/lit/ - Literature

>>6006990
Hot damn, thanks for the PDF.

Just what I needed to read

>>6007509

Let's talk about notable hacker literature, whatever that means, whatever form it may take, however removed from actual literature it may be.

http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

This despicable gun-toting libertarian piece of garbage entered my life via the magnificent Jargon File, and gave a meaning to my life when, at 16, I was spending around 4 hours per day playing GTA, and spending 5 hours in class reading Tom Clancy novels at the back of the class.

6 years and no college diploma later, people are paying me a tiny amount of money to write code, and tolerate my shameful lack of self-discipline and professionalism.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html

This fucking guy's gorgeous style will forever shape my stance on idealism vs. realism, and the shape of the oncoming battle between software Good and software Evil.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2008/10/universal-design-pattern.html

Here we can see a man, in the purest Classical literature tradition, trying to escape the confines of his society's suffocating orthodoxy, frame the crazy, wild antics of tech nomads into the framework that the Dead Sea scrolls of Software Design Patterns is imposing on him, just like a Reformist would do, going back to the original text and extracting a new, old, forgotten meaning to that philosophical pillar of the Patrician society.

Hacker literature is basically one of three things:
1. half-remembered conversations reconstructed into prose years later by biography authors profiling rich hackers.

Ex. Masters of Doom, Fire in the Valley, Levy's "Hackers"

2. half-remembered conversations reconstructed into prose hours later by early net hackers

Ex. http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/random.html

3. Neal Stephenson novels

You wanna talk about idealism vs. realism in hacker literature Anathem is the place to start.

You can also start to add books that inspired hackers en masse - Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, etc.

I remember reading the blog/newsletter of a group of people who considered themselves amateur hackers way back when I was 13 or 14. Maybe even younger, so 6+ years ago. They wrote a bunch of stuff about hacking payphones, their misadventures together, and posted funny irc logs. They were based out of bog.com or bog.org or something similar. I've tried to find their old site since I remember it having a bit of an influence on me. I couldn't find it by google or the wayback machine and I've had no other luck.

Small chance, but anyone know what I'm talking about?

>>6009650

>>6011996

MOD? Masters of Destruction/Deception. There's a book on them, by the same name. They were busted in the 80s or 90s I think. Mainly based in NYC. There was also LOD (League of Destruction) which they spun off from.

>>6007509
> this video is unavailable
)=

>>6007509
Jesus, I'm a Ruby programmer and I had no idea he wrote anything.

>>6012041
It never was available after the book was decoded but internet detectives believe it was either a duplicate of a video called "drunk woman laughing" or just a protected one. But I think it is meant to be unavailable: it's a commentary on the effervescence of digital content and code similar to the quotes about novels written for the 32 bit PowerPC. _why quit programming because he could never make something as beautiful as Amerika that would last as long. The video is gone to give the reader that exact same frustration.

>>6007509
Why are so many pages unreadable? They look like bad photocopies.

>>6012050
that makes much more sense (and is sort of exactly what i'm feeling right now, looking through all the programs i've ever written)

this book is amazing, and, of course, it was written by somebody else.

>>6012050
>novels written for the 32 bit PowerPC
What are you talking about?

>>6012056
the book was published as a series of printer files that were later reconstructed into pdfs. the first two pages were added by a blogger who compiled the works. Again, likely part of a commentary on obsolescence in relation to art.

>>6012058
I'm not sure. It's entirely possible, but the style seems PERFECT to me and the amount of work for that kind of forgery would be incredible. Also it was published on _why's web domain, one of the few accounts where he probably retained control/ownership after infocide because of the way ICANN works.

>>6012063
Read the text before questioning the commentary

>>6012056

>>6012069
the history of the internet seems like a condensed version of humanity's history

> single little group
> spreads and is mirrored in other places
> diversity increases
> creative adaptations happen
> cultures form
> cultures thrive
> some eventually get too big and eat all the others, losing themselves in the process
> that last few subgroups are slowly stamped out of extinction

all neatly packed up in a time frame that allows a single human see the entirety.

I love this to pieces, I had no idea this existed and it's one of my favorite sort of things to discover, a piece that somehow matches up with an undiscovered part of me.

Thank you original poster.

>>6012097
OP here. That's how I felt too. When he dropped into IF prose I actually had to stand up and pace around for a little while because of how well he was conveying the themes in such specific and powerful ways that will be incomprehensible for anyone outside a small subset of people, which in itself reinforces the aesthetic of effervescence.

For people who aren't aware, the author, "why the lucky stiff" or _why was a pseudonymous noted Ruby coder (to the point of helping define parts of the language and community) and was influential in the early days of creative coding movement.

He wrote the immensely popular "Why's poignant guide to Ruby" which introduced many people to the language, now is the bread and butter default for silicon valley startups today. Stay tuned in CLOSURE for why's complete SKEWERING of SV people.

In 2009 he committed infocide by deleting every single account, blog, repository, and project he owned from the internet and disappeared. Much of his work has been mirrored and reconstructed from backups since then, but he has remained silent.

In 2013, a series of printer files were published on his website which were processed by coders into what has been called CLOSURE. The pages in the PDF are arranged chronologically but the narrative is asynchronous. Comparisons have been made to House of Leaves.

Considered by some to be one Jonathan Gillette, but evidence is inconclusive.

I don't understand. (is this at all interesting to people who don't care about coding?)

Welp, when in doubt...
>autism

>>6011996

You would enjoy the Cult of the Dead Cow

>>6013004

You could consider it as a gateway drug to programming; in that context, you could say this guy appeals to people who don't code but will soon do.

>>6013004
No but it is very interesting to some programmers who have a literary or artistic bent as well. CLOSURE is one of those things that looks extremely stupid from the outside looking in, but when you understand all the stuff he's saying it's actually very impressive writing from a literary perspective. This insular nature is an ironic statement.

>>6014547
I would say that's true for his prior works but CLOSURE made me want to quit coding.

I'm pretty happy about getting this. I never knew _why wrote anything other than code. Thank you OP.

>>6009668
You sound horrible but I do need money.

This is some riveting work for a female author, has she written anything else?

>>6016679
_why's a dude. if this WAS him and not a MF DOOM style impersonator.