The Glider: An Appropriate Hacker Emblem (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The Glider: An Appropriate Hacker Emblem (2014)

catb.org

65 pointsprajjwal44 comments

I'm not convinced that the glider represents the 'hacker community' as a whole - I know a good few folks (not only 'web developers') who have no idea about Game of Life. Damn, I know at least one good coder who never heard of IRC. So much for shared experience.

In all fairness I don't think a 'hacker community' as such exists any more - if there ever was one.

And the glider continues off into infinity, unconcerned, unchanged by its lack of neighbors.

Until...

The article is by ESR and in his mind "hacker community" is a very specific group. A group who happened to have their heyday when the game of life had just been published and Conway was still offering a prize for an infinitely expanding pattern. This makes it really more of a coincidental thing rather than a representation of any inherent trait of the community.

Though even for that community(and people now who really like the game of life) I don't think it is a great logo. Circles are not a very pretty or pleasant way of representing the game of life and it makes me think of a board game when I look at it.

The Game of Life was first implemented on Go boards.

I'm totally unconvinced that Eric "The Flute" Raymond represents or speaks for the 'hacker community'.

For one thing, very few people I know of in the hacker community are as racist as ESR. He's out there with Terry Davis when it comes to being racist and mentally ill, but he can't hold a candle to Terry Davis's hacking ability.

The page says May 2014, but this is quite old. ESR proposed it in 2003 and it . . . failed to catch on.

the article says this in the first few sentences

It definitely caught on in some circles; I've seen a number of other blogs that contain a badge with this emblem. Hasn't by any means become universal among hackers, but isn't a complete flop either.

I saw it once or twice at the 31c3. It didn't catch on, but it's not unknown either.

I love the glider as a hacker emblem. Here's a tiny version with Unicode Braille: ⠠⠵

This, along with a life-long fascination with cellular automata, inspired me to get a tattoo of the glider sequence a few years ago. It is a tattoo that is occasionally difficult to explain to innocent bystanders but it constantly reminds me of what motivates and inspires me.

Yup, I have one too. It's timeless, does not resemble any sort of contemporary physical artifact of technology, like a bar code or a circuit board, and to anybody who doesn't recognise it, it's just a small decorative piece.

"I believe, but cannot prove, that global “AIDS” is a whole cluster of unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as the sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal blunders in the history of medicine." -- Eric S. Raymond.

"In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color." -Eric S. Raymond http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129

Homosexuals are child abusers http://armedndangerous.blogspot.co.uk/2002_06_16_armedndange...

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." -Eric S Raymond

"My favorite part of the "many eyes" argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code." -Theo De Raadt

The little experience Raymond DOES have auditing code has been a total fiasco and embarrassing failure, since his understanding of the code was incompetent and deeply tainted by his preconceived political ideology and conspiracy theories about global warming, which was his only motivation for auditing the code in the first place. His sole quest was to discredit the scientists who warned about global warming. The code he found and highlighted was actually COMMENTED OUT, and he never addressed the fact that the scientists were vindicated.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

>During the Climategate fiasco, Raymond's ability to read other peoples' source code (or at least his honesty about it) was called into question when he was caught quote-mining analysis software written by the CRU researchers, presenting a commented-out section of source code used for analyzing counterfactuals as evidence of deliberate data manipulation. When confronted with the fact that scientists as a general rule are scrupulously honest, Raymond claimed it was a case of an "error cascade," a concept that makes sense in computer science and other places where all data goes through a single potential failure point, but in areas where outside data and multiple lines of evidence are used for verification, doesn't entirely make sense. (He was curiously silent when all the researchers involved were exonerated of scientific misconduct.)

We're nonconformists! You can tell by our uniform!

I cringe at the idea of using it myself. I believe the title of hacker shall be earned from peers ("Cool hack!") not self-assigned.

"When you put the glider emblem on your web page, or wear it on clothing, or display it in some other way, you are visibly associating yourself with the hacker culture. This is not quite the same thing as claiming to be a hacker yourself — that is a title of honor that generally has to be conferred by others rather than self-assumed. But by using this emblem, you express sympathy with hackers' goals, hackers' values, and the hacker way of living."

Don't forget to read the "The idea of using Life patterns as an emblem was semi-anticipated by some hackers in Argentina" part. I would say it was anticipated... it uses a still life instead of a moving pattern.

[1] http://swain.webframe.org/tshirts/conway_life_zoom.jpg

I hadn't realized esr was suggesting the glider as a sort of hieroglyph of hackerness. I think it, like the Kline bottle shape, evokes a certain kind of resonance in folks who enjoy algorithms and mathematics.

These linked ones are quite pleasing http://swain.webframe.org/tshirts/conway_life_zoom.jpg/

I'll take Alan Turning over the Glider, anytime.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1046#comment-236592

At the intersection of both the objects mentioned in your post, I still find it amazing that one can build a UTM in Conway's Game Of Life.

Life is overrated. Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" goes a lot further and is much more amazing than that, with much simpler rules than life.

Life is particularly interesting because it's something I've been toying with (off and on, not in any particular depth) for all my life. It's certainly not pushing the limits of simplicity.

The historic cellular automata rule that would be MUCH more appropriate than Life to represent hacker culture would be John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata [1], and the most appropriate pattern to use would be his universal constructor, which can reproduce itself given the right input, thus is a two-dimensional cellular automata quine.

He's the ORIGINAL hacker's hacker, who figured all of that out on paper, without the use of computers. And his Universal Constructor [3] is much more beautiful and interesting that a simple Life glider, in my opinion. Now that would make an impressive tattoo!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_cellular_automaton

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construct...

[3] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/Nobili_Pe...

(By the way, it's Alan Turing, not Turning -- a common and understandable mistake!)

(Also by the way, children and nice people read Hacker News, so please do not link to ESR's reprehensible web site, promote his racist ideology, or buy into his bullshit that he is a hacker or speaks for hackers.)

I've long felt that some variation of the anarchy symbol would be more appropriate for a hacker symbol being that hacking represents total freedom (in my mind).

Not all hackers are anarchists, though.

That's why we shouldn't adopt the anarchist symbol as is. A variation would be needed.

You could put an H inside a circle, but a lot of people will think you're trying to be a hospital.

I'd suggest (λx.t), but that's not very anarchic, I guess.

A lambda in a circle is the mark of the Lambda Complex and a symbol for the Resistance in Half Life. Adopting that would be pretty nerdy, but I don't know if it says "Hacker."

A lot of people might thing you were referring to a certain dead hologram too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Rimmer

If you consider that the basic meaning of Anarchism is "no hierarchies!" and compare that in a not-too-strict sense to core principles of the hacker and maker community, it becomes clear that a hacker culture and anarcism are not too far apart.

High emphasis on collaboration, egalitarian mindset and a "respect stems from knowledge" attitude come to my mind.

But still most of the hackers I know don't want to be associated to anarchy, even though they act like anarchists. I think the reason is that their acting like anarchists simply is appropropiate for what they are trying to achieve and not a political act or message by itself.

Absolutely. Anarchism in the popular imagination means wearing funny headgear and throwing bombs, but the real meaning is as you say, "anti hierarchy", or perhaps more accurately, "anti hierarchy-that-can't-justify-itself", since I guess some forms of hierarchy are necessary and mutually beneficial"

Anyway, in the spirit of totally ignoring Raymond's pedantic and arbitrary missives, we (a hackerspace, somewhere) have produced our own variation, which is still part of the "game of life" glider sequence, but looks much better, looks sort of like an 'h' for hacker, or someone sitting typing, or a group of people (of different shades!) listening to a presenter, etc, etc, etc: http://i.imgur.com/ba7o9i0.png

Isn't this document much older than 2014?

Edit: Here's an archived copy from 2003: https://web.archive.org/web/20031202225527/http://www.catb.o...

A still life would be even better. The emblem would be doing what it is supposed to be doing: stay put.

That is very difficult to google for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life#Example...

There's a whole wiki that just documents shapes, ideas, and software for Conway's Game of Life. http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Still_life http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/List_of_common_still_lifes

I like the notion that you can't tell whether it's a snapshot or running.

But on the flip side, a still life isn't getting much done.

I like the idea, not really into the emblem.

Might have caught on if it were hackable in plaintext. The graphic is abhorrent.

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