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Comment by jackdoe | Hacker News Reader

Reminder to rewatch the 1995 movie Hackers :)

I used to read it quite often when I was 15, now that I am in my 40s, I think the manifesto is quite weak, even though its romantic in its attempt to celebrate curiosity and claim a new home for some.

Now I align more with Bunnie's [1] way: when you look at a thing as a thing, strip it from its social weight, a program is just a program, you can study it, understand its machinery and mechanisms, and make it do what you want. You can understand things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyYsVeYzbik

PS: I still think phrack 49/14 was the most iconic article I have read, and has changed the way I look at programs ever since.

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12 year old me would disagree with you. The movie hackers and the manifesto inspired me. Being a gay geeky kid in the 90s, this helped me feel not alone.

I respect your opinion, but we would have had some flame wars back in the day ;)

12-year-old you would have resonated powerfully with that sort of thing. Adult you probably realizes that being smarter than everyone else really doesn't matter as much as you think it does. And even (especially!) the smartest people show their work if they want credit for it. Age is like that. It puts things in perspective.

The enduring bit of the Manifesto, I think, is the idea that we need to cultivate our curiosity even when society tells us we shouldn't. I mean that in the sense of both "we ought to" and it being a physical need, like an addiction.

The rest of it sounds a bit like Julia Stiles in Ghostwriter (PBS TV series): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLlj_GeKniA

The whole ‘we exist without nationality, race, gender, etc’ is what I’m referring to. I don’t think I considered myself particularly smart, but did feel that structured education is largely a waste of time for some people.

I (re)watched Hackers on the big screen a month or so ago (it was the 30th anniversary), and it was an absolute pleasure. You should definitely rewatch it!

As for the hacker's manifesto: we are now old. Teenage rebellion content doesn't resonate as much. I reread it after watching Hackers and agree it's not as great as I remembered. Though I also reread it multiple times as a teenager. It really resonated back then, and I'm forever grateful for it.

> we are now old. Teenage rebellion content doesn't resonate as much.

This statement tells more about the personality traits of the person that makes it than about age. I, for example, would claim that the central thing that changed with age is that you gained deeper knowledge, and you have more money.

I would say that I still rebel for the same causes as in my teenager time (while many people of the same age got much more conformist), but

- with the insane baggage of additional knowledge, I (can) use a very different approach than the more naive one of my teenager time,

- with more money, a lot of things become easier, i.e. in opposite to the teenager time you don't have to invest you precious time resources in some things that can be solved with money.

Well said.

Indeed, "Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit" changed my life, even though I work nowhere near security. It's about perspectives.

Shout Factory and 88 Films both released Hackers in 4k recently. Commentary track as well, havent had a chance to listen to that yet. But the 4k transfer was great.

Thanks for this. Trying to follow along but modern compilers and cpus seem to modify the disassembly in a way that makes it tough to follow along. Tried throwing a bunch of flags at gcc but still getting some diffs. Had this issue when I was working with an older C book as well.

Maybe Godbolt has some way to emulate this better

This article does not work due to many protections that were added since then, not only in compilers but also the kernel and CPUs. If you want to follow along, download a Slackware 3.0 ISO.

Then go watch Sneakers after :)

I usually watch WarGames after :)

Shall we play a game?

haha I actually made https://punkx.org/overflow/ to play with my daughter and it initially started with buffer overflowing to win tictactoe inspired from wargames, but I thought force jump to gameover was cooler.

A question and a suggestion: 1. How much of a first-mover advantage is there? 2. Maybe have the first player only execute 5 instructions on the first turn, to remove whatever first mover advantage there is -- that way at the end of each player's turn they will always be 5 moves "ahead" of their opponent, whether they went first or second. 3. Okay, a second question: I'm curious how well handicapping by e.g. one player getting an extra instruction per turn?

its actually not much of an issue because as you are writing your shellcode the other person has access to it as well, and ofc there is the monkeypatch nop pawn

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