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The girl with the ANSI tattoo

oracle-wtf.blogspot.co.uk

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Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#131

Post by scott_s »

rbanffy wrote: post #128
polemic wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a hacker, so I can't. FYI I'm referring to 'trying to break into a system, possibility illegally, with time pressure, hackers', rather than HackerNews hackers. Which I thought was reasonably obvious from the context. If you're actually trying to crack a system, you're generally trying a lot of different things very rapidly. Tweaking performance and nicely formatting code you're going to immediately discard is…

Sorry if I look harsh, but this is not the meaning of "hacker" I like to see promoted. On the movie, also, the girl was not trying to crack into a computer - she seemingly had full MySQL console access.

I think that ship has sailed, and we just have to use context to disambiguate.

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#134

Post by warmwaffles »

scott_s wrote: post #115
polemic wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, except: hackers ⊈ developers Hackers are not optimizing for performance or readability. I've watched a few penetration testers at work - they have to have a very broad knowledge base and work at speed. They're not sitting around wondering if their query is going to work in 1s or 0.1s - it just doesn't matter. Awesome to see 'real' sql in action though.

And I agree, as long as we also agree that: hackers ∩ developers ≠ ∅ (The set of all hackers are not a strict subset of the set of all developers, but it's also true that some hackers - yes, in the breaking-in-to-something sense - are developers.)

tis a sad day when I understand these symbols and chuckle :(

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#135

Post by vl »

nhebb wrote: post #69
mibbitier wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is, if you're "good" at something, and a movie gets it wrong, it can ruin the movie for you. My pet hate is people playing the piano, but playing the wrong notes (While the soundtrack is playing something different).

Exactly. My pet peeve is military depictions in movies. I can't recall a movie that's gotten even the basics right. I may be nitpicking, but it does detract from the viewing experience.

And I can't immerse in the Game of Thrones because Nigth's Watch members stroll around in the snow without hats. Any person who was in the cold temperature for the prolonged time would recognize it as complete nonsense. Every time I see it, I get this feeling "this looks wrong", and then, "oh, they are without hats again!"

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#136

Post by chimeracoder »

scott_s wrote: post #131
rbanffy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if I look harsh, but this is not the meaning of "hacker" I like to see promoted. On the movie, also, the girl was not trying to crack into a computer - she seemingly had full MySQL console access.

I think that ship has sailed, and we just have to use context to disambiguate.

I prefer to think of 'hack' and its variants as neutral terms that can, in context be either good ('Look what I hacked together!') or bad ('They hacked into the servers').

(Actually, the way usually explain it to non-techies: duct tape. Everyone understands what duct tape is meant for: it won't necessarily win any awards for style[1], but it's powerful, and it sure as heck gets the job done in a pinch, and quickly too! I find that analogy generally holds well enough, whether we're talking about black-hat hacking or 'real' hacking.)

[1] Most of the time, that is: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=duct%20tape%20cloth...

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#137

Post by sjm »

drostie wrote: post #98
btilly wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely true. I had the opportunity to complain about this once to a big name Hollywood producer, and he told me that the rule of thumb that most movie makers use is, "If we don't know the difference, our audience won't either." Occasionally they hire experts to be sure they get it right, but that is more the exception than the rule, and mostly happens when a feeling of realism is considered important for…

It was so absolutely nice that NUMB3RS hired actual applied math geeks to write the equations that their statistician uses to solve crimes. If only they had hired a computer geek to write the crap about the Turing test. ;_;

Yeah, if I remember correctly "NUMB3RS" likens IRC to pirates trading illegal drugs in international waters.
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