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  • Hacker News
  • This should have a permanent home on the hacker news site: https://news.ycombinator.com/manifesto.txt :)
    by keepamovin
  • If you are interested in hacker culture, you might enjoy the game I released yesterday, Outsider (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/).

    The main character is an old school hacker (AND a cracker, which is a different thing) and the game leans heavily on the community's culture.

    by gxd
  • The Wikipedia page has plenty of interesting miscellany for the curious reader.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_Manifesto

    by OuterVale
  • Loyd Blankenship (The Mentor) about the "Conscious of a Hacker" 16 years later in 2002 at H2K2:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tEnnvZbYek

    by basilikum
  • Previously:

    The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21346387 - Oct 2019 (128 comments)

    The Hacker's Manifesto (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520964 - July 2010 (16 comments)

    The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=178686 - May 2008 (5 comments)

    by tomhow
  • Most, if not all, of the efnet era #2600 heros turned out to be complete parodies of themselves, or total sellouts. One need not look further than the recent Defcons.
    by dysphoracle
  • and then 4chan happened, and "hackers" started looking like https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bogac... and running underpaid botfarms in Cambodia and this just feels hopelessly romantic and naive. What do kids like this do today, with constant internet access and no phone lines to tie up?
    by internet_points
  • your username, comment and worldivew are perfectly in sync, cynic. i pray you discover something meaningful and share it
    by keepamovin

  •             I made a discovery today.  I found a computer.  Wait a second, this is
    cool.  It does what I want it to.  If it makes a mistake, it's because I
    screwed it up.  Not because it doesn't like me...
                    Or feels threatened by me...
                    Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
    by fouc
  • I like to think that Serial Lain Experiments picks up on this 1990s vibe of where computers were going (whilst going off the rails just a bit), along with the strange parity of Hacker culture with emerging EDM scene (Cyberia comes to mind)
    by tetris11
  • Reminder to rewatch the 1995 movie Hackers :)

    I used to read it quite often when I was 15, now that I am in my 40s, I think the manifesto is quite weak, even though its romantic in its attempt to celebrate curiosity and claim a new home for some.

    Now I align more with Bunnie's [1] way: when you look at a thing as a thing, strip it from its social weight, a program is just a program, you can study it, understand its machinery and mechanisms, and make it do what you want. You can understand things.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyYsVeYzbik

    PS: I still think phrack 49/14 was the most iconic article I have read, and has changed the way I look at programs ever since.

    by jackdoe
  • Then go watch Sneakers after :)
    by 7222aafdcf68cfe
  • Thanks for this. Trying to follow along but modern compilers and cpus seem to modify the disassembly in a way that makes it tough to follow along. Tried throwing a bunch of flags at gcc but still getting some diffs. Had this issue when I was working with an older C book as well.

    Maybe Godbolt has some way to emulate this better

    by matltc
  • Shout Factory and 88 Films both released Hackers in 4k recently. Commentary track as well, havent had a chance to listen to that yet. But the 4k transfer was great.
    by nickthegreek
  • Indeed, "Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit" changed my life, even though I work nowhere near security. It's about perspectives.
    by zorked
  • I (re)watched Hackers on the big screen a month or so ago (it was the 30th anniversary), and it was an absolute pleasure. You should definitely rewatch it!

    As for the hacker's manifesto: we are now old. Teenage rebellion content doesn't resonate as much. I reread it after watching Hackers and agree it's not as great as I remembered. Though I also reread it multiple times as a teenager. It really resonated back then, and I'm forever grateful for it.

    by tasn
  • 12 year old me would disagree with you. The movie hackers and the manifesto inspired me. Being a gay geeky kid in the 90s, this helped me feel not alone.

    I respect your opinion, but we would have had some flame wars back in the day ;)

    by hsbauauvhabzb
  • There is definitely some naivety about this manifesto - mostly about what computers would end up looking like in practice once the hardware and software industries figured out how to build them so they could be marketed to the petty authoritarians who administer schools, as well as the smart rebellious kids, and every other sort of person including ones who were never at +++The Mentor+++'s high school. It's net-good if the average normie has access to the incredibly powerful computers and networked systems of the present day, but that will necessarily dilute the number of people interested in deeply exploring computer systems as a percentage of total internet users, which indeed is what actually happened. Not to mention all of the other complicated social consequences of the widespread adoption of networked computers that occurred in the decades after this essay - I suspect the author would like some and dislike others, depending on their other values in life.

    Nonetheless, I can't help but admire the rebellious spirit in this article. A lot of human social systems really are conformist and oppressive - high school absolutely included - and I have some respect for people who chafe against it.

    I guess it would be good to ask, what specifically was +++The Mentor+++ arrested for, and is that law good or bad?

    by JuniperMesos
  • Oh it was really stupid actually:

    Blankenship was hired by Steve Jackson Games in 1989.[3] He authored the cyberpunk role-playing sourcebook GURPS Cyberpunk, the manuscript of which was seized in a 1990 raid of Steve Jackson Games headquarters by the U.S. Secret Service.[4][5] The raid resulted in the subsequent legal case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service.[6]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyd_Blankenship

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._U...

    by jamal-kumar
  • This is so nostalgic for me. In 1999, I watched a couple of movies, and I decided I wanted to be a hacker. I watched the movie Hackers, Swordfish and let's not forget The Matrix. These were all influntial to me, I went down a rabbit hole and found the Hacker Manifesto, which I resonated with. I slurped up all the information I could find (There wasn't much), and then came a realization that changed everything for me. Hacking was as hard as writing software to me, one was creating and inventing things and the other was tearing down what others had made...not to mention it was also illegal (White hat was not really big at the time). I was like, if I was gonna do one, I'd rather develop software and make things that made people's day and got praised for than ruin people's day and possibly go to jail. Hence my origin story as a software developer :)
    by adim86
  • Sneakers (1992) also worth a look
    by gjvc