Top all-time · #7
Eric S. Raymond
Personal blog · catb.orgprogrammingwritingculture
Eric S. Raymond's personal blog at catb.org covers programming, writing and culture. Since 2007, 1,570 different Hacker News readers have linked it 2,398 times, most often “How To Ask Questions The Smart Way”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Rarely recommended · 1 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link catb.org mainly for the Jargon File definitions and Eric Raymond's essays and koans, cited as references for terms and advice such as smart questions.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- One commenter calls the smart-questions essay a valuable resource for people who ask questions.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Site header page.
Most-linked posts?
- How To Ask Questions The Smart Way81 people · 93 mentions · first linked 2007-06-21
- How To Become A Hacker68 people · 78 mentions · first linked 2007-05-05
- The Story Of Mel64 people · 71 mentions · first linked 2008-06-03
- How To Become A Hacker50 people · 55 mentions · first linked 2010-09-06
- The Lost Art of C Structure Packing32 people · 36 mentions · first linked 2014-01-01
- How to Ask Questions the Smart Way31 people · 40 mentions · first linked 2012-09-09
- How To Ask Questions The Smart Way30 people · 32 mentions · first linked 2009-11-23
- A Story About ‘Magic' (1994)29 people · 32 mentions · first linked 2008-05-04
- “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.”28 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2011-08-02
- A Story About 'Magic'24 people · 25 mentions · first linked 2011-02-11
What Hacker News says?
I think it is important to note that GitHub's parent company[1] Microsoft is a member of the RIAA[0], the group who initially filed this DMCA. The cynic in me says this was deliberately pre-planned to garnet free press. That type of behavior would certainly be in-line for the company responsible for the Halloween Documents[2][3]. Even if we give GitHub, and by extension Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here, this…
Comment linking /~esr/halloween/
on “YouTube-dl's repository has been restored”Submitted Things Every Hacker Once Knew as a story · 539 points
HN discussionhttps://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/ http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/ > I think you have it backwards. It's the new vision of computers (walled gardens, all the interesting logic hidden away in data centers, content consumption appliances instead of real computers) that is pale and sickly. Yes, these new trends are worrisome. But it's not the first time! I firmly believe that we'd all be better off…
Comment linking /~esr/halloween/
on “Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform”Submitted The Unix Philosophy as a story · 353 points
HN discussionIt seems to be a specialized term referring to the change in focus of blogs [0] and online communities [1] over time. This strikes me as a very specialized concept, rather than a generally-important term in machine learning as a whole. Edit: To add my perspective, with years of industry experience and graduate-level machine learning coursework, I have never before encountered this term. [0]: https://link.springer.co…
Comment linking /jargon/html/T/topic-drift.html
on “Machine Learning Crash Course”Submitted The Lost Art of C Structure Packing as a story · 335 points
HN discussionOh yeah the early 2000s, not a great day to be a hacker (by hacker I mean actual hacker: http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html ). I remember getting yelled at for changing the display resolution and typing a few commands in DOS to change file names quickly. Computers were never up to date of course, we had cathodic displays up to 2010.
Comment linking /~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
on “IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district”Submitted The Lost Art of C Structure Packing as a story · 284 points
HN discussionYeah, the "smallest box" story comes to me very wrong. It basically shows him as really stupid -- as he is simply failing the "describe the goal, not the step" rule in most "how to ask questions" guides -- e.g., http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#goal . Not only that, but he is also implying that people "who design processors" must also know our way around shopping for computers. This couldn't be far…
Comment linking /~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
on “Willingness to look stupid”Submitted A Story About ‘Magic' (1994) as a story · 232 points
HN discussionI find people to be completely befuddled when I use bottom posting, with interleaved posting faring only a tad better. The worst part being Exchange/Outlook users whose quoting system is braindead and has the uncanny power to routinely throw off any form of automated top-posting quote folding detection, making for a terrible reading experience in MUAs that support threading properly, as well as said users making hea…
Comment linking /jargon/html/T/top-post.html
on “Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.””Submitted Memorandum on Microsoft’s strategy against Linux and Open Source software (1998) as a story · 215 points
HN discussion> I used to hold scientists and programmers to a different standard than most normal people, because it seemed like a certain level of advanced understanding was necessary to build anything functional in those fields. I think you need to reevaluate the standards to which you hold people you know nothing about. GitHub is a free platform that anyone can post on, regardless of academic pedigree. Further, having special…
Comment linking /jargon/html/
on “Swift is Open Source”Submitted Plan 9: The way the future was as a story · 197 points
HN discussionGood old vdiff: https://catb.org/jargon/html/V/vdiff.html Visual diff. The operation of finding differences between two files by eyeball search. The term optical diff has also been reported, and is sometimes more specifically used for the act of superimposing two nearly identical printouts on one another and holding them up to a light to spot differences. Though this method is poor for detecting omissions in the ‘re…
Comment linking /jargon/html/V/vdiff.html
on “I've acquired a new superpower”Submitted The Art of Unix Programming as a story · 178 points
HN discussionI come here to talk and learn about tech and science, not banter about politics. I'm all for a politic-free HN. Find just about any article on the hacker mindset and politics, aside from the desire for freedom, won't be anywhere near the top of the list. Nothing about Republicans, Democrats, race, etc. Some examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28subculture%29 http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html…
Comment linking /esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
on “Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week”Submitted The Story Of Mel as a story · 169 points
HN discussion"Aunt Marge will be as happy using Linux without even knowing it's Linux" Unless she wants to print something... [1] [1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html
Comment linking /esr/writings/cups-horror.html
on “We only hire the trendiest”Submitted The Lost Art of C Structure Packing (2014) as a story · 159 points
HN discussion> What if your email client gave you empowering choices of ways to respond, instead of “what message do you want to type back?” Communicating directly via writing or talking is the only thing here that is not driven by limited choices. It reminds me of the koan about the expressiveness of the command line compared to point and click: http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/gui-programmer.html One evening, Master Foo…
Comment linking /esr/writings/unix-koans/gui-programmer.html
on “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds”Submitted Simple Revision Control as a story · 158 points
HN discussionI think at least part of it is because the people on HN enjoy solving problems so much. When there's a post that says "we solved this problem", a lot of people here (me included) think "great, what's the next problem to solve". The focus is on "the next problem to solve" more than the "great", sometimes to the degree that the "great" is completely ignored. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it can ge…
Comment linking /~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
on “FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote”Submitted Origins and History of Unix, 1969-1995 (2003) as a story · 147 points
HN discussionDirect link: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
Comment linking /jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
on “My dad's resume and skills from 1980”Submitted How to Learn Hacking as a story · 133 points
HN discussionWhich is, of course, included as “The story of Mel” in the jargon file: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/
Comment linking /jargon/html/
on “My dad's resume and skills from 1980”Submitted The -a to -z of Command-Line Options (2003) as a story · 132 points
HN discussionOpen source culture is so much more than the licenses. A license dictates what is legally permissible but it doesn't mean that there aren't other cultural expectations that go with that. Eric Raymond famously wrote about the customs of open source in Homesteading the Noosphere: "I have observed these customs in action for 20 years, going back to the pre-FSF ancient history of open-source software. They have several…
Comment linking /~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/homesteading/ar01s04.html
on “AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service”Submitted The Art of Unix Usability (2004) as a story · 128 points
HN discussion
