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71-463: The word hacker in "Hacker News" is used in its original meaning and refers to the hacker culture which consists of people who enjoy tinkering with technology. The site was created by Paul Graham in February 2007. Initially called Startup News or occasionally News.YC., it became known by its current name on August 14, 2007. It developed as a project of Graham's company Y Combinator , functioning as

142-434: A VPN or the dark web ) to mask their identities online and pose as criminals. Hacking can also have a broader sense of any roundabout solution to a problem, or programming and hardware development in general, and hacker culture has spread the term's broader usage to the general public even outside the profession or hobby of electronics (see life hack ). Reflecting the two types of hackers, there are two definitions of

213-519: A hacker named Charles Spurgeon got a large chunk of the File published in Stewart Brand 's CoEvolution Quarterly (issue 29, pages 26–35) with illustrations by Phil Wadler and Guy Steele (including a couple of Steele's Crunchly cartoons). This appears to have been the File's first paper publication. A late version of Jargon-1, expanded with commentary for the mass market, was edited by Guy Steele into

284-490: A book published in 1983 as The Hacker's Dictionary (Harper & Row CN 1082, ISBN   0-06-091082-8 ). It included all of Steele's Crunchly cartoons. The other Jargon-1 editors (Raphael Finkel, Don Woods, and Mark Crispin ) contributed to this revision, as did Stallman and Geoff Goodfellow . This book (now out of print) is hereafter referred to as "Steele-1983" and those six as the Steele-1983 coauthors. Shortly after

355-541: A central timesharing system. The only kind of widespread hardware modification nowadays is case modding . An encounter of the programmer and the computer security hacker subculture occurred at the end of the 1980s, when a group of computer security hackers, sympathizing with the Chaos Computer Club (which disclaimed any knowledge in these activities), broke into computers of American military organizations and academic institutions. They sold data from these machines to

426-556: A comparison of the actual arrival times of local SEPTA trains to their scheduled times after being reportedly frustrated by the discrepancy. Security hackers are people involved with circumvention of computer security. There are several types, including: Hacker culture is an idea derived from a community of enthusiast computer programmers and systems designers in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 's (MIT's) Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and

497-413: A love of learning about technology. They restrict the use of the term cracker to their categories of script kiddies and black hat hackers instead. All three subcultures have relations to hardware modifications. In the early days of network hacking, phreaks were building blue boxes and various variants. The programmer subculture of hackers has stories about several hardware hacks in its folklore, such as

568-521: A love-hate relationship... They're kids who tended to be brilliant but not very interested in conventional goals It's a term of derision and also the ultimate compliment." Fred Shapiro thinks that "the common theory that 'hacker' originally was a benign term and the malicious connotations of the word were a later perversion is untrue." He found that the malicious connotations were already present at MIT in 1963 (quoting The Tech , an MIT student newspaper), and at that time referred to unauthorized users of

639-646: A mysterious "magic" switch attached to a PDP-10 computer in MIT's AI lab that, when switched off, crashed the computer. The early hobbyist hackers built their home computers themselves from construction kits. However, all these activities have died out during the 1980s when the phone network switched to digitally controlled switchboards, causing network hacking to shift to dialing remote computers with modems when pre-assembled inexpensive home computers were available and when academic institutions started to give individual mass-produced workstation computers to scientists instead of using

710-499: A positive light to the general public. In the early 1990s in particular, many news stories emerged portraying hackers as law-breakers with no respect for the personal privacy or property of others. Raymond wanted to show some of the positive values of hacker culture, particularly the hacker sense of humor. Because love of humorous wordplay is a strong element of hacker culture, a slang dictionary works quite well for such purposes. PC Magazine in 1984, stated that The Hacker's Dictionary

781-448: A positive sense, that is, using playful cleverness to achieve a goal. But then, it is supposed, the meaning of the term shifted over the decades and came to refer to computer criminals. As the security-related usage has spread more widely, the original meaning has become less known. In popular usage and in the media, "computer intruders" or "computer criminals" is the exclusive meaning of the word. In computer enthusiast and hacker culture,

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852-484: A real-world application of the Arc programming language which Graham co-developed. At the end of March 2014, Graham stepped away from his leadership role at Y Combinator, leaving Hacker News administration in the hands of other staff members. The site is currently moderated by Daniel Gackle who posts under the username dang . Gackle co-moderated Hacker News with Scott Bell (username sctb ) until 2019 when Bell stopped working on

923-410: A specific date as a "National Day of Civic Hacking" to encourage participation from civic hackers. Civic hackers, though often operating autonomously and independently, may work alongside or in coordination with certain aspects of government or local infrastructure such as trains and buses. For example, in 2008, Philadelphia-based civic hacker William Entriken developed a web application that displayed

994-492: A substantial entry on the work, the Encyclopedia of New Media by Steve Jones (2002) observed that this defense of the term hacker was a motivating factor for both Steele's and Raymond's print editions: The Hacker's Dictionary and The New Hacker's Dictionary sought to celebrate hacker culture, provide a repository of hacking history for younger and future hackers, and perhaps most importantly, to represent hacker culture in

1065-462: A tendency to look down on and disassociate from these overlaps. They commonly refer disparagingly to people in the computer security subculture as crackers and refuse to accept any definition of hacker that encompasses such activities. The computer security hacking subculture, on the other hand, tends not to distinguish between the two subcultures as harshly, acknowledging that they have much in common including many members, political and social goals, and

1136-521: Is a criminal financial gain to be had when hacking systems with the specific purpose of stealing credit card numbers or manipulating banking systems . Second, many hackers thrive off of increasing their reputation within the hacker subculture and will leave their handles on websites they defaced or leave some other evidence as proof that they were involved in a specific hack. Third, corporate espionage allows companies to acquire information on products or services that can be stolen or used as leverage within

1207-615: Is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hacker  – someone with knowledge of bugs or exploits to break into computer systems and access data which would otherwise be inaccessible to them. In a positive connotation, though, hacking can also be utilized by legitimate figures in legal situations. For example, law enforcement agencies sometimes use hacking techniques to collect evidence on criminals and other malicious actors. This could include using anonymity tools (such as

1278-466: Is also common within the programmer subculture of hackers. For example, Ken Thompson noted during his 1983 Turing Award lecture that it is possible to add code to the UNIX "login" command that would accept either the intended encrypted password or a particular known password, allowing a backdoor into the system with the latter password. He named his invention the " Trojan horse ". Furthermore, Thompson argued,

1349-409: Is done to get practical barriers out of the way for doing actual work. In special forms, that can even be an expression of playful cleverness. However, the systematic and primary engagement in such activities is not one of the actual interests of the programmer subculture of hackers and it does not have significance in its actual activities, either. A further difference is that, historically, members of

1420-519: Is intended. However, because the positive definition of hacker was widely used as the predominant form for many years before the negative definition was popularized, "hacker" can therefore be seen as a shibboleth , identifying those who use the technically oriented sense (as opposed to the exclusively intrusion-oriented sense) as members of the computing community. On the other hand, due to the variety of industries software designers may find themselves in, many prefer not to be referred to as hackers because

1491-488: Is not permitted until a user has 30 karma points. Graham stated he hopes to avoid the Eternal September that results in the general decline of intelligent discourse within a community. The site has a proactive attitude in moderating content, including automated flame and spam detectors and active human moderation. It also practices stealth banning in which user posts stop appearing for others to see, unbeknownst to

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1562-508: Is the inclusion of script kiddies in the popular usage of "hacker", despite their lack of an underlying skill and knowledge base. Jargon File The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers . The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab , the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of

1633-559: The ARPANET , circulated even in cultures far removed from MIT's; the content exerted a strong and continuing influence on hackish slang and humor. Even as the advent of the microcomputer and other trends fueled a tremendous expansion of hackerdom, the File (and related materials like the AI Koans in Appendix A) came to be seen as a sort of sacred epic, a hacker-culture Matter of Britain chronicling

1704-455: The C compiler itself could be modified to automatically generate the rogue code, to make detecting the modification even harder. Because the compiler is itself a program generated from a compiler, the Trojan horse could also be automatically installed in a new compiler program, without any detectable modification to the source of the new compiler. However, Thompson disassociated himself strictly from

1775-578: The Encyclopedia of New Media , the Jargon file, especially in print form, is frequently cited for both its definitions and its essays, by books and other works on hacker history, cyberpunk subculture, computer jargon and online style, and the rise of the Internet as a public medium, in works as diverse as the 20th edition of A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology edited by José Ángel García Landa (2015); Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in

1846-497: The Jupiter project at DEC . The File's compilers, already dispersed, moved on to other things. Steele-1983 was partly a monument to what its authors thought was a dying tradition; no one involved realized at the time just how wide its influence was to be. As mentioned in some editions: By the mid-1980s, the File's content was dated, but the legend that had grown up around it never quite died out. The book, and softcopies obtained off

1917-645: The MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory . The concept expanded to the hobbyist home computing community, focusing on hardware in the late 1970s (e.g. the Homebrew Computer Club ) and on software ( video games , software cracking , the demoscene ) in the 1980s/1990s. Later, this would go on to encompass many new definitions such as art, and life hacking . Four primary motives have been proposed as possibilities for why hackers attempt to break into computers and networks. First, there

1988-577: The NHD as a source for computer-related neologisms . The Chicago Manual of Style , the leading American academic and book-publishing style guide, beginning with its 15th edition (2003) explicitly defers, for "computer writing", to the quotation punctuation style – logical quotation  – recommended by the essay "Hacker Writing Style" in The New Hacker's Dictionary (and cites NHD for nothing else). The 16th edition (2010, and

2059-511: The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) that came out of early TX-0 and PDP-1 hackers in the 1950s, where the term hacker emerged and the ethic, philosophies and some of the nomenclature emerged. The Jargon File (referred to here as "Jargon-1" or "the File") was made by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975. From that time until the plug was finally pulled on the SAIL computer in 1991,

2130-691: The Digital Age by Constance Hale and Jessie Scanlon of Wired magazine (1999); Transhumanism: The History of a Dangerous Idea by David Livingstone (2015); Mark Dery's Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1994) and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (2007); Beyond Cyberpunk! A Do-it-yourself Guide to the Future by Gareth Branwyn and Peter Sugarman (1991); and numerous others. Time magazine used The New Hacker's Dictionary (Raymond-1993) as

2201-581: The File was named "AIWORD.RF[UP,DOC]" ("[UP,DOC]" was a system directory for "User Program DOCumentation" on the WAITS operating system). Some terms, such as frob , foo and mung are believed to date back to the early 1950s from the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT and documented in the 1959 Dictionary of the TMRC Language compiled by Peter Samson. The revisions of Jargon-1 were all unnumbered and may be collectively considered "version 1". Note that it

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2272-549: The Jargon File in its "CyberStuff" segments. Computing Reviews used one of the Jargon File's definitions on its December 1991 cover. On October 23, 2003, The New Hacker's Dictionary was used in a legal case. SCO Group cited the 1996 edition definition of "FUD" ( fear, uncertainty and doubt ), which dwelt on questionable IBM business practices, in a legal filing in the civil lawsuit SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp. (In response, Raymond added SCO to

2343-506: The SAIL computer continued as a computer science department resource until 1991. Stanford became a major TWENEX site, at one point operating more than a dozen TOPS-20 systems, but by the mid-1980s, most of the interesting software work was being done on the emerging BSD Unix standard. In April 1983, the PDP-10 -centered cultures that had nourished the File were dealt a death-blow by the cancellation of

2414-447: The SAIL contact for the File (which was subsequently kept in duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with periodic resynchronizations). The File expanded by fits and starts until 1983. Richard Stallman was prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT and ITS -related coinages. The Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) was named to distinguish it from another early MIT computer operating system, Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS). In 1981,

2485-470: The Soviet secret service, one of them in order to fund his drug addiction. The case was solved when Clifford Stoll , a scientist working as a system administrator, found ways to log the attacks and to trace them back (with the help of many others). 23 , a German film adaption with fictional elements, shows the events from the attackers' perspective. Stoll described the case in his book The Cuckoo's Egg and in

2556-524: The TV documentary The KGB, the Computer, and Me from the other perspective. According to Eric S. Raymond, it "nicely illustrates the difference between 'hacker' and 'cracker'. Stoll's portrait of himself, his lady Martha, and his friends at Berkeley and on the Internet paints a marvelously vivid picture of how hackers and the people around them like to live and how they think." The mainstream media 's current usage of

2627-464: The academic world started to take part in the programmer subculture of hacking. Since the mid-1980s, there are some overlaps in ideas and members with the computer security hacking community. The most prominent case is Robert T. Morris, who was a user of MIT-AI, yet wrote the Morris worm . The Jargon File hence calls him "a true hacker who blundered". Nevertheless, members of the programmer subculture have

2698-516: The basis for an article about online culture in the November 1995 inaugural edition of the "Time Digital" department. NHD was cited by name on the front page of The Wall Street Journal . Upon the release of the second edition, Newsweek used it as a primary source, and quoted entries in a sidebar, for a major article on the Internet and its history. The MTV show This Week in Rock used excerpts from

2769-448: The beginning of the 1970s. An article from MIT's student paper The Tech used the term hacker in this context already in 1963 in its pejorative meaning for someone messing with the phone system. The overlap quickly started to break when people joined in the activity who did it in a less responsible way. This was the case after the publication of an article exposing the activities of Draper and Engressia. According to Raymond, hackers from

2840-507: The changes made under his watch were controversial; early critics accused Raymond of unfairly changing the file's focus to the Unix hacker culture instead of the older hacker cultures where the Jargon File originated. Raymond has responded by saying that the nature of hacking had changed and the Jargon File should report on hacker culture, and not attempt to enshrine it. After the second edition of NHD (MIT Press, 1993; hereafter Raymond-1993), Raymond

2911-485: The computer community began to differentiate their terminology. Alternative terms such as cracker were coined in an effort to maintain the distinction between hackers within the legitimate programmer community and those performing computer break-ins. Further terms such as black hat , white hat and gray hat developed when laws against breaking into computers came into effect, to distinguish criminal activities from those activities which were legal. Network news' use of

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2982-529: The computer security hackers: "I would like to criticize the press in its handling of the 'hackers,' the 414 gang , the Dalton gang, etc. The acts performed by these kids are vandalism at best and probably trespass and theft at worst. ... I have watched kids testifying before Congress. It is clear that they are completely unaware of the seriousness of their acts." The programmer subculture of hackers sees secondary circumvention of security mechanisms as legitimate if it

3053-425: The current issue as of 2016 ) does likewise. The National Geographic Style Manual lists NHD among only 8 specialized dictionaries, out of 22 total sources, on which it is based. That manual is the house style of NGS publications, and has been available online for public browsing since 1995. The NGSM does not specify what, in particular, it drew from the NHD or any other source. Aside from these guides and

3124-451: The distinction, grouping legitimate "hackers" such as Linus Torvalds and Steve Wozniak along with criminal "crackers". As a result, the definition is still the subject of heated controversy. The wider dominance of the pejorative connotation is resented by many who object to the term being taken from their cultural jargon and used negatively, including those who have historically preferred to self-identify as hackers. Many advocate using

3195-426: The editors of Steele-1983). It merged in about 80% of the Steele-1983 text, omitting some framing material and a very few entries introduced in Steele-1983 that are now only of historical interest. The new version cast a wider net than the old Jargon File; its aim was to cover not just AI or PDP-10 hacker culture but all of the technical computing cultures in which the true hacker-nature is manifested. More than half of

3266-407: The effective use of the knowledge (which can be to report and help fixing the security bugs, or exploitation reasons) being only rather secondary. The most visible difference in these views was in the design of the MIT hackers' Incompatible Timesharing System , which deliberately did not have any security measures. There are some subtle overlaps, however, since basic knowledge about computer security

3337-545: The entries derived from Usenet and represented jargon then current in the C and Unix communities, but special efforts were made to collect jargon from other cultures including IBM PC programmers, Amiga fans, Mac enthusiasts, and even the IBM mainframe world. Eric Raymond maintained the new File with assistance from Guy Steele, and is the credited editor of the print version of it, The New Hacker's Dictionary (published by MIT Press in 1991); hereafter Raymond-1991. Some of

3408-548: The entry in a revised copy of the Jargon File , feeling that SCO's own practices deserved similar criticism. ) The book is particularly noted for helping (or at least trying) to preserve the distinction between a hacker (a consummate programmer) and a cracker (a computer criminal ); even though not reviewing the book in detail, both the London Review of Books and MIT Technology Review remarked on it in this regard. In

3479-498: The heroic exploits of the Knights of the Lab. The pace of change in hackerdom at large accelerated tremendously, but the Jargon File passed from living document to icon and remained essentially untouched for seven years. A new revision was begun in 1990, which contained nearly the entire text of a late version of Jargon-1 (a few obsolete PDP-10-related entries were dropped after consultation with

3550-411: The marketplace. Lastly, state-sponsored attacks provide nation states with both wartime and intelligence collection options conducted on, in, or through cyberspace . The main basic difference between programmer subculture and computer security hacker is their mostly separate historical origin and development. However, the Jargon File reports that considerable overlap existed for the early phreaking at

3621-433: The more recent and nuanced alternate terms when describing criminals and others who negatively take advantage of security flaws in software and hardware. Others prefer to follow common popular usage, arguing that the positive form is confusing and unlikely to become widespread in the general public. A minority still use the term in both senses despite the controversy, leaving context to clarify (or leave ambiguous) which meaning

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3692-551: The official Jargon File since 2003. A volunteer editor produced two updates, reflecting later influences (mostly excoriated) from text messaging language , LOLspeak , and Internet slang in general; the last was produced in January 2012. Despite its tongue-in-cheek approach, multiple other style guides and similar works have cited The New Hacker's Dictionary as a reference, and even recommended following some of its "hackish" best practices. The Oxford English Dictionary has used

3763-407: The old ARPANET AI / LISP / PDP-10 communities, including Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), Carnegie Mellon University , and Worcester Polytechnic Institute . It was published in paperback form in 1983 as The Hacker's Dictionary (edited by Guy Steele ), revised in 1991 as The New Hacker's Dictionary (ed. Eric S. Raymond ; third edition published 1996). The concept of the file began with

3834-470: The people who make up the hacker culture". He was nevertheless critical of Raymond's tendency to editorialize, even " flame ", and of the Steele cartoons, which Jackson described as "sophomoric, and embarrassingly out of place beside the dry and sophisticated humor of the text". He wound down his review with some rhetorical questions: [W]here else will you find, for instance, that one attoparsec per microfortnight

3905-401: The primary meaning is a complimentary description for a particularly brilliant programmer or technical expert. A large segment of the technical community insist the latter is the correct usage, as in the Jargon File definition. Sometimes, "hacker" is simply used synonymously with " geek ": "A true hacker is not a group person. He's a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine in

3976-425: The programmer subculture of hackers were working at academic institutions and used the computing environment there. In contrast, the prototypical computer security hacker had access exclusively to a home computer and a modem. However, since the mid-1990s, with home computers that could run Unix-like operating systems and with inexpensive internet home access being available for the first time, many people from outside of

4047-452: The programmer subculture usually work openly and use their real name, while computer security hackers prefer secretive groups and identity-concealing aliases. Also, their activities in practice are largely distinct. The former focus on creating new and improving existing infrastructure (especially the software environment they work with), while the latter primarily and strongly emphasize the general act of circumvention of security measures, with

4118-555: The publication of Steele-1983, the File effectively stopped growing and changing. Originally, this was due to a desire to freeze the file temporarily to ease the production of Steele-1983, but external conditions caused the "temporary" freeze to become permanent. The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s, by funding cuts and the resulting administrative decision to use vendor-supported hardware and associated proprietary software instead of homebrew whenever possible. At MIT, most AI work had turned to dedicated Lisp machines . At

4189-661: The same time, the commercialization of AI technology lured some of the AI Lab's best and brightest away to startups along the Route 128 strip in Massachusetts and out west in Silicon Valley . The startups built Lisp machines for MIT; the central MIT-AI computer became a TWENEX system rather than a host for the AI hackers' ITS. The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980, although

4260-449: The self-designation of hobbyists as hackers is generally acknowledged and accepted by computer security hackers, people from the programming subculture consider the computer intrusion related usage incorrect, and emphasize the difference between the two by calling security breakers "crackers" (analogous to a safecracker ). The controversy is usually based on the assertion that the term originally meant someone messing about with something in

4331-433: The site. The intention was to recreate a community similar to the early days of Reddit . However, unlike Reddit where new users can immediately both upvote and downvote content, Hacker News does not allow users to downvote content until they have accumulated 501 "karma" points. Karma points are calculated as the number of upvotes a given user's content has received minus the number of downvotes. "Flagging" comments, likewise,

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4402-467: The telephone network, that is, the phreaker movement that developed into the computer security hacker subculture of today. Civic hackers use their security and/or programming acumens to create solutions, often public and open-sourced , addressing challenges relevant to neighborhoods, cities, states or countries and the infrastructure within them. Municipalities and major government agencies such as NASA have been known to host hackathons or promote

4473-434: The term consistently pertains primarily to criminal activities, despite attempts by the technical community to preserve and distinguish the original meaning. Today, the mainstream media and general public continue to describe computer criminals, with all levels of technical sophistication, as "hackers" and do not generally make use of the word in any of its non-criminal connotations. Members of the media sometimes seem unaware of

4544-406: The term may be traced back to the early 1980s. When the term, previously used only among computer enthusiasts, was introduced to wider society by the mainstream media in 1983, even those in the computer community referred to computer intrusion as hacking, although not as the exclusive definition of the word. In reaction to the increasing media use of the term exclusively with the criminal connotation,

4615-444: The user. Additional software is used to detect "voting rings to purposefully vote up stories". According to a 2013 TechCrunch article: "Graham says that Hacker News gets a lot of complaints that it has a bias toward featuring stories about Y Combinator startups, but he says there is no such bias. [...] Graham adds that he gets a lot of vitriol from users personally with accusations of bias or censoring." Hacker A hacker

4686-432: The word "hacker": Mainstream usage of "hacker" mostly refers to computer criminals, due to the mass media usage of the word since the 1990s. This includes what hacker jargon calls script kiddies , less skilled criminals who rely on tools written by others with very little knowledge about the way they work. This usage has become so predominant that the general public is largely unaware that different meanings exist. Though

4757-431: The word holds a negative denotation in many of those industries. A possible middle ground position has been suggested, based on the observation that "hacking" describes a collection of skills and tools which are used by hackers of both descriptions for differing reasons. The analogy is made to locksmithing , specifically picking locks, which is a skill which can be used for good or evil. The primary weakness of this analogy

4828-561: Was accused of adding terms reflecting his own politics and vocabulary, even though he says that entries to be added are checked to make sure that they are in live use, not "just the private coinage of one or two people". The Raymond version was revised again, to include terminology from the nascent subculture of the public Internet and the World Wide Web, and published by MIT Press as The New Hacker's Dictionary , Third Edition, in 1996. As of January 2016 , no updates have been made to

4899-579: Was always called "AIWORD" or "the Jargon file", never "the File"; the last term was coined by Eric Raymond. In 1976, Mark Crispin , having seen an announcement about the File on the SAIL computer, FTPed a copy of the File to the MIT AI Lab. He noticed that it was hardly restricted to "AI words", and so stored the file on his directory, named as "AI:MRC;SAIL JARGON" ("AI" lab computer, directory "MRC", file "SAIL JARGON"). Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly thereafter and Don Woods became

4970-794: Was so engaging that one's reading of it should be "severely timed if you hope to get any work done"; and Mondo 2000 describing it as "slippery, elastic fun with language", as well as "not only a useful guidebook to very much un-official technical terms and street tech slang, but also a de facto ethnography of the early years of the hacker culture". Positive reviews were also published in academic as well as computer-industry publications, including IEEE Spectrum , New Scientist , PC Magazine , PC World , Science , and (repeatedly) Wired . US game designer Steve Jackson , writing for Boing Boing magazine in its pre-blog, print days, described NHD 's essay "A Portrait of J. Random Hacker" as "a wonderfully accurate pseudo-demographic description of

5041-584: Was superior to most other computer-humor books, and noted its authenticity to "hard-core programmers' conversations", especially slang from MIT and Stanford. Reviews quoted by the publisher include: William Safire of The New York Times referring to the Raymond-1991 NHD as a "sprightly lexicon" and recommending it as a nerdy gift that holiday season (this reappeared in his "On Language" column again in mid-October 1992); Hugh Kenner in Byte suggesting that it

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