fare, posts by tag: hacker - LiveJournal

The last dream of my night was memorable. At least, that was what I thought when I was having it: I was so eager to tell it that I dreamed of telling it to my better half before I actually woke up and told it to my better half.

I was a hacker in a multinational corporation, and pushing forward the project for making a movie about hackers, titled «Hacking» — because it's the process that matters. I had been sending the message accross the company on this project to celebrate the hacker spirit, and getting back lots of answers. And so the shooting had begun.

In the first speaking scene of the movie, after an opening scene and an animation/montage under introductory music, the Hacker, main protagonist, comes into his shared office room, reading from a printout or from his palmtop: «Hey Georgie, here's a good one: «So the apprentice comes to the Master, and says «Master, I've found Illumination!», and the Master replies…»» Then realizing his friend George, for whom he was reading the joke, is not here, he abruptly stops narrating, and asks «Where's Georgie?». The Intern, who was in the room, and is eager to hear the end of the joke, inquires «What's does the Master reply?» The Hacker, not paying attention, leaves the room and finds George in the corridor showing off some cool gadget he'd been hacking on.

As it appears later in the movie, this joke, and other ones, are read from a mailing-list discussing a project for a movie about hacking. Recursion being big amongst hackers, the movie project is referred to at times in the movie. The joke itself becomes a recurring theme of the movie, with the Intern/Apprentice trying to extract from the Hacker/Master the end of the joke, but never succeeding at getting his attention long enough.

At some point, the apprentice, while discussing an issue with their current project, proposes: «I know what we'll do, we'll…» and gets a smack on the head, because the master already knows the silly beginner's mistake the apprentice is going to propose, or because «this is not a «I know what we'll do» problem». As the movie progresses, the apprentice makes other contributions, that the master easily rebukes after a bit of thought, then with more thought, then doesn't rebuke, then rebukes out of lack of thought.

By the end of the movie, the apprentice saved the project by an essential contribution, had a fall out with his master, and is his own, independent, hacker. He understands that it doesn't matter what the master says at the end of the joke. Either the apprentice did, or didn't, find illumination; that's fact. Either the master rebukes him (probably) or not, that's already commentary. And so when this newly graduated hacker is presented with an apprentice of his own, amazed to be working in a renowned company, as a new master, the hacker starts: «Here's a good one: «So the apprentice comes to the Master, and says «Master, I've found Illumination!», and the Master replies…»» But the closing music interrupts his telling the end of the joke.

Beyond the jokes and the story of achievement against human and natural odds, the movie had two, dual, overarching themes: design and emerging order. And curiosity. I'll come in again. Design and emerging order, curiosity and creation, and the fact that hacking is about people. Peculiar people. Who are awkward and don't know that much really. But who can and do learn. As an illustration, the initial intro animation shows chaos vanquished by design; and the ending animation shows individual design as part of a higher, undesigned, and undesignable order.

How many TVTropes in that didactic story? You tell me. At least it's not about Cops, Soldiers, or any kind of Goons with Guns. We celebrate creation, not destruction. I'm collecting ideas for the rest of the script...

Rahul recently pointed me to a nice 1998 review of datamodels in the database world by Stonebraker and Hellerstein: What comes around goes around. This paper is quite insightful, and I believe a good overview of the field, but it falls into the usual traps shared by most database practitioners. This got me started to think about what programming languages and databases have to learn from each other.

You may remember that I am looking for a solution to the SNAIL problem, which will have to be based on epistemic monotonic logic. Well, monotone offers half of the solution, monotonic logic. And that is also the more useful half to me, considering that the instantaneous latency of my SNAIL networks is actually low: when my computers are connected to each other, then the communication latency between them is below a few tenths of seconds at most.

I am glad to announce my latest piece of semi-useful software, CL-Launch, an infrastructure to easily make your Common Lisp software launchable from a Unix command line.

And now, in your XML documents, instead of typing the tedious <apply><sin/><apply><plus/><ci>x</ci><ci>y</ci></apply></apply> that you must type in MathML (at best -- and I didn't invent it, at least not as bad as it ended up), you'll be able to just do the whole thing with <SEX> and type (sin (+ x y)) instead; alternatively you may use <MEX> and type sin(x+y), and similarly you may use <RPN> and type x y + sin. Any of these tags make things much shorter and much more readable than they were in XML. However, SEX, like XML, has this advantage over MEX and RPN that it works well even in absence of a grammar definition (DTD, etc.): you can exchange SEX services with foreigners or be an intermediate in their SEX transactions without having to learn any of their foreign languages; SEX is a universal means of communication!

In a previous post, I told you of a door hack one of my colleagues did, and what social concepts it illustrated. Mind you, when I was younger, I also did my own door hacks. My former clubmates from the Club Informatique of Lycée Louis-le-Grand may remember one that I did long ago, back in High-School. In retrospect, I realize this anecdote too may illustrate a number of interesting social concepts.

I've recently discovered the word captcha. Of course, I already knew the concept. I first faced it on the internet long ago, quite possibly at the time when there were still free SMS services and they tried to limit abuse. Then, I wrote about using them in my article stamps vs spam.

Captchas are an inconvenience, but that's their whole point of them: they are a economic signalling device, by which the solver proves that he cares by accepting a sunk cost. The real problem with captchas is that they can be defeated, thanks to distributed porn-processing. Or maybe not.

Now that I have a newly working Lisp development system running Debian, complete with XEmacs, CLISP, SLIME, SSH and CVS, I have taken time to publish my Common Lisp software in the updated form of asdf packages, ready to be installed with asdf-install. Yup, that packaging software is named ASDF. Not SHRDLU.

The Graphing Calculator Story, that is making rounds in computist blogs, reminds me of the .sig by Alan Schmitt:

The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen.

The world needs more hackers and fewer witch doctors. Now, I wonder how much of the difference in psycho-epistemology is in-born, and how much is acquired... and I admit I am rather pessimistic as to the answer and its consequences.

Here are a few things I'd like to say about dynamic software development, after I've just had the opportunity to test first hand with CTO what I had been studying in theory and through the experiences of other people.

Now is a good time to announce that the software behind Cliki.Tunes.Org, aka CTO, has been noticeably improved.

mood: sleepy

music: Yves Duteil - Lucille et les libellules

OK, je l'avoue, je fais du remplissage de blog en vidant mes vieux brouillons. Ça me permettra peut-être de rattraper mon le sommeil d'hier. D'une pierre trois coups.

Look at these pencils. Pretty, eh? Well, there ain't no picture in the HTML, it's all done with CSS. Ouch. What a waste of bandwidth! :-) (Found via Irate Nate.)

Note that the site has other tips. But I'm sure there are better uses of CSS.

La semaine dernière, j'ai perdu pas mal de temps chez mes parents à faire marcher des ordinateurs. Lecture réservée aux amateurs de solutions hackeuses ayant l'estomac bien accroché.

mood: sleepy

music: Salsa

Said Calvin Coolidge:

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

And he's right. Persistence is everything. And though I've long wanted to someday implement Orthogonal Persistence, I admit I have a lot of trouble trying to achieve explicit persistence, or having the right stuff to persist to begin with. Let's improve this year!

I first heard of Clay Shirky through Slashdot, with his article The Case Against Micropayments. But actually, I like all his articles. This guy has a lot of insight, and his approach of problems is definitely of the same kind as for austrian economists: taking information costs into account.

Whether they are in their teens or their thirties years old, I like to watch photos of their naked front and back; and when I can't touch them myself, I enjoy watching the action, or reading the best that was written about it.

Since the Dissident Frogman recently cited him, I think it is the perfect time to point to Eric S. Raymond's blog. ESR is one of the two libertarians with whom I've had a year-long mail-based discussion about guns, back in the days before he's been busy being a famous open-source advocate (you may also see my replies to some of his essays) and back when young brainwashed I sheepishly agreed with french governmental gun control laws.

Well, nowadays, I'm proud to say I'm as strong a proponent of gun control as can be found: but since I'm no more oblivious of the Law of Eristic Escalation, I now know that that means guns under the control of the people, not under the pseudo-"control" of politicians (what a silly anerism!). So, let's repeal governmental prohibitions, regulations, etc., and return the guns to those who will make good use of them, that is, honest law-abiding citizens, instead of leaving them to the legal and illegal mobsters who currently hoard them.

I've once written an article about Microkernels, where I denounce them as being mostly an intellectual fraud.

Someone from the internet (possibly a random student doing homework) sent a mail to me and Jonathan Shapiro asking whether a Kernel was faster than a Microkernel. Here is what I replied.

[Darn, I didn't insist enough on the whole kernel/microkernel issue being irrelevant in the face of the overwhelming issue of the structuration of the higher-level system components. And about the solution being of course no kernel and expressive contracting between components instead. Reminds me of the metaphor of system as society and kernel as government: no one needs a government; everyone needs an expressive market of property rights.]

So many things to say, so little time to blog. I think the bilingual constraint is overkill for me, and I'd rather do most everything in just one language: the overhead of blogging is high enough and doesn't need be tripled by the need to translate everything. I have had so many libertarian ideas to share, computer science ideas to expose, etc. -- I will have to reserve time to do that in my schedule.

I'm currently near Berlin at the Chaos Communication Camp 2003, demonstrating my Lisp Machine in the Hack Center under the DS-GROK-LC flag. It's rare enough being able to see that many diverse rational people at the same place that such an opportunity to feel both commonly sane and uncommonly unique shouldn't be neglected; it gives you hope in mankind, really.

A stand here sells "space waffeln" -- THC-enhanced wafers. I had a try.