41–48 of 48 posts
Does he have an entry on how to become an insufferable blow-hard?
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sextips/
...
"Cathy: Try this on a stranger in an elevator, if you must, to minimize the fear level."
His comments about Windows are plain ignorant.
how to become a hacker? it's easy: http://hackertyper.com
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I honestly wish nothing Eric wrote would ever be linked on HN again. He had his hey-days, he grabbed enough asses at conventions and harassed enough unsuspecting girls and we should just never mention him again. This is not the 90s anymore and I just hope stuff that barely applied in the 90s is more than historic and dated by now and "geeks" and "hackers" are a TON more diverse than that by now. When it comes down to…
ESR is known for harassing girls? Never heard of that but sounds like a fun story.. I actually remember reading ESRs writings as a teenager and actually being slightly afraid of ending up like him.
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Python is more powerful than Ruby. You have more meta-programming options available to you and a far, far wider scope of tools (scipy, etc). Python also naturally can lead you to c/c++ through cython as well as idiomatically functional programming (partials, function passing, decorators) far easier than Ruby (since in ruby parans are optional).
> as well as idiomatically functional programming Intuitive as this may seem, it ends up being the opposite: you'll see more "functional-like" code in Ruby codebases. A simple think like Guido considering multi-line lambdas "a Rube Goldberg language feature" [1] and rejecting them was sort of a butterfly effect that pushed real-world ruby codebases away from functional programming. Same as the nice-looking block pass…
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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 a…
Look, I disagree with esr on more than a few things myself. But this essay strikes me as a fairly reasonable introduction to a number of activities and mindsets that a would-be hacker would want to cultivate. And it's not like he is saying "This is the only route to becoming a hacker".
I also don't understand your thing about finding the reference to pistol shooting "offensive". I can understand if you're an anti-gunner or whatever and don't like guns, but the simple facts are that millions of people enjoy going to the range and shooting their pistols. We're talking about something that is legal (with some caveats), safe, fun, and has positive personal benefits... it's not like he suggested going out and watching kiddie-porn or stealing food from starving children.
Possibly 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…
Nietzsche said the meaning of a thing is a function of power rather than truth. If someone had written something better and with similar exposure, people would give that assessment more authority. Books and essays like "Management secrets of Gengis Khan" are an attempt at invoking this kind of power, that the writer is both knowledgeable enough and the topic is relevant enough to the times in which it appears to hold…
Well that's easy: Mötley Crüe.