The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
usc.edu
usc.edu
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.
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.
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. :-)
I still like terminals; even on my 3k laptop (which is largely for gaming).
I broke into my first mainframe in 1977 because I had to if I wanted to play Colossal Cave Adventure. :)
I learned to blue box because I had to if I wanted to talk to my friends around the world and couldn't afford the phone bill.
I tell people now that if you want to pen test, cool, grab some VMs and go nuts. You might even get a bug bounty or two...
Always exciting to see this pop up someplace new. It's being translated into Polish for a textbook this year as well.
While a wholly inaccurate portrayal of hacking or even computing, it did contribute to my fascination with both.
On the culture side, I don't know of any major films that capture computing culture. Charles Stross's Laundry series does a better job than most (You can still read The Atrocity Archives without a backround in computing, but you'll get this nagging feeling you're missing something), seeing as Stross is up to his eyeballs in computing. It's also the first piece of fiction I know of to reference Symbolics. And of course, the protagonist's name is Bob Oliver Francis Howard. Because that book just couldn't get any more in-jokey. But, you know, in a good way.
"You" and "Daemon" also capture bits of computing fairly well.
Going back to your point about being angst: if it's any consolation, that's how I felt as a teenager as well. I didn't come across your manifesto until quite some years after it was written but it definitely resonates with how I felt at the time as well.
"We write those scenes to be inaccurate and ridiculous on purpose.
I'm a young writer in his mid-30's, computer and game savvy. Lots of us are. I guess you could call it a competition of one-upping other shows to see who can get the best/worst "zoomhance" sequence on the air. Sometimes the exec producers and directors are in on it, and other times we just try to get bits and lines into scripts.
90% of our TV viewing audience will never know the difference and honestly, we love it when threads like this get started and love reading the youtube comments. "
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/f2i7t/ive_written_f...
The comments on that thread link to a lot of ridiculous moments of IT movie/TV history.
(My google-fu is strong today.)
And he's absolutely right that it was angsty venting (I was 19, so I'll even allow adolescent). That doesn't mean that it didn't resonate with multiple generations of hackers in the 30 years since.
I also think the previous commenter makes a mistake in not recognizing the influence of teenage angst on hacker culture, like many other subcultures.
Young, mostly male, persons form groups, use nicknames, makes their own publications, rejects the (some) rules of society and try to decide who is the best is almost every subculture at the end of the last century. From punkrockers and ravers, to graffiti writers and street gangs.
I think there's value in knowing how things were and what makes a culture.
I hope it made the parent commenter feel awkward realising that the person he's insulting is metaphorically in the room.
The humilty of @loydb's comment should hopefully add futher shame.
-Remagi
No, I don't MMO any more.
Face facts, you're never gonna live this one down. :) The document is emblematic of what social butterflies call the zeitgeist of an era. What was really more or less a bunch of kids messing around, they see as a revolution, akin to punk rock. "Conscience of a Hacker" seemed to validate their mythology of the 80s hacker as a cyberpunk revolutionary, so it will be preserved and repeated as part of the mythohistory of computing.
Plus it was quoted in Hackers and will be immortal on the strength of that alone.
> 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.
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.
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.
Hardly a new state of affairs. I mean, he invented the Rapture of the Nerds back in the fifties!
Unfortunately I can't give a page reference right this minute, because my last paper copy of the book disintegrated under heavy use some years ago and the samizdat electronic version doesn't have charts or page numbers. But it's in there, and when the new paper copy I've just ordered arrives on Monday, I'll look up the page and reply to this comment with a link to a photo or something.
That's not the only thing in Expanded Universe, of course; it's quite a long book and contains a great deal of other worthwhile material - short stories, articles, and transcripts of various talks, which together both entertain the reader and lend insight into the qualities of the author. It's not the first book I'd recommend if you're only going to read one Heinlein - that would have to be The Door into Summer. But if you're only going to read two, I'd suggest this be the second one.
I remember reading the serialization of the first few chapters of Number of the Beast in Omni magazine, and thinking how great it was. Then I got the book and read the rest, and was sad.
Don't get me started on _Friday_.
I think part of my problem with Fear no Evil is that I read it just after reading all of the Lazarus Long stories (which I enjoyed a lot) and coming from that Fear no Evil just wasn't as good...
I actually did like Job A Comedy of Justice which he wrote after Fear no Evil... It's very different from his other books and I wouldn't say it's great but it's fun.
Friday is one of his few novels that I never read..
http://i.imgur.com/BIfImA3.jpg
This is from the 1950 edition of "Where To?" - if there's an earlier example of the central concept of the "Singularity", I am not familiar with it.
Do you have a better way of signaling to the reader that a function is a predicate? I don't write a ton of Common Lisp, but I do still see quite of a bit of foop when I read Common Lisp. Possible that most of the code I'm reading was written when this was still a thing though...
I think the only reason this doesn't exist in Clojure (which is the lisp I used the most) is that ? is a valid identifier. Similarly Scheme includes ? as a valid identifier (at least R5RS as implemented by Chicken).
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node188.html seems to indicate that you could use ? in a common lisp function name, though.
The convention for predicates is to use "-p" (there is a hyphen if the rest of the symbol has hyphens, otherwise no hyphen). I think I saw a few libraries that define "thing?" predicates, but that is quite rare. People generally tend to not break conventions in practice, even though "?" can be regarded as a logical prefix for predicates.
http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw51/CLHS/Front/X_Per...
Scheme does use ?, and you can in CL if you really want. But CL reserves ? as a programmable reader macro [1]. It is often used, for example, to designate a stand-in domain variable designation in, say an embedded Prolog.
Another reason that CL avoids the "?" convention is that it's "unpronounceable" [2]. CL is the only language spec I've seen that discusses pronunciation; they actually gave thought to how programmers might converse about their code unambiguously [3]. Another manifestation of this is CL's sort-of case-insensitivity [4].
--
[1] The other reserved characters are !, [ ], and { }
[2] Although at least one wag suggested pronouncing it as "eh?", like a good Canadian.
[3] CLtL2 provides quite a bit of this. My fav is a brief excursion into how some hackers pronounce "macrolet" to rhyme with Chevrolet. :)
[4] This is not actually the case, but appears to be true to new Lispers, until they understand that by default, the reader converts everything to upcase.
You're not the only one. I give esr a lot of credit for having written the Jargon File at all, because I would not be what I am today had I not encountered it in childhood. But I also give him a lot of blame for writing it in a way that, however satisfactory it must be to his many and multifarious personal prejudices, militates directly against its value in the role he purports to intend that it fill.
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.
Wanted to emphasize this. Hope you don't mind the edit.
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.
In person, I would totally say "hackers don't give a fuck about women" because like you said, it's got a rhetorical good punch, and I can also clarify it if misconstrued. Whereas on the internet, when someone misinterprets, I may, or may not, have to spend another 5 minutes writing a response.
Solid points.
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.
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...
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.
I second your thoughts on 'Hackers' with the exception of its introduction of Angelina Jolie ;) For the record, there were no teenage girls like her around the hacking culture back then; what am I saying? There were no women at any of my meetups, period. I am glad to see that has changed, although there is a long way to go still.
I remember reading your words in my early 20s; it was motivating in a good way for me. It gave me a reason to introspect more on my activities, which were pretty misguided from 1978 on my Commodore PET with cassette drive to the computers I use nowadays.
Swapping prisoners: I had left NYU in 84. Before then you could, if you were so inclined, use your Bobst Library login credentials to telnet into the backend mainframe (Dec PDP 11 or Dec Vax's - can't remmeber). They had an off-campus 777 dial-up though. Ah, modem dial-up tones! I think somebody claimed to have logged on to a Houston NASA computer, and then the SYSADMIN popped on and asked that they identify themselves! ;)
Anyway, I never took jobs in infosec, or IT after having had gained all of that experience with the exception of an DBA position when times were tough. I left computers for work, and only use them for fun - coding, animating, livecoding music and visuals, and amateur game dev. Oh, and geeky mathematics stuff!
I was jaded by the office cube syndrome, and web dev becoming the 2000s equivalent of becoming a word proccessor in the 80s (remember that? Learn Word or WordPerfect and earn big salaries?). Nobody correlated it with just transferring typing skills to a computer. There was the occasional hacker/guru who wrote mail merge macros and such, but after the low-hanging fruit was had, it was spellcheck all day!
I went on to do things like technical design, engineering and fabrication of show action equipment, technical diving to service underwater electrical and hydraulics, rope access work, and multimedia, and other stuff where I could apply code in creative ways - automation, math visualizations, and multimedia.
Can you introduce me to Angelina? Oh, never mind, Brad would kick my butt!
A lot of so called "hackers" are like david brent unfortunetly
And I say this as some one who was asked by a senior press officer to respond on behalf of my employer (bt) on alt.2600 - unfortunately SD (BT Security) nixed that
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cybergypsies-Indra-Sinha/dp/1416525...
I even get a shout out under my handle in the dedication
what a time to be alive
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.
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.
Particularly this bit:
Them: “So, it’s a game about programming…”
Me: “Yes, it’s so much fun!”
Them: “But I program all day.”
Me: “Me too!”
Them: “The last thing I want to do when I come home is program again”
awkward silence
Them: “You’re nuts.”https://youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI
Why do Bryan's talks keep being relevant to my discussions on HN? This is the second time I've linked one in two days.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_Manifesto
Primary Source: http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html
Dammit now I'm on a list somewhere. Phrack was the real deal.
Read more like Maya Angelou's 'Caged Bird'. It's poetry.
Still has a familiar ring.
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. :-(
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.
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.
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...
"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).