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Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

Being fifty I think I can say I grew up in this culture. Looking at this test made me realize I grew up to dislike it. (This, or I got grumpy with age)

The chest banging coming from knowing obscure and useless details is kinda cringe. Yeah I know this test is tongue-in-cheek but I remember dudes who were really like that.

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I don't think anyone has mentioned the context of the Hacker Purity Test. Back in the 80s, the "Purity Test" was a well-known thing on Usenet, a long list of sexual activities, drugs, and so forth. By checking off which things you had done, you could get your purity score. (This test made for a lot of interesting discussions with friends.) The Hacker Purity Test is a humorous parody of the original Purity Test. Its humor comes from replacing wild sex acts with super-nerdy activities, while keeping the form and style of the original test.

Originally from Rice University in 1924: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_test

To think, just a century ago, those immoral coeds were running around breaking engagements!

"Rice Girls Not Quite Half Bad" https://digitalcollections.rice.edu/Documents/Detail/the-thr...

"It is an awful thing to say but it may be that she is called the village belle* because she has the most rings." (p2)

p4, just right of a taxi ad, is an ad for Stanford?

(also, either a chicken or a steak dinner may be had for $1, but a hat will set you back $5)

EDIT: * on the topic of texas belles (krasivyje i smelyje?), a very belated idea for songs that might be sung should the RF support Texas' secession from the US: "Jolene lish raz, Jolene lish raz"

Might it because you do not remember the currency of the time was knowledge? In absence of Internet, people traded knowledge, their status depended on this, they got access to cool things because of it. And, as with any valuable, there’s bound to be hoarding.

Maybe. I think I was in the camp of "I will share my knowledge whether you want it or not", always eager to tell people they are doing things in an uninformed way, like not using the right editor ;)

> their status depended on this

But it's not inevitable that people chase status and lord it over others. Doing that is a choice. People can always choose to focus on something more healthy and productive.

I think it is inevitable though when a bunch of hairless apes taught sand how to think.

what is the currency now?

Data

Upvotes.

Engagement, likes, garbage like that.

I see what you're getting at, and I agree.

But at the same time, reading this again also made me a bit nostalgic for at least some parts of 1990s hacker culture. (I'm a bit too young to have experienced the 80s.) There's an irreverence that seems to have been lost. The culture was full of cringey gatekeeping behavior and that wasn't even the worst of it. And the purity test did revel in that a little bit. But it also represents nerd culture taking the piss out of itself in the same breath. The BOFH files also come to mind as an example of this.

It seems like a lot of modern nerd culture isn't quite so able to do that. Gamer culture, for example, is also rife with gatekeeping behavior. And there's also a lot of humor, but what I don't see quite so much is gamer nerds taking a good hard look at themselves, and laughing at what they see.

Also, remember this as a set of in-jokes. Many of these entries were meant to laugh at, not seriously use as a benchmark.

It's a thing of maturity. In programming and system administration, that kind of obscure thing can be really helpful. I was debugging an NMI just yesterday.

So, doing obscure things and knowing intricate details of a machine is always a plus if you're facing it 8 hours a day, and having small wrestling matches with it from time to time.

However, having a piss contest out of it is not cool or nice.

Grumpy, This is not about knowing obscure and useless details, these things were not learnt in isolation but via exposure through lots of hacking/coding and the culture back then.

If I were one to use the word "cringe", a fifty year old willfully using the words "kinda cringe" would absolutely be cringe.

Language changes. Adapt or be cringe.

INCYMI, FWIW, pwn, MacGyver, cringe and ICYMI have been part of the M-W dictionary for three years.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/new-words-in-the-di...

> The dictionary chronicles how the language grows and changes, which means new words and definitions must continually be added. When many people use a word in the same way, over a long enough period of time, that word becomes eligible for inclusion.

FWIW, "fwiw" was already common on Usenet concurrently with this purity test.

(I'd call 60% of that list to have been in use before the turn of the century)

MacGyver hasn't been on the air for three decades... I was pointing out that language changes and "cringe" has been recognized as part of the (American) english language for a few years now (by one dictionary publisher).

Agreed; I had just been surprised that the others had all been added in the very same year as "yeet".

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