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by delan 3692 days ago
Some of their other writing seems to be of a similarly low quality. Another of their pages [0] seems to mirror a post [1] that they had sent to comp.lang.lisp, where they describe their difficulty with finding out the identities behind some blogs in sufficient detail.

> PS it annoys me to no end when one cannot easily find the name of the author on blogs, when the blog author clearly didn't meant to be anonymous. Is there a reason you didn't want it spelled it out?

This turns into a small rant against handles, which, if you set aside the jargon, are essentially nicknames.

> (i despise hacker culture, where these “hackers” idiotic-namesake prefer to go by “handles” or abbrevs (e.g. “RMS”, “ESR”, “JWZ”) or whatnot insider-fashion fuck. But that's just me.)

One person seemed a bit annoyed by them, so they then responded with a larger rant [2] that proposes that “hackers” are a strict subset of the people who like to tinker with computers, without ever clearly describing what it is about “hackers” that they “despise” — concluding:

> It is this group of people, i despise. More accurately: i despise their general style and outlook. I despite them. Fuck them. FUCK hackers. FUCK their hacking. Fuck their mothers. Scumbags.

At this point, I’d have dismissed them as a troll, but they went to the effort of buying a domain name and everything!

[0] http://xahlee.info/Netiquette_dir/whats_hacker.html

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/VQF8CIUIotg/q...

[2] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/VQF8CIUIotg/P...

2 comments

Xah Lee is a well known usenet troll. He entered my killfile many, many years ago for his ranting against Python, Vim, Emacs, Lisp, and everything else under the sun.

Must be profitable, if he's still at it.

The articles you are citing are from comp.lang.lisp newsgroup. I'm a regular there roughly from 1999 to 2010.

I didn't buy a domain to put a rant. I had a website since 1995, had domain since 2000, and my website had several thousand links from math department of universities, educational institutions, printed books, math journals.