Richard Feynman explains confusion - a good definition of "hacker"? | Hacker News Reader

Richard Feynman explains confusion - a good definition of "hacker"?

video.google.com

24 pointsandreyf16 comments

This may be just me, but I think we should stop attributing all favorable qualities of a person to the label 'hacker'. Being a hacker's good and all, but prepending 'hacker' to everything that's interesting isn't exactly accurate.

True enough, but Feynman's certainly entitled to the "hacker" honorific, same as Woz or Felsenstein or Stallman or any of the other usual suspects.

I agree and argue that it is against the guidelines due to 'hacker' being gratuitous. Either the submissions stands on its own merit or it falls.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=728020

Something else struck me when watching that video.

I'm often struck how my intelligence diminishes when I'm frustrated, anxious or angry. I've read research that seems to confirm such--such feelings interfere with short-term memory.

But Feyman exhibited such sheer joy and, if he carried that on when he meditated on a problem, that may well have helped him.

Well you just broke even on the crackpot index: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html (#8)

To be fair, shouldn't it be ok to mention their names if showing a video of them giving a talk?

Also the index is about potential contributions to physics, which this post is not about.

Its not about mentioning them, its the blatant misspelling of their names "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann" (http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstien,+Hawkins+or+Feynmann)

EDIT: Feynman is spelled Feinman in Russian texts which andreyf maybe familiar with :)

The name's Feynman.

Not in Russian textbooks; andreyf may have been a little tired and ‘Confused’ or sth.

Well, he wasn't Russian, was he? In New Joisey they spell it with a 'y'.

Oy! But his dad was sort of Russian (of Belorussian Jewish ancestry and growing up in a country with Russian the official language). The native spelling was not in Latin characters so there was a bit of freedom of how to transliterate the name: Фейнман.

Had he moved to the USA in the middle of the century, the standard of the transliteration then was to convert the "й" character to "j" so he could have been Fejnman.

It is also possible that the original name was indeed Feinman in Yiddish with "ei" read as in German (the long i), which would explain how it became Фейнман in the first place (transliteration from German Yiddish by a simple substitution based on the spelling while distorting the phonetics). Some Russian Jewish names appear to have gone through a similar process. This is speculation, however; I have not done any research on the origin of the Feynman's family name.

Good article http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0504.html

You know that John Nash used the word "hack" and "hacker" too, right?

Is it a good definition of a "hacker" as someone who doesn't avoid the Confusion Feinman is talking about, but rather embraces it?

I have a machine with the hostname set as 'banana' to remind me video.

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