Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Story of Mel (1983)

cs.utah.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 175 posts

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#51

Post by Suzuran »

zozbot234 wrote: post #42
ratww wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1000. But in my experience the trend started not with developers, but with the other people around them: Product Managers, Designers, Engineering Managers, Steve Jobs wannabes. There was an obvious disdain for users, and they were seen as complete dunces that should be shepherded to whatever new functionality happened to pop up their heads. There was also a complete disdain for the medium: designers used to print de…

> There was an obvious disdain for users The disdain for "lusers" came from BOFH sysadmin types, well before it was adopted by the non-"tech", business-focused folks.

It predates the BOFH a bit as well. I am restoring a PDP-10 to operation and the operating system refers to users as "lusers", non-sanctioned users of the system are "turists" who were just there to gawk at things. It's not so much out of disdain for the people themselves as what they were doing with the computer - when computer resources were limited, it was grating to have to wait while unskilled and uncaring people occupied those resources for frivolous or unnecessary reasons.

Edit: Consider being told something along the lines of "Your DNA sequence has to wait, the CEO has important Facebook posts to read..."

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#52

Post by billpg »

billpg wrote: post #28

I hope I never have to work with someone like him. He sounds awful.

Some things never change. One of my first HN comments got me four down-votes for much the same comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679208

Back then, I was so new it bumped me down into negative score. I almost made a new account but decided to keep it and try and rebuild my damaged rep.

Nowadays, my score in the thousands, but Mel still sounds awful.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#54

Post by Majromax »

zozbot234 wrote: post #42
ratww wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1000. But in my experience the trend started not with developers, but with the other people around them: Product Managers, Designers, Engineering Managers, Steve Jobs wannabes. There was an obvious disdain for users, and they were seen as complete dunces that should be shepherded to whatever new functionality happened to pop up their heads. There was also a complete disdain for the medium: designers used to print de…

> There was an obvious disdain for users The disdain for "lusers" came from BOFH sysadmin types, well before it was adopted by the non-"tech", business-focused folks.

> The disdain for "lusers" came from BOFH sysadmin types, well before it was adopted by the non-"tech", business-focused folks.

Based on the definitions in the thread, I'd say the BOFH attitude is more the inverse: it is contemptuous towards users, whereas the modern practice is more condescending towards users.

The latter still has a notional ethos of catering to the user, but the Monkey's Paw corruption caters towards the user's most superficial desires, particularly at a first impression, while de-optimizing for the acclimated or "power" user.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#55

Post by Suzuran »

billpg wrote: post #52
billpg wrote: post #28

I hope I never have to work with someone like him. He sounds awful.

Some things never change. One of my first HN comments got me four down-votes for much the same comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679208 Back then, I was so new it bumped me down into negative score. I almost made a new account but decided to keep it and try and rebuild my damaged rep. Nowadays, my score in the thousands, but Mel still sounds awful.

I'd be interested to know exactly why; Is it because he doesn't obey his bosses when told to make the program cheat, or just the way it's framed as some kind of testosterone caveman thing?

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#57

Post by userbinator »

oaiey wrote: post #30

In 1997 I was doing an apprenticeship. It had a very well organized curriculum and well thought courses. One course was based on 8080/8085 cpu. You know what they gave us: A development board (roughly the size of a modern mainboard) with onboard hex keyboard 0-9a-f and 3-4 function keys (halt, run, write at ... something like that). And a book and templated paper. So the exercises, 3-4 hours every week, were: Impleme…

I can still "sight-read" much of the x86 instructions from a hexdump or even (E-)ASCII --- the ISA is much easier to memorise and more regular in octal. This is a habit I acquired from the days when I did a lot of binary patching, for various reasons, and good disassemblers weren't yet easy to come by.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#58

Post by jasonladuke0311 »

int0x2e wrote: post #44
OmarAssadi wrote: post #39

I’m surprised I haven’t seen this linked yet, but Bryan Cantrill of dtrace, Sun, lawnmower, Joyent, etc, fame gave an amazing talk for Monktoberfest 2016, titled “Oral Tradition in Software Engineering”, which features The Story of Mel [1]. Highly recommend checking it out — there are loads of little gems and stories like this throughout. All of his other presentations are great too and definitely worth a listen if y…

Bryan Cantrill's talks are some the best I've ever seen. I've always tried sharing them around with colleagues (with limited success, but still worth it in my view...)

"Don't fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison" is one of the funniest things I've ever heard: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2302

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#60

Post by eob »

I bought the Hackers Dictionary by Eric S. Raymond as a 90s kid and it had this story, as well as a few others. Das Blinkenlights and some AI Koans like the Broken Lisp Machine come to mind.

I used to read them over and over, and it really left an imprint on me. The early hacker ethos was such a strong flavor. Sort of a "one part gnostic, one part mechanic, one part counterculture" vibe.

Sometimes I wonder if that flavor always exists, but shifts from community of practice to community of practice, or if there was something specific about the early days of the net that caused it to arise uniquely.

Post reply on HN