Top all-time · #2278
Paul Dourish
Personal blog · dourish.comdesignhistory
Paul Dourish's personal blog at dourish.com covers design and history. Since 2008, 36 different Hacker News readers have linked it 39 times, most often “The Original Hacker's Dictionary”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- The Original Hacker's Dictionary15 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2018-10-15
- The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988)9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2012-03-03
- /goodies/see-figure-1.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-09-13
- Pros and Cons of Suns (Flame On)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-11-19
What Hacker News says?
The patents that have his name on them are design patents , not software or hardware patents. If he does have his name on a software or hardware patent, it is for legal purposes only. I'm using the Jargon file's definition of hacker [1], which is : "HACKER [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] n. 1. A person who enjoys learning the details of programming systems and how to stretch their capabilities,…
Comment linking /goodies/jargon.html
on “You are not Steve Jobs”Submitted The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988) as a story · 83 points
HN discussionSteve Jobs was not a "hacker". [‡] He knew almost nothing about computer languages, computer architecture, and according to Neil Young, he listened to vinyl records at home [1] — which shows that he was ignorant of how audio quality works (see [2]). Steve did not contribute any original ideas or any important technological innovations. He claimed during his Stanford commencement speech that if Macintosh had not incl…
Comment linking /goodies/jargon.html
on “You are not Steve Jobs”Submitted The Original Hacker's Dictionary as a story · 3 points
HN discussionBoth the Jargon file quote and a citation from a published book (which has the quote the grandparent posted) are listed on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan Eric Raymond kinda butchered the Jargon File when he took over maintenance, so it wouldn't surprise me if some of the text there is invented. The original Jargon File does not contain any koans: http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.h…
Comment linking /goodies/jargon.html
on “AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol 3-0 [video]”Submitted Jargon.txt (1988) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNot TAOUP specially, but the Jargon file is what ESR took loads of things as wrong or Unix related. Also, at TAOUP you have Emacs, which is the Anti-UNIX by definition. https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html
Comment linking /goodies/jargon.html
on “For the Love of Pipes”Submitted Pros and Cons of Suns (Flame On) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion>Let's consult the Jargon File. That's not the real jargon file. This is: http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html
Comment linking /goodies/jargon.html
on “How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos”Submitted The Original Hacker's Dictionary as a story · 2 points
HN discussion>There's some kind of idea going around It's not new, by any stretch. I remember seeing such many references in the early 2000s and beyond. Doing some vague poking around textfiles.com, I didn't pull any easy to find 1980s 'boxen' references. It almost looks like it might have been the addition of 'unix boxen' to the 'new hacker dictionary' by esr which spread the joke into the mid-90s communities. I wasn't online a…
Comment linking /goodies/jargon.html
on “A regular expression to check for prime numbers (2007)”Submitted The Original Hacker's Dictionary as a story · 2 points
HN discussionfoo and bar , and foobar , have meanings and utility that is undermined by people giving them new definitions and polluting our public namespace. Instead, call the project "farting in an elevator" because that's what you're doing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable * FOO 3. Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything.* https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html A similar injustice…
Comment linking /goodies/jargon.html
on “Foobar2000”Submitted iStuff (2003) [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionPremise 1: Legally pure mathematical objects cannot be patented. Premise 2: Algorithms are pure mathematical objects. Tentative conclusion 1: Algorithms cannot be patented. Premise 3: Hahaha, lawyers don't know math but they do know billable hours. Firm conclusion: See figure 1[1]. [1] https://www.dourish.com/goodies/see-figure-1.html
Comment linking /goodies/see-figure-1.html
on “End Software Patents (2007)”Submitted How To Deconstruct Almost Anything as a story · 2 points
HN discussionDAEMON (day'mun, dee'mun) [archaic form of "demon", which has slightly different connotations (q.v.)] n. A program which is not invoked explicitly, but which lays dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is that the perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a daemon is lurking (though often a program will commit an action only because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a daemon). For e…
Comment linking /goodies/jargon.html
on “What is the origin of “daemon” with regards to computing? (2011)”Submitted The Original Hacker's Dictionary (MIT-AI 1988) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionInfrastructure is always messy: http://www.dourish.com/publications/2007/BellDourish-Yesterd...
Comment linking /publications/2007/BellDourish-YesterdaysTomorrows-PUC.pdf
on “Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform”Submitted The Hacker's Dictionary as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWas not aware of this, I've been reading the file since like … a very long time. I did always find the "Portrait of J Random Hacker" pretty lame, but really enjoyed the AI Koans, especially "Moon instructs a student". -- New version has many more terms in the lexicon, but it's good to see the "canonical" terms although the foreword exhibits its own strong bias. Original is missing some of my favorites from the so-ca…
Comment linking /goodies/jargon.html
on “What is the history of the use of "foo" and "bar" in source code examples? (2012)”Submitted Pros and Cons of Suns (1987) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe real jargon file is probably here: https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html And it includes an explanation of what is wrong with ESR's version. But well, lets reiterate that: ESR is this weird kind of quasi-libertarian ego-maniac who occasionally produces something marginally useful and then oversells how that thing is part of the critical internet infrastructure or something like that.
Comment linking /goodies/jargon.html
on “What is the history of the use of "foo" and "bar" in source code examples? (2012)”Submitted The Original Hacker's Dictionary as a story · 1 points
HN discussionTough Tomate principle is a new (to me) take on how the tools and the product shape each other, but it reminded me of this gem: https://dourish.com/publications/2012/ubicomp2012-colonial.p... Ubicomp’s Colonial Impulse
Comment linking /publications/2012/ubicomp2012-colonial.pdf
on “Software, the Tough Tomato Principle, and the Great Weirdening of the World”Submitted See Figure 1 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFor a better take on this solution space, checkout Crista Lopes’s essay on naturalistic programming: http://www.dourish.com/publications/2003/oopsla2003-naturali...
Comment linking /publications/2003/oopsla2003-naturalistic.pdf
on “If I were to invent a programming language for the 21st century”The Hacker's Dictionary ( http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html ) calls them Brokets, as shorthand for "broken brackets". And, by the way, the less pointy variant that is used in 'proper' typography is called a chevron or guillemet ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet )
Comment linking /goodies/jargon.html
on “An Illustrated History of objc_msgSend”Pretty much along your line of thinking, check out this 2003 paper by Crista Lopes titled "Beyond AOP: Toward Naturalistic Programming": http://www.dourish.com/publications/2003/oopsla2003-naturali... Abstract: > Software understanding for documentation, maintenance or evolution is one of the longest-standing problems in Computer Science. The use of “high-level” programming paradigms and object-oriented languages he…
Comment linking /publications/2003/oopsla2003-naturalistic.pdf
on “Ask HN: What human language features could be useful for the writing of code?”Helen Nissenbaum (now at Cornell Tech) wrote a famous paper framing privacy as Contextual Integrity, which has been highly influential for researchers on computer privacy as well as public policy makers. The Wikipedia entry on Contextual Integrity is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_Integrity The basic idea is that rather than focusing on broad rules about privacy (like the Fair Information Prac…
Comment linking /publications/1996/cscw96-place.pdf
on “Software Needs Philosophers (2006)”
