16 ms·

The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

248 points by cjg 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
amingilani 10y ago
Gets me everytime
nxzero 10y ago
30 years old (aka 1986) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_Manifesto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_Manifesto Primary Source: http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html
mongo0se 10y ago
I found a comupter.
objectiveariel 10y ago
To 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 offers a more balanced and intricate exploration of The Hacker. It's always worth a read. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html
- sevensor 10y ago
  > To me, this manifesto has little more than historical value. It's more an expression of generic adolescent angst rather than of hacker culture. Well sure, but let's not discount the historical value of its angsty naïveté. This is an important part of our cultural history -- it helps explain the peculiar contradiction that many of us still feel a sense of persecution even as working in technology has become both lucrative and respectable.
  - lubujackson 10y ago
    Computing in general started with such an idealistic, academic mindset. It's important to remember that the "hacker mindset" was really a call to return to that original approach where people would literally hack together on a computer, explore its limits and do it simply for the thrill. By the 80s, there was a business/professionalism that was eating away at that early approach and the "manifesto" is almost a straight lament. Same thing happened to startups, the Web, etc.
    - sevensor 10y ago
      I see where you're coming from, but this is an oversimplification. A lot of the early work on and thinking about computers was about the possibility of top-down social control. This features explicitly in Weiner's Cybernetics and at least implicitly in Von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. (The Soviets latched onto the same idea and tried to build a central-planning computer network.) The "hacking" ethic was really part of the counterculture, and like the counterculture, it ultimately dissolved into the mainstream.
      - pnathan 10y ago
        > 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 sake of the hack. They are often looked down on... it's still countercultural to the modern software/VC world. :-)
        uola 10y ago
        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 would say is a good modern representation of the hacker spirit.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  It's almost as if ideals and principles are necessarily broad generalizations.
- loydb 10y ago
  To be fair, I was pretty damn angsty at the time :) Always exciting to see this pop up someplace new. It's being translated into Polish for a textbook this year as well.
  - justinhensley 10y ago
    How did you feel about it showing up in the critically acclaimed film, Hackers? That was my first exposure to it.
    - loydb 10y ago
      Pleased, because I think I'm the answer to the trivia question "What was the first email address to ever appear in a major movie credit roll". Sad, because, damn, is that a bad movie.
      - api 10y ago
        I think it's a great bit of campy cinema. It's like Wet Hot American Summer with ravers and 90s cyberculture. It's a lot better today than it was when it was made. Instead of lame it feels charmingly funny and nostalgic.
        justinhensley 10y ago
        I completely agree. I actually thought it was extremely cool even when it was released, but I was 12. While a wholly inaccurate portrayal of hacking or even computing, it did contribute to my fascination with both.
        int_19h 10y ago
        For all the factual inaccuracies in this movie - which was like 99% of it - I think they have done an amazing job relaying the spirit of the manifesto - the general notion that hacking, as a culture, is really about challenging yourself and satisfying your curiosity.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Although just to be safe, I'd reccomend going back to an older version of the Jargon File. Around 3.x or so, ESR started poisoning the well, and adding some stuff that definitely doesn't belong, reflective of his ideology.
- ashark 10y ago
  > We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias > judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. Hm. I may make these parts CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md in my next Github project.
  - zeveb 10y ago
    Careful — I don't know if GitHub will want you to refrain from judging people by their skin colour, c.f. http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-...
  - Pete_D 10y ago
    I know at least one project already has - the surf browser's code of conduct[0] is more or less the full text of the manifesto. http://git.suckless.org/surf/tree/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md http://git.suckless.org/surf/tree/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Mary Sue would like a word with you.
- icc97 10y ago
  I'd say a major point of a manifesto is to inspire people which it clearly did.
- jff 10y ago
  In my opinion, the Jargon File is a fun look back at historical hacker lifestyles, but it's also a microcosm of a very few schools in the 60s and 70s. Teenagers have a bad habit of reading the Jargon File and thinking that's how they MUST behave to be a hacker--I did it, to my embarrassment, and a trip to Defcon or most any freshman CS course will find others doing the same. You don't have to start saying "grok" to be a hacker, or adopt the idiotic "-p convention" which doesn't even really exist in Lisp any more. Both the Hacker Manifesto and to a lesser extent the Jargon File also tend to perpetrate an "us vs. them" ("freaks vs. squares", "hackers vs. normies") mindset that's pretty outdated these days. You know the only people who give a shit about categories like "geeks and jocks" any more? The ones who are so tied up in their manufactured geek identity that they don't realize the jocks are also learning Python after football practice these days.
  - sevensor 10y ago
    A lot of people have adopted "grok" without understanding its subversive connotations. The shade of Robert Heinlein is laughing at us all. Edit: just checked the Jargon File on "grok," and it mentions neither sexual congress nor ritual cannibalism. I think ESR may be chuckling as well.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      > The shade of Robert Heinlein is laughing at us all. Hardly a new state of affairs. I mean, he invented the Rapture of the Nerds back in the fifties!
      - chadgeidel 10y ago
        Wow, really? I haven't read enough Heinlein - what was that in? I always thought Rapture of the Nerds was grounded in Vinge's "The Coming Technological Singularity" (https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.ht...)
        throwanem 10y ago
- devishard 10y ago
  > 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. Platitudes, yes, but they're platitudes because everyone assumes that those are goods that everyone values. The thing is, while most people would say they value those things, very few people actually follow through on it. But hacker culture is all about what you actually follow through and do, so they actually follow through. Take, for example, a social justice movement that pulls women out of STEM and into women's studies and related fields, and then complains that women don't get into STEM fields. Meanwhile, women are actually much better represented in hacker culture than in most of STEM, because hackers, unlike the rest of the conversation around women in STEM, don't give a fuck about women. They only care what people do, and it turns out women do about the same amount of stuff as men.
  - sverige 10y ago
    I think you've put your finger on the difference between hacker culture in the early 80s and now.
  - et-al 10y ago
    > because hackers, unlike the rest of the conversation around women in STEM, don't give a fuck about [gender]. They only care what people do, and it turns out women do about the same amount of stuff as men. Wanted to emphasize this. Hope you don't mind the edit.
    - devishard 10y ago
      That edit is fine and says a reasonable thing that I agree with, but there are two reasons why I said "women" instead of "gender". 1. "Hackers don't give a fuck about women" is a more shocking statement than "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender" given millennial social justice sensibilities. That shock was intended, because it demonstrates to readers who aren't hackers the difference between their view and the hacker view, in a very visceral way. When you read, "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender", you have to think about it to realize how fundamental a difference in thinking that is. But when you say, "Hackers don't give a fuck about women", you can feel how different it is. 2. Gender is also a much larger issue than women in STEM. In the context of this discussion, "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender" is true, but in a larger context, I think hackers do care about gender, because gender is very hackable.
- eggy 10y ago
  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 turnout). I was new, and laughed it off, until I say two guys taking snapshots (no digital cameras then!) our way. We would wave at them. Good memories of HOPE 1994 too. Funny to see the back of my head in some of the videos of it posted to YouTube. They were put up only these past 3 years or so. I also remember the weight of the situation hit me at the least expected during Phiberfest at Irving Plaza, NYC in 1995, celebrating Phiber Optik's (Mark Abene) release from prison. I don't think taking chances with your time, and someone else's money (VC) is the same as putting yourself out there the way it was in late 70s, early 80s as a hacker. I think modern 'Hacker' culture as popularly used now, is more 'three-piece', and that anything that may be actually legal, but more on the darker side is actually attacked by modern 'Hacker' culture. Whether you agree with Anonymous, whose manifesto borrows some from The Hacker's Manifesto, it is more in line with the meaning of the word 'Hacker' to me, and less ameliorated like over-cooked, over-watered oatmeal of the word's usage today by self-described hackers.
  - loydb 10y ago
    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...
    - jlgaddis 10y ago
      As an early teen when I first read your words ~25 years ago, I immediately related. Even more so a few years later when I was kicked out of my high school computer classes, banned from touching the computers, and then when the FBI showed up at my home (unrelated). All these years later, it feels odd to see this here, read your comment, and write a reply. Your words served as "inspiration" to probably thousands of youth. I hope you're doing well.
- crawsible 10y ago
  Just think: 30 years from now, my age group will be reminiscing about Justin Timberlake's speech in The Social Network. what a time to be alive
- fcanela 10y ago
  It showed me (when I was a teenager living away from the city in the 90s) that I was not alone in my curiosity. I had The Mentor Manifiesto in my walls, along with prints of code or networking diagrams (i.e. TCP handshake sequence). I found the text really inspiring then.
benkarst 10y ago
Missed a paren in the title.
- MrMid 10y ago
  Won't compile.
  - loydb 10y ago
    Story of my life.
    - JBiserkov 10y ago
      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).
2close4comfort 10y ago
It is always good to remember your roots.
- goldenkey 10y ago
  Don't forget to Vieta jump!
tempodox 10y ago
> we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak Still has a familiar ring.
- goldenkey 10y ago
  Unfortunately as I study higher level mathematics on my own, I hunger to be in a graduate program where the eagerness to learn and sharing of profundity and boundless energy to crack the truths of pure logic buzz around departments and campuses. It sucks to be in solace with knowledge. I wish I realized earlier that higher education was far more matched to skills needed for research. I would have majored in math instead of biomedical sciences. Too late now. 3.8GPA, waste of a major and the chance I had to be part of the "scene." Undergraduate math is much more logical than other majors in actually being useful. Aye. :-(
  - throwanem 10y ago
    > a graduate program where the eagerness to learn and sharing of profundity and boundless energy to crack the truths of pure logic buzz Do such things exist? I chose not to continue my studies beyond high school graduation, but from my experience around academics and academia, the sort of program you describe seems at the very least well away from the norm.
    - goldenkey 10y ago
      High school academia is nothing like undergraduate academia which is nothing like graduate academia. Graduate academia is awesome unless you get stuck under a professor who tries to use you as a grunt worker. It happens but it's not the norm.
      - throwanem 10y ago
        > High school academia is nothing like undergraduate academia which is nothing like graduate academia. I never claimed otherwise. My point is that, while I lack firsthand experience in the area, I've worked with a wide variety of grad students under a number of PIs, and found them universally to present an impression of being stooped under a heavy load of debt, shit work, and misery. Perhaps that's unrepresentative, though, or inaccurately perceived.
noonespecial 10y ago
Not really a "manifesto" but I always liked it. Read more like Maya Angelou's 'Caged Bird'. It's poetry.
33a 10y ago
This made me cringe a little.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Always a fun read. The Hacker Manifesto reminds us that computing culture stands at a crossroads: between hobbyists and academia, between bedroom programmers and industry, between hackers, and, well, hackers, although both appear on either side of the fence. While sinister and angsty in tone, this is ultimately a tale of someone discovering the wonders of computing, much as I, and many others did - although I never broke into anything, save my iPod. From the FSF to MS to the demoscene, we're all computing, and many of us have a spark of feelings this piece evokes - a natural curiosity, a desire to push the boundaries, to see what's possible, and a bit of rebeliousness. It's what separates the hackers (both kinds) and the hobbyists and the wannabes, from those who don't have that feeling, the people for whom this is a 9-5 job, who grind out StrategyObjectFactoryFactorySingletonFactories, and when they get home want to think about anything but programming. In short, that spark is what separates those who really care about computing from those who just want to get their job done and forget about it. As usual with any broad, sweeping statements I make, I may be wrong.
- CodeMage 10y ago
  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.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    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.
    - riboflava 10y ago
      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.
DonHopkins 10y ago
Excellent 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 https://twitter.com/iaincollins/status/719687723590762496 ‏@iaincollins Iain Collins Retweeted $30,000 Logout CSRF TIL ESR is a racist white supremacist and his neo-pagan self description is a dog whistle (see thread for more) https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/719621538257903616 https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/719621538257903616 https://www.dropbox.com/s/002k6yy1mzqkd70/Screenshot%202016-02-03%2016.19.59.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/002k6yy1mzqkd70/Screenshot%202016-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_lazy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_la... http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/gun-linux http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/gun-linux
- 12381291 10y ago
  What is the point you are making here? Not saying that you're wrong, but these links are unintelligible to me.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    ESR claims that everyone is an SJW, he says that blacks have a lower IQ than whites, and he defended an article called "blacks are lazy," saying that it was accurate. In short, he's a piece of scum. And that's the truth.
    - jpadkins 10y ago
      actually the screenshot you linked shows that he didn't say blacks have lower IQ than whites. He said haiti has an average IQ or 70, and its not because they are black.
      - DonHopkins 10y ago
        That is just the tip of the iceberg, one of his MANY racist posts from his blog. I won't link to it, but go read the whole thing, including the comments sections, if you really want to know what he and his followers are really like. His favorite technique is to play this game of Libertarian Chicken, where he says something that's totally racist on its face, just to bait people, and then attempts to argue that he's actually operating at a higher level and much more clever than everyone else, and is really right, but just misunderstood, because everyone else is an idiot. Russ Nelson made a ham-fisted attempt to emulate Raymond's standard technique in his "Blacks are Lazy" posting, but it cost him his job as President of the Open Source Initiative. But ESR threw down the gauntlet and made a full throated public defense of Russ's "Blacks are Lazy" premise, by attacking the people who wanted him removed as "fools" and "thugs" (dog whistle for the n-word). Raymond actually wanted OSI to get into a public knock-down drag-out fight with the "social justice warriors" who wanted Nelson to resign, at whatever cost in cash, credibility, alienating minorities, and endangering the mission of the OSI. Not exactly a shining example of leadership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_lazy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_la... Note that although Russell withdrew the article, and admitted it was badly written, Eric S. Raymond is on the record as having defended it by accusing people asking Russell to step down as being "fools and thugs". Note that "thug" has been called a "dog whistle" term for "n*gger". https://web.archive.org/web/20140126142113/http://aattp.org/thug-just-a-dog-whistle-for-n-word-says-nfl-star-richard-sherman/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140126142113/http://aattp.org/... http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/New-OSI-President-Steps-Down/#sthash.EJtgGdxJ.dpuf http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/New-OSI-Presi... Eric S. Raymond wrote: “The people who knew Russ as a Quaker, a pacifist and a gentleman, and no racist, but nevertheless pressured OSI to do the responsible thing and fire him in order to avoid political damage should be equally ashamed,” Raymond said. “Abetting somebody elses witch hunt is no less disgusting than starting your own.” “Personally, I wanted to fight this on principle,” Raymond said. “Russ resigned the presidency rather than get OSI into that fight, and the board quite properly respected his wishes in the matter. That sacrifice makes me angrier at the fools and thugs who pulled him down.”
drannex 10y ago
Posted this last week on here, was an excellent read - was looking for it for the last ~5 years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12241214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12241214
pepijndevos 10y ago
Still waiting for the closing parenthesis. Yes, I'm - amongst other things - a lisper.
ktRolster 10y ago
It's also worth reading The Hacker Crackdown, which has an analysis of various hacker manifestos in part 2, and in general is an excellent read.
jonheller 10y ago
Every time I read this I hear it read in the voice of the villain from the movie Hackers. Which I have to admit was totally a guilty pleasure of my teenage years.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Why only your teenage years? It can still be a guilty pleasure today!
- YngwieMalware 10y ago
  The movie completely owns
transitorykris 10y ago
Better formatting and at least one less typo http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html
- heartbreak 10y ago
  > How to Make TNT Dammit now I'm on a list somewhere. Phrack was the real deal.
boie0025 10y ago
Thanks for posting that! I just had a flashback to my BBS/FidoNet days of childhood.
biot 10y ago
This is found at the very end of the Vice article, still on the front page of HN: https://motherboard.vice.com/read/72-hours-of-pwnage-a-paranoid-n00b-goes-to-def-con https://motherboard.vice.com/read/72-hours-of-pwnage-a-paran...
hashberry 10y ago
For the full cultural effect, read it while listening to angsty MIDI music. Nirvana's Heart-Shaped Box is a perfect soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUscmM8e9lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUscmM8e9lc
HemanHeartYou 10y ago
What was everyone's TTC[1]? I had about 4 seconds. [1]Time To Cringe
YngwieMalware 10y ago
Cool? You think it's cool? It's not cool. It's commie bullshit.
- YngwieMalware 10y ago
  I'm taking the first down vote with pride because someone didn't get the reference. Rookie mistake
  - fredoliveira 10y ago
    Upvotes are like spandex. A privilege, not a right.
saneshark 10y ago
I 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.
- loydb 10y ago
  It is "board". If someone changed it to "bored", they were wrong.
Kalium 10y ago
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.
- RRRA 10y ago
  And to a lot of people here thinking this mentality is dead are, I think, confused by the fact that the growth and general appeal of computers have only diluted the hackers, but they are still growing in absolute numbers. Same goes at DEFCON in a way, where so many people want to see what a hacker is that the whole conference looses its "direction" in a way, as a whole at least...
  - Kalium 10y ago
    Very true. When you define "hacker" to mean "A person who writes code quickly and is willing to take business risk", you're not likely to run in the same circles as the people who crack open complex software systems for fun. You might wind up believing those people no longer really exist, having gone the way of the dial-up modem.
meatsock 10y ago
here is a more recent and in depth exploration of the hacker, with a similar title but a solid footing in philosophy and history -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hacker_Manifesto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hacker_Manifesto
dustinls 10y ago
Feels wrong to have a thread about the Hacker's Manifesto without including this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNtcWpY4YLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNtcWpY4YLY
znpy 10y ago
I find quite annoying that many people go "oh geez, what is this crap, nah, it's not like this" when this is a huge part of what brought us all that the hackerdom is today (whatever it is anyway).

248 points by cjg 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

amingilani 10y ago

Gets me everytime

nxzero 10y ago

30 years old (aka 1986) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_Manifesto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_Manifesto Primary Source: http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html

mongo0se 10y ago

I found a comupter.

objectiveariel 10y ago

To 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 offers a more balanced and intricate exploration of The Hacker. It's always worth a read. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html

sevensor 10y ago
> To me, this manifesto has little more than historical value. It's more an expression of generic adolescent angst rather than of hacker culture. Well sure, but let's not discount the historical value of its angsty naïveté. This is an important part of our cultural history -- it helps explain the peculiar contradiction that many of us still feel a sense of persecution even as working in technology has become both lucrative and respectable.
- lubujackson 10y ago
  Computing in general started with such an idealistic, academic mindset. It's important to remember that the "hacker mindset" was really a call to return to that original approach where people would literally hack together on a computer, explore its limits and do it simply for the thrill. By the 80s, there was a business/professionalism that was eating away at that early approach and the "manifesto" is almost a straight lament. Same thing happened to startups, the Web, etc.
  - sevensor 10y ago
    I see where you're coming from, but this is an oversimplification. A lot of the early work on and thinking about computers was about the possibility of top-down social control. This features explicitly in Weiner's Cybernetics and at least implicitly in Von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. (The Soviets latched onto the same idea and tried to build a central-planning computer network.) The "hacking" ethic was really part of the counterculture, and like the counterculture, it ultimately dissolved into the mainstream.
    - pnathan 10y ago
      > 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 sake of the hack. They are often looked down on... it's still countercultural to the modern software/VC world. :-)
      - uola 10y ago
        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 would say is a good modern representation of the hacker spirit.
Karunamon 10y ago
It's almost as if ideals and principles are necessarily broad generalizations.
loydb 10y ago
To be fair, I was pretty damn angsty at the time :) Always exciting to see this pop up someplace new. It's being translated into Polish for a textbook this year as well.
- justinhensley 10y ago
  How did you feel about it showing up in the critically acclaimed film, Hackers? That was my first exposure to it.
  - loydb 10y ago
    Pleased, because I think I'm the answer to the trivia question "What was the first email address to ever appear in a major movie credit roll". Sad, because, damn, is that a bad movie.
    - api 10y ago
      I think it's a great bit of campy cinema. It's like Wet Hot American Summer with ravers and 90s cyberculture. It's a lot better today than it was when it was made. Instead of lame it feels charmingly funny and nostalgic.
      - justinhensley 10y ago
        I completely agree. I actually thought it was extremely cool even when it was released, but I was 12. While a wholly inaccurate portrayal of hacking or even computing, it did contribute to my fascination with both.
        int_19h 10y ago
        For all the factual inaccuracies in this movie - which was like 99% of it - I think they have done an amazing job relaying the spirit of the manifesto - the general notion that hacking, as a culture, is really about challenging yourself and satisfying your curiosity.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Although just to be safe, I'd reccomend going back to an older version of the Jargon File. Around 3.x or so, ESR started poisoning the well, and adding some stuff that definitely doesn't belong, reflective of his ideology.
ashark 10y ago
> We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias > judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. Hm. I may make these parts CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md in my next Github project.
- zeveb 10y ago
  Careful — I don't know if GitHub will want you to refrain from judging people by their skin colour, c.f. http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-...
- Pete_D 10y ago
  I know at least one project already has - the surf browser's code of conduct[0] is more or less the full text of the manifesto. http://git.suckless.org/surf/tree/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md http://git.suckless.org/surf/tree/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
maxerickson 10y ago
Mary Sue would like a word with you.
icc97 10y ago
I'd say a major point of a manifesto is to inspire people which it clearly did.
jff 10y ago
In my opinion, the Jargon File is a fun look back at historical hacker lifestyles, but it's also a microcosm of a very few schools in the 60s and 70s. Teenagers have a bad habit of reading the Jargon File and thinking that's how they MUST behave to be a hacker--I did it, to my embarrassment, and a trip to Defcon or most any freshman CS course will find others doing the same. You don't have to start saying "grok" to be a hacker, or adopt the idiotic "-p convention" which doesn't even really exist in Lisp any more. Both the Hacker Manifesto and to a lesser extent the Jargon File also tend to perpetrate an "us vs. them" ("freaks vs. squares", "hackers vs. normies") mindset that's pretty outdated these days. You know the only people who give a shit about categories like "geeks and jocks" any more? The ones who are so tied up in their manufactured geek identity that they don't realize the jocks are also learning Python after football practice these days.
- sevensor 10y ago
  A lot of people have adopted "grok" without understanding its subversive connotations. The shade of Robert Heinlein is laughing at us all. Edit: just checked the Jargon File on "grok," and it mentions neither sexual congress nor ritual cannibalism. I think ESR may be chuckling as well.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    > The shade of Robert Heinlein is laughing at us all. Hardly a new state of affairs. I mean, he invented the Rapture of the Nerds back in the fifties!
    - chadgeidel 10y ago
      Wow, really? I haven't read enough Heinlein - what was that in? I always thought Rapture of the Nerds was grounded in Vinge's "The Coming Technological Singularity" (https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.ht...)
      - throwanem 10y ago
devishard 10y ago
> 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. Platitudes, yes, but they're platitudes because everyone assumes that those are goods that everyone values. The thing is, while most people would say they value those things, very few people actually follow through on it. But hacker culture is all about what you actually follow through and do, so they actually follow through. Take, for example, a social justice movement that pulls women out of STEM and into women's studies and related fields, and then complains that women don't get into STEM fields. Meanwhile, women are actually much better represented in hacker culture than in most of STEM, because hackers, unlike the rest of the conversation around women in STEM, don't give a fuck about women. They only care what people do, and it turns out women do about the same amount of stuff as men.
- sverige 10y ago
  I think you've put your finger on the difference between hacker culture in the early 80s and now.
- et-al 10y ago
  > because hackers, unlike the rest of the conversation around women in STEM, don't give a fuck about [gender]. They only care what people do, and it turns out women do about the same amount of stuff as men. Wanted to emphasize this. Hope you don't mind the edit.
  - devishard 10y ago
    That edit is fine and says a reasonable thing that I agree with, but there are two reasons why I said "women" instead of "gender". 1. "Hackers don't give a fuck about women" is a more shocking statement than "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender" given millennial social justice sensibilities. That shock was intended, because it demonstrates to readers who aren't hackers the difference between their view and the hacker view, in a very visceral way. When you read, "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender", you have to think about it to realize how fundamental a difference in thinking that is. But when you say, "Hackers don't give a fuck about women", you can feel how different it is. 2. Gender is also a much larger issue than women in STEM. In the context of this discussion, "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender" is true, but in a larger context, I think hackers do care about gender, because gender is very hackable.
eggy 10y ago
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 turnout). I was new, and laughed it off, until I say two guys taking snapshots (no digital cameras then!) our way. We would wave at them. Good memories of HOPE 1994 too. Funny to see the back of my head in some of the videos of it posted to YouTube. They were put up only these past 3 years or so. I also remember the weight of the situation hit me at the least expected during Phiberfest at Irving Plaza, NYC in 1995, celebrating Phiber Optik's (Mark Abene) release from prison. I don't think taking chances with your time, and someone else's money (VC) is the same as putting yourself out there the way it was in late 70s, early 80s as a hacker. I think modern 'Hacker' culture as popularly used now, is more 'three-piece', and that anything that may be actually legal, but more on the darker side is actually attacked by modern 'Hacker' culture. Whether you agree with Anonymous, whose manifesto borrows some from The Hacker's Manifesto, it is more in line with the meaning of the word 'Hacker' to me, and less ameliorated like over-cooked, over-watered oatmeal of the word's usage today by self-described hackers.
- loydb 10y ago
  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...
  - jlgaddis 10y ago
    As an early teen when I first read your words ~25 years ago, I immediately related. Even more so a few years later when I was kicked out of my high school computer classes, banned from touching the computers, and then when the FBI showed up at my home (unrelated). All these years later, it feels odd to see this here, read your comment, and write a reply. Your words served as "inspiration" to probably thousands of youth. I hope you're doing well.
crawsible 10y ago
Just think: 30 years from now, my age group will be reminiscing about Justin Timberlake's speech in The Social Network. what a time to be alive
fcanela 10y ago
It showed me (when I was a teenager living away from the city in the 90s) that I was not alone in my curiosity. I had The Mentor Manifiesto in my walls, along with prints of code or networking diagrams (i.e. TCP handshake sequence). I found the text really inspiring then.

benkarst 10y ago

Missed a paren in the title.

MrMid 10y ago
Won't compile.
- loydb 10y ago
  Story of my life.
  - JBiserkov 10y ago
    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).

2close4comfort 10y ago

It is always good to remember your roots.

goldenkey 10y ago
Don't forget to Vieta jump!

tempodox 10y ago

> we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak Still has a familiar ring.

goldenkey 10y ago
Unfortunately as I study higher level mathematics on my own, I hunger to be in a graduate program where the eagerness to learn and sharing of profundity and boundless energy to crack the truths of pure logic buzz around departments and campuses. It sucks to be in solace with knowledge. I wish I realized earlier that higher education was far more matched to skills needed for research. I would have majored in math instead of biomedical sciences. Too late now. 3.8GPA, waste of a major and the chance I had to be part of the "scene." Undergraduate math is much more logical than other majors in actually being useful. Aye. :-(
- throwanem 10y ago
  > a graduate program where the eagerness to learn and sharing of profundity and boundless energy to crack the truths of pure logic buzz Do such things exist? I chose not to continue my studies beyond high school graduation, but from my experience around academics and academia, the sort of program you describe seems at the very least well away from the norm.
  - goldenkey 10y ago
    High school academia is nothing like undergraduate academia which is nothing like graduate academia. Graduate academia is awesome unless you get stuck under a professor who tries to use you as a grunt worker. It happens but it's not the norm.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      > High school academia is nothing like undergraduate academia which is nothing like graduate academia. I never claimed otherwise. My point is that, while I lack firsthand experience in the area, I've worked with a wide variety of grad students under a number of PIs, and found them universally to present an impression of being stooped under a heavy load of debt, shit work, and misery. Perhaps that's unrepresentative, though, or inaccurately perceived.

noonespecial 10y ago

Not really a "manifesto" but I always liked it. Read more like Maya Angelou's 'Caged Bird'. It's poetry.

33a 10y ago

This made me cringe a little.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

Always a fun read. The Hacker Manifesto reminds us that computing culture stands at a crossroads: between hobbyists and academia, between bedroom programmers and industry, between hackers, and, well, hackers, although both appear on either side of the fence. While sinister and angsty in tone, this is ultimately a tale of someone discovering the wonders of computing, much as I, and many others did - although I never broke into anything, save my iPod. From the FSF to MS to the demoscene, we're all computing, and many of us have a spark of feelings this piece evokes - a natural curiosity, a desire to push the boundaries, to see what's possible, and a bit of rebeliousness. It's what separates the hackers (both kinds) and the hobbyists and the wannabes, from those who don't have that feeling, the people for whom this is a 9-5 job, who grind out StrategyObjectFactoryFactorySingletonFactories, and when they get home want to think about anything but programming. In short, that spark is what separates those who really care about computing from those who just want to get their job done and forget about it. As usual with any broad, sweeping statements I make, I may be wrong.

CodeMage 10y ago
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.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  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.
  - riboflava 10y ago
    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.

DonHopkins 10y ago

Excellent 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 https://twitter.com/iaincollins/status/719687723590762496 ‏@iaincollins Iain Collins Retweeted $30,000 Logout CSRF TIL ESR is a racist white supremacist and his neo-pagan self description is a dog whistle (see thread for more) https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/719621538257903616 https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/719621538257903616 https://www.dropbox.com/s/002k6yy1mzqkd70/Screenshot%202016-02-03%2016.19.59.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/002k6yy1mzqkd70/Screenshot%202016-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_lazy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_la... http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/gun-linux http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/gun-linux

12381291 10y ago
What is the point you are making here? Not saying that you're wrong, but these links are unintelligible to me.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  ESR claims that everyone is an SJW, he says that blacks have a lower IQ than whites, and he defended an article called "blacks are lazy," saying that it was accurate. In short, he's a piece of scum. And that's the truth.
  - jpadkins 10y ago
    actually the screenshot you linked shows that he didn't say blacks have lower IQ than whites. He said haiti has an average IQ or 70, and its not because they are black.
    - DonHopkins 10y ago
      That is just the tip of the iceberg, one of his MANY racist posts from his blog. I won't link to it, but go read the whole thing, including the comments sections, if you really want to know what he and his followers are really like. His favorite technique is to play this game of Libertarian Chicken, where he says something that's totally racist on its face, just to bait people, and then attempts to argue that he's actually operating at a higher level and much more clever than everyone else, and is really right, but just misunderstood, because everyone else is an idiot. Russ Nelson made a ham-fisted attempt to emulate Raymond's standard technique in his "Blacks are Lazy" posting, but it cost him his job as President of the Open Source Initiative. But ESR threw down the gauntlet and made a full throated public defense of Russ's "Blacks are Lazy" premise, by attacking the people who wanted him removed as "fools" and "thugs" (dog whistle for the n-word). Raymond actually wanted OSI to get into a public knock-down drag-out fight with the "social justice warriors" who wanted Nelson to resign, at whatever cost in cash, credibility, alienating minorities, and endangering the mission of the OSI. Not exactly a shining example of leadership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_lazy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_la... Note that although Russell withdrew the article, and admitted it was badly written, Eric S. Raymond is on the record as having defended it by accusing people asking Russell to step down as being "fools and thugs". Note that "thug" has been called a "dog whistle" term for "n*gger". https://web.archive.org/web/20140126142113/http://aattp.org/thug-just-a-dog-whistle-for-n-word-says-nfl-star-richard-sherman/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140126142113/http://aattp.org/... http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/New-OSI-President-Steps-Down/#sthash.EJtgGdxJ.dpuf http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/New-OSI-Presi... Eric S. Raymond wrote: “The people who knew Russ as a Quaker, a pacifist and a gentleman, and no racist, but nevertheless pressured OSI to do the responsible thing and fire him in order to avoid political damage should be equally ashamed,” Raymond said. “Abetting somebody elses witch hunt is no less disgusting than starting your own.” “Personally, I wanted to fight this on principle,” Raymond said. “Russ resigned the presidency rather than get OSI into that fight, and the board quite properly respected his wishes in the matter. That sacrifice makes me angrier at the fools and thugs who pulled him down.”

drannex 10y ago

Posted this last week on here, was an excellent read - was looking for it for the last ~5 years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12241214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12241214

pepijndevos 10y ago

Still waiting for the closing parenthesis. Yes, I'm - amongst other things - a lisper.

ktRolster 10y ago

It's also worth reading The Hacker Crackdown, which has an analysis of various hacker manifestos in part 2, and in general is an excellent read.

jonheller 10y ago

Every time I read this I hear it read in the voice of the villain from the movie Hackers. Which I have to admit was totally a guilty pleasure of my teenage years.

throwanem 10y ago
Why only your teenage years? It can still be a guilty pleasure today!
YngwieMalware 10y ago
The movie completely owns

transitorykris 10y ago

Better formatting and at least one less typo http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html

heartbreak 10y ago
> How to Make TNT Dammit now I'm on a list somewhere. Phrack was the real deal.

boie0025 10y ago

Thanks for posting that! I just had a flashback to my BBS/FidoNet days of childhood.

biot 10y ago

This is found at the very end of the Vice article, still on the front page of HN: https://motherboard.vice.com/read/72-hours-of-pwnage-a-paranoid-n00b-goes-to-def-con https://motherboard.vice.com/read/72-hours-of-pwnage-a-paran...

hashberry 10y ago

For the full cultural effect, read it while listening to angsty MIDI music. Nirvana's Heart-Shaped Box is a perfect soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUscmM8e9lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUscmM8e9lc

HemanHeartYou 10y ago

What was everyone's TTC[1]? I had about 4 seconds. [1]Time To Cringe

YngwieMalware 10y ago

Cool? You think it's cool? It's not cool. It's commie bullshit.

YngwieMalware 10y ago
I'm taking the first down vote with pride because someone didn't get the reference. Rookie mistake
- fredoliveira 10y ago
  Upvotes are like spandex. A privilege, not a right.

saneshark 10y ago

I 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.

loydb 10y ago
It is "board". If someone changed it to "bored", they were wrong.

Kalium 10y ago

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.

RRRA 10y ago
And to a lot of people here thinking this mentality is dead are, I think, confused by the fact that the growth and general appeal of computers have only diluted the hackers, but they are still growing in absolute numbers. Same goes at DEFCON in a way, where so many people want to see what a hacker is that the whole conference looses its "direction" in a way, as a whole at least...
- Kalium 10y ago
  Very true. When you define "hacker" to mean "A person who writes code quickly and is willing to take business risk", you're not likely to run in the same circles as the people who crack open complex software systems for fun. You might wind up believing those people no longer really exist, having gone the way of the dial-up modem.

meatsock 10y ago

here is a more recent and in depth exploration of the hacker, with a similar title but a solid footing in philosophy and history -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hacker_Manifesto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hacker_Manifesto

dustinls 10y ago

Feels wrong to have a thread about the Hacker's Manifesto without including this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNtcWpY4YLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNtcWpY4YLY

znpy 10y ago

I find quite annoying that many people go "oh geez, what is this crap, nah, it's not like this" when this is a huge part of what brought us all that the hackerdom is today (whatever it is anyway).