[objectiveariel]

To me, this manifesto has little more than historical value. It's more an expression of generic adolescent angst rather than of hacker culture.

It's a poor "manifesto" too. What exactly are the aims of The Hacker? "Exploring", "Outsmarting you", and "judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like". Platitudes, really, if you set aside the emotional outbursts surrounding them.

The Jargon File offers a more balanced and intricate exploration of The Hacker. It's always worth a read.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html

[eggy]

I will not argue the angst angle or semantics of manifesto, but given the context of who and when they wrote it, it was and can still carry some weight. But just as your comment betrays your age (I think?), so does mine. I remember going to 2600 meetings in the lower plaza of the Citigroup building once a month.

At that time, someone told me Feds come and photograph to record attendees (all 5 or 8 people if a good turnout). I was new, and laughed it off, until I say two guys taking snapshots (no digital cameras then!) our way. We would wave at them.

Good memories of HOPE 1994 too. Funny to see the back of my head in some of the videos of it posted to YouTube. They were put up only these past 3 years or so.

I also remember the weight of the situation hit me at the least expected during Phiberfest at Irving Plaza, NYC in 1995, celebrating Phiber Optik's (Mark Abene) release from prison.

I don't think taking chances with your time, and someone else's money (VC) is the same as putting yourself out there the way it was in late 70s, early 80s as a hacker.

I think modern 'Hacker' culture as popularly used now, is more 'three-piece', and that anything that may be actually legal, but more on the darker side is actually attacked by modern 'Hacker' culture.

Whether you agree with Anonymous, whose manifesto borrows some from The Hacker's Manifesto, it is more in line with the meaning of the word 'Hacker' to me, and less ameliorated like over-cooked, over-watered oatmeal of the word's usage today by self-described hackers.

[loydb]

We found out that the SS was filming through hotel mirrors in a couple of rooms during Summercon 88. Poor Knight Lightning had to watch hours and hours of nothing but drunken shenanigans (because nobody trusted the dude who showed up out of nowhere claiming his handle was the "Dictator", so basically we trashed his room. I left a blender in there, the only thing I did in that room was mix batches of Margaritas.)

When we had an LOD meetup in Dallas in 1989 or 1990, we changed hotels at the very last minute to avoid a similar situation...

[jlgaddis]

As an early teen when I first read your words ~25 years ago, I immediately related. Even more so a few years later when I was kicked out of my high school computer classes, banned from touching the computers, and then when the FBI showed up at my home (unrelated).

All these years later, it feels odd to see this here, read your comment, and write a reply. Your words served as "inspiration" to probably thousands of youth. I hope you're doing well.

[Blahah]

For me, aged 12, the manifesto was a beacon telling me that I was not alone. Nobody I knew IRL shared my interests, no authority saw my curiosity as anything but disruptive. But now I knew there were people, enough of them that they had a name and a 'manifesto', that I started on the road to feeling OK about myself. Through subsequent expulsion from school, arrest by the SS, and worse, that confidence kept me going and eventually helped me turn my life into a positive story. +1 for these words serving as inspiration. Honestly changed my life.

[eggy]

Great story. Glad you're posting here, a real treat. I used to belong to Echo in NYC, and met Mark that way once or twice.

I second your thoughts on 'Hackers' with the exception of its introduction of Angelina Jolie ;) For the record, there were no teenage girls like her around the hacking culture back then; what am I saying? There were no women at any of my meetups, period. I am glad to see that has changed, although there is a long way to go still.

I remember reading your words in my early 20s; it was motivating in a good way for me. It gave me a reason to introspect more on my activities, which were pretty misguided from 1978 on my Commodore PET with cassette drive to the computers I use nowadays.

Swapping prisoners: I had left NYU in 84. Before then you could, if you were so inclined, use your Bobst Library login credentials to telnet into the backend mainframe (Dec PDP 11 or Dec Vax's - can't remmeber). They had an off-campus 777 dial-up though. Ah, modem dial-up tones! I think somebody claimed to have logged on to a Houston NASA computer, and then the SYSADMIN popped on and asked that they identify themselves! ;)

[loydb]

You would not believe how many emails I got right after the movie came out from teenage boys wanting me to put them in touch with Jolie...

[eggy]

Oh, I would believe it alright. I would have emailed you too at the time. As much as she is the cliche Hollywood leading, she is not. There was enough of the fringe then, and still, that it appealed to my fringe self ;)

Anyway, I never took jobs in infosec, or IT after having had gained all of that experience with the exception of an DBA position when times were tough. I left computers for work, and only use them for fun - coding, animating, livecoding music and visuals, and amateur game dev. Oh, and geeky mathematics stuff!

I was jaded by the office cube syndrome, and web dev becoming the 2000s equivalent of becoming a word proccessor in the 80s (remember that? Learn Word or WordPerfect and earn big salaries?). Nobody correlated it with just transferring typing skills to a computer. There was the occasional hacker/guru who wrote mail merge macros and such, but after the low-hanging fruit was had, it was spellcheck all day!

I went on to do things like technical design, engineering and fabrication of show action equipment, technical diving to service underwater electrical and hydraulics, rope access work, and multimedia, and other stuff where I could apply code in creative ways - automation, math visualizations, and multimedia.

Can you introduce me to Angelina? Oh, never mind, Brad would kick my butt!

[walshemj]

Cybergypsies by Inndra Sinha (a booker prize shortlisted author) is a good snapshot of the UK scene.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cybergypsies-Indra-Sinha/dp/1416525...

I even get a shout out under my handle in the dedication

[walshemj]

Amen Brother/Sister Hacker is not some one who is doing cut'n paste webdev :-)

A lot of so called "hackers" are like david brent unfortunetly

And I say this as some one who was asked by a senior press officer to respond on behalf of my employer (bt) on alt.2600 - unfortunately SD (BT Security) nixed that

[loydb]

To be fair, I was pretty damn angsty at the time :)

Always exciting to see this pop up someplace new. It's being translated into Polish for a textbook this year as well.

[icc97]

Where else can you get a reply from the Hacker that wrote the Hackers Manifesto.

[uola]

It's slightly anticlimactic when the comment being responded to is a casual dismissal completely missing the context of the text. I've seen plenty of stories on HN where there's some random flamewar on top and the authors insightful comments are at the bottom. For the backstory by the author you're better off with the talk given at HOPE in 2002.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tEnnvZbYek

[loydb]

I was about to jump on an airplane, and didn't really have time for a nuanced response. The OP comment is, likely, from someone who has no idea what hacker culture was like in the 1970s and early 1980s, so I can see how he doesn't find it very relevant to his life today.

And he's absolutely right that it was angsty venting (I was 19, so I'll even allow adolescent). That doesn't mean that it didn't resonate with multiple generations of hackers in the 30 years since.

[uola]

Since the term hacker has become so widespread I think it's hard for people to appreciate the difference between scenes calling themselves hackers, but also to recognize other forms of computer subculture.

I also think the previous commenter makes a mistake in not recognizing the influence of teenage angst on hacker culture, like many other subcultures.

Young, mostly male, persons form groups, use nicknames, makes their own publications, rejects the (some) rules of society and try to decide who is the best is almost every subculture at the end of the last century. From punkrockers and ravers, to graffiti writers and street gangs.

I think there's value in knowing how things were and what makes a culture.

[icc97]

I'd actually say quite the opposite. It suddenly made an article referring to something 30 years ago have life and relevence today.

I hope it made the parent commenter feel awkward realising that the person he's insulting is metaphorically in the room.

The humilty of @loydb's comment should hopefully add futher shame.

[Roritharr]

This was actually read at one of our local events here after Aaron Swartz died. https://vimeo.com/57438877

[justinhensley]

How did you feel about it showing up in the critically acclaimed film, Hackers? That was my first exposure to it.

[loydb]

Pleased, because I think I'm the answer to the trivia question "What was the first email address to ever appear in a major movie credit roll". Sad, because, damn, is that a bad movie.

[qwertyuiop924]

I feel you on that. Tron and Sneakers are both more fun, and Sneakers captures computing more accurately.

On the culture side, I don't know of any major films that capture computing culture. Charles Stross's Laundry series does a better job than most (You can still read The Atrocity Archives without a backround in computing, but you'll get this nagging feeling you're missing something), seeing as Stross is up to his eyeballs in computing. It's also the first piece of fiction I know of to reference Symbolics. And of course, the protagonist's name is Bob Oliver Francis Howard. Because that book just couldn't get any more in-jokey. But, you know, in a good way.

"You" and "Daemon" also capture bits of computing fairly well.

[laumars]

Antitrust[1] is good for getting the subtle details right while still having a dramatic plot for Hollywood. I quite liked War Games[2] as well.

[1] http://gb.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/

[2] http://gb.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/

[ergothus]

So many books in, and I never noticed his name...

[qwertyuiop924]

If you mean the protagonist's full name, it's only mentioned in "Pimpf" AFAIK. And even then, not directly. I had to have TvTropes help me put it together.

[api]

I think it's a great bit of campy cinema. It's like Wet Hot American Summer with ravers and 90s cyberculture. It's a lot better today than it was when it was made. Instead of lame it feels charmingly funny and nostalgic.

[justinhensley]

I completely agree. I actually thought it was extremely cool even when it was released, but I was 12.

While a wholly inaccurate portrayal of hacking or even computing, it did contribute to my fascination with both.

[int_19h]

For all the factual inaccuracies in this movie - which was like 99% of it - I think they have done an amazing job relaying the spirit of the manifesto - the general notion that hacking, as a culture, is really about challenging yourself and satisfying your curiosity.

[laumars]

I quite enjoyed Hacker, albeit to laugh at. But I've seen far worse "Hacker" themed movies. Though it party helps that Hackers has aged pretty well compared to many of the others.

Going back to your point about being angst: if it's any consolation, that's how I felt as a teenager as well. I didn't come across your manifesto until quite some years after it was written but it definitely resonates with how I felt at the time as well.

[kaybe]

Well, for what it's worth, there's this comment on IT stuff in movies:

"We write those scenes to be inaccurate and ridiculous on purpose.

I'm a young writer in his mid-30's, computer and game savvy. Lots of us are. I guess you could call it a competition of one-upping other shows to see who can get the best/worst "zoomhance" sequence on the air. Sometimes the exec producers and directors are in on it, and other times we just try to get bits and lines into scripts.

90% of our TV viewing audience will never know the difference and honestly, we love it when threads like this get started and love reading the youtube comments. "

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/f2i7t/ive_written_f...

The comments on that thread link to a lot of ridiculous moments of IT movie/TV history.

(My google-fu is strong today.)

[bitwize]

Hey Loyd.

Face facts, you're never gonna live this one down. :) The document is emblematic of what social butterflies call the zeitgeist of an era. What was really more or less a bunch of kids messing around, they see as a revolution, akin to punk rock. "Conscience of a Hacker" seemed to validate their mythology of the 80s hacker as a cyberpunk revolutionary, so it will be preserved and repeated as part of the mythohistory of computing.

Plus it was quoted in Hackers and will be immortal on the strength of that alone.

[hutzlibu]

Do you see anything different, today? For example the curious argument... would just apply to the NSA as well...

[igamer]

Sup bdrop.

-Remagi

[loydb]

Sup :) #agony4life

[znpy]

woah, 30 years-old inside jokes going on?

[loydb]

That one's a little more recent. Agony was our Everquest (and later WoW) guild. We raided together for over a decade. The core of the membership was silicon valley based, and since I travel there a lot, I ended up making many IRL friends that I still hang out with to this day from it.

No, I don't MMO any more.

[jff]

In my opinion, the Jargon File is a fun look back at historical hacker lifestyles, but it's also a microcosm of a very few schools in the 60s and 70s. Teenagers have a bad habit of reading the Jargon File and thinking that's how they MUST behave to be a hacker--I did it, to my embarrassment, and a trip to Defcon or most any freshman CS course will find others doing the same.

You don't have to start saying "grok" to be a hacker, or adopt the idiotic "-p convention" which doesn't even really exist in Lisp any more.

Both the Hacker Manifesto and to a lesser extent the Jargon File also tend to perpetrate an "us vs. them" ("freaks vs. squares", "hackers vs. normies") mindset that's pretty outdated these days. You know the only people who give a shit about categories like "geeks and jocks" any more? The ones who are so tied up in their manufactured geek identity that they don't realize the jocks are also learning Python after football practice these days.

[throwanem]

> I did it, to my embarrassment

You're not the only one. I give esr a lot of credit for having written the Jargon File at all, because I would not be what I am today had I not encountered it in childhood. But I also give him a lot of blame for writing it in a way that, however satisfactory it must be to his many and multifarious personal prejudices, militates directly against its value in the role he purports to intend that it fill.

[jff]

He didn't create it, he just more or less appointed himself maintainer after 1990-ish.

[throwanem]

I think it's reasonable to argue that he's revised it so thoroughly away from its original form that he can be considered to have written it. Perhaps it would help to distinguish the Jargon File and TNHD, although the former has for a very long time merely been the latter without the cartoons.

[emidln]

> adopt the idiotic "-p convention" which doesn't even really exist in Lisp any more.

Do you have a better way of signaling to the reader that a function is a predicate? I don't write a ton of Common Lisp, but I do still see quite of a bit of foop when I read Common Lisp. Possible that most of the code I'm reading was written when this was still a thing though...

I think the only reason this doesn't exist in Clojure (which is the lisp I used the most) is that ? is a valid identifier. Similarly Scheme includes ? as a valid identifier (at least R5RS as implemented by Chicken).

[jgw]

See first 25 entries or so in the permuted CL symbol index:

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw51/CLHS/Front/X_Per...

Scheme does use ?, and you can in CL if you really want. But CL reserves ? as a programmable reader macro [1]. It is often used, for example, to designate a stand-in domain variable designation in, say an embedded Prolog.

Another reason that CL avoids the "?" convention is that it's "unpronounceable" [2]. CL is the only language spec I've seen that discusses pronunciation; they actually gave thought to how programmers might converse about their code unambiguously [3]. Another manifestation of this is CL's sort-of case-insensitivity [4].

--

[1] The other reserved characters are !, [ ], and { }

[2] Although at least one wag suggested pronouncing it as "eh?", like a good Canadian.

[3] CLtL2 provides quite a bit of this. My fav is a brief excursion into how some hackers pronounce "macrolet" to rhyme with Chevrolet. :)

[4] This is not actually the case, but appears to be true to new Lispers, until they understand that by default, the reader converts everything to upcase.

[Jach]

Did you miss the Hoon language and their pronunciation table that works for other languages too? http://urbit.org/docs/hoon/syntax/ They suggest pronouncing '?' as 'wut'.

[junke]

You can name your symbol as you want in Lisp, "(make-symbol s)" works for all string "s". With the reader, if you need to define symbols with spaces or otherwise not treated as symbols, or if you want to ensure the names are not upcased (it depends on the readtable), you enclose the name in bars: |anything, whatever| is a single symbol, as well as || (the empty symbol).

The convention for predicates is to use "-p" (there is a hyphen if the rest of the symbol has hyphens, otherwise no hyphen). I think I saw a few libraries that define "thing?" predicates, but that is quite rare. People generally tend to not break conventions in practice, even though "?" can be regarded as a logical prefix for predicates.

[jff]

You may be right, maybe I've just only looked at Scheme lately and thought "?" had migrated to Common Lisp.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node188.html seems to indicate that you could use ? in a common lisp function name, though.

[throwanem]

You could, but I've never seen it. Convention seems to be to suffix 'p' if the predicate name is a single word, and '-p' otherwise.

[bobbyi_settv]

In languages without '?', it's common to prefix the predicate function's name with "is", for example is_empty or isEmpty.

[sevensor]

A lot of people have adopted "grok" without understanding its subversive connotations. The shade of Robert Heinlein is laughing at us all.

Edit: just checked the Jargon File on "grok," and it mentions neither sexual congress nor ritual cannibalism. I think ESR may be chuckling as well.

[throwanem]

> The shade of Robert Heinlein is laughing at us all.

Hardly a new state of affairs. I mean, he invented the Rapture of the Nerds back in the fifties!

[chadgeidel]

Wow, really? I haven't read enough Heinlein - what was that in? I always thought Rapture of the Nerds was grounded in Vinge's "The Coming Technological Singularity" (https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.ht...)

[throwanem]

I honestly don't recall the name of the specific piece, but I do remember that it's anthologized in his collection Expanded Universe, and it was clearly the "Singularity" he described, although of course not by that name - there's even a chart and a curve for those readers not yet familiar with the concept of exponential growth! I remember it quite well, not least because I'd thought I was years past learning anything further from Heinlein, and here he was teaching me that there's nothing new under the sun.

Unfortunately I can't give a page reference right this minute, because my last paper copy of the book disintegrated under heavy use some years ago and the samizdat electronic version doesn't have charts or page numbers. But it's in there, and when the new paper copy I've just ordered arrives on Monday, I'll look up the page and reply to this comment with a link to a photo or something.

That's not the only thing in Expanded Universe, of course; it's quite a long book and contains a great deal of other worthwhile material - short stories, articles, and transcripts of various talks, which together both entertain the reader and lend insight into the qualities of the author. It's not the first book I'd recommend if you're only going to read one Heinlein - that would have to be The Door into Summer. But if you're only going to read two, I'd suggest this be the second one.

[throwanem]

The book got here a day early:

http://i.imgur.com/BIfImA3.jpg

This is from the 1950 edition of "Where To?" - if there's an earlier example of the central concept of the "Singularity", I am not familiar with it.

[nicolas_t]

Not sure I'd suggest The Door into Summer, it's one of the weakest books from Heinlein imho together with the Number of the Beast and I Will Fear No Evil. I'd usually recommend the Moon is a Harsh Mistress or one of his juveniles as the first book.

[walshemj]

Back then those wher the only schools /universities that mattered

[devishard]

> It's a poor "manifesto" too. What exactly are the aims of The Hacker? "Exploring", "Outsmarting you", and "judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like". Platitudes, really, if you set aside the emotional outbursts surrounding them.

Platitudes, yes, but they're platitudes because everyone assumes that those are goods that everyone values. The thing is, while most people would say they value those things, very few people actually follow through on it. But hacker culture is all about what you actually follow through and do, so they actually follow through.

Take, for example, a social justice movement that pulls women out of STEM and into women's studies and related fields, and then complains that women don't get into STEM fields. Meanwhile, women are actually much better represented in hacker culture than in most of STEM, because hackers, unlike the rest of the conversation around women in STEM, don't give a fuck about women. They only care what people do, and it turns out women do about the same amount of stuff as men.

[et-al]

> because hackers, unlike the rest of the conversation around women in STEM, don't give a fuck about [gender]. They only care what people do, and it turns out women do about the same amount of stuff as men.

Wanted to emphasize this. Hope you don't mind the edit.

[devishard]

That edit is fine and says a reasonable thing that I agree with, but there are two reasons why I said "women" instead of "gender".

1. "Hackers don't give a fuck about women" is a more shocking statement than "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender" given millennial social justice sensibilities. That shock was intended, because it demonstrates to readers who aren't hackers the difference between their view and the hacker view, in a very visceral way. When you read, "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender", you have to think about it to realize how fundamental a difference in thinking that is. But when you say, "Hackers don't give a fuck about women", you can feel how different it is.

2. Gender is also a much larger issue than women in STEM. In the context of this discussion, "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender" is true, but in a larger context, I think hackers do care about gender, because gender is very hackable.

[et-al]

Totally agree with you.

In person, I would totally say "hackers don't give a fuck about women" because like you said, it's got a rhetorical good punch, and I can also clarify it if misconstrued. Whereas on the internet, when someone misinterprets, I may, or may not, have to spend another 5 minutes writing a response.

Solid points.

[jeszicawii]

Something I wish people understood.

[sverige]

I think you've put your finger on the difference between hacker culture in the early 80s and now.

[sevensor]

> To me, this manifesto has little more than historical value. It's more an expression of generic adolescent angst rather than of hacker culture.

Well sure, but let's not discount the historical value of its angsty naïveté. This is an important part of our cultural history -- it helps explain the peculiar contradiction that many of us still feel a sense of persecution even as working in technology has become both lucrative and respectable.

[lubujackson]

Computing in general started with such an idealistic, academic mindset. It's important to remember that the "hacker mindset" was really a call to return to that original approach where people would literally hack together on a computer, explore its limits and do it simply for the thrill. By the 80s, there was a business/professionalism that was eating away at that early approach and the "manifesto" is almost a straight lament. Same thing happened to startups, the Web, etc.

[sevensor]

I see where you're coming from, but this is an oversimplification. A lot of the early work on and thinking about computers was about the possibility of top-down social control. This features explicitly in Weiner's Cybernetics and at least implicitly in Von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. (The Soviets latched onto the same idea and tried to build a central-planning computer network.) The "hacking" ethic was really part of the counterculture, and like the counterculture, it ultimately dissolved into the mainstream.

[pnathan]

> The "hacking" ethic was really part of the counterculture,

Right. And that's often missed. The hacker ethic and the FSF project are fundamentally countercultural to the Big Iron mentality of the 60s-80s. In the 90s it started getting sanitized by the Open Source folks, and the collision of Big Money and Software in the 00s subverted and subsumed the whole business.

But there are still many people who hack for the sake of the hack. They are often looked down on... it's still countercultural to the modern software/VC world. :-)

[uola]

I agree with your and the parents comments about hacker culture being counterculture. I don't agree that it still is. The countercultural aspect largely disappeared as computers (and software) became cheap and information widely available. I cringe a bit when see modern hackers using their $3k laptops to have fun coding C in a terminal by themselves. Nothing wrong with that of course, but not necessarily something I would say is a good modern representation of the hacker spirit.

[loydb]

^This.

I broke into my first mainframe in 1977 because I had to if I wanted to play Colossal Cave Adventure. :)

I learned to blue box because I had to if I wanted to talk to my friends around the world and couldn't afford the phone bill.

I tell people now that if you want to pen test, cool, grab some VMs and go nuts. You might even get a bug bounty or two...

[Joof]

Unless they are hacking on shaders, CUDA or deeplearning (which admittedly isn't C most of the time). Although, I admit that a web server is probably more handy if it's not shaders.

I still like terminals; even on my 3k laptop (which is largely for gaming).

[qwertyuiop924]

Although just to be safe, I'd reccomend going back to an older version of the Jargon File. Around 3.x or so, ESR started poisoning the well, and adding some stuff that definitely doesn't belong, reflective of his ideology.

[ashark]

> We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias

> judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.

Hm. I may make these parts CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md in my next Github project.

[zeveb]

Careful — I don't know if GitHub will want you to refrain from judging people by their skin colour, c.f. http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-...

[Pete_D]

I know at least one project already has - the surf browser's code of conduct[0] is more or less the full text of the manifesto.

http://git.suckless.org/surf/tree/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

[icc97]

I'd say a major point of a manifesto is to inspire people which it clearly did.

[fcanela]

It showed me (when I was a teenager living away from the city in the 90s) that I was not alone in my curiosity.

I had The Mentor Manifiesto in my walls, along with prints of code or networking diagrams (i.e. TCP handshake sequence).

I found the text really inspiring then.

[Karunamon]

It's almost as if ideals and principles are necessarily broad generalizations.

[crawsible]

Just think: 30 years from now, my age group will be reminiscing about Justin Timberlake's speech in The Social Network.

what a time to be alive

[maxerickson]

Mary Sue would like a word with you.