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.
The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
101–110 of 155 posts
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Won't compile.
Story of my life.
The entirety of programming experience in two phrases:
"That didn't work as expected."
"That didn't work, as expected."
Another facet of programming experience - one character (that can be hard to notice) can change the behavior of a program in major ways, yet it can remain undiscovered for quite some time (by both compiler and humans).
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well maybe after you've hung around the hacker news community for more than 22 minutes, you'll begin to understand. I've known Eric Raymond for well over a year to every minute that you've been a member of this community. The "Blacks are Lazy" post you're linking to is the revised post-resignation damage-control edition. The original post is archived here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_la.…
This is probably futile, but ESR's original message appears to have been private , so there could not have been any intention of "defaming" Perens. Perens posted the private message on a Debian list: https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html And received some pushback: https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00636.html I don't condone ESR's original message and would never write something lik…
I'm not claiming that that ESR's private message with the threat was the defamation itself. That would come later, in public.
The implied "Second Amendment Solution" threat of "I will find a way to make you regret it" is that Raymond the angry gun nut would shoot Perens, but Raymond's plausible denial after the fact was that he actually only meant he would make Perens regret it by attacking his reputation in public.
He must feel inspired and vindicated by Trump's antics.
I'm still waiting for you to mansplain how Raymond was justified in accusing members of the open source software community of being "fools" and "thugs", and how "thugs" had absolutely nothing to do with the racial context of "Blacks are Lazy".
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#104Earlier 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…
Unless they are hacking on shaders, CUDA or deeplearning (which admittedly isn't C most of the time). Although, I admit that a web server is probably more handy if it's not shaders.
I still like terminals; even on my 3k laptop (which is largely for gaming).
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#105Excellent advice. ESR's ideology is vile, he tries to inject it into everything, and he has no shame. He regularly judges and bullies people on the color of their skin, gender, nationality and religion, and he's certainly not qualified as a "hacker". https://twitter.com/iaincollins/status/719687723590762496 @iaincollins Iain Collins Retweeted $30,000 Logout CSRF TIL ESR is a racist white supremacist and his neo-paga…
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12320275 and marked it off-topic.
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where else can you get a reply from the Hacker that wrote the Hackers Manifesto.
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 multiple generations of hackers in the 30 years since.
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#107Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#108I thought it was "a board is found" not "a bored is found" what is bored? A board would be a bulletin board system, one of many precursors to the modern web.
It is "board". If someone changed it to "bored", they were wrong.
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I'm bitter for my age, but I feel that the culture has already gone through the crossroads. I do get what you're trying to say, though, but I believe that it's the industry that finds it self at the crossroads, not the culture. The culture itself has largely been co-opted by business concerns.
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 non-professional.
Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
#110To me, this manifesto has little more than historical value. It's more an expression of generic adolescent angst rather than of hacker culture. It's a poor "manifesto" too. What exactly are the aims of The Hacker? "Exploring", "Outsmarting you", and "judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like". Platitudes, really, if you set aside the emotional outbursts surrounding them. The Jargon File offer…
I will not argue the angst angle or semantics of manifesto, but given the context of who and when they wrote it, it was and can still carry some weight. But just as your comment betrays your age (I think?), so does mine. I remember going to 2600 meetings in the lower plaza of the Citigroup building once a month. At that time, someone told me Feds come and photograph to record attendees (all 5 or 8 people if a good tu…
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 we had an LOD meetup in Dallas in 1989 or 1990, we changed hotels at the very last minute to avoid a similar situation...