Comment by Tcepsa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tcepsa | Hacker News Reader

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This is a shitpost and/or copypasta, right? Maybe it's intended as a "Ha, look at the ridiculous sorts of FUD that folks posted about this stuff back in the day" but its tone is earnest enough--even with tons of obvious flags like the ones I mention below--that I'd encourage you to seriously consider adding a disclaimer of some kind.

Some of the "tells": The whole thing has a "Chick Tract" vibe to it (personal, relatable story but with oddly specific details segueing into actions you can take for the good of your soul/safety of your family). Most of the items are obviously and patently false to anyone with any kind of domain knowledge, but are phrased earnestly enough that someone who assumes the writer is acting in good faith may not realize this. For example, number 4 suggesting that Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Neuromancer, etc. are "hacking manuals" or number 5's conflation of Disk Operating System DOS with Denial Of Service DOS.

It would be great if by this point in time everyone who saw something like this would realize it was either in jest or bad faith, but I suspect that computer illiteracy--and the number of folks who would take this at face value--is far higher than most of us realize (then again, maybe I'm just being overly cynical. I hope so; that's the sort of thing that I'd love to be wrong about! ;-) )

It appears to be this article "Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?": https://web.archive.org/web/20031114161830/http://www.adequa...

No idea of the origin.

It's a troll! An infamous Slashdot/Usenet one at that, which in the day raised the hackles of many a * nix folk:

Adequacy first gained widespread Internet notoriety after the December 2, 2001 publication of a story entitled "Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?" The story was engineered to raise the hackles of as wide a swath of the Internet geek community as possible; it lampooned such topics as the Linux operating system, processors from Advanced Micro Devices, online gaming, and rave culture. Furor over the story spread quickly through technology / gaming blogs and Usenet newsgroups [1], and visitors came to the site in droves to express their opinions. The story received an official count of 5,913 individual comments, not including several thousand more that were hidden by the Adequacy editors. This figure even exceeds the record of the much more heavily visited Slashdot, which (as of November 21, 2006) stands at 5,687 replies to the story "Kerry Concedes Election to Bush".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adequacy.org#Notable_stories

My view is that Hacker News is, or ought to be, the spiritual successor to Slashdot. Sometimes (unfortunately) it seems, though, without the humor.

Shitposting / copypasta made Slashdot suck. Let's strive to follow the site guidelines which are geared at making HN better than Slashdot ever was.

I dunno. You might be right, but another thing about that is whereas Slashdot had a moderation system that enabled voting along a dimension such as "funny", "interesting", or "insightful", I believe that a +1 Funny rating didn't actually boost your karma. So in theory you get something that is less inundated by sarcastic circle jerks of in-jokes than Reddit but less sterile and devoid of humor than hacker news. The no-nonsense attitude of frowning upon humorous mischief and misdirection is one of the first things that I noticed about this site, and, which while superficially appears to raise the level of discourse, I think is a sign of weakness, since a community that can't tolerate jokes isn't really a community at all. In fact at very least it goes against the ethos of computing, which always had an element of mischief and clever pranks. Look at the culture of the MIT AI lab or, well, Slashdot and its ilk to see the contrast.

Copypasta isn't a clever prank, though, it's banal and derivative. Trolling sucks, please quit it. I say funny stuff on HN all the time. I aim to keep it 100% original, and mixed in with relevant and topical discussion, and I rarely get downvoted for making jokes in that context.

I dunno. What I posted was a reference to a 20 year old in-joke that poked fun at GP for (in the eyes of his father) conforming to a humorously incorrect cliche of a "computer hacker", that anyone who frequented Slashdot would have been amused to come across again. It's more of a reference than derivative "copypasta".

That all said, I totally get that this kind of thing doesn't mesh with what Hacker News seems to strive for, although in my personal opinion it's worse for it.

"His" father? Nooope, try again. Or, don't? You don't seem to fit the culture.

Hm. I've still had trouble integrated gender-neutral pronouns into my brain (for years and years I had been taught that "their" was strictly plural).

Believe me when I say I meant nothing by inserting a default gender. If nothing else I was projecting myself into your situation. I honestly am sorry for the mistake.

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