Hippies, Nerds, and Lumpenprogrammers | Hacker News Reader

Hippies, Nerds, and Lumpenprogrammers

perforce.com

32 pointsraganwald31 comments

This article is a load of crappy overgeneralisations that don't match to any of my experiences of myself or others. It reminds me of the scene from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas where some whacky doctor classifies the "marijuana culture" as "Square, Hip, Cool and Groovy".

I can't quite fathom why anyone would vote this trash up.

Upvoted you, since I can't downvote the article.

Anyway, I really need to work on pronouncing a clear programmer personality. Am I a hippy? Am I a nerd? I'm so confused. I just hope I'm not a lumpenprogrammer!

I appear to be a hippie, for this definition of hippie, anyway...

Most of it was kind of silly, but this part felt close to home:

For hippie programmers, the problem is solved when they've figured out how to solve it rather than later, when the work is finished and the problem no longer exists.

Not sure how that makes me a hippy, though...

By accident? Sorry! But I'd also like to be able to save articles without upvoting them.

Right click... "Bookmark This Link", at least in Firefox

This is entertainment and marketing, not any useful useful insight into programmer personalities (as you might thing from the title).

The point of this is to make a manager read it, laugh that Harry is a Hippie and Nelson is a Nerd, and then think of Larry, worry, and go buy Perforce.

It looks like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are the archetypes for this guys idea of programmers. He should go out in the real world more often, or stay out of it in the case with hackers.

Agreed. It's not well written either.

The only reason I can see it being up-voted is maybe people want to figure out which "photo sharing" site is stuck with the unmaintainable code base...

There are photo sharing sites other than flickr?

Facebook is a lot bigger than flickr.

I'm trying to figure out who #3 is.

smugmug? picasa?

"Yes, this is an over-generalization, but it is also correct."

No, if it was correct you wouldn't be over-generalizing.

Want to know what a real hacker profile is like?

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/appendixb.html

I always thought that was fairly accurate.

The earlier versions were better, before esr fucked up the sections on politics and personality. Here's the first version in which that appendix appeared; search for "this profile".

http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-2.3.1.dos.txt

Perforce: like Subversion, but slower and more expensive.

The article contains some sprinklings of truisms but is mostly a naked grab at a dwindling market through FUD.

I have to say, the guys I've known who wear shorts and sandals year round and grow their hair out for years at a time did not "know" women and snort cocaine.

The dichotomy Cringely seems to be drawing here is between people who don't conform to social norms because they're unaware of them, and people who don't conform to social norms because they're actively rebelling against them. To be honest, I don't think most people care about the distinction. For them, both of these caricatures are just awkward; no further sub-classifications are necessary.

For an article which seems to be trying to popularize geek culture, it sure does a good job of trivializing it.

What a bizarre, convoluted way to justify buying Perforce.

"the company... seems to possess only object code and that code is broken and undecipherable. Nobody... understands it well enough to change the code or add new features..."

Well if they only have object code, it would be undecipherable (to a human) - and if it's broken, how come this unnamed photo-sharing site is 'running smoothly'?

When I was in high school I was hired by a company to fix a problem in code for which they only had the EXE, not even object files! Since I had a lot of experience hex editing computer games, I was actually able to fire up a debugger and go down into the machine code and patch it. There are hackers who can work with machine code - but it sounds like if this company got into the mess their in in the first place (by letting go the engineers who knew the codebase), they're unlikely to attract the kind of talent that can patch a program with nothing but the binaries and a debugger.

I take your point (that it's possible to patch binaries) but I'm still very sceptical about the problems of this unnamed photo-sharing site. Seems a bit suspicious that the author knows about it but nobody here can guess who it is.

I've just re-read the original article and had to laugh at this:

'...a good source code control system would have avoided this problem... If only they had thought to buy one.'

Saving the source code to a floppy disk or printing it out and putting it in a safe place would have avoided this problem, not to mention using CVS, Subversion, or one of the other free version control systems.

Is it http://www.fotolog.com/ ? first google result for photo sharing site and 100 million. Also I have never heard of it and it appears to be Euro / Global (popular outside the US)

Given the divisive replies I received when bringing up the virtues of psychedelic/entheogen use on this site, I think the author may be on to something (despite his overgeneralizations and obvious ulterior motive).

I work on a large photo sharing site, and we were speculating today about who this un-named company might be.

hippies smoke weed, yuppies snort coke off strippers, get your over-generalizations right :)

How does this "buying" concept of source control software work?

Apparently it involves spending about $900 per person, per year. Yikes! (http://perforce.com/perforce/price.html#prices)

It's only that much for the first year. Support is $160/year after that.

I used perforce about six years ago, and it performed like a champ. Not sure if it's needed now that svn/git/etc are available, and I haven't kept up with Perforce since.

Anyone know if Google still uses Perforce company-wide?

for a nice take on Lumpenprogrammmers read "Cube Farm" by Bill Blunden

Reply on news.ycombinator.com