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Comment by cutler | Hacker News Reader

Sometime last year I was taking a short bus ride home from a local supermarket in Leytonstone (London) when a passenger boarded with a slightly louder American voice. I thought he looked familiar then it hit me - Richard Stallman. I didn't have much time to decide what to do as he was about to get off at the next stop so I left the bus at the same stop and caught up with him. After an introduction and short conversation about Emacs and the Free Software Foundation he drew his sword upon which I kneeled and was dubbed a hacker. That's how it's done.

Aw, alright - the sword bit is fictitious but the rest is true. Contact with a deity can confer status.

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I too have a Stallman encounter story from years ago. He used to work/sleep one floor below the research group I worked for as an undergrad, and he would wander up to our floor regularly. He would sometimes walk by and nod at me when I was working on the computer. One day he stopped and asked me what language I was using. I told him it was Java, and he said, unsurprisingly, that I should help contribute to gcj, gnu’s free Java alternative. Not really knowing how to respond, I kind of mumbled something to the effect that I’ll look into it, and then added that I was at least using Emacs. A few days later, I went to use the bathroom on my floor, and who should be standing at the next urinal but the man himself. He recognized me, and while we were both emptying our bladders, he asked if I had checked out gcj yet. I had to admit that I hadn’t yet and that I was hosed that semester because I was taking some tough classes. He reiterated that I should contribute if possible. Well, after that, I did checkout gcj and eventually used it quite a bit, including in production. Sometimes I wonder if I might be the only person who’s ever had a urinal conversation about free software with Stallman, but given his whole life of gnu advocacy, I believe there must be many more of us out there.

Edit: spelling

Does this make me a hacker?

Donald Knuth was giving a presentation to celebrate someones birthday by debugging his old FORTRAN code. He was having trouble giving it since his PDF of his presentation was autoforwarding using Adobe Acrobat. I figured out that Preview would avoid this outcome. I think this is the largest contribution I will have to Computer Science.

Absolutely.

Nice. Mine's not so impressive, but when I was green and in college, I was casually job shadowing an older friend for a day at a major tech company, and was asked to take a look at some code that had an issue.

I spotted the bug in 30 seconds.

It was then I realized that even at the top of our profession, everyone is still human beings with their own sets of strengths and weaknesses, and I have just as much potential as anyone else.

Yea, to this day though I don't know how you can configure Adobe Acrobat to autoforward slides.

New eyes help a lot. Haven't you glossed over something that once found is obvious, both yourself and with the help of others?

This power is only multiplied when having to answer good questions about the system and even explain it in ways that may be different from your usual model but that clicks better with the other person.

Pretty sure you mean this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP2D4DEQBTU — the contribution was crucial IMO :)

I've seen Knuth give other (more recent) talks out of slides like that one (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/karp80.pdf) where each PDF page is a possibly different size and he wants it displayed full screen individually, but don't recall that problem from other times… so the impact of your contribution may extend beyond that one talk!

I'm reminded of a quote from Steve Jobs about optimizing the Macintosh.

"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"

I must have optimized Computer Science at least maybe a minute or two. Too bad it won't change my Erdos number.

It was really cool getting a selfie with him.

That's an awesome experience. And the sword part may not be true, but it might as well be.

"A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth." -- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

I love how, this being Richard Stallman, I actually believed the sword thing.

Somehow "took out a flute" just didn't cut it.

You kneeled on his sword?

Hackers rites are different then knight rites.

upon which ~ at which time.

Possibly more of a British English usage; I'd appreciate somebody with better formal language knowledge giving a less shallow insight.

Or even thereupon.

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