Earlier quoted context omitted.
isn't the hacker the first guy and the developer with experience the second guy?
Nope. http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html
I thought the same thing, re-read the essay and am still confused.
ZenPayroll Is Not Hiring Hackers
51–58 of 58 posts
Re: ZenPayroll Is Not Hiring Hackers
#52Hacking is yielding an output from something other than the basic expected output. That doesn't mean it has to be thrown together, or done in a non efficient way. Hackers are immensely intelligent people, and if they're not then we must be battling over semantics.
Re: ZenPayroll Is Not Hiring Hackers
#53I'm the CEO of ZenPayroll and I want to apologize for any misunderstanding with this post. Our intent was to highlight the business critical nature of payroll and the fact that we spend a lot of time making sure things are done correctly. There are many definitions of the term "hacker" and I strongly believe there is no single right way to build software. Every team has to find the approach that's right for them and…
I think you messed up with this post. You've apparently alienated to some extent one of the company's best and most prominent friends. And I believe most of the post's readers will feel you've mis-defined what it means to be a "hacker".
Re: ZenPayroll Is Not Hiring Hackers
#54I think it's kind of hilarious how these guys are badmouthing hackers as slinging things together, and then go on to aggrandize the government and payroll systems. Most systems are slung together with lots of duct-tape, and I don't think government/payroll is an exception.
Re: ZenPayroll Is Not Hiring Hackers
#55I'm embarrassed to see such nonsense coming from a company we funded. A hacker is not intrinsically someone who throws things together to see if they'll work. The phrase "kernel hacker," for example, doesn't mean someone who writes OSes in that way. It means someone who is deeply familiar with OS internals.
I felt it was a way of getting people to look at their solicitation, nothing more.
Re: ZenPayroll Is Not Hiring Hackers
#56I'm embarrassed to see such nonsense coming from a company we funded. A hacker is not intrinsically someone who throws things together to see if they'll work. The phrase "kernel hacker," for example, doesn't mean someone who writes OSes in that way. It means someone who is deeply familiar with OS internals.
This is clearly a case of semantic disputes. Hacker in the MIT definition of the word emphasizes cleverness and playfulness, and I think this is how most people (including the HN crowd here) usually mean to use the word. I should note that the term 'kernel hacker' has more or less developed on its own, separately, as a phrasal noun. One could very well argue that the definition of 'hacking' extends to sloppy implemen…
Has "Lisp hacker" also developed separately as a phrasal noun? "Unix hacker?" "C Hacker?"
The term "hack" extends to sloppy implementation. I wrote about that here:
http://paulgraham.com/gba.html
but the word "hacker" doesn't simply mean someone who produces hacks in that sense.
Re: ZenPayroll Is Not Hiring Hackers
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html
I thought the same thing, re-read the essay and am still confused.
Definition of "hacker": http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
A "developer" is usually someone who just codes for money, isn't into it, and therefore probably sloppy.
Re: ZenPayroll Is Not Hiring Hackers
#58Good call, imagine you had a task like taking the input from the form for the employees wage. A good developer with no knowledge of IEEE754 might do something like this: float hourlyWage = hourlyWageTextbox.text.floatValue(); While a hacker with intricate knowledge of IEEE754 might insist that everyone do the following: string hourlyWage[] = hourlyWageTextbox.text.split('.') int hourlyWage = hourlyWage[0].to_int * 10…
And then the developer with ISO 4217 experience realizes that splitting the input on '.' doesn't cut it. The Indonesian rupiah is formatted 1.234,56; the Japanese Yen is formatted 123,456; the Lebanese pound is formatted 1 234.
The rabbit hole goes deep. Be careful when you think you've reached the end of it.