Hacker folklore, koans, and other fun stuff

This is a thread for sharing that which is the culture of hackers; stories, wisdom, usenet messages, code comments, history etc. I'll start: http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html http://ianchaiwriting.50megs.com/c-bible.html http://dummy.no-ip.com/robert/software/rsi4unix.shtml

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PaWFYm0kEw This talk is great. Bryan Cantrill is one of my favourite speakers, and if you like this I suggest you go watch his other talks too.

here's some koans: https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/vim-koans/ http://canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html

Here are some of my favourites: Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html Ed, man! !man ed https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html The Bug Count Also Rises http://workpump.com/bugcount/bugcount.html Pranks at Microsoft (specifically the bouncy balls parts) http://exmsft.com/~hanss/pranks.htm Dangerous Virus! (about the X windowing system) http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/dangerous-virus.html ...which comes from the UNIX-HATERS Handbook http://web.mit.edu/%7Esimsong/www/ugh.pdf It's a pretty funny document which contains some very outdated criticisms and some that are still very much valid even today, I really recommend it even as a serious read; it gives perspective to some failings of Unix that are really not obvious in this age where all you'll ever use is probably Unix (and Windows, perhaps).

I think the most famous comments overall are the "what the fuarrrk?" from Quake III's source code for the fast inverse square root, and "you are not expected to understand this" from Unix's source code. The latter has gone down in history as to indicate a very complex part of the system, but in reality it just meant that it wouldn't be on the exam that source code was used as a teaching material for, and the funny thing is that apparently not even the implementors fully understood it themselves; that code apparently had a nasty bug. One of my personal favourites is this rant against PSD in Xee's source code. https://bitbucket.org/WAHa_06x36/old-xee/src/fe1cec107972603523e67e7be29a83e493f5cac2/XeePhotoshopLoader.m?at=default&fileviewer=file-view-default#XeePhotoshopLoader.m-108 Also, this is pretty funny; it's a compendium of some of the profanities found in the Netscape code that were expunged before releasing it to the public. https://www.jwz.org/doc/censorzilla.html

The original Hacker's Dictionary, before it was molested by esr: http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html

>>1807 Holy soykaf the Hemingway one just got me so pumped

Here's one of my favorites, the Hacker Test: http://www.textfiles.com/humor/COMPUTER/HackTest.512 Also the story of Mel but OP already shared it, makes sense.

>>2062 apparently I'm a hacker.

>>2064 Impressive, all I got was a lousy 0x2a (A user, I'll take my leave now)

>>2064 im a nerd, they expected too many social things from me

>>THE HACKER TEST >>0006 Have you ever patched paper tape? It might need to be updated.

I've just read about a fun and useful debugging method, which is all the more fun because of this comic made about it. You can read the paper here: http://www.multicians.org/thvv/threeq.html

got a 0x5f. it's a bit sad many of us are too young to even understand all of this

>>2949 I'd say all of us, I doubt there's anybody here who's ever used punched cards.

>>2062 soykaf I'm only an operator @ 0x54

Here's an interesting paper I've recently read, written by John McCarthy, the creator of Lisp, Programs with Common Sense: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcc59.html

>>2953 Apparently hard drives were literal washing machines back then and you could somehow cause the drum to fly off and "walk" all over the place. Nobody here can possibly have done this either

Do you know of any books or articles that detail the history of Lisp, Lispms, and especially Lisp culture?

>>6150 Page not found Also, what is www-formal?

>>2062 Nice, I'm a hacker too

>>2953 My dad did, in university. He had an actual slide rule too, I used to love playing with that.

>>2891 Turns out I do most of this stuff unconsciously every time I find a bug. Thanks for sharing Lain, loved the comic too.

>>2062 I suck i got a 24

>>2062 104 decimal, 0x68 hex operator it is, im cool with that

This is an interesting link related to UNIX-HATERS: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/login.html I'll also take the opportunity to suggest some Gopher resources, as I've recently been getting acquainted with it: gopher://floodgap.com gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/0gopher/relevance.txt I have more Gopher links, but these are the oldest I'm aware of that would be good to share. If you're not familiar with how to use Gopher, you can pass these URLs to lynx or you can access them with, say, this: printf "gopher/relevance.txt\r\n" | netcat gopher.floodgap.com 70

This page is literally hilarious http://www.seebs.net/faqs/c-iaq.html

It's not historical, but it does fit the vibe of the thread and this thread could use a new post; I have this resource in which I collect jokes and other such things I've written: http://verisimilitudes.net/2019-02-22 gopher://verisimilitudes.net/02019-02-22 It has a clear bias towards computing jokes. Feel free to tell me what you think.

>>2953 Sometimes at least in the recent past, you can find Slashdot comments about programming punch cards, there are some Jems on that site if you can find them.

>>14472 Honestly some of these are so unfunny that they loop around to anti jokes I appreciate the effort

>>2062 0x30 ACTIVATING SELF-ANNIHILATION CIRCUITS.

>>13297 Curl supports gopher links, fyi

>>1807 Finished UGH at the end of Spring. Great read. If 80% of what was written is real, then damn. How did UNIX enjoy such fame and usage?

>>14482 >there are some Jems on that site if you can find them. Oh come on, that's truly outrageous.

>http This gives me the chills.

>>15639 Ay same man. I really can't believe what I read. In fact, I really can't tell if there is a source that proves all that. UNIX was a prank for MULTICS and C as well? fuarrrk. But, the issues about the programs fuarrrking up the memory, the regex mess and such technical issues make sense. It was quite the lovely read, regardless.