
ESR on Facebook - srl
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4118
======
jemfinch
I'm still struggling to figure out why ESR is relevant, or ever was relevant,
for that matter. As far as I can tell, his most significant engineering
accomplishment was fetchmail, and I'm not sure many here would call it very
significant these days.

(I'm willing to accept the downvotes I'll likely get if only someone will
answer me on this point.)

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ryanklee
Apart from his being a great public advocate for open source software, he
wrote "The Art of Unix Programming" and "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" -- both
very influential.

~~~
docgnome
The Art of Unix Programming is even a good book! I though can't stand ESR's
rhetoric.

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notaddicted
Arguing about definitions, a how-to:

Step 1. Choose a word with a vague and emotional meaning to the audience

Step 2. Espouse a definition of the term based on syllogistic reasoning.

example A: The hacker way is good. Continuous iteration and improvement is
good. The hacker way is continuous iteration and improvement.

example B: The hacker way is good. Writing your own tool to present a filtered
view of a datastream is good. The hacker way is writing your own tool present
a filtered view of a data stream.

Step 3: Now Fight!

[EDIT: slipping this in here:
<http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/>]

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Delmania
Depending on who you ask, Eric is the current keeper of the definition of
hacker: <http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker.html>
<http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html>

~~~
InclinedPlane
Not keeper, hoster.

By that logic Jimmy Wales is the current keeper of the definition of
everything.

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eugenejen
I think this two comments are good one.

\--- from the blog

Garrett Says: February 2nd, 2012 at 3:19 pm

At one of my last companies, all of our web GUI pages were structured that if
you passed in a parameter to the query the result you got back was effectively
the same data, but as a JSON dump. This was used internally by some of our own
implementation and tools, and allowed the whole website to be scripted.
Written by hackers, used by everybody. Its also good practice, too, because it
allows for the separation of UI and data. As long as the UI logic is separate,
you can validate the entire data-processing component through automated
testing, leaving only the UI processing code to be tested manually as that
actually requires a human to look at and see if things are working correctly.

Good design leading to better quality and testability.

esr Says: February 2nd, 2012 at 3:22 pm

>Good design leading to better quality and testability.

Damn. Garret, can you email me more details? That sounds like a good case
study for the second edition of TAOUP.

~~~
lurker17
I read this technique in the Pragmatic Programmers' "Agile Web Applications
with Rails" 5 years ago. It was already standard then.

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mongol
"The Hacker Way" according to Zuckerberg:

> We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social
> graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the
> monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date.

How is Facebook not top-down? However it tries it can not be anything but top-
down. Bottom up or peer-to-peer is bittorrent, RSS and SMTP. Protocols
designed for distributed control. We need more of this, and less of corporate
control.

~~~
aeturnum
That quote seems to be talking about the "social graph", not Facebook.
Facebook pushes the "social graph" as part of their product, but I don't think
they'd claim Facebook is the same thing as the graph.

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casca
Amazingly, esr defines "hacker" in a different way to Mark Zuckerberg. Next
thing we'll be seeing is people using "hacker" to mean people who break into
other people's systems without permission and what a firestorm that will
cause.

~~~
shareme
early part of Harvard hacker culture diverged from the main culture before
Mark got there..

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lurker17
Obviously, ESR is talking about hacker users, and "Company X" is talking about
hacker employees.

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nknight
If Facebook embodied "the hacker way" internally, they wouldn't behave in the
manner they do toward their users. They wouldn't elevate their "hacker
employees" to a privileged position over a "hacker user" when it comes to that
user's data and mechanism of experience.

A company wouldn't get to call itself an "open source company" just because
all of their employees have access to their source code.

~~~
eropple
> A company wouldn't get to call itself an "open source company" just because
> all of their employees have access to their source code.

HipHop. Thrift. Cassandra. Hive. Tornado. And that's just off the top of my
head.

I've seen commits from @facebook.com emails to Hadoop, HBase, PHP, and
Varnish.

There are a lot of things you can call Facebook. One is _definitely_ an "open
source company."

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jrockway
RedHat is an open source company. Facebook is a social networking company.

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tantalor
I'd add, Does Corporation X allow users to extend the platform, or do they ban
anybody who would "interfere with the intended limitations or impairs the
proper working" of the platform?

See, for example, [http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-bans-browser-
plu...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-bans-browser-plugin-fgs-
and-its-developer/6955)

~~~
aptwebapps
No, no answering machines for you.

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majmun
From blog post: "Concretely: can I write my own client to present a filtered
view of the Corporation X data stream, or have other people do that for me?"

The answer is yes but most of users don't use it like that. it is what it says
it is, database of people. and a way of reaching them. Before this you
couldn't acces most of them but only few. when i first went to facebook i was
amazed how many people are there but werent online before.

