February 19, 2004
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Via sean's site, I found a site about the topic of hackerdom, which includes this article: How To Be A Hacker.
I agree with most of it, but the main problem I have with it is that it treads on hallowed ground. It says that if you follow some simple steps, you'll be hacker. The first step is to learn a computer programming language... I'd offer that there were no programming languages around when Issac Newton was hacking physics, or when Gregor Mendel was hacking genes. Which is to say, I don't think you can teach someone to be a hacker.
I'm not a very good hacker. I can program computers, I've read a lot of science fiction, I've even been to science fiction conventions. Yes, plural. I know people who were making the internet run before it was called 'the internet.' They are hackers. I'm just a guy who could learn Tkl if he wanted to.
Anyway, that website has come up with an emblem for hackers to use, which is appropriately nerdish in origin. My initial guess was that it was something like a binary representation of the number 42 or maybe some kind of binary mathematical magic square, but the actual meaning is good, too.
Back when I lived in Houston, I used to 'hang out' with appropriately alienated hacker-ish types (to one degree or another). Meaning, I'd go to BBS meetings sometimes. At one of these get-togethers, I was talking to Brian O. Blivion (not his real name, obviously; I can't remember it), who made a sort of reputation for himself as being the hacker's lawyer. Remember Operation Sun Devil? That was the vibe of the time, and it was nice to have a lawyer around who knew the story. He was in his mid 40s (it seemed any way), the token normal-looking adult person in a room full of GenX social delinquents. I confided: "I'm not really a hacker. I have no desire to make free phone calls to China, just to prove I can do it." He said, "You're a good writer." Then he looked at me, as if he were the Official Bestower Of Validation For All Hacker Hangers-On and said, "You write software for people's brains." And I totally ate it up.
So I'm a hacker. I hack YOU.
Comments (4)
LOL!! Love it.
Brian O. Blivion. What a FANTASTIC moniker! *ALMOST* as great as Homer The Brave.
It's a media reference, too. Look it up.
Even though ESR says to start with a programming language, you're right: Newton, Mendel, Einstein = hackers.
The first guy to figure out how to pick a lock without destroying it - lock hacker.
Alton Brown - food hacker
That guy three houses down, ratcheting things uder the hood of his Nova at 1am just to SEE if he can shave .01 seconds off of his quarter-mile: - car hacker.
Computer hackers get a bad rap!
I'm both happy and sad that no one commented that 'Tkl' should be 'tcl.'
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