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Ask HN: Hacker Philosophy?

4 points by elcron 16 years ago · 4 comments · 1 min read


I was wondering if there is a philosophy that most encompasses what most hackers on this sight seem to live by.

i.e.: Release early release often, Sharing work vi open source, Simple and well designed vs. feature bloated, etc.

Is there already a name for this philosophy? Is it just the hacker philosophy? What else does/should it include?

Travis 16 years ago

I'm not sure it's a formal philosophy, but I think the attributes you're describing are lean and open.

  • elcronOP 16 years ago

    I didn't think there was, but I was wondering if there was and it just had a name I was unaware of.

mindcrime 16 years ago

Well, the "Unix Philosophy" is a big part of what is widely regarded as "hacker culture" so you might give this a look:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

There's also the "Hacker Ethic" to look at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic

And his stuff doesn't necessarily have a name, but Eric Raymond's writings have been pretty influential to a lot of hackers.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/

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