E
Eric S. Raymond
esr.ibiblio.org · Personal blog · on HN since 2008
Eric S. Raymond, open source author and hacker culture figure, writes on programming, version control, politics, and open source.
What HN saysCommenters cite his essays on git-svn and netiquette, but some are put off by his heated political posts and flaming.
381HN people shared it
210linked it in comments
441stories submitted
4.6Kstory points
6 months agolast shared
2008people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1From kafkatrap to honeytrap16 people · 125 points · first shared 2015 · 22 comments on HN
- 2The Right to Be Rude11 people · 56 points · first shared 2020 · 9 comments on HN
- 3Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?10 people · 133 points · first shared 2020 · 162 comments on HN
- 4Why Hackers Must Eject the SJWs10 people · 31 points · first shared 2015 · 8 comments on HN
- 5Post 2610 people · first shared 2012
- 6Preventing visceral racism9 people · 8 points · first shared 2013 · 3 comments on HN
- 7Kafkatrapping9 people · 1 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 8Rust severely disappoints me8 people · 46 points · first shared 2017 · 68 comments on HN
- 9Reposurgeon’s Excellent Journey and the Waning of Python8 people · 40 points · first shared 2018 · 1 comments on HN
- 10Who are the famous programmers?7 people · 9 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 11ESR on autism, genius, and the power of obliviousness6 people · 7 points · first shared 2016 · 2 comments on HN
- 12Homepage6 people · first shared 2009
- 13Rust and the limits of swarm design5 people · 67 points · first shared 2017 · 54 comments on HN
- 14Non-discrimination is a core value of Open Source5 people · 16 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 15Post 1295 people · first shared 2014
What HN people wrote when they linked it
sgbeal · 2026-05-02
> I have no idea why this idea is around,
To the best of my fallible knowledge, the notion was first popularized via <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764>.
SergeAx · 2023-02-07
I believe that the best antidote for this utterly bullshit propaganda is ESR[0]'s essay "Why hackers should eject SWJs". Please take time to read this (and, if you like it, other his essays): http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond
jlgaddis · 2020-10-22
> ... some help pages on the web are still recommending git-svn as a conversion tool for migrating Subversion repositories to git. DO NOT DO THIS. You may damage your history badly if you do. -- http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6778 (2015-05-28)
chillwaves · 2020-09-14
Really wish I hadn't followed your link, so I can see them post gems like this:
> >There is no communist invasion force openly posturing to invade and occupy the United States.
> No. Instead we have a violent Communist insurgency within our borders. They are determined, murderous totalitarians who will shoot you for wearing a MAGA hat. And it is time to end them.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8752#comment-2450425
Hard pass on that shit.
MaxBarraclough · 2020-09-14
A fine complement to ESR's classic essay on netiquette, How To Ask Questions The Smart Way.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Not that ESR has outgrown straight-up flaming, mind: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4650
kodachi · 2020-03-08
Thanks. This 'under attack' and 'us vs them' really sucks.
It would be unwise to form an opinion of the whole thing without actually reading all of the emails. Yes, there are ad-hominem attacks in the email you quoted, and even if ESR was right in everything, probably not the best way to express it.
Anyway, at least this outrage brought the issue into attention, now I'm super curious about this matter.
I'm reading his side first here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8609
dfrage · 2019-06-16
People who follow his blog will be familiar with at least some of the following:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html
Some distance down the list is reposurgeon, which has been used to convert Gnu Emacs and many smaller/younger repositories to git, and is in the process of converting GCC: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?tag=reposurgeon
Not directly software: http://www.catb.org/~esr/projects.html
lordlimecat · 2018-10-23
Take a look at her comments on github and judge for yourself.
https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
She wants to tar and feather an OSS contributor for views expressed on a personal twitter account. Further down searches through his ~400 git repositories, finds two with potentially offensive names (which have rational explanations, including being non-native english speaker), and uses that as basis to continue witch hunt.
Eric Raymond did a good write up on what's happening here that I certainly found insightful. He gives a description that perfectly describes what you see in that github issue:
"What’s there is totalitarianism in miniature: ideology is everything, merit counts for nothing against the suppression of thoughtcrime, and politics is conducted by naked intimidation against any who refuse to conform."
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918
cosmiccartel · 2017-11-02
For anyone interested, "Cultural Marxism" refers to the application of Marxist critical theory to the social sciences, particularly issues of race, gender, culture, and identity.
Current mainstream leftist memes, with a focus on issues like "white privilege", and the systematic inversion of this supposed privilege, cannot be described as anything but Cultural Marxism.
Somewhat related, and highly recommended, is the article Gramscian Damage by ESR (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260).
And if anyone like eli_gottlieb wants to smear you as an antisemite for speaking out against Marxism, this is why: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=125
simonsarris · 2017-02-13
It's worth also keeping in mind there may be old Russian propaganda models of 1930's memetic warfare still kicking around.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=218
I'm not sure either of these should be called strictly Russian, in either invention or execution, though.
vog · 2017-01-19
I'm surprised this article is from 2017. It seems that esr doesn't account for the latest (huge) improvements of Rust during the last year.
Given that Rust is younger than Go, ignoring a year's worth of development makes for an especially unfair comparison.
The issues he cited were from 2014 and 2015, regarding Rust for networking code. Moreover, on his blog post (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7294) he received a clear answer that he seems to have ignored:
Stefano:
[...]
For epoll: There is a crate. You could also use
future-rs or tokio. So you have three possibilities.
Finally, the author of another networking project, TRust-DNS, used these Rust features and was quite satisfied with the elegance of the resulting code:
https://bluejekyll.github.io/blog/rust/2016/12/03/trust-dns-into-futur…
blub · 2017-01-04
C++ would be a great alternative, assuming the developer(s?) working on the project didn't hate it, as is the tradition: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=532
Oh well, at least they're moving from C, which will be a big win either way.
DanBC · 2017-01-04
Eric S Raymond, author of some important and influential software related books (Cathedral and Bazaar, for example), but also a mysogynistic, homophobic, conspiracy theorist
It's hard to pick one example because there are so many, but read what he says about the Catholic abuse scandal:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26
There are so many errors scattered through that piece that there's no point rebutting them. It's best to just flag anything (not related to computing) about ESR.
mjolk · 2017-01-01
This is a great post. I'm not sure that I consider ESR to be a "tribal elder", but I imagine I'll be linking to this article at some point in the coming year.
I hadn't previously read his article on "kafkatrapping" (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122), but it rings eerily true to how it feels to be the target of a manipulation attempt.
imglorp · 2016-06-03
It's worth pointing out that the NTPsec project is working hard on reducing the attack surface of NTP classic. At some point there will be few or no reasons to run NTP.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7167
https://www.ntpsec.org
duncan_bayne · 2015-11-30
The counterpoint: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918
Edited: to clarify, the above link is the article to which Coraline is responding in her Medium piece. It's worth remembering also that Coraline - while not a contributor to a particular OSS project, OpalRb - attempted to have someone ousted from the project (or at least censured), because he wrote something she didn't like.
davidgerard · 2015-11-15
Of course he has evidence: some guy on IRC told him a stdh.txt! http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6907
Good analysis of why this is an immaculate stdh.txt: http://nymag.com/following/2015/11/this-the-perfect-insane-anti-femini…
anon3_ · 2015-08-21
Yeah but significant still. 27.7% of their pie disappeared.
Recent versions of Firefox have introduced third party plugins (like pocket).
After the Eich thing, they lost the "hacker" cred and their talent was pretty easy much poached. Further, the concept of merit - overlooking the political in lieu of skill / talent - is no longer a core value of the organization. [1]
Recruiters were all over linkedin and taking away the best talent left and right.
[1] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6688
harkyns_castle · 2015-06-25
That's a surprise to me, I hadn't heard any of that. Not that I've followed things that closely.
What I found so far is [1], in which he seems to just be doing a bit of a "show me the data" thing wrt global warming (its fairly old I guess in defense). In [2] he's definitely saying IQ is race-related, and gender related to a lesser extent, in my quick readings.
I quite like that he doesn't mince his words, sugar coat things or seem to take any notice of popular opinion/political correctness. Not agreeing with him, but I find that refreshing.
[1] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1436
[2] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?m=200311
lexcorvus · 2015-03-09
This looks fantastic. One possible wrinkle: I predict that, although top-performing Starfighters will be a diverse lot, they will lack "diversity". I hope the Starfighter founders have a plan to push back against the carping complainers a venture such as this is likely to attract. (My suggestion is to point out that CTFs are the ultimate expression of "Shut up and show us the code." [1])
[1]: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6642
dfc · 2014-03-25
Is anyone familiar with SCons? I stumbled across it the other day when I was playing with gpsd.[^1]
[^1]: ESR lovefest: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3089
MBlume · 2012-07-31
This is another area where I prefer Raymond's open-source consequentialism to Stallman's free software deontology. Raymond actually takes the time to evaluate the harms (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4371) we anticipate from closed source software, and shows why we can expect a greater harm from OS or productivity software than from games or elevator firmware.
tjr · 2012-06-11
I suspect this is the reference:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4371&cpage=1#comment-381328
Luke Leighton writes:
i spoke to dr stallman about the assessment concepts presented here, because i think they’re fantastic and should be more formalised, and adopted more widely including by the FSF. unfortunately he was sufficiently upset by the personal references that he can’t possibly recommend that. what’s the best way to proceed?
mhartl · 2012-04-06
"Onerous" essentially means "expensive to comply with", not necessarily "hard to follow". For more detail on these sorts of issues, see, e.g., http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1752.
cobrausn · 2012-03-26
ESR had actually posted about this particular issue not too long ago and was looking for assistance with the 'Bufferbloat' project. Not my area of expertise, so I don't think I would be able to do much, but I thought this might be worth mentioning.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4171
http://www.bufferbloat.net/
thecabinet · 2012-02-14
One thing I absolutely despise about the phrase "anti-intellectual" is the ambiguity about what it means. There was a great explanation of why people should be suspicious of "intellectuals" in an HN comment from a year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400310. ESR also had examined the various possible meanings: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4001
In general, though, "anti-intellectual" seems to usually mean, "Why won't those damn hick Republicans just get out of the damn way!?"
gizzlon · 2011-12-19
The Eric S. Raymond link posted at the end is worth a read as well (although it's kind of off topic):
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4009
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3367674
neilk · 2010-09-27
No, he just writes blog posts with titles like "The First Time I Changed History".
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2539
That said, in the latter half of this post he backpedals and gives the "hacker culture" credit for being able to recognize his contributions, but still -- the title of the article isn't "On the openness of the RFC process in the 80s".
I don't know what to think about ESR. I disagree strongly with his interpretation of what hacker culture is, and how free software works, and personally I think it has taken us a long time to undo some of the damage he did to the discourse in both those areas. But he also legitimately influenced a lot of things for the better. Oddly, he seems to be unsatisfied with that level of achievement, and wants to be recognized as being a great statesman or visionary. If he claimed less credit he'd probably get more credit.
hga · 2010-04-23
These "data analysis techniques to correct for a false decline" at best consisted of substituting thermometer readings for tree ring proxies. I wouldn't call that a "data analysis technique".
They also "improved" the curve for the 1930s as ESR learned from the code and data (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447): "This, people, is blatant data-cooking, with no pretense otherwise. It flattens a period of warm temperatures in the 1930s — see those negative coefficients? Then, later on, it applies a positive multiplier so you get a nice dramatic hockey stick at the end of the century."
Also note how this meshes nicely with the paper that started this thread that did not until it was corrected show that 1934 was the hottest year in the 20th century.
billswift · 2009-10-10
This is a followup to "Three Systemic Problems with Open-Source Hosting Sites", http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1282 .