hackers , although both appear on either side of the fence. While sinister and angsty in tone, this is ultimately a tale of someone discovering the wonders of computing, much as I, and many others did - although I never…
Maybe I'm bitter for my age, but I feel that the culture has already gone through the crossroads. I do get what you're trying to say, though, but I believe that it's the industry that finds it self at the crossroads, not the culture. The culture itself has largely been co-opted by business concerns.
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see where you're coming from, but this is an oversimplification. A lot of the early work on and thinking about computers was about the possibility of top-down social control. This features explicitly in Weiner's Cybernetics and at least implicitly in Von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. (The Soviets latched onto the same idea and tried to build a central-planning computer network.) T…
> The "hacking" ethic was really part of the counterculture, Right. And that's often missed. The hacker ethic and the FSF project are fundamentally countercultural to the Big Iron mentality of the 60s-80s. In the 90s it started getting sanitized by the Open Source folks, and the collision of Big Money and Software in the 00s subverted and subsumed the whole business. But there are still many people who hack for the s…
I agree with your and the parents comments about hacker culture being counterculture. I don't agree that it still is. The countercultural aspect largely disappeared as computers (and software) became cheap and information widely available. I cringe a bit when see modern hackers using their $3k laptops to have fun coding C in a terminal by themselves. Nothing wrong with that of course, but not necessarily something I would say is a good modern representation of the hacker spirit.
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion, the Jargon File is a fun look back at historical hacker lifestyles, but it's also a microcosm of a very few schools in the 60s and 70s. Teenagers have a bad habit of reading the Jargon File and thinking that's how they MUST behave to be a hacker--I did it, to my embarrassment, and a trip to Defcon or most any freshman CS course will find others doing the same. You don't have to start saying "grok" to b…
> I did it, to my embarrassment You're not the only one. I give esr a lot of credit for having written the Jargon File at all, because I would not be what I am today had I not encountered it in childhood. But I also give him a lot of blame for writing it in a way that, however satisfactory it must be to his many and multifarious personal prejudices, militates directly against its value in the role he purports to inte…
He didn't create it, he just more or less appointed himself maintainer after 1990-ish.
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I've been observing him for longer and more closely than you have. Using the word "thug" in a conversation about street fighters is one thing. But using it to viciously attack people in the open source community who take offense at an idiotic click-bait essay entitled "Blacks are Lazy" that you happen to agree with is something else entirely. With dog whistles, context matters. You have read the essay, haven't…
Russ's essay makes a different point than "ho boy them blacks sure are lazy aye tell you wut". His essay makes the claims: (1) Black are lazier than whites if by lazy we mean that they appear to work less hard than whites. This same definition would imply that whites (at least in the areas of Texas I'm familiar with) are lazier than latinos. (2) For historical reasons, their culture values leisure time more. (3) For…
Good points, and well expressed. I'm sorry for misinterpreting which case you were referring to.
Evidence that the term was meant as a dog-whistle to provoke a reaction is that it doesn't make any sense in a non-racist context. And the context was already about race, thanks the Russ's brilliant essay.
The names that Eric the Flute (that's what ESR really calls himself ;) ) called other people were hyperbolically exaggerated, and completely unjustifiable, especially coming from somebody who threatens other people's lives on the internet, and walks it back as merely trying to defame. How many people in the open source community who don't have a file systems named after them are actually thugs (or even maddogs)? And why did they all suddenly choose to gang up on poor Russ all together at once?
Maybe Trump has made everyone completely insensitive and bored with these kinds of tactics nowadays, but this happened in 2005, and it's not an isolated occurrence of racism from Eric Raymond: he has a long track record of race baiting, not just his latest tweet.
With both Raymond and Trump, it's a big game of click-bait chicken, to say the most offensive thing possible to get lots of attention, and then prove how smart he is to be able to talk himself out of trouble when everybody gets offended. Just read his blog comments. I'm sure he thought his "I just meant to defame him" excuse for threatening Bruce Peren's life was very clever.
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#89Always a fun read. The Hacker Manifesto reminds us that computing culture stands at a crossroads: between hobbyists and academia, between bedroom programmers and industry, between hackers, and, well, hackers , although both appear on either side of the fence. While sinister and angsty in tone, this is ultimately a tale of someone discovering the wonders of computing, much as I, and many others did - although I never…
Maybe I'm bitter for my age, but I feel that the culture has already gone through the crossroads. I do get what you're trying to say, though, but I believe that it's the industry that finds it self at the crossroads, not the culture. The culture itself has largely been co-opted by business concerns.
I'm unconvinced. All the wacky projects that usually pop up on show HN are pretty strong signs of a culture that encourages things that don't necessarily make business sense.
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a bit confused about what you're trying to achieve here. Out of curiosity I just headed over to ESR's blog. The thing that stands out most is that 95% of the commenters there are uninformed nutcases (and I mean this literally). On the other hand you seem to cherry pick some incidents and exaggerate/misrepresent the facts. Today is the first time ever that I've heard the claim that "thug" has the "n-word" connotat…
Well maybe after you've hung around the hacker news community for more than 22 minutes, you'll begin to understand. I've known Eric Raymond for well over a year to every minute that you've been a member of this community. The "Blacks are Lazy" post you're linking to is the revised post-resignation damage-control edition. The original post is archived here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_la.…
This is probably futile, but ESR's original message appears to have been private, so there could not have been any intention of "defaming" Perens.
Perens posted the private message on a Debian list:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html
And received some pushback:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00636.html
I don't condone ESR's original message and would never write something like that, but again, you are totally exaggerating.