11 ms·

How To Become A Hacker

48 points by krmboya 14y ago

gatherknwldg 14y ago
Does he have an entry on how to become an insufferable blow-hard?
- slurry 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4germeister http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4germeister
- neckbeard 14y ago
  http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sextips/ http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sextips/
  - cantbecool 14y ago
    That's freaking hilarious. Who knew hackers needed sex tips. I had to do a double take on the domain to see if they were identical.
  - snogglethorpe 14y ago
    A cringe-inducing classic... oO;
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    "Some men have this down well enough that they can make eye contact with a woman they've never met before, smile, say "You're very pretty." and make her smile back" ... "Cathy: Try this on a stranger in an elevator, if you must, to minimize the fear level."
- kahawe 14y ago
  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 it, he is a politician, a lobbyist and while these roles are arguably not without use I would rather not have someone like that lay down the law what I as a "hacker" should and should not do or how I am supposed to be more like him.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    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.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
niggler 14y ago
"No problem should ever have to be solved twice." I sincerely disagree. There is rarely a problem for which there is one strictly optimal solution. And competition (friendly or otherwise) between solutions leads to progress. As an example, take the browser wars. As opposed to accepting Mozilla/Firefox, Apple and Google's efforts have moved the bar much further than if they just decided to use Mozilla's solution "What's not OK is artificial technical, legal, or institutional barriers (like closed-source code) that prevent a good solution from being re-used and force people to re-invent wheels." If it weren't for LZW patent enforcement, we wouldn't have formats like PNG ... (I guess, "necessity is the mother of innovation")
- mindcrime 14y ago
  > I sincerely disagree. There is rarely a problem for which > there is one strictly optimal solution. And competition > (friendly or otherwise) between solutions leads to > progress You know, he does make the point that it is OK to pursue a superior solution: Note, however, that "No problem should ever have to be solved twice." does not imply that you have to consider all existing solutions sacred, or that there is only one right solution to any given problem. Often, we learn a lot about the problem that we didn't know before by studying the first cut at a solution. It's OK, and often necessary, to decide that we can do better.
  - niggler 14y ago
    If you read the rest of my response, you'd see my response to his clarification: "What's not OK is artificial technical, legal, or institutional barriers (like closed-source code) that prevent a good solution from being re-used and force people to re-invent wheels." If it weren't for LZW patent enforcement, we wouldn't have formats like PNG ... (I guess, "necessity is the mother of innovation")
    - mindcrime 14y ago
      If you read the rest of my response, you'd see my response to his clarification: Of course I read all of your response. The second part seems, to me, to be addressing a different issue altogether. You claim to strongly disagree with "no problem should be solved twice" but your statement about why you disagree jibes with what ESR himself said. I'm not sure what it is you disagree with him about in the general sense. The second part, sure, you are saying that patent enforcement can result in better solutions due to the "necessity being the mother of invention" factor, whereas Raymond completely objects to "artificial barriers". But that's just a detail, surely?
montecarl 14y ago
What is up with the tooltips on that page? They are almost too distracting for me to read the text. I had to use the fabulous viewtext.org to keep sane.
- SleekoNiko 14y ago
  I thought I was going crazy.
onan_barbarian 14y ago
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 reminds me of the the wooly business books one comes across at airports ("Management secrets of Gengis Khan", the "Lexus and the Olive Tree") that milk a bad analogy for two hundred pages to arrive at the conclusion that people just like the author are pretty great.
- mindcrime 14y ago
  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 hacker" wouldn't you wind up with something suggesting that hackers should be like pg? If rtm wrote "how to be a hacker" do you think it wouldn't wind up reflecting a bias towards his mindsets and attitudes? If onan_barbarian wrote "how to be a hacker" would it not create an argument for hackers being much like onan_barbarian? If esr's essay is factually incorrect or misleading or damaging in some fashion, then I'd encourage anyone to criticize it for that, rather than just slamming the man for writing it.
  - onan_barbarian 14y ago
    I suspect you're missing his point, possibly wilfully. Regardless of whether you agree with it or not, his criticism is that the content of the "how to be a hacker" essay in question is almost nothing more than thinly veiled self-description.
    - mindcrime 14y ago
      I suspect you're missing his point No, I get the point, I just saying he's wrong.
DustinCalim 14y ago
.article { margin: auto; width: 700px; }
- dbaupp 14y ago
  max-width is significantly nicer than width for mobile users.
wfunction 14y ago
His comments about Windows are plain ignorant.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  To be fair this was written around the time that Windows 98 was still the version of Windows that most people were familiar with.
zalew 14y ago
how to become a hacker? it's easy: http://hackertyper.com http://hackertyper.com
- cpressey 14y ago
  Cute. That's totally how real hackers write code, too: in an uninterrupted stream from start to finish :)
ely-s 14y ago
This one has been floating around the nets for a very long time.
nnq 14y ago
Kinda side-topic, but: why do most "hacker advice" tend to recommend Python over Ruby or Perl (ok, Perl is "just old") as a beginner's scripting language? I love Python and I like using it in production better than Ruby, but Ruby is much more of a "hacker's language" and pushes you to more "lispyness" in spirit and practice! (I admit I'am a bit of a Python ecosystem fanboy, with all the cool and easy to use machine learning tools and libs, but this state of affairs is a bit unintuitive - and I'm looking at this types of questions from a language designer's perspective too as I'm working on a language that has 99.9% chances of not tacking over the world, but that 0.1% is enough to "make me high" and keeps me banging my hammers on until I get to something that I can show to the world).
- wuest 14y ago
  Most "hacker advice" articles are old. Ruby hasn't been popular for all that long (I started hacking in it circa 2004, and I was a very early adopter, on the broader scale).
- Xion 14y ago
  > (...) but Ruby is much more of a "hacker's language" and pushes you to more "lispyness" in spirit and practice! Which, I think, is one of the main reasons why Python is recommended more: it's simpler and has less sharp corners. The other thing is that Ruby is significantly slanted towards the object-oriented paradigm while Python remains much more neutral in this regard.
- 3pt14159 14y ago
  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).
  - nnq 14y ago
    > 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 passing syntax pushed Ruby in the opposite direction! And makes Ruby DSLs easy as pie (though I find DSLs a bit against the "hacker spirit" - any tool that's less "general purposes" ends up "limiting your mind" - take Rails which is a giant "meta-DSL for web apps" imho). ...though I still recommend Python to wannabe "hackers" for the same reasons you said above, I find myself, as a "real-world hacker", enjoying Ruby more. [1] http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358 http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358
snogglethorpe 14y ago
Hack.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
crististm 14y ago
It is interesting to see these classic articles getting to the HN front page. If nothing else, it's a measure of HN new comers.

48 points by krmboya 14y ago

gatherknwldg 14y ago

Does he have an entry on how to become an insufferable blow-hard?

slurry 14y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4germeister http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4germeister
neckbeard 14y ago
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sextips/ http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sextips/
- cantbecool 14y ago
  That's freaking hilarious. Who knew hackers needed sex tips. I had to do a double take on the domain to see if they were identical.
- snogglethorpe 14y ago
  A cringe-inducing classic... oO;
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  "Some men have this down well enough that they can make eye contact with a woman they've never met before, smile, say "You're very pretty." and make her smile back" ... "Cathy: Try this on a stranger in an elevator, if you must, to minimize the fear level."
kahawe 14y ago
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 it, he is a politician, a lobbyist and while these roles are arguably not without use I would rather not have someone like that lay down the law what I as a "hacker" should and should not do or how I am supposed to be more like him.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  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.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

niggler 14y ago

"No problem should ever have to be solved twice." I sincerely disagree. There is rarely a problem for which there is one strictly optimal solution. And competition (friendly or otherwise) between solutions leads to progress. As an example, take the browser wars. As opposed to accepting Mozilla/Firefox, Apple and Google's efforts have moved the bar much further than if they just decided to use Mozilla's solution "What's not OK is artificial technical, legal, or institutional barriers (like closed-source code) that prevent a good solution from being re-used and force people to re-invent wheels." If it weren't for LZW patent enforcement, we wouldn't have formats like PNG ... (I guess, "necessity is the mother of innovation")

mindcrime 14y ago
> I sincerely disagree. There is rarely a problem for which > there is one strictly optimal solution. And competition > (friendly or otherwise) between solutions leads to > progress You know, he does make the point that it is OK to pursue a superior solution: Note, however, that "No problem should ever have to be solved twice." does not imply that you have to consider all existing solutions sacred, or that there is only one right solution to any given problem. Often, we learn a lot about the problem that we didn't know before by studying the first cut at a solution. It's OK, and often necessary, to decide that we can do better.
- niggler 14y ago
  If you read the rest of my response, you'd see my response to his clarification: "What's not OK is artificial technical, legal, or institutional barriers (like closed-source code) that prevent a good solution from being re-used and force people to re-invent wheels." If it weren't for LZW patent enforcement, we wouldn't have formats like PNG ... (I guess, "necessity is the mother of innovation")
  - mindcrime 14y ago
    If you read the rest of my response, you'd see my response to his clarification: Of course I read all of your response. The second part seems, to me, to be addressing a different issue altogether. You claim to strongly disagree with "no problem should be solved twice" but your statement about why you disagree jibes with what ESR himself said. I'm not sure what it is you disagree with him about in the general sense. The second part, sure, you are saying that patent enforcement can result in better solutions due to the "necessity being the mother of invention" factor, whereas Raymond completely objects to "artificial barriers". But that's just a detail, surely?

montecarl 14y ago

What is up with the tooltips on that page? They are almost too distracting for me to read the text. I had to use the fabulous viewtext.org to keep sane.

SleekoNiko 14y ago
I thought I was going crazy.

onan_barbarian 14y ago

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 reminds me of the the wooly business books one comes across at airports ("Management secrets of Gengis Khan", the "Lexus and the Olive Tree") that milk a bad analogy for two hundred pages to arrive at the conclusion that people just like the author are pretty great.

mindcrime 14y ago
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 hacker" wouldn't you wind up with something suggesting that hackers should be like pg? If rtm wrote "how to be a hacker" do you think it wouldn't wind up reflecting a bias towards his mindsets and attitudes? If onan_barbarian wrote "how to be a hacker" would it not create an argument for hackers being much like onan_barbarian? If esr's essay is factually incorrect or misleading or damaging in some fashion, then I'd encourage anyone to criticize it for that, rather than just slamming the man for writing it.
- onan_barbarian 14y ago
  I suspect you're missing his point, possibly wilfully. Regardless of whether you agree with it or not, his criticism is that the content of the "how to be a hacker" essay in question is almost nothing more than thinly veiled self-description.
  - mindcrime 14y ago
    I suspect you're missing his point No, I get the point, I just saying he's wrong.

DustinCalim 14y ago

.article { margin: auto; width: 700px; }

dbaupp 14y ago
max-width is significantly nicer than width for mobile users.

wfunction 14y ago

His comments about Windows are plain ignorant.

jiggy2011 14y ago
To be fair this was written around the time that Windows 98 was still the version of Windows that most people were familiar with.

zalew 14y ago

how to become a hacker? it's easy: http://hackertyper.com http://hackertyper.com

cpressey 14y ago
Cute. That's totally how real hackers write code, too: in an uninterrupted stream from start to finish :)

ely-s 14y ago

This one has been floating around the nets for a very long time.

nnq 14y ago

Kinda side-topic, but: why do most "hacker advice" tend to recommend Python over Ruby or Perl (ok, Perl is "just old") as a beginner's scripting language? I love Python and I like using it in production better than Ruby, but Ruby is much more of a "hacker's language" and pushes you to more "lispyness" in spirit and practice! (I admit I'am a bit of a Python ecosystem fanboy, with all the cool and easy to use machine learning tools and libs, but this state of affairs is a bit unintuitive - and I'm looking at this types of questions from a language designer's perspective too as I'm working on a language that has 99.9% chances of not tacking over the world, but that 0.1% is enough to "make me high" and keeps me banging my hammers on until I get to something that I can show to the world).

wuest 14y ago
Most "hacker advice" articles are old. Ruby hasn't been popular for all that long (I started hacking in it circa 2004, and I was a very early adopter, on the broader scale).
Xion 14y ago
> (...) but Ruby is much more of a "hacker's language" and pushes you to more "lispyness" in spirit and practice! Which, I think, is one of the main reasons why Python is recommended more: it's simpler and has less sharp corners. The other thing is that Ruby is significantly slanted towards the object-oriented paradigm while Python remains much more neutral in this regard.
3pt14159 14y ago
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).
- nnq 14y ago
  > 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 passing syntax pushed Ruby in the opposite direction! And makes Ruby DSLs easy as pie (though I find DSLs a bit against the "hacker spirit" - any tool that's less "general purposes" ends up "limiting your mind" - take Rails which is a giant "meta-DSL for web apps" imho). ...though I still recommend Python to wannabe "hackers" for the same reasons you said above, I find myself, as a "real-world hacker", enjoying Ruby more. [1] http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358 http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358

snogglethorpe 14y ago

Hack.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

crististm 14y ago

It is interesting to see these classic articles getting to the HN front page. If nothing else, it's a measure of HN new comers.