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Good Bad Attitude

Posted by timothy on from the properly-improper dept.

teidou writes "Paul Graham has posted a new essay titled 'Good Bad Attitude' talking about the hacker attitude toward rules and government regulation of Intellectual Property. Choice quote: "(Hackers) can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm.""

6 of 653 comments (clear)

  1. Except Animals are more likely to be right. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hackers are as likely to be wrong as they are to be right. In their case it isn't an accute sense, but chronic pessimism.

  2. Re:Now if hackers could just learn to hack the gov by billbaggins · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Government is a tool that can be hacked to work for you, just as a computer can be hacked to work for you.
    There's just one problem with your analogy - I hack my computer to make it work for me, but most other people would find it more or less unusable. That's fine, because they have their own computers. A government, we have to share. And we don't have root on it. So while we're trying, in our small ways, to hack the gov't to do X, other people are working, oftentimes much harder, to make it do not-X.

    Which is not to say that we shouldn't try to make it better, because we should. Just that it's going to be many many orders of magnitude harder to get anything useful accomplished.

    --
    "The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
    --Winston Churchill
  3. Re:Now if hackers could just learn to hack the gov by the_meager · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You completely neglected to mention the FACT that the wealthy use government to deter competition and maintain their control.

    Limited government and free markets undermine that entire system.

    (And seriously... if you're going to say that we should use tools to get back at the wealthy, why stop at government? Why not expand into physical coercion with guns, like government seems to?)

    --
    Speckpot?
  4. It's You by serutan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is it just me or is this one of the more ridiculous sounding things you've heard in a while?

    It's you. I thought the thunderstorm was a nice metaphor. Here's another good line:

    "A society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people."

    But here in the Rush Limbaugh era, we place as much value on making fun of something as on making an actual point. Oh well, too bad for us.

  5. Graham's Essays by cthlptlk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    By now, I should know better than to read the Paul Graham essays when they're posted on slashdot, but I can't help myself. I think it's my sick obsession with lisp.

    Now that I've read a few in the space of a few weeks, I think I'm able to pin down what bothers me. Graham is really good at a certain rhetorical style: he talks at length about a topic that really isn't the topic at hand, until you start to wonder if you're really reading the essay that you thought you were reading, and suddenly the focus shifts to the target. "Maori customs are really a metaphor/synedoche for the perl philosophy!" or whatever. The change is so dizzying (because it is unexpected but not completly random) and such changes come so fast that the reader doesn't stop to evaluate the correctness of Graham's assertions or the depth of what he's saying. It's like a cheesy magic show...the magician distracts you by waving the wand around, so that you don't see that he's actually pulling the rabbit out of his sleeve, rather than out of the hat. To his credit, I think Graham does this trick really well, and it's hard to do.

    The thing is, I can appreciate cheesy-magic-show writing, but at some point, I would like to take away an actual idea from what I'm reading. And what are Graham's ideas? Lisp is really l33t! Hackers are really l33t! Graham's ideas are really that simple; they're not refinements or unexpected corrollaries of ideas that were first trotted out ten or twenty years ago. After a few essays, it becomes apparent that all of these ideas really reduce to I, Paul Graham, am really l33t because I like this l33t stuff! I don't fault Graham in the slightest for thinking this, or even about writing it, but since I'm not Paul Graham, it's not a very interesting idea to me.

  6. Re:Old school hackers vs. new school hackers. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The distinction seems fairly clear to me.

    IT folks are consumers of software. Fairly empowered consumers, but still consumers at heart. Whereas the guys with the "larger job scope" are likely to be, at some level or another, producers as well.

    Stealing software suddenly seems alot less cool when it might be your software that's being stolen.