How a Young Turk Spared Hackerdom From Respectability
By LEE GOMES, October 4, 2006
from The Wall Street Journal
Just when it was in danger of becoming entirely respectable, the word "hacker" was reclaimed over the weekend on behalf of all of the old-fashioned hackers of the world. It happened at the Yahoo Hack Day, and we have a Yahoo rival, indirectly, to thank.
For several years, Yahoo has been holding Hack Days for its engineers. The idea is to give engineers a day off to come up with an idea, develop a quick and dirty working version of it, and then show it to colleagues. The point, says Yahoo, isn't so much to get finished products but to encourage outside-the-box collaboration.
This past weekend, Yahoo held the first Hack Day open to the public, and hundreds of programmers made their way to the company's Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters to take part.
For its troubles, Yahoo gets to look at some smart programmers it might want to hire. It also gets to tell a recruiting-department-brochure version of life at Yahoo -- one full of beer, barbecue and Beck (the musician gave a free concert Friday night), and a place where the only limits to what programmers can work on are their imaginations and their tolerance for Red Bull. All this is opposed to, say, having to slog away in the salt mines of search monetization, which might well be what they would end up doing if they ever really got hired.
Hacker, of course, used to mean "computer-connected bad guy." That's still how the word is used on TV. In tech circles, however, it has shed its nefarious undertones and now stands for "computer enthusiast." (Although, in more rarified programming circles, it has come full circle and is pejorative once more; here a hacker has only a superficial knowledge of programming and gravitates toward quick but impermanent solutions. Think duct tape.)
The pro-hacker aesthetic is now so ascendant that the mere whim of hacker is valued more than even the most studied plan of someone else, such as a marketing dweeb. Indeed, the organizers of Yahoo Hack Day said participants weren't even supposed to decide before they arrived what their hack project was going to be.
That clearly didn't happen. A number of Hack Day participants used the opportunity to strut their existing Web sites ("flipmeat," in the lexicon of the current Web 2.0 business bubble) in front of potential Yahoo acquirers.
Saturday afternoon, after 24 hours of hacking, about 50 projects were presented in two-minute segments to a panel of judges. The majority were mix-and-match combinations of Yahoo offerings: programs to show users when their favorite bands would be playing in town, to allow people looking at a Web site together to blog about it, and to let people uploading photos to attach audio files to them.
Then, in the middle of things, a programmer named Jordan Sissel stepped on stage. For his hack, Mr. Sissel said, he figured out how to store large files -- pictures, MP3s, even whole computer programs -- on Yahoo's Del.icio.us Web site.
Del.icio.us is a hot site among the technorati that hasn't really caught on in the rest of the world. It lets users bookmark Web pages, then see what pages other people have linked to. What was remarkable about Mr. Sissel's announcement was that it wasn't a place to store files.
At least not before he got his hands on it. In his allotted two minutes, the 23-year old showed how he managed to fool the Del.icio.us system into storing a multimegabyte photograph of the San Francisco skyline.
Up until now, everything that hackers had been showing was entirely polite. But Mr. Sissel's hack was not polite. In fact, it was very naughty -- not criminal or unethical, just naughty -- in that cool, old-fashioned hacker way. For one thing, it could place an enormous load on the Del.icio.us computers.
But, like any great hack, the program was clever and funny. His hacker forefathers -- a lineage that includes Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who before selling the Apple I computer sold "blue boxes" that allowed you to make free phone calls -- would have been proud.
The audience roared its approval, and several came up to congratulate him. "Dude, that was a great hack," one said.
Mr. Sissel's project didn't win the "best hack" award. That honor went to something more polite: a small digital camera that would automatically upload photos to Yahoo's Flickr site.
Later, Mr. Sissel told me he planned his hack Friday morning. Usually, he explained, the URLs that Del.icio.us users send to the site are just a dozen or so characters long. But they can be as long as 65,535 characters. Mr. Sissel thus split up his big file, sent each chunk to Del.icio.us as a URL, then hacked a way to recombine them.
That's not quite how founders of the site planned on it being used. But doing something someone didn't plan on is pretty much what hackers are all about.
For the conspiracy buffs among you, Mr. Sissel's employer is Google. Mr. Sissel says he has worked there four months, in technical support. He insisted he wasn't acting as some Google agent trying to embarrass Yahoo on its big day.
I couldn't help but believe him; he had too much geeky insouciance to be lying. No, this guy wasn't any sort of spy or saboteur. He was a hacker!
--
i have a subscription to wsj now, so i'll probably be posting the occasional article.
By LEE GOMES, October 4, 2006
from The Wall Street Journal
Just when it was in danger of becoming entirely respectable, the word "hacker" was reclaimed over the weekend on behalf of all of the old-fashioned hackers of the world. It happened at the Yahoo Hack Day, and we have a Yahoo rival, indirectly, to thank.
For several years, Yahoo has been holding Hack Days for its engineers. The idea is to give engineers a day off to come up with an idea, develop a quick and dirty working version of it, and then show it to colleagues. The point, says Yahoo, isn't so much to get finished products but to encourage outside-the-box collaboration.
This past weekend, Yahoo held the first Hack Day open to the public, and hundreds of programmers made their way to the company's Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters to take part.
For its troubles, Yahoo gets to look at some smart programmers it might want to hire. It also gets to tell a recruiting-department-brochure version of life at Yahoo -- one full of beer, barbecue and Beck (the musician gave a free concert Friday night), and a place where the only limits to what programmers can work on are their imaginations and their tolerance for Red Bull. All this is opposed to, say, having to slog away in the salt mines of search monetization, which might well be what they would end up doing if they ever really got hired.
Hacker, of course, used to mean "computer-connected bad guy." That's still how the word is used on TV. In tech circles, however, it has shed its nefarious undertones and now stands for "computer enthusiast." (Although, in more rarified programming circles, it has come full circle and is pejorative once more; here a hacker has only a superficial knowledge of programming and gravitates toward quick but impermanent solutions. Think duct tape.)
The pro-hacker aesthetic is now so ascendant that the mere whim of hacker is valued more than even the most studied plan of someone else, such as a marketing dweeb. Indeed, the organizers of Yahoo Hack Day said participants weren't even supposed to decide before they arrived what their hack project was going to be.
That clearly didn't happen. A number of Hack Day participants used the opportunity to strut their existing Web sites ("flipmeat," in the lexicon of the current Web 2.0 business bubble) in front of potential Yahoo acquirers.
Saturday afternoon, after 24 hours of hacking, about 50 projects were presented in two-minute segments to a panel of judges. The majority were mix-and-match combinations of Yahoo offerings: programs to show users when their favorite bands would be playing in town, to allow people looking at a Web site together to blog about it, and to let people uploading photos to attach audio files to them.
Then, in the middle of things, a programmer named Jordan Sissel stepped on stage. For his hack, Mr. Sissel said, he figured out how to store large files -- pictures, MP3s, even whole computer programs -- on Yahoo's Del.icio.us Web site.
Del.icio.us is a hot site among the technorati that hasn't really caught on in the rest of the world. It lets users bookmark Web pages, then see what pages other people have linked to. What was remarkable about Mr. Sissel's announcement was that it wasn't a place to store files.
At least not before he got his hands on it. In his allotted two minutes, the 23-year old showed how he managed to fool the Del.icio.us system into storing a multimegabyte photograph of the San Francisco skyline.
Up until now, everything that hackers had been showing was entirely polite. But Mr. Sissel's hack was not polite. In fact, it was very naughty -- not criminal or unethical, just naughty -- in that cool, old-fashioned hacker way. For one thing, it could place an enormous load on the Del.icio.us computers.
But, like any great hack, the program was clever and funny. His hacker forefathers -- a lineage that includes Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who before selling the Apple I computer sold "blue boxes" that allowed you to make free phone calls -- would have been proud.
The audience roared its approval, and several came up to congratulate him. "Dude, that was a great hack," one said.
Mr. Sissel's project didn't win the "best hack" award. That honor went to something more polite: a small digital camera that would automatically upload photos to Yahoo's Flickr site.
Later, Mr. Sissel told me he planned his hack Friday morning. Usually, he explained, the URLs that Del.icio.us users send to the site are just a dozen or so characters long. But they can be as long as 65,535 characters. Mr. Sissel thus split up his big file, sent each chunk to Del.icio.us as a URL, then hacked a way to recombine them.
That's not quite how founders of the site planned on it being used. But doing something someone didn't plan on is pretty much what hackers are all about.
For the conspiracy buffs among you, Mr. Sissel's employer is Google. Mr. Sissel says he has worked there four months, in technical support. He insisted he wasn't acting as some Google agent trying to embarrass Yahoo on its big day.
I couldn't help but believe him; he had too much geeky insouciance to be lying. No, this guy wasn't any sort of spy or saboteur. He was a hacker!
--
i have a subscription to wsj now, so i'll probably be posting the occasional article.
Nice one.
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/hackday06/
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/hackday06/
\m/ hackers, you do your thing! Google represent :)