
The Nerd Handbook - ironkeith
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2007/11/11/the_nerd_handbook.html
======
Osmose
Forgive me if I'm overlooking some heavy sarcasm, but I'm genuinely surprised.
I would have thought more people would have objected to the stereotypes and
generalizations that plague this article.

I don't know the writer's background, so I can't figure out if this is a "non-
technie looking in" or "techie explaining to the world" post. Neither is an
excuse to assume that the hypothetical nerd has control issues, a cave, or an
obsession with gathering knowledge.

I dearly hope no one attempts to interact with me based on this.

~~~
dkokelley
I believe the piece is intended as informative satire. Yes there are many
aspects that will not apply to every nerd. Also, from what I can tell the
author is writing as an insider explaining nerds to the world.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
Oh yes. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.

The interesting thing is that my wife has touches of nerdiness, and this
article pins most of them. None of them are as clearly defined or extreme, but
each is recognisable.

And this article has helped her understand a few things she formerly hadn't
articulated.

For us - spot on. Thank you.

~~~
nathanwdavis
I sent the link to my wife before I even finished the article.

Should be good for my marriage - I think.

~~~
GrandMasterBirt
Exact same thing happened to me. I get an IM "lets go to the movies where its
dark and damp and you can be in your cave and shit, bring a laptop"

------
rudin
The section "Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in
his head." should be recast as "Expect social incompetence and rudeness from
your nerd". This is not something people will accept or should accept. Nerds
have to realize that when they do something like this they are performing a
trade-off. As outcasts, they had to lower their need for social contact. The
discrepancy between their lowered needs and the need of others is what causes
these conflicts.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
The article is about understanding your nerd, and what it says is true. You
will get social incompetence and rudeness from your nerd, whether or not you
believe it to be acceptable.

This article is a step towards understanding not just by people of nerds, but
by nerds of themselves. I was 17 when someone recognised these aspects f the
nerd in me, and made me see them myself. Net result was that I made it a
project to make myself socially capable.

In the main I succeeded, although there are still occasions when I slip and
fall, but it was recognising and accepting the truth that made it possible to
change.

The article is right as it stands, as indeed you actually acknowledge when you
say "Nerds have to realize ... they are performing a trade-off."

------
jcapote
"but your nerd would prefer to hide in his cave for hours on end chasing The
High" - That's a beautifully succinct way to label that state of consciousness
we all strive to attain throughout our day.

------
Mongoose
An oldie, but a goodie. Rands is great. Following his blog and tweets proves
that there can be managerial whimsy.

His site's glossary is worth a skim:
<http://www.randsinrepose.com/glossary_alpha.html>

_Collaboration: A word used to convince you to work with people you'd rather
avoid._

 _Office: The square box where you live. Some models come with windows._

------
jazzychad
> your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses
> to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest
> fumble around with a mouse.

Bingo. I work at a command line all day, and even use the "Terminal" GMail
theme with plain-text formatting. I'm glad someone else recognizes that
monospaced fonts are a hallmark of nerds.

~~~
celoyd
I’m a nerd who’s done some typography, and I hate monospace. The distinctive
thing here is that nerds are about language, and the good linguistic
interfaces to the machine are mainly monospaced just by historical accident.
It’s not like we’d invent it over again if we hadn’t thought of it until now.

Now that it’s established, of course, we’re all pretty much locked in. Most of
the text on my screen right now is monospaced. I mean, good luck writing code
in a proportional font: pretty much every language and text editor assumes you
can align with spaces, tiny punctuation looks huge, etc.

But saying that monospace is inherently nerdy is like saying that, say,
slashes are inherently path separators.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Depends on the kind of nerd. I _wish_ I were a typography nerd, it's one of my
weaknesses. On the other hand, I actually have written more than my fair share
of COBOL74 on an old greenscreen, and if I had to do that in a beautiful
typographical font, I would have killed someone.

Monospace isn't entirely an accident.

~~~
celoyd
Sure, I guess “accident” is a vague way of putting it. I mean monospace sucks,
but it sucked in a way that people could take advantage of until they relied
on it. Now that we have ncurses, it’s hard to call it an accident.

I could complain the same way about practically anything. Cement. Unix. C. The
genitive absolute. But granted that great things are made out of hacks, some
hacks are uglier than others, and monospace is pretty darn ugly.

~~~
donaq
Uh, what sucks about Unix and C? I don't think they suck at all.

~~~
nrr
Everything sucks, but Unix and C certainly don't suck less. I'd rather stab
myself in the eyes with rusted forks than profess my love for either.

C is an overgrown assembly language, and Unix doesn't have enough kitchen
sinkery going on to make all of the tiny programs that do one thing well even
marginally useful.

------
motters
I thought this article was a rather silly cliche. Nerd cave?

Often so-called "nerds" are just smart people working on projects which are
too advanced or too abstract for most people to grok. And no, it's not always
about computers either. You can find the same intellectual focus amongst many
people - architects, surgeons, lawyers, artists, and so on.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
It sounds to me like you are not, and do not know, any true "nerds." This
article rang so many bells with me, my wife, my colleagues at work, and others
here on HN, that it seems you have not experienced "nerd-dom".

The "nerd cave" takes many forms, but for those of us who know many nerds it
is instantly recognisable. Yes, there are non-computer nerds, but they have
equivalent forms. Yes, I know a surgeon and several artists who don't
(significantly) use computers, and some of them exhibit most of the
characteristics described. The description is close enough that already I've
been thanked by a husband who now better understands his artist-nerd wife.

Perhaps you are unable to match the description given against a superficially
different instance, or perhaps you really just don't know any nerds, but I
believe you are mistaken.

If you believe the article to be silly, then perhaps you should just be
relieved that you aren't a nerd.

~~~
pushingbits
Of course all true Scotsmen... errr... I mean all true nerds are exactly like
the article describes.

This is really just semantics. Your definition of "nerd" apparently includes a
dorkiness clause and a set of very specific idiosyncrasies. For me, a nerd is
just someone who's extremely competent (or trying hard to become extremely
competent) at some brainy craft.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Hmm. My usage, and that of my colleagues, certainly conforms to the
description given. As does the version on WikiPedia (fount of all knowledge
(remove tongue from cheek)) and other on-line dictionaries.

Perhaps it doesn't match your meaning, but it doesn't mean either of us is
right. Or wrong. The article is describing a stereotype, giving it a label,
and it happens to match very closely with people I know. And me.

Call it what you will. Perhaps "Geek" more closely fits with your model:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerd>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek>

~~~
pushingbits
Here's a thought experiment. Take Donald Knuth, assume that he doesn't have a
cave, has great social skills and no control issues. Would you consider him a
nerd?

Instinctively, I would say yes.

The essence is being competent. All those other things are just side effects.
Very common side effects, which is why they became part of the stereotype, but
still optional.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I know people who are as brilliant, productive and esoteric as Don, and who
don't have a cave, and do have great social skills, and don't have control
issues, and no, I wouldn't call them nerds.

In fact, I know Don Knuth peripherally, and I don't think he is a nerd.

<shrug>

The baggage you have for the word "nerd" is different from mine. The article
is definitely describing mine. In essence you said it earlier: your semantics
don't match mine. They obviously don't match the author's either. Or my
wife's. Or my colleagues'.

------
wwalker3
Do you really have to have severe ADD to be a nerd? I'm super-nerdy by any
measure, but have a very long attention span. Most nerds I know are similar --
that's how those ambitious nerd projects actually get finished.

The guys with the long line of abandoned projects behind them aren't true
nerds, they're just dilettantes. Like raccoons, compelled to collect shiny
things, but never doing anything useful with them.

I also watch one TV show at a time (OK maybe two, so I can avoid commercials),
read one book at a time, and don't switch conversational topics in mid-
sentence. Can non-ADD nerds like me get any props on the Internet, or are we
hopelessly outnumbered?

~~~
Freebytes
The ADD stems from ignoring all topics that are not relevant to your current
project. It appears to be ADD to most people, but in reality, it is simply
ignoring irrelevance. "What do you think of the green dress?" "That is nice."
"What about blue?" "Yeah, that is good." "What did I just ask?" "Uh...." "You
have some kind of ADD!"

------
Estragon
I get the impression this was written more to stroke a nerd audience than to
inform a nerd-SO audience. :)

------
angusgr
I showed this post to my girlfriend a while ago, and there was a lot of "OMG
this is you".

Not exactly the same as me (same as RiderOfGiraffes' comment), but I think it
helped her understand a lot of my day to day nerdiness.

Recommended if you're in a live-in relationship with someone not quite as
nerdy as you. :).

------
trickjarrett
I'm a half-breed. I'm nerdy but I was blessed with more social skills and only
half-as-much stubbornness. But I love the puzzles, the high, etc.

My only fear is my fiancee discovering that 'cool' does actually mean I wasn't
listening.

~~~
peregrine
I was thinking about sending this to my GF till I read that line. Now I will
just post it to facebook and assume she read it.

------
thewileyone
I sent this article and the article, "Nerd and his cave", to my wife a couple
of months back. She understands me completely now and is so much better at
leaving me alone to feed my inner nerd.

------
evilslut82
Genius!! I hope my gf will read it properly :)

------
araneae
I don't understand how nerds could date non-nerds. But that's just me ^-^.

~~~
Deestan
I first met my wife at a getting-drunk-on-tequila party, if that answers your
question. :)

------
psyklic
I disagree with the author that a nerd lives to build things -- rather, a nerd
is just really into non-mainstream stuff that the public understands is
important but isn't for them.

~~~
derefr
Traditionally, that's called a _geek_. There is in fact a distinction.

~~~
dunstad
Not in the popularly accepted definitions.

~~~
allwein
I don't think that a place called "Hacker" News is going to be overly
concerned with popularly accepted definitions. Otherwise we'd all be
complaining about the lack of 2600 articles and Kevin Mitnick blog entries.

------
winter_blue
This article seems like a joke to me.

~~~
chacha102
I really don't think it is a joke. I know a lot of people who do a lot of what
is talked about. For the most part, a lot in the article is true.

While it may talk about a few points in a joke-like manner, it is still a
pretty realistic article.

------
c00p3r
Too much scores for a bunch of generalizations.

Just try to _:,$s/your nerd/kid with autism/g_ and _:,$s/project/game/g_

------
azharcs
Seriously, I really miss HN's quality. A year ago when articles like these
wouldn't even reach the first page, now it is a top story.

~~~
adbachman
Really? It was on the front page two years ago
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78409>).

There must have been a quality bump somewhere around a year ago.

------
p_h
This is genius

