
Kevin Korb's Jokes: Care and Feeding of Your Hacker - jacquesm
http://www.sanitarium.net/jokes/getjoke.cgi?41
======
esmevane
At odds with many of the comments in this thread, I interpreted the article as
satire and was definitely amused.

The fact is that a lot of this is uncomfortably true and there is only a small
chance that I would interpret this being said of me IRL as a friendly gesture,
as opposed to a sarcastic stab at my character for what I regret may seem to
be my failures to communicate normally, or my remote behavior, tendency to
obsess, smell and preferred style of dress. One of the small chances that I'd
be prepared to accept and face the accusations would be in the realm of
satire.

But, oh well - for the longest time, hackers have failed to properly deliver
jokes.

For example, from the article:

4.2: My hacker makes obscure, meaningless jokes.

If you feel brave, ask for an explanation. Most of them can be explained. It
may take a while, but it may prove interesting.

------
coderdude
"No. Hackers aren't, contrary to media reporting, the people who break into
computers. Those are crackers."

Calling hackers crackers when they really do mean 'hackers' needs to be curbed
(or maybe not, language evolves). Crackers break open and reverse engineer
software. They are not the security system hackers that most people definitely
mean to refer to when they use the word. When the warez scene was huge there
was a very clear understanding of what the terms meant and you would have
never seen a group misusing the term. Maybe this is occurring because people
want to be able to apply the latest popular meaning of 'hacker' to themselves
but also want to avoid possible negative connotations.

Or perhaps I have everything reversed and it is the old warez scene that
turned 'cracker' on its head and used it for their own purposes. (My Carl
Sagan-esque reflection on both possibilities.)

~~~
p4lto
Isn't reverse engineering what hackers are largely about? Taking things apart
and figuring out how they work, or does reverse engineering have a more
specific definition?

RE to me is not, and has never been, a bad noun/verb though I often see others
frowning upon it.

~~~
coderdude
It depends on which 'hacker' you mean. The 'Hacker News' hacker or 'the movie
Hackers' hacker? Though I bet you could shoe-horn reverse engineering into
both without any trouble. That's a big part of the problem. People pick which
part of the 'hacker' label they want to apply to themselves while discarding
the undesirable parts. The end result is several related terms and multiple
definitions, often overlapping or contradicting.

------
silentific
RE: 0.4: "Is there a book on this?"

Rands has a great post on this topic, the "Free Electron".
[http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/03/20/free_electr...](http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/03/20/free_electron.html)
It starts a bit down the page.

He's also published this in "Managing Humans". There's a link on the blog
post. It's a good read. (I am not the author.)

------
sounds
I first thought from the title that it was a guide for your S.O. (
<http://www.google.com/search?q=a+girls+guide+to+geeks> )

Still a fun read. If you're not familiar with the Jargon File, you may find
you lose a few unaccountable hours there.

------
funkah
We're just people who do a job. I find it distasteful, all this folklore and
acting like we are bunch of special, precious gems who need our "flow" and
should be allowed to dress and act like mutants. Read the Dale Carnegie book
and get over yourself.

~~~
unalone
You know, reading this article half of me was thinking exactly this – it's so
goddamn conceited and selfish to write something that says "treat your hackers
like the supermen they are and allow them to do whatever they want whenever
they want it or else you are stupid and don't deserve them". But the other
half of my was thinking: _My God, I need to get this to my boss stat._

I don't really consider myself a hacker, but when I'm sitting in front of a
computer I expect to be doing one of two things: either I'm solving problems
and stretching my mind, or I'm loafing off. If I'm not given work that
involves some sort of interesting challenge, then I'll be spending a big chunk
of my time cavorting and goofing around. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing;
I spent a month in an intensive eight-hour-a-day writing program where
probably five or six hours were spent looking at YouTube videos and
Facebooking. The mind needs its down time. But when the idiotic gruntwork
piles up, I find it harder and harder to actually do these stupidly simple
things. It feels so pointless. I don't have an especially short attention
span, but if I'm to spend six hours in front of a computer, I want to spend
that time doing something meaningful, or at least creative. If I wanted
mindless work, I'd at least like it to be physical or social in nature.

I've been trying to implement a site since August, and it's been an extremely
aggravating experience. I had a rough design finished in two days;
implementing it took three months, as I had routine task after routine task
hurled my way, stopping me from making any progress. After those three months,
I presented the site and was promptly told it was no good, the boss didn't
like it – even though it'd been sitting in his inbox since my first week on
the job. Now I've redesigned it and waited three more months to get extremely
rudimentary feedback (on the level of, "you should put a button in that
corner"), and now I'm finally allowed to implement it as an actual site.

I'm on the bottom of the list of "people who actually matter" in my workplace,
and I'd feel irritating and self-righteous sending this link to anybody, but
it nails every single aspect of why I find my workplace so frustrating.
Everybody's smart and nice and doing big, important things, but I feel out-of-
place and under-utilized. I could be a hell of a lot more productive if
somebody even made half an effort to figure out how I work best in a team, but
nope, I just sit in a corner and fiddle my thumbs and get told to post links
to things on Twitter. (In two months I finish my position here; does anybody
have advice on how I'd go about finding a less teeth-gritting employer?)

~~~
trustfundbaby
<https://jobpoacher.com/>

------
gonzo
Moar esr-fluffing.

~~~
9999
What does the East Somerset Railway have to do with this article, and how is
the article fluffing the East Somerset Railway?

Some useful individual noted that he is referring to Eric S. Raymond, not the
East Somerset Railway, but then deleted their comment after getting downvoted.
I will continue to assume that we're all talking about fluffing the East
Somerset Railway, because that is more amusing.

------
languagehacker
"Hey I hear there's this things "hackers" can do to make your internet work.
But I'm afraid they'll steal my credit card information. Is this article right
for me? Also, Friends is still a TV show" -- this article

