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ESR on Facebook

esr.ibiblio.org

73 pointssrl32 comments

I'm still struggling to figure out why ESR is relevant, or ever was relevant, for that matter. As far as I can tell, his most significant engineering accomplishment was fetchmail, and I'm not sure many here would call it very significant these days.

(I'm willing to accept the downvotes I'll likely get if only someone will answer me on this point.)

Apart from his being a great public advocate for open source software, he wrote "The Art of Unix Programming" and "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" -- both very influential.

The Art of Unix Programming is even a good book! I though can't stand ESR's rhetoric.

Struggle no more!

How can anyone forget his seminal work - Sex Tips for Geeks

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/

Also ncurses (which is still widely used) and a large amount of GNU Emacs code. I cannot comment on how much of the code that is in use in those tools now is still his, but I don't think that matters. But probably his writing and advocacy for Open Source is more influential than his code.

Well that's a silly comment. Is your entire life based around percieved relevance?

Zuckerberg could be considered "more relevant", but that doesn't make him a good person with morals.

How does it matter whether ESR is (or was ever) relevant or not?

his historical relevance to hackerdom was firmly cemented by his work on the jargon file, in my opinion.

Arguing about definitions, a how-to:

Step 1. Choose a word with a vague and emotional meaning to the audience

Step 2. Espouse a definition of the term based on syllogistic reasoning.

example A: The hacker way is good. Continuous iteration and improvement is good. The hacker way is continuous iteration and improvement.

example B: The hacker way is good. Writing your own tool to present a filtered view of a datastream is good. The hacker way is writing your own tool present a filtered view of a data stream.

Step 3: Now Fight!

[EDIT: slipping this in here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/]

Depending on who you ask, Eric is the current keeper of the definition of hacker: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

Not keeper, hoster.

By that logic Jimmy Wales is the current keeper of the definition of everything.

He had a lot of influence on the current definition, but no longer does. (I don't think he would dispute this.)

I think this two comments are good one.

--- from the blog

Garrett Says: February 2nd, 2012 at 3:19 pm

At one of my last companies, all of our web GUI pages were structured that if you passed in a parameter to the query the result you got back was effectively the same data, but as a JSON dump. This was used internally by some of our own implementation and tools, and allowed the whole website to be scripted. Written by hackers, used by everybody. Its also good practice, too, because it allows for the separation of UI and data. As long as the UI logic is separate, you can validate the entire data-processing component through automated testing, leaving only the UI processing code to be tested manually as that actually requires a human to look at and see if things are working correctly.

Good design leading to better quality and testability.

esr Says: February 2nd, 2012 at 3:22 pm

>Good design leading to better quality and testability.

Damn. Garret, can you email me more details? That sounds like a good case study for the second edition of TAOUP.

I read this technique in the Pragmatic Programmers' "Agile Web Applications with Rails" 5 years ago. It was already standard then.

"The Hacker Way" according to Zuckerberg:

> We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date.

How is Facebook not top-down? However it tries it can not be anything but top-down. Bottom up or peer-to-peer is bittorrent, RSS and SMTP. Protocols designed for distributed control. We need more of this, and less of corporate control.

That quote seems to be talking about the "social graph", not Facebook. Facebook pushes the "social graph" as part of their product, but I don't think they'd claim Facebook is the same thing as the graph.

Well, Open Graph Protocol is actually kind of distributed.

Amazingly, esr defines "hacker" in a different way to Mark Zuckerberg. Next thing we'll be seeing is people using "hacker" to mean people who break into other people's systems without permission and what a firestorm that will cause.

early part of Harvard hacker culture diverged from the main culture before Mark got there..

Obviously, ESR is talking about hacker users, and "Company X" is talking about hacker employees.

This is true, but you would expect that "hacker employees" would make their products compatible with "hacker users."

My thoughts when reading Zuckerberg's letter (and I admit I only scanned it) were: 1. "Wow, this surprises me, but I actually agree with what he is saying." followed immediately by 2. "Waaaaaaait just one minute. Facebook -- externally at least -- embodies none of this!"

They have closed down what could be open. They are helping to ruin the internet by making walled gardens acceptable and the norm.

If Facebook embodied "the hacker way" internally, they wouldn't behave in the manner they do toward their users. They wouldn't elevate their "hacker employees" to a privileged position over a "hacker user" when it comes to that user's data and mechanism of experience.

A company wouldn't get to call itself an "open source company" just because all of their employees have access to their source code.

> A company wouldn't get to call itself an "open source company" just because all of their employees have access to their source code.

HipHop. Thrift. Cassandra. Hive. Tornado. And that's just off the top of my head.

I've seen commits from @facebook.com emails to Hadoop, HBase, PHP, and Varnish.

There are a lot of things you can call Facebook. One is definitely an "open source company."

RedHat is an open source company. Facebook is a social networking company.

That was an analogy, it should be blindingly obvious I was in no way addressing whether Facebook is an open source company.

I'd add, Does Corporation X allow users to extend the platform, or do they ban anybody who would "interfere with the intended limitations or impairs the proper working" of the platform?

See, for example, http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-bans-browser-plu...

No, no answering machines for you.

From blog post: "Concretely: can I write my own client to present a filtered view of the Corporation X data stream, or have other people do that for me?"

The answer is yes but most of users don't use it like that. it is what it says it is, database of people. and a way of reaching them. Before this you couldn't acces most of them but only few. when i first went to facebook i was amazed how many people are there but werent online before.

Deleted comment

  > no big pieces of google make it out, unless they are dead internally

Um, I know nothing about Google's internal goings on, but I would be surprised if a majority of V8, NaCl, Chromium, GWT, WebM, Go, Closure Tools and Android are dead internally.

http://code.google.com/opensource/projects.html

Most of those sound like dead internally, i.e either they have nothing to do with their money making scheme (Ads), or they are to be used externally to assist that purpose, not internally.

With Go being of marginal use inside Google (C++, Java, Python win the day), the only exceptions I see in the list is Closure Tools and GWT.

Whether their code is open source or not is almost irrelevant. Read what ESR said carefully, it's not actually about the code itself, it's about user control of their data and experience.

Appropriate, thorough APIs and policies can probably accomplish the goals of user control even better than what is most likely a maze of undocumented code that would be hard for anybody outside of Facebook to make sense of, or put to good use.

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