Re: Hackers and Painters

[Tiago Assumpcao <module () whatever org ar>]

Sinan Eren wrote:

> http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
>
> For those of you, like me, who havent read this essay so far, please do 
> so! words of wisdom in its most elegant form ...
>
> cheers,
> Sinan
>
>
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>
>  

Errmm, this discussion has grown a lot since I last saw it; I'm too 
late, but I won't leave it aside... sorry.

I've seen "Hackers & Painters"  (the book with a set of the essays, 
including Hackers & Painters one) the other day in this local book 
store, and I decided I should buy it as a gift for my dutch friend. When 
finally arriving at home, yesterday night with this book, my argentinian 
brother asked: "Hey, isn't this about the Graham's book you've just 
bought?!"

Wish I have had more time + used more of my energy into it. However I've 
read some few pages...

About ``Why Nerds are Unpopular'': I hate generalizations... unless they 
are saint graal, universal solutions; therefore meaning smart and nerd 
to be equivalent is no good when discussing one part's social 
position/correlation  -- I've seen so many stupid nerds and so many 
smart playboys flying around the world, including in high-school.

Plus,I think, *being* nerd is a "momentum". One can stop living a "nerd 
life" whenever he wants. Being smart is bio + great amount of 
psyche/social, defined by a non-deterministic system, as well as its 
opposite (Not Being Smart  -- ignoring boundaries between them).


``Hackers & Painters'': Is this science? I think Graham's point by 
multiple-times saying hacking is not science, but somehow an art, means 
hackers don't need the formality of science to create (and by "maker" I 
think he's trying to mean "creator"; where creator holds conceptual 
abstraction+design+implementation).  One quote only:

"The fact that hackers learn to hack by doing it is another sign of how 
different hacking is from the sciences. Scientists don't learn science 
by doing it, but by doing labs and problem sets. Scientists start out 
doing work that's perfect, in the sense that they're just trying to 
reproduce work someone else has already done for them. Eventually, they 
get to the point where they can do original work. Whereas hackers, from 
the start, are doing original work; it's just very bad. So hackers start 
original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original."


When I remember about science, I remember about formality... When it 
happens I always remember (always...) about Hilbert/Godel and how one 
can, formally, break down the Formal Reason and transform Philosophy in 
the 20th century.

Galois has been ignored by the academy for his life. Maybe there was too 
much formality in the academy... maybe Cauchy was too busy increasing 
the number of his monographies. Who knows... maybe History can't be 
formal enough to answer. Hey, it's not that I hate formality, it's 
important! I just appreciate freedom much more.



Since I've thought about universal solutions, formality, Hilbert and 
Reason; I would like ask for opinions around Hilbert's Problems 
(http://mathworld.wolfram.com/HilbertsProblems.html). My opinion, about 
part of it, is that "randomly stating" big problems and expecting 
universal solutions to be given is just hrmmm, not cool. How about 
"forwarding" somebody else's Problem?

8. Prove the Riemann hypothesis 
<http://mathworld.wolfram.com/RiemannHypothesis.html>. The conjecture 
<http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Conjecture.html> has still been neither 
proved nor disproved.

I don't think he was trying to criticize some "prove attempt failure" in 
a sarcastic way, because that would go against what history says [1]. 
Unless there was a secret message... who knows..


Is this science? Art? Rebellion? I don't care!

For me, hackers' mind are beautiful because they love abstract concepts, 
yet they have the need of using it, for real. Maybe a hacker is a mix of 
an informal scientist with an engineer, that transforms artistic inputs 
into concrete outputs. That's a saint graal, universal creator.



[1]: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/RiemannHypothesis.html
(....) The Riemann hypothesis has thus far resisted all attempts to 
prove it. Stieltjes (1885) published a note claiming to have proved the 
Mertens conjecture <http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MertensConjecture.html> 
with /c/ = 1, a result stronger than the Riemann hypothesis and from 
which it would have followed. However, the proof itself was never 
published, nor was it found in Stieltjes papers following his death, so 
it is strongly believed his claim to have possessed such a proof was 
erroneous (Derbyshire 2004, pp. 160-161 and 250). In the late 1940s, 
H. Rademacher's erroneous proof of the falsehood of Riemann's hypothesis 
was reported in /Time/ magazine, even after a flaw in the proof had been 
unearthed by Siegel (Borwein and Bailey 2003, p. 97; Conrey 2003).




Sorry to waste your time with my messy, bad formulated and based thoughts.
Cheers.

--
Tiago Rezende Assumpcao - module  whatever org ar
7D9A A6BA 8275 964E EF47 EE5A 7AFF C759 B578 ACAA

http://whatever.org.ar/~module


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