FollowI apparently managed to ruffle some Twitter feathers yesterday with my post about the overloading of the word hacker. One of the most common complaints was that I didn’t address white hat hackers. It’s flattering that people took the time to read my post and then respond. But I think that they might have missed the bottom line. It’s not really a problem that the word “hacker” has multiple meanings. It’s a polyseme, and this …
Monthly Archives: February 2012
The Trouble with Hackers
You know, for a group so obsessed with namespace issues, we’ve done a pretty poor job of choosing a name for ourselves. Hackers. Hacking. Hackathons. Hack. To most technical people, the meaning of hack is clear. “To write code quickly, sometimes at the cost of quality.” But when non-technical peers ask me if I ever hack, I have to catch myself. Because I know they’re imagining this: Why have we done this to ourselves? The …
TartanHacks vs. PennApps: The Ultimate Showdown
This past weekend, I went to TartanHacks, Carnegie Mellon’s brand new 24-hour hackathon. Though the event was technically CMU-only, the organizers graciously invited eight students from Penn to partake, as a sign of goodwill and hacking-unity. Six of us made the trek. TartanHacks went very smoothly–I could hardly believe it was a first-time event. The hacks were impressive and everyone really got into the spirit of it. So I couldn’t resist the temptation to compare …
Why Grassroutes Went a Tiny Bit Viral
At this point, I think it’s safe to say that Grassroutes went a little viral during SOPA Blackout. It wasn’t like bird flu or SARS or anything, it just made a couple corners of the internet a little sniffly. (Pardon the pun.) Drew posted some numbers up over on our makeshift Grassroutes blog, if you want to see them. By all means, Grassroutes probably shouldn’t have gone viral, not even a little bit. We started …