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The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

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Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#121

Post by uola »

loydb wrote: post #106
uola wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tEnnvZbYek

I was about to jump on an airplane, and didn't really have time for a nuanced response. The OP comment is, likely, from someone who has no idea what hacker culture was like in the 1970s and early 1980s, so I can see how he doesn't find it very relevant to his life today. And he's absolutely right that it was angsty venting (I was 19, so I'll even allow adolescent). That doesn't mean that it didn't resonate with multi…

Since the term hacker has become so widespread I think it's hard for people to appreciate the difference between scenes calling themselves hackers, but also to recognize other forms of computer subculture.

I also think the previous commenter makes a mistake in not recognizing the influence of teenage angst on hacker culture, like many other subcultures.

Young, mostly male, persons form groups, use nicknames, makes their own publications, rejects the (some) rules of society and try to decide who is the best is almost every subculture at the end of the last century. From punkrockers and ravers, to graffiti writers and street gangs.

I think there's value in knowing how things were and what makes a culture.

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#122

Post by Blahah »

jlgaddis wrote: post #117
loydb wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We found out that the SS was filming through hotel mirrors in a couple of rooms during Summercon 88. Poor Knight Lightning had to watch hours and hours of nothing but drunken shenanigans (because nobody trusted the dude who showed up out of nowhere claiming his handle was the "Dictator", so basically we trashed his room. I left a blender in there, the only thing I did in that room was mix batches of Margaritas.) When…

As an early teen when I first read your words ~25 years ago, I immediately related. Even more so a few years later when I was kicked out of my high school computer classes, banned from touching the computers, and then when the FBI showed up at my home (unrelated). All these years later, it feels odd to see this here, read your comment, and write a reply. Your words served as "inspiration" to probably thousands of you…

For me, aged 12, the manifesto was a beacon telling me that I was not alone. Nobody I knew IRL shared my interests, no authority saw my curiosity as anything but disruptive. But now I knew there were people, enough of them that they had a name and a 'manifesto', that I started on the road to feeling OK about myself. Through subsequent expulsion from school, arrest by the SS, and worse, that confidence kept me going and eventually helped me turn my life into a positive story. +1 for these words serving as inspiration. Honestly changed my life.

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#123

Post by throwanem »

goldenkey wrote: post #120
throwanem wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

High school academia is nothing like undergraduate academia which is nothing like graduate academia. Graduate academia is awesome unless you get stuck under a professor who tries to use you as a grunt worker. It happens but it's not the norm.

> High school academia is nothing like undergraduate academia which is nothing like graduate academia.

I never claimed otherwise. My point is that, while I lack firsthand experience in the area, I've worked with a wide variety of grad students under a number of PIs, and found them universally to present an impression of being stooped under a heavy load of debt, shit work, and misery. Perhaps that's unrepresentative, though, or inaccurately perceived.

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#125

Post by throwanem »

chadgeidel wrote: post #92
throwanem wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The shade of Robert Heinlein is laughing at us all. Hardly a new state of affairs. I mean, he invented the Rapture of the Nerds back in the fifties!

Wow, really? I haven't read enough Heinlein - what was that in? I always thought Rapture of the Nerds was grounded in Vinge's "The Coming Technological Singularity" ( https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.ht... )

I honestly don't recall the name of the specific piece, but I do remember that it's anthologized in his collection Expanded Universe, and it was clearly the "Singularity" he described, although of course not by that name - there's even a chart and a curve for those readers not yet familiar with the concept of exponential growth! I remember it quite well, not least because I'd thought I was years past learning anything further from Heinlein, and here he was teaching me that there's nothing new under the sun.

Unfortunately I can't give a page reference right this minute, because my last paper copy of the book disintegrated under heavy use some years ago and the samizdat electronic version doesn't have charts or page numbers. But it's in there, and when the new paper copy I've just ordered arrives on Monday, I'll look up the page and reply to this comment with a link to a photo or something.

That's not the only thing in Expanded Universe, of course; it's quite a long book and contains a great deal of other worthwhile material - short stories, articles, and transcripts of various talks, which together both entertain the reader and lend insight into the qualities of the author. It's not the first book I'd recommend if you're only going to read one Heinlein - that would have to be The Door into Summer. But if you're only going to read two, I'd suggest this be the second one.

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#126

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

laumars wrote: post #116
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel you on that. Tron and Sneakers are both more fun, and Sneakers captures computing more accurately. On the culture side, I don't know of any major films that capture computing culture. Charles Stross's Laundry series does a better job than most (You can still read The Atrocity Archives without a backround in computing, but you'll get this nagging feeling you're missing something), seeing as Stross is up to his…

Antitrust[1] is good for getting the subtle details right while still having a dramatic plot for Hollywood. I quite liked War Games[2] as well. [1] http://gb.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/ [2] http://gb.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/

Wargames isn't great on accuracy, but it's not awful, and it has a good story, not just tech-masturbation, so it gets the gold star.

Haven't seen Antitrust.

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#127

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

riboflava wrote: post #109
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yet so many of those projects, when submitted, attract comments on HN from people who just don't get it. The culture is still there, but it's not as uniformly concentrated anywhere anymore. It's hard to tell what that really means. In absolute numbers there are probably more hackers with the spark now than ever, but you wouldn't be able to tell by just casually sampling the computing industry both professional and no…

Yeah. This blog post sold that for me: https://eviltrout.com/2015/06/29/an-emulator-for-tis-100.htm...

Particularly this bit:

  Them: “So, it’s a game about programming…”

  Me: “Yes, it’s so much fun!”

  Them: “But I program all day.”

  Me: “Me too!”

  Them: “The last thing I want to do when I come home is program again”

  awkward silence

  Them: “You’re nuts.”

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#129

Post by jgw »

emidln wrote: post #68
jff wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

> adopt the idiotic "-p convention" which doesn't even really exist in Lisp any more. Do you have a better way of signaling to the reader that a function is a predicate? I don't write a ton of Common Lisp, but I do still see quite of a bit of foop when I read Common Lisp. Possible that most of the code I'm reading was written when this was still a thing though... I think the only reason this doesn't exist in Clojure…

See first 25 entries or so in the permuted CL symbol index:

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw51/CLHS/Front/X_Per...

Scheme does use ?, and you can in CL if you really want. But CL reserves ? as a programmable reader macro [1]. It is often used, for example, to designate a stand-in domain variable designation in, say an embedded Prolog.

Another reason that CL avoids the "?" convention is that it's "unpronounceable" [2]. CL is the only language spec I've seen that discusses pronunciation; they actually gave thought to how programmers might converse about their code unambiguously [3]. Another manifestation of this is CL's sort-of case-insensitivity [4].

--

[1] The other reserved characters are !, [ ], and { }

[2] Although at least one wag suggested pronouncing it as "eh?", like a good Canadian.

[3] CLtL2 provides quite a bit of this. My fav is a brief excursion into how some hackers pronounce "macrolet" to rhyme with Chevrolet. :)

[4] This is not actually the case, but appears to be true to new Lispers, until they understand that by default, the reader converts everything to upcase.

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#130

Post by Jach »

jgw wrote: post #129
emidln wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> adopt the idiotic "-p convention" which doesn't even really exist in Lisp any more. Do you have a better way of signaling to the reader that a function is a predicate? I don't write a ton of Common Lisp, but I do still see quite of a bit of foop when I read Common Lisp. Possible that most of the code I'm reading was written when this was still a thing though... I think the only reason this doesn't exist in Clojure…

See first 25 entries or so in the permuted CL symbol index: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw51/CLHS/Front/X_Per... Scheme does use ?, and you can in CL if you really want. But CL reserves ? as a programmable reader macro [1]. It is often used, for example, to designate a stand-in domain variable designation in, say an embedded Prolog. Another reason that CL avoids the "?" convention is that it's "unpronounce…

Did you miss the Hoon language and their pronunciation table that works for other languages too? http://urbit.org/docs/hoon/syntax/ They suggest pronouncing '?' as 'wut'.
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