The Hacker's Manifesto (1986) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#141

Post by qwertyuiop924 » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 1:51 PM UTC

rorykoehler wrote: post #133

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.

The number of times I show or talk about a side project with business people and they start talking about it as something I built to generate income rather than just for my own curiousity is quite amusing. I think for certain groups of people the idea of creating for purely intellectual purposes is completely alien. It is part of the reason many companies can't hold onto real technical talent. At a cerain point intel…

You know, Bryan Cantrill kind of did a talk on this...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI

Why do Bryan's talks keep being relevant to my discussions on HN? This is the second time I've linked one in two days.

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#142

Post by throwanem » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:02 PM UTC

nicolas_t wrote: post #140

throwanem wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anythi…

Not sure I'd suggest The Door into Summer, it's one of the weakest books from Heinlein imho together with the Number of the Beast and I Will Fear No Evil. I'd usually recommend the Moon is a Harsh Mistress or one of his juveniles as the first book.

That's good advice and I appreciate it.

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#143

Post by loydb » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:21 PM UTC

eggy wrote: post #135

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…

Great story. Glad you're posting here, a real treat. I used to belong to Echo in NYC, and met Mark that way once or twice. I second your thoughts on 'Hackers' with the exception of its introduction of Angelina Jolie ;) For the record, there were no teenage girls like her around the hacking culture back then; what am I saying? There were no women at any of my meetups, period. I am glad to see that has changed, althoug…

You would not believe how many emails I got right after the movie came out from teenage boys wanting me to put them in touch with Jolie...

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#144

Post by loydb » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:25 PM UTC

znpy wrote: post #136

loydb wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sup :) #agony4life

woah, 30 years-old inside jokes going on?

That one's a little more recent. Agony was our Everquest (and later WoW) guild. We raided together for over a decade. The core of the membership was silicon valley based, and since I travel there a lot, I ended up making many IRL friends that I still hang out with to this day from it.

No, I don't MMO any more.

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#145

Post by loydb » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:30 PM UTC

nicolas_t wrote: post #140

throwanem wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anythi…

Not sure I'd suggest The Door into Summer, it's one of the weakest books from Heinlein imho together with the Number of the Beast and I Will Fear No Evil. I'd usually recommend the Moon is a Harsh Mistress or one of his juveniles as the first book.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is definitely my favorite. I don't think Fear no Evil was that bad -- I think it was the last decent book he wrote.

I remember reading the serialization of the first few chapters of Number of the Beast in Omni magazine, and thinking how great it was. Then I got the book and read the rest, and was sad.

Don't get me started on _Friday_.

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#146

Post by loydb » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:36 PM UTC

uola wrote: post #86

pnathan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

^This.

I broke into my first mainframe in 1977 because I had to if I wanted to play Colossal Cave Adventure. :)

I learned to blue box because I had to if I wanted to talk to my friends around the world and couldn't afford the phone bill.

I tell people now that if you want to pen test, cool, grab some VMs and go nuts. You might even get a bug bounty or two...

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#147

Post by Kalium » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 3:11 PM UTC

RRRA wrote: post #138

Kalium wrote: post #101

It's interesting to contrast what YCombinator/Facebook mean by "hacker" and what it means at DEFCON. Or when this document was written. The former definitely has strong commercial overtones and the latter strong subversive overtones. They really are two very different meanings.

And to a lot of people here thinking this mentality is dead are, I think, confused by the fact that the growth and general appeal of computers have only diluted the hackers, but they are still growing in absolute numbers. Same goes at DEFCON in a way, where so many people want to see what a hacker is that the whole conference looses its "direction" in a way, as a whole at least...

Very true. When you define "hacker" to mean "A person who writes code quickly and is willing to take business risk", you're not likely to run in the same circles as the people who crack open complex software systems for fun. You might wind up believing those people no longer really exist, having gone the way of the dial-up modem.

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#148

Post by nicolas_t » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 3:16 PM UTC

loydb wrote: post #145

nicolas_t wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I'd suggest The Door into Summer, it's one of the weakest books from Heinlein imho together with the Number of the Beast and I Will Fear No Evil. I'd usually recommend the Moon is a Harsh Mistress or one of his juveniles as the first book.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is definitely my favorite. I don't think Fear no Evil was that bad -- I think it was the last decent book he wrote. I remember reading the serialization of the first few chapters of Number of the Beast in Omni magazine, and thinking how great it was. Then I got the book and read the rest, and was sad. Don't get me started on _Friday_.

Oh yes, Number of the Beast started out good. That's actually what makes it more frustrating.

I think part of my problem with Fear no Evil is that I read it just after reading all of the Lazarus Long stories (which I enjoyed a lot) and coming from that Fear no Evil just wasn't as good...

I actually did like Job A Comedy of Justice which he wrote after Fear no Evil... It's very different from his other books and I wouldn't say it's great but it's fun.

Friday is one of his few novels that I never read..

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#149

Post by throwanem » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 3:31 PM UTC

nicolas_t wrote: post #148

loydb wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is definitely my favorite. I don't think Fear no Evil was that bad -- I think it was the last decent book he wrote. I remember reading the serialization of the first few chapters of Number of the Beast in Omni magazine, and thinking how great it was. Then I got the book and read the rest, and was sad. Don't get me started on _Friday_.

Oh yes, Number of the Beast started out good. That's actually what makes it more frustrating. I think part of my problem with Fear no Evil is that I read it just after reading all of the Lazarus Long stories (which I enjoyed a lot) and coming from that Fear no Evil just wasn't as good... I actually did like Job A Comedy of Justice which he wrote after Fear no Evil... It's very different from his other books and I wou…

I sort of like Friday, but I wouldn't really recommend it to someone who isn't also a Heinlein completist. I don't think it is bad, but it's not one of his stronger novels, and I understand why a lot of people really don't care for it; Heinlein is always most controversial when he writes first-person female characters, and there are good reasons why that's so.

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#150

Post by eggy » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 7:44 AM UTC

loydb wrote: post #143

eggy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great story. Glad you're posting here, a real treat. I used to belong to Echo in NYC, and met Mark that way once or twice. I second your thoughts on 'Hackers' with the exception of its introduction of Angelina Jolie ;) For the record, there were no teenage girls like her around the hacking culture back then; what am I saying? There were no women at any of my meetups, period. I am glad to see that has changed, althoug…

You would not believe how many emails I got right after the movie came out from teenage boys wanting me to put them in touch with Jolie...

Oh, I would believe it alright. I would have emailed you too at the time. As much as she is the cliche Hollywood leading, she is not. There was enough of the fringe then, and still, that it appealed to my fringe self ;)

Anyway, I never took jobs in infosec, or IT after having had gained all of that experience with the exception of an DBA position when times were tough. I left computers for work, and only use them for fun - coding, animating, livecoding music and visuals, and amateur game dev. Oh, and geeky mathematics stuff!

I was jaded by the office cube syndrome, and web dev becoming the 2000s equivalent of becoming a word proccessor in the 80s (remember that? Learn Word or WordPerfect and earn big salaries?). Nobody correlated it with just transferring typing skills to a computer. There was the occasional hacker/guru who wrote mail merge macros and such, but after the low-hanging fruit was had, it was spellcheck all day!

I went on to do things like technical design, engineering and fabrication of show action equipment, technical diving to service underwater electrical and hydraulics, rope access work, and multimedia, and other stuff where I could apply code in creative ways - automation, math visualizations, and multimedia.

Can you introduce me to Angelina? Oh, never mind, Brad would kick my butt!