This one has been floating around the nets for a very long time.
How To Become A Hacker
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: How To Become A Hacker
#22"No problem should ever have to be solved twice." I sincerely disagree. There is rarely a problem for which there is one strictly optimal solution. And competition (friendly or otherwise) between solutions leads to progress. As an example, take the browser wars. As opposed to accepting Mozilla/Firefox, Apple and Google's efforts have moved the bar much further than if they just decided to use Mozilla's solution "What…
I think your second point is pretty contestable. Sure, png was a direct response to the gif/lzw debacle, but it is equally probable that someone would have said "you know, we could probably do better". For example, JSON didn't arise from the XML patents (of which there are none), it came from someone saying, "Seriously we all know this thing we're doing with XML could be better", and doing it.
Same for a lot of programming languages.
Same for a lot of things.
Technology seems to progress by a combination of people's interest and snagging at the low-hanging fruit of "this has become unbearable". At some point, a better gif would have happened just because it hit the proper pain point.
Re: How To Become A Hacker
#23What is up with the tooltips on that page? They are almost too distracting for me to read the text. I had to use the fabulous viewtext.org to keep sane.
I thought I was going crazy.
Re: How To Become A Hacker
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect you're missing his point, possibly wilfully. Regardless of whether you agree with it or not, his criticism is that the content of the "how to be a hacker" essay in question is almost nothing more than thinly veiled self-description.
I suspect you're missing his point No, I get the point, I just saying he's wrong.
I don't think he's wrong, really he should have titled it "How to be me" not "how to be a hacker" if that's what he was going to do.
Re: How To Become A Hacker
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect you're missing his point No, I get the point, I just saying he's wrong.
I don't think he's wrong, really he should have titled it "How to be me" not "how to be a hacker" if that's what he was going to do.
Isn't *that" the point he was trying to make?
Re: How To Become A Hacker
#26Possibly the best thing ever said on the topic of this essay is from the infamous Dabblers and Blowhards post: ---- I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of schlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the "what is a hacker?" essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond. [...] The whole genre re…
I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of schlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the "what is a hacker?" essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond Sounds like a pretty weak criticism to me. We all reflect our own biases and opinions in our writings, surely? If pg wrote "how to be a hacke…
It's perfectly possible to write from your experience, while consciously trying to generalize, keeping an eye out for biases. As a (self proclaimed) figurehead of a movement, you may even be expected to do so. Esr has certainly not done that, which most clearly shows in the 'points for style' section of his essay. I'm into martial arts myself, but suggesting that as a 'point for style' is ludicrous. Combine it with an incentive to go 'pistol shooting' and I actually think it is offensive.
Re: How To Become A Hacker
#27Kinda side-topic, but: why do most "hacker advice" tend to recommend Python over Ruby or Perl (ok, Perl is "just old") as a beginner's scripting language? I love Python and I like using it in production better than Ruby, but Ruby is much more of a "hacker's language" and pushes you to more "lispyness" in spirit and practice! (I admit I'am a bit of a Python ecosystem fanboy, with all the cool and easy to use machine learning tools and libs, but this state of affairs is a bit unintuitive - and I'm looking at this types of questions from a language designer's perspective too as I'm working on a language that has 99.9% chances of not tacking over the world, but that 0.1% is enough to "make me high" and keeps me banging my hammers on until I get to something that I can show to the world).
Re: How To Become A Hacker
#28Hack.
Re: How To Become A Hacker
#29Re: How To Become A Hacker
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I sincerely disagree. There is rarely a problem for which > there is one strictly optimal solution. And competition > (friendly or otherwise) between solutions leads to > progress You know, he does make the point that it is OK to pursue a superior solution: Note, however, that "No problem should ever have to be solved twice." does not imply that you have to consider all existing solutions sacred, or that there is o…
If you read the rest of my response, you'd see my response to his clarification: "What's not OK is artificial technical, legal, or institutional barriers (like closed-source code) that prevent a good solution from being re-used and force people to re-invent wheels." If it weren't for LZW patent enforcement, we wouldn't have formats like PNG ... (I guess, "necessity is the mother of innovation")
If necessity is the mother of innovation, then maximizing necessity should be our goal right? This line of thought would however turn silly quite fast, with "lets have wars!", and "lets have random barriers everywhere".
If there weren't patents on formats, people would still make new formats. Crappy energy inefficient and data expensive algorithms get replaced when basic research (unaffected by patents mind you) show that better ways exist.
Here is a thought: figure out a new algorithm that lower the bandwidth use of Google by 25%. They would surely pay you with heaps of money no matter if there is a patent involved or not.