

The Hackers Manifesto - spoiledtechie
http://www.spoiledtechie.com/post/The-Hackers-Manifesto.aspx

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mdakin
Wow, memories. Reminds me of going to the 2600 meetings in the Pru's food
court and hanging out with guys from the other sides of Boston who I'd have
known no other way. Guys with whom I'd later go to college and/or start
companies. Reminds me of learning how computers actually worked by reading and
finally understanding "Assembley for Cracking" by the shepherd, playing with
Macsbug, ResEdit's code editor, and referring to a Morotola m68k manual which
Motorola sent me for free after I called and asked for one. Reminds me of
cracking software for fun. Neither distributing the cracks nor really even
using the cracked software but knowing that I could do it. Reminds me of
trying to find every way possible to locate the base-address of the VRAM and
then blitting pixels directly into it "by hand for speed." That MOV16
instruction on the 68040 was really something. Back then my little brain
focused so much energy on this stuff and it's something I don't even remember
unless someone posts something like this to news.yc. So strange.

Oh and if anyone has "Assembley for Cracking" I'd love to read it again! :)

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marcus
I prefer this one "Imagine a school with children that can read and write, but
with teachers who cannot, and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in
which we live."

~~~
stcredzero
I had one teacher was trying to teach us about the moon landings. She threw up
a picture of the Lunar Lander and said, "Oooh, look, it's a Moon Walker!"

That's wrong on three levels at least.

Mush-for-brains imprecision is one thing when teaching history. Now imagine
that applied to teaching about technology. Ugh.

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megaduck
Wow. Flashback to 9th grade.

Glad I'm not there anymore.

~~~
stcredzero
Enough pointless raging against "the machine" or "the man." Create something
useful or beautiful or both.

~~~
Harkins
It can be both useful and beautiful to rage against the man.

~~~
Scriptor
No, it's just old and might get a few heads turned from some people who say,
"Yeah, that guy's a nonconformist. Just like me!" Then nothing happens.

We need to do something against the man.

~~~
unalone
There's a quote from Steven Bond, some guy whose web site I read a while ago,
regarding why he critiques awful movies:

"Why do I review crap? Simple: for pleasure. For the sheer joy of it. Every
piece of crap you like is an immense world of delight waiting to be explored.
Crap is a driving force, crap is inspirational: nothing urges me to set things
right more than seeing them done wrong. I'm especially pleased when the crap
is so bad it makes me angry — for anger is a pleasant sensation. To feel your
bile rise and your blood boil, to feel a rush of fury — why, it's the pleasure
of being alive, of feeling some actual emotion instead of the constant dull
fuzz of the easily contented."

<http://plover.net/~bonds/stupidresponses.html>

Partly it's that. Anger towards the system very often gives you the energy,
motivation, and experience enough to make something great. The two big
projects I've done - the book I wrote last year, and the site I'm building the
beta of now - both had some element of hate against the system that was
preventing me from doing something. It's not good to _dwell_ in the emotion,
but using it is useful.

~~~
stcredzero
Then don't dwell. Innovate or fix. Open source or sell.

~~~
unalone
I don't think dwelling is a good solution. But neither is ignoring it if it
genuinely upsets you.

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gaius
Not our kind of hacking.

~~~
revelude
Not _your_ kind of grossly capitalistic hacking. :)

~~~
eru
I lived in a so called socialistic state for the first five years of my live.
That's enough for a whole live.

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anuraggoel
Teen angst.

"You build atomic bombs..." Oh, not you Mr. Feynman. You're fine.

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brentr
I find it amazing that many of these people complain about the school system
leaving them behind, behind in the sense that it didn't fulfill all of their
curiosities. I felt the same way, but I didn't complain; I went to the
library.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
The system doesn't leave you behind. It locks you into your seat with your
eyelids taped open with turgid pap being projected onto a screen in front of
you.

Any creativity or individual initiative which resists the system is swiftly
punished.

~~~
brentr
I read books while many of my teachers lectured. They knew there was only so
much they could do for me without seeming to neglect the rest of the class. I
was left alone to read or do what I wanted as long as I did the work that was
assigned.

~~~
unalone
I was put in detention for reading in class, I had books taken from me and
thrown away, I had long lectures from teachers in front of classes to
humiliate me. I was sent down to several offices and lectured by several
administrators who told me something like, "We understand you _can_ do this,
but it's disrespectful to your teachers and the school operates in loco
parentis while you're here." And I thought the school system was a very good
one overall.

If you can get away with that stuff, it's great. But more often than not you
don't have a choice.

~~~
kaens
More or less the same experience here, except that I don't think the school I
went to was very good at all.

I tried really hard to get my school to let me test out of classes and be in
classes where I would actually be learning something, they refused. I spent
the entire time there pissed off and frustrated at having to sit through a
whole lot of boring, and in many cases inaccurate _shit_ when there was so
much out there to _actually learn about_.

An example: I got suspended for correcting a teacher that told the class that
Germany was a communist country during WWII.

~~~
brentr
In that case I would take all the detention they would give me. The truth is
the truth.

~~~
unalone
Yeah, but "the truth" only goes so far before some level of anger, if not
cynicism, begins seeping in. Once you get used to this idea that you'll be
punished for doing the right thing, either you start deciding that the right
thing isn't really right (which I find despicable, but which happens pretty
often), or you decide that the system itself is flawed in some way, which is
what happened to me.

It's tough to keep yourself an idealist when your parents tell you it's not
worth it to get in trouble for things - I suppose they might have had a point,
especially since if they _did_ I'd still be too stubborn to cave in to
somebody that was wrong - and when you get scolded across the board for what
you do. I spent 3 years mainly under the radar at the school, then in my
senior year was threatened with suspension three times: once for making a rude
gesture at a teacher who over-the-top ranted at me for not standing during the
pledge of allegiance, once for telling the teacher in charge of the literary
magazine that I was the editor of that the magazine was bad and that he was
refusing to fix things, and the last time for posting on Facebook about my
dislike of the yearbook magazine (on a private note, of course).

I left still trying to do the right thing, but the result is a profound
dislike for that school, despite the excellent handful of teachers that
actually shaped me as a person. That's really sad, when you think about it.

Anyway, the point is that unlike most systems - unlike, say, the world of
entrepreneurdom, where all that matters is idea and execution and getting
ahead - some systems are designed intentionally to cripple the people within
it. The school system is the worst, because a, focusing on the best students
_would_ hurt most other students and that would be unfair in a manner of
speaking, and b, it's much easier for the teachers when they can create a
bland routine, force everybody into it, and have everybody come out unharmed
if not much wiser. The teachers who _didn't_ do that at my school were
incredible, but there were always unspoken hints at how difficult the
administration was making things.

I entered school wanting to be a teacher. I left it realizing that it simply
wasn't worth the sheer cost fighting the system would be worth.

~~~
brentr
I didn't get in trouble at school, but I constantly got in trouble at home for
choosing not to do chores so that I could read more. Thankfully my mother and
stepfather didn't realize that grounding me to my room was not a punishment
but rather what I wanted all along. The thing is, make do with what you have.
Don't let people take things or time away from you.

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tptacek
This is to hacking what The Cure's "Disintegration" is to popular music.

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kwamenum86
What is the significance of the image at the end?

~~~
pistoriusp
It's a screenshot of logs showing someone trying a brute-force attack so gain
entry via ssh. They used the username "Hitler."

~~~
eru
It's on Windows. That spoils the whole page.

I mean you can go work on Windows when you have calmed down and want to make
money (or actually explore the system etc). But an angry young hacker on
Windows?

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devicenull
I had this memorized at one point..

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spoiledtechie
Such a long time ago....

