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I find this debate/discussion ("who's really a hacker??") boring and pointless; it's a mainstay of 2600 editor "Emmanuel Goldstein" on the 2600 radio show ( htt

by sequoia 15y ago

I find this debate/discussion ("who's really a hacker??") boring and pointless; it's a mainstay of 2600 editor "Emmanuel Goldstein" on the 2600 radio show ( http://www.2600.com/offthehook/ http://www.2600.com/offthehook/ ). His view is that once you're a malicious criminal (or do something he doesn't like, e.g. Anonymous ddos's) you're not a hacker. "I don't like what you're doing! You're not a real hacker! You give hackers a bad name!" Now to make myself a hypocrite: One aspect of this phenomenon that I find amusing is how low the bar is set in terms of programming to qualify as a "hacker." e.g. "I hacked together this RoR site over the weekend" makes me think, "You used a popular, well documented website building framework for it's intended purpose... how exactly is this hacking?" "I hacked together a cake this weekend; even hacked my own cream cheese frosting!" People (like myself) who would once have had to settle for a more boring title like "software engineer" or "computer scientists" are all "hackers" now. :p /my 2¢

zck 15y ago
>"I hacked together this RoR site over the weekend" makes me think, "You used a popular, well documented website building framework for it's intended purpose... how exactly is this hacking?" It's a third sense of the word, meaning something like "put together without a plan, by trying things until they worked". When someone says "I hacked together this program", they mean "I threw code at it, and now it seems to do what I want".
- archgoon 15y ago
  Related: "This is a bit of hack" to describe a solution that is very fragile and subject to breaking, or just ignores good practices. Technically, you could argue that this is in fact the original usage, as the solution's fragility typically is due to ignoring the conventional semantics and exploiting the actual underlying implementation of something.
- sequoia 15y ago
  good definition! You are right. To expand upon it: "not fully tested / MVP / not yet able to handle all possible cases"
mindcrime 15y ago
One aspect of this phenomenon that I find amusing is how low the bar is set in terms of programming to qualify as a "hacker." e.g. "I hacked together this RoR site over the weekend" makes me think, "You used a popular, well documented website building framework for it's intended purpose... how exactly is this hacking?" I'll argue that it is hacking, where "hacking" is largely about exploring the unknown and/or creating things that didn't exist before. Just because the tool your using is common, doesn't mean the result is. So depending on what the RoR site is (or maybe I should say, what it does) I think it's construction could justifiably be called hacking. But that's just me...
- evilduck 15y ago
  I agree, I think it depends on what the focus of the activity is. A while back I made http://crimesagainstcode.com/ http://crimesagainstcode.com/ as a weekend hack. It's built on Rails 3.1/CoffeeScript simply because that's was I was also playing with at the time, but the "hack" part for me was the fiddling with QR codes in a pretty obtuse manner to see what I could safely manipulate, not the underlying technology of the site itself.
- sequoia 15y ago
  I'm of a different opinion here. One classical definition of hacking is tied closely to "Using tools or technology in a way not originally intended by the tool's creator." So e.g. blueboxing phones, cooking meat in your car's engine, running linux on your wristwatch etc.. This is the definition that I find the most acceptable, so for me using a television to watch Glee is not hacking; you're using the tool as it was meant to be used. Making your television receive analog FM radio signals to listen to NPR, on the other hand, is hacking, because you're misusing the technology to some useful end. MS Kinect hacking is a good example here: users making the tool do things it wasn't intended to do my Microsoft.
  - mindcrime 15y ago
    Fair enough... I just think a programming language and a framework are - by design - made for creating new things, things that didn't exist before. And I equate hacking largely with that sense of exploring what's possible, in terms of "what can I create?" That's why I find most - but not all - coding to be hacking... if your coding and creating something new, that's enough to meet my personal bar of "hacking." I will admit that it's a fuzzy and subjective bar though...

by sequoia 15y ago

zck 15y ago

>"I hacked together this RoR site over the weekend" makes me think, "You used a popular, well documented website building framework for it's intended purpose... how exactly is this hacking?" It's a third sense of the word, meaning something like "put together without a plan, by trying things until they worked". When someone says "I hacked together this program", they mean "I threw code at it, and now it seems to do what I want".

archgoon 15y ago
Related: "This is a bit of hack" to describe a solution that is very fragile and subject to breaking, or just ignores good practices. Technically, you could argue that this is in fact the original usage, as the solution's fragility typically is due to ignoring the conventional semantics and exploiting the actual underlying implementation of something.
sequoia 15y ago
good definition! You are right. To expand upon it: "not fully tested / MVP / not yet able to handle all possible cases"

mindcrime 15y ago

One aspect of this phenomenon that I find amusing is how low the bar is set in terms of programming to qualify as a "hacker." e.g. "I hacked together this RoR site over the weekend" makes me think, "You used a popular, well documented website building framework for it's intended purpose... how exactly is this hacking?" I'll argue that it is hacking, where "hacking" is largely about exploring the unknown and/or creating things that didn't exist before. Just because the tool your using is common, doesn't mean the result is. So depending on what the RoR site is (or maybe I should say, what it does) I think it's construction could justifiably be called hacking. But that's just me...

evilduck 15y ago
I agree, I think it depends on what the focus of the activity is. A while back I made http://crimesagainstcode.com/ http://crimesagainstcode.com/ as a weekend hack. It's built on Rails 3.1/CoffeeScript simply because that's was I was also playing with at the time, but the "hack" part for me was the fiddling with QR codes in a pretty obtuse manner to see what I could safely manipulate, not the underlying technology of the site itself.
sequoia 15y ago
I'm of a different opinion here. One classical definition of hacking is tied closely to "Using tools or technology in a way not originally intended by the tool's creator." So e.g. blueboxing phones, cooking meat in your car's engine, running linux on your wristwatch etc.. This is the definition that I find the most acceptable, so for me using a television to watch Glee is not hacking; you're using the tool as it was meant to be used. Making your television receive analog FM radio signals to listen to NPR, on the other hand, is hacking, because you're misusing the technology to some useful end. MS Kinect hacking is a good example here: users making the tool do things it wasn't intended to do my Microsoft.
- mindcrime 15y ago
  Fair enough... I just think a programming language and a framework are - by design - made for creating new things, things that didn't exist before. And I equate hacking largely with that sense of exploring what's possible, in terms of "what can I create?" That's why I find most - but not all - coding to be hacking... if your coding and creating something new, that's enough to meet my personal bar of "hacking." I will admit that it's a fuzzy and subjective bar though...