Subject
[Fwd: Nabokov sighting]
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I am not sure if this has been noted before, but Jeremy Bernstein's
"Cranks, Quarks and the Cosmos"(Pg 129) contains the following
interesting
observation:
"It is difficult to give an entirely precise definition of what a hack
is.
It is more than a "trick." It is a very elegant way of doing something
-solving something- that a priori might seem undoable or unsolvable or
even uncreatable...A person who is able to hack consistently comes to be
regarded as a hacker. I see it as a designation with broad
applications...
Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon were and are hackers. Socrates was and
Aristotle wasn't. Kant certainly wasn't. As my friend Marvin Minsky, who
was regarded by a whole generation of students as the king of computer
hackers, once noted, 'If you do enough hacking you often get something
profound.'"
Cheers!
yours
Kiran
"Existentialism means that no one can take a bath for you."
-Delmore Schwartz, Does Existentialism still Exist?
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~kiran
http://www.physics.usyd.edu/hienergy
I am not sure if this has been noted before, but Jeremy Bernstein's
"Cranks, Quarks and the Cosmos"(Pg 129) contains the following
interesting
observation:
"It is difficult to give an entirely precise definition of what a hack
is.
It is more than a "trick." It is a very elegant way of doing something
-solving something- that a priori might seem undoable or unsolvable or
even uncreatable...A person who is able to hack consistently comes to be
regarded as a hacker. I see it as a designation with broad
applications...
Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon were and are hackers. Socrates was and
Aristotle wasn't. Kant certainly wasn't. As my friend Marvin Minsky, who
was regarded by a whole generation of students as the king of computer
hackers, once noted, 'If you do enough hacking you often get something
profound.'"
Cheers!
yours
Kiran
"Existentialism means that no one can take a bath for you."
-Delmore Schwartz, Does Existentialism still Exist?
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~kiran
http://www.physics.usyd.edu/hienergy