Julian Assange contributed to PostgreSQL | Hacker News Reader

Julian Assange contributed to PostgreSQL

git.postgresql.org

262 pointsreplyifuagree38 comments

He also created strobe, an early port scanner, under the handle of proff.

Many people tend to forget what a small world the internet was at that time and hackers (white/black/other hat) that tended to be productive in one area were often productive in many others.

Wikipedia tell us more about Julian Assange as a programer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange (Programming section)

He also contributed to an Emacs package

http://ergoemacs.org/misc/Richard_Stallman_and_Julian_Assang...

I like his search app: https://gitlab.com/surfraw/Surfraw

He was also an early NetBSD developer -- proff@netbsd.org

https://mwl.io/archives/443

He was a prolific programmer and hacker, that is how he got his start.

Also an OCaml hacker: http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2000/08/6b8b1...

Julian Assange – I’m slowly dying here…: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21924081

He contributed to surfraw as well. http://surfraw.org/

Did he also run the original bugtraq list?

Do we know if this was "the" Julian Assange?

The mail address seems to check out.

Hmm, might be because I'm on mobile, but I couldn't see an email address (if you were wondering why I asked!)

Click any of the names of the commits.

Ah christ, I only thought to tap on the committer's name!

Not your fault. Bad UX is everywhere.

For a while there I was getting emails about open-source related conferences organized by a guy named "Hans Reiser". After the infamous Hans Reiser was in jail. It was a bit creepy, and I felt a bit sorry for him (the non-infamous Hans just trying to organize conferences, not the infamous one who murdered his wife).

EDIT: Speaking of which, Wikipedia seems to think he may be eligible for parole in a week or so. O_o

That reminds me of William Hitler, nephew of Adolf, who was born in the UK and fought with the Americans in WWII. Led to some interesting conversations.

"What's your name, son?"

"Hitler."

"Howdy, Hitler, you ready to help us fight Hitler?"

See http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/to-hell-with-hitler.htm... for more detail on this.

I sympathize with the whole "why should I change, he's the one that sucks" attitude, but having the same name as a famous murderer is probably a good opportunity to adopt a 'stage name' for professional use, if not get it legally changed.

I understand 'Hans' is related to 'Johannes' and is sometimes anglicized to 'John' (I believe one of my great grandfathers did this.) One of the nice things about the name 'John' is you can change it in various ways without anybody thinking it unusual; e.g. a 'John' can also call themselves 'Jack' and nobody thinks that unusual.

Johann/es is usually the given name for Hans.

Maybe it’s because I’m not American but if you introduce yourself as Jack and then your legal name is John I would think that unusual.

Jack is indeed a common nickname for John.

And not just in America. It's common in Australia too, and apparently it dates back a long way in England. Jack has become a lot more common as an actual given name over the past few decades, though.

I thought it was a British thing. As an American, I’ve never met a John going by Jack (at least, I don’t think I have).

On the other hand, C.S. Lewis apparently went by Jack, which isn’t a common nickname for Clive or Staples. But people generally don’t argue over nicknames. And they may not even realize a nickname actually is a nickname; it’s not common for people to ask for your legal ID, after all.

People still talk about Jack Kennedy, the assassinated US president.

Apparently Jack is a generic name, too, for any small boy. So inns would employ a boot-Jack to help guests get their boots off, later supplanted by a gadget.

It’s pretty American - I know a boy named John after his father John, who has been called Jack all his life.

On a semi-related note, james is an english form of the name jacob.

Yeah, it is. It's fairly well known in PG circles. :)

Wow. No tests though — joke. But super impressive. Didn’t know he was a C programmer.

Yes. He also wrote Strobe in the mid-90s, which was an notable port scanner in the days before nmap came along.

> Wow. No tests though

These are commits from the "dark ages" and doesn't mean he didn't test his code locally. The "public" TDD culture didn't really surface until Kent Beck et-al published their TDD manifestos in the early 2000's.

Testing did not spring forth as a concept from Kent Beck’s head: it was widely expected in, for example, Perl code on CPAN in the mid to late 90s and that was far from unique. The tools were worse or mostly paid for some languages (e.g. C) so there was more variation and justifications for not doing it.

Those are some very inconsistent commit messages.

What do you mean?

To me these messages seem consistent with other postgresql commit messages from around July 1996.

Mixed caps vs. no caps

Also my OCD kicks in with sometimes colons. Additionally, periods in commit messages...

Has it really been long enough that this is no longer common knowledge? Before it was "wikileaks founder was open source contributor", it was "open source name has wiki thing for document leaks".

Of course that all happened in the long long ago so there is no reason to dwell on it. It's not like every news story that has been trying to craft a hack narrative to explain Assange's actions and motivations to the public has fallen short of slashdot comments circa 2005.

There's no reason to know anything about the past. Back then we developed everything in COBOL using Waterfall because no big brains were around to coin the word "agile" yet and save us from ourselves. And subversion server side hooks didn't even exist because nobody had coined the phrase "continuous deployment" yet. Dark times indeed.

Sorry, but this comment is a bit nonsensical.

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