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Comment by eob | Hacker News Reader

I bought the Hackers Dictionary by Eric S. Raymond as a 90s kid and it had this story, as well as a few others. Das Blinkenlights and some AI Koans like the Broken Lisp Machine come to mind.

I used to read them over and over, and it really left an imprint on me. The early hacker ethos was such a strong flavor. Sort of a "one part gnostic, one part mechanic, one part counterculture" vibe.

Sometimes I wonder if that flavor always exists, but shifts from community of practice to community of practice, or if there was something specific about the early days of the net that caused it to arise uniquely.

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I've wondered this too. When my dad was learning to program, this was the culture. When I was learning to program, the culture was no longer fresh and alive, but its spirit was still strongly felt; the torch was being passed to us. Have we preserved that light? If my son learns to program, what will "hacker culture" mean to him?

Maybe being able to figure out strangers' discord passwords. More generally, phishing powers

I think in this context, 'hacker' means more 'one that twiddles bits' than 'one that twiddles others bits'.

The definition of 'hacker' was changed and is a moving target over the years.

It's still alive, but it's not the culture IMO. Which is sad.

> I bought the Hackers Dictionary by Eric S. Raymond

That hurts a bit to read. Raymond is/was a huckster who took the original Hackers Dictionary, a communal MIT project, and made some edits. He went on to annoy the Linux community with his CML2 antics around the build system. Lisp/MIT, BSD, and Linux all have their own histories, a mixture of forgettable drama and fundamental difference.

> a communal MIT project, and made some edits

The Jargon File had been dead and dated for nearly a decade when he picked it up. His maintenance and publication was an important part of making this content relevant and accessible to future generations.

Eric Raymond's work is a mix of good and bad-- like you could say about anyone.

Oh interesting -- I didn't know any of the above Raymond controversy (or even really who he was; the name just is etched in my brain from that book)

As a guy who found the Jargon File via that book, I'm grateful he did it. But I can see how publishing an edit of an online forum would ruffle a lot of feathers: 30 years later you get guys like me attributing it all to him.

The introduction makes it pretty clear the sourcing: http://catb.org/jargon/html/revision-history.html (This appears in the printed book, too).

Most of the criticism of his stewardship of the jargon file and the publication as N.H.D. by MIT Press comes after other controversies.

A lot of that ethos I think is just Generation X plus computers. A rebellious generation that came of age during a time when digital technology had just granted kids the power to wardial norad. I think tinkerers have always been timeless, but that kind of cyberpunk culture is something we're unlikely to see again.

I'm solidly GenX, but the hacking culture described by "The Hacker's Dictionary" is a generation older than that -- the era of the MIT AI Lab or Stanford's SAIL in the mid 1970s. Lisp Machines and custom in-house operating systems. The GenX hacking culture was the 1980s and was more about getting the most out of our own microcomputers.

It was also about bullshitting on Alliance.

Oh believe me I know it has origins in ivory towers like MIT. Stallman has written all about that for instance. The context with GP was once it had trickled down into more popular culture with the ESR / Jargon File days. We honestly don't know a lot of the true origins of hacker culture, because so much of it started in corporate government enclaves with confidentiality rules. What we know are echos of practices and socialization that crystalized into usenet posts.

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