What gets held up as an ideal gets followed, especially as children, when we're looking to establish our identities. I wonder if promoting a more diverse image of "hacking" to be included in other hobbies will help. While programming has always been a passion of mine, I also like astronomy, travel, and politics. Perhaps there should be discussion of how to change the practice and culture of programming to be one that more children can follow if they desire?
No one is promoting the hacker image, the image is defined by those seen to be the hackers. Who are you suggesting we point to and say look at what this person did to make the image more diverse?
I'm not really saying we need to promote pizza and staying up all night coding, it's that we need to maybe make it more inclusive, to encourage more people to join the tech party.
This is the point I making, she is hardly famous for being a successful hacker, and that's the problem. If you want more diverse role models they have to achieve something, this whole article is look I am pretty and smart isnt that amazing? If anything it is making things worse.
I don't know if I ever thought "hacker" was only a term for someone who has been programming for 10+ years. I'm about to graduate from college, and I started programming my freshman year. I unfortunately never got to see the beauty and joys of programming until then, and it does suck a little bit. But does that automatically not make me a hacker?
Yet, I am arguably successful. I got a job offer from Amazon at the start of my senior year and took it, and of course, I eventually want to start my own company that's why I'm on this site. I understand the stigma because I personally have never told anyone I only started programming in college. I've never been asked either. I love playing around with new languages and learning all I can about software, but I don't feel I'm that far behind people who started programming early if even behind at all.
We need to stop acting like people who have been programming since kids have a huge advantage. It is much more about what you constantly put in, and there are numerous other ways to be a hacker then just programming. Most people who didn't program might already have the "hacker" in them and just need to attach the programming element of it.
People who feel alienated of the unique culture of programming will say anything to change it. They want everything to be normative, everything must be diverse everyone must have the same opportunities and pointing to gifted people and saying hey your a hacker and thats really good is a huge threat to that idea. It is almost like thinly veiled socialism.
You say "socialism" like it's a bad thing. I don't feel "alienated" from hacker culture, everyone I've met seems quite nice and receptive to me (although perhaps I'm in the wrong room).
But perhaps what I see is that this is really nice, and why can't we share it with more people? Hacking isn't a zero-sum game. If we double the number of people trying to write open source, isn't that a win for everybody?
It's not like encouraging somebody else to write code takes my job away, or dilutes the amount of genius to go around.
Think positively, my friend. "Socialism" may or may not work when we're building massive factories built out of atoms, but perhaps the economy of bits works differently than the economy of atoms.
imo "socialism" is bad, except for things like infrastructure and utilities, you could probably make a very convincing case that open source is digital infrastructure, and I would probably agree with you, but we arent talking about open source.
I never suggested that we should'nt be encouraging more hackers, the point I was making is that the article is suggesting that the hacker stereotype is bad because it makes people feel inferior.
I think it's important to pick and choose how we conduct ourselves in life carefully. I have met many smart people. Some do alienate others around them, they are "intellectual bullies." Others are reserved and/or withdrawn, neither encouraging nor discouraging others. And yet others are encouraging to all they meet.
I'm not in the same category at all, but I think of people like Feynman, he was not shy about criticizing policies he disliked, but he also worked tirelessly to bring more people into science.
I had some natural advantages, my mother was a systems analyst, and I had some early precocity.
But I also ran into some very encouraging people at key moments in my youth, for example there were various students at UofT who encouraged me to tinker with WATFIV and SNOBOL programs on punch cards. Some even let me use their terminals to play with APL.
I cannot say what would have happened if they had shooed me away and/or called security, but I think that my longevity in programming owes something to people who were welcoming.
I'll second this. The whole tone of the article doesn't make much sense because to me a hacker has always been someone who strives to impress themselves rather than other people.
I'm not a young woman so it's hard for me to say, but it looks to me like people are doing a much better job of encouraging young women to program. There are lots of programs to support women in CS. On the other hand, I don't know how effectively these solve the deeper cultural problems where it's not considered "normal" for girls to be interested in coding.
I have a lot of female coding friends, we grew up together and one of the biggest barriers they had when we were at university was from their female friends. Suggesting that their choice would stop them from getting a husband and they would turn into a basement dweller.
This was the normal situation for most of the women I graduated with, huge pressure from their female social groups to not do programming. On the flip side, they had lots of friends in the course because it was a massive sausage party. The point is the hardest thing they had to do was overcome all the vitriol being slung at them from their own gender.
The prevalence of the 'hacker' stereotype hurts those who don't identify with it, such as women
The stereotype of prodigies in sports is also hurting everyone like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, why should other sports people be disadvantaged by not starting at an early age. Really?
"Hacker" doesn't equate to the best software engineer, the best founder, or much of anything other than having benefited from a longer period of time to gain experience—extra time that may or may not have been used effectively to gain additional knowledge
This hasnt been my experience, seems like a lot of what ifs.
I remember in the late 90s I was 10 or 11 and I figured out how to use the public library internet for more than the limit of 30 minutes.
I wanted to use internet so bad but I was not allowed a computer so I always hung out at the public library and I wished more than anything to use the internet as much as possible.
I thought by asking how does the computer know when the 30 minute is up? There must be a timer! Can I prevent the timer?
Sure enough, for half a second there's a dos terminal in windows 95 that is displayed when I restart the computer. It took a few tries but I managed to close it. 30 minutes passed and I was still on it. then an hour, another hour passes and I'm still not logged out!
I used the internet all the day from morning to dark. I let my sister use it too when I wanted to take a 'break'. I would see people check the wait list look over at me and leave very annoyed.
The next week, the librarian who remembered me told me they would need my library card as collateral, and that they will be keeping tabs on the time. the jig was up.
This was my hacker moment. not exactly sophisticated but I wanted something so bad and I got it.
I was 15 at the time. I was on the internet 24/7 frequenting various communities, back when any "scene" had its own "official" forum.
I was primarily interested in gamehacking and web exploitation. I made a few friends from these communities and we often shared stupid exploits with eachother such as uploading some html file deep in a large corporations file structure and linking it between us for laughs.
My friend messages me one day that he managed to upload a c99 shell on a large website. He linked me to it, but deep within the structure to a plain text database of millions of credit cards.
Fast forward two months later: I'm ratting out every connection I know along with emails/names/info to the police, after they kicked my door down and seized literally every computing device in my house.
Phones, computers, tablets, desktop computers, and my NAS'. It's been 8 years and I have yet to hear from the police and they have dodged my emails, in person visits, and calls every time.
I lost over $10,000 worth of computer equipment. This was my hacker moment.
Pre-internet, early 80s, I had my first computer, a Commodore 64. I was pretty active on the local BBS's and some long distance ones via an open modem relay I discovered at a local General Motors plant while wardialing.
I started using a new service called Quantum Link and hung out with a lot of shady characters that were doing phreaking and credit card number passing.
That's a path I probably would have continued down until one day I received a call from a guy saying he was with the FBI, that they new what I was doing, and were going to be paying me a visit.
Being something like 12, 13 years old, I freaked out and quickly hid all my pirated floppies and took my C=64 down to my friends house to hide it.
After a couple of weeks my patience wore out and I got my system back, but kept my nose clean after that (other than copying software, you couldn't have a C=64 and not trade with friends:).
It was only after four or five years later that I found out that the "FBI agent" was actually a friend of my friend's older brother. Doh! Probably all for the best.
Now I will have to share my own library story. When I was in middle school I loved going to the library, reading books, comics, manga , magazines. In summer I used to go very often to the library. I would walk from my house to my local public library and go straight to he bathroom so that I could wipe the sweat from my face and arms. I've had some of my happiest memories in that library. I will share my most significant experiences.
The computers at the local public library had Windows (XP maybe?), we could use them for an hour or more depending on how many people wanted to use the computers. They also had computers in a kid section which had some games and limited internet access (the library's portal) and some more computers in another section which only had access to the library's portal. Once I was using a computer which was only supposed to be used to check books, somehow I discovered that a lot of times the library's portal also had a link to the item in Amazon, and from Amazon I could get into Google and then to any website. I got caught and scolded by a librarian, she told me "If you ever used this computers to get into the internet again, we are going to cancel your library card" or something like, well I never used those computers for the internet again. I used the ones in the kids section and it felt awesome.
Another significant thing that at that time didn't seem that significant was when I checked out a thick programming book on C or C++ I am not sure. I had a vague idea about what a program was and I had read thick books before. I didn't even had a computer at my house but I was so curious. I opened it tried to make sense out of the text but I couldn't, it seemed like Chinese. The next day I returned the book and I never again got interested in programming until high school.
Another significant thing that at that time didn't seem
that significant was when I checked out a thick
programming book on C or C++ I am not sure. I had a vague
idea about what a program was and I had read thick books
before. I didn't even had a computer at my house but I
was so curious. I opened it tried to make sense out of
the text but I couldn't, it seemed like Chinese. The next
day I returned the book and I never again got interested
in programming until high school.
I did a similar thing, but being so desperate for a computer around the late 90s, I eventually found an old Intel 286 computer that was abandoned in the closet. It had monochrome monitor and I found something called QBASIC. I went to the library and took out very heavy book on it and ended up just copying the source code from the book. I didn't understand the code a great deal but the game ran after running through several pages. I thought it was interesting but realized trying to make a game is going to be very tough.
What sparked my interest soon after that was creating my own website after my dad helped me host it on a free server. I still have a copy of it backed up on a cd somewhere. It was created with Netscape Navigator. I showed my teacher and classmates. It was magic. It was so awesome.
I took a course that taught Visual Basic and also QBasic in junior high. It bored me because we were making very simple apps that I already knew. Wasn't learning anything new. Also whenever I sped ahead or began working on other things instructor would emphasize that I was to follow her step by step in an excruciatingly slow pace that the rest of the students had to follow. If she saw someone speeding ahead she would get angry and say STOP. Killed my interest in programming.
Then came along counter-strike and and things pretty much went downhill from there. It ruined my academic career playing it so much. I found out that the guy who created counter strike also graduated from the university I would attend some years after.
It wasn't until I saw my high school friend (nerdy guy who I used to tease in high school but was secretly jealous of his programming knowledge) in University that he inspired me to do what I thought was unthinkable, learn how to code again. "You just stick with it" is what he told me when I asked how he did it. He would show me the windows apps he made and I would be amazed how one could create something from nothing. Even now, that is the magic that drives me. Something out of nothing, and I stuck with it.
I identify with the sentiment this person wrote about. My first language was GW basic/logo at around that age, learned some pascal/C around high school, and just tried to learn more.
I miss those days, being a youngster and programming: doing without totally understanding but still learning. I still do stuff on my own, though, but no one will look at it or care.
But now all I do is fix bugs. I got one job after school, where I created something new. Looking back on it now, it was garbage but it was my garbage. That was the last time, though. Now I do 'sustaining' work. I don't mind but it feels like the industry as a whole has turned their back on me. I'm considering doing a startup sooner or later.
Do side projects. A small web game, iPhone app, terminal utility... it doesn't matter what it is, what matters is getting back to that state where you're proud of "your garbage " :)
Spending a few hours over the evenings and weekends is totally doable, and within a few weeks you'll have gotten further than you may think!
An easy way to get started might be the daily programmer subreddit .. It's fun looking over other peoples solutions especially in the more esoteric languages & satisfying to be solving even trivial problems within a community.
I don't fit the stereotype and am okay with that: I wear dresses and heels instead of hoodies and sneakers, I keep a regular sleep schedule
I dont remember that being the stereotype for hackers. I would be interested to hear from other people about what they think? But to me it has been someone who is intensely interested in computers and is very good at it. What they wear (wow really shallow much) hasnt really ever factored into it.
What they wear is (and has always been) a huge part of it. Here's a bunch of comments from years ago about suits at interviews, for a specific example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639740
Clothes aren't shallow, how you dress reflects how much you care about presenting yourself to the world; whether you care at all. Someone who doesn't wash or shave is the obvious example of someone who's just 'zero fucks given' in that regard, but that's an extreme. Clothing is just a more subtle form of it.
Growing up my stereotype of 'hackers' was of unfit boys with an almost monk-like isolation and dedication to their projects surrounded by fizzy drinks. ... Which, for all that I liked programming, wasn't something that made me identify with that role.
Perhaps an unfair characterisation. If you want to be among the best at anything it's going to demand a massive amount of your time, which necessarily has to be drawn from time making friends outside of that area and engaging in other more widely pro-social activities. And things always appear more extreme from the outside than they actually are. I don't know. I just know that, looking back, I can't think of anyone who identified themselves as a hacker who had any friends that any of us knew about.
I think it's pretty common. As concrete sources, Eric Raymond's edition of the jargon file not only bothers to cover dress in quite some detail, but is pretty insistent what it includes as well as excludes:
Certainly for me, that entire section of his website (and also his hacker-howto.html) was something that I took seriously when I was in grade school and first learning about hacker culture. Even today I doubt there are things on the web with better claims to defining and documenting the hacker stereotype as Eric Raymond's writings.
I think the issue is that the word hacker has too many meanings, and some of them contradictory. A hacker can be a prankster, a skilled programmer, a creative programmer, a skilled/creative programmer with some vague ideology that supports freedom of information, a computer security breacher, a person who tinkers with electronics, a person who subverts any type of system or authority (reality hacker/culture jammer), any sort of whimsical and creative fellow who applies unorthodox solutions to his everyday life, etc.
In addition, a hack can mean: an unskilled or untalented person, a charlatan, an inelegant but efficient solution to a problem (a kludge), an inelegant and inefficient solution to a problem (cruft), an elegant but unconventional solution to a problem, a skilled application of marketing (growth hack), a culture jam (reality hack), hacking off a limb, a prank, a computer security exploit or breach, a program to cheat at video games and so forth.
As far as I know, the "hacker" stereotype is that of the skilled but evil and socially isolated computer criminal.
Well, in my opinion the view a young person can develop by reading a site like Hacker News is a skewed reality of what it is to be a software engineer, a hacker.
One example of this is what I will generically call the "Google Interview". I know brilliant engineers how have done massive non-trivial projects that have generated millions of dollars in revenue who could not pass such an interview.
The other aspect is the constant exposure to the language-of-the-day and framework-of-the-day club. I can see a young aspiring developer becoming utterly disappointed when realizing it is nearly impossible to keep up with it all. Where do you start? How do you learn this stuff? Someone could very easily think they are not up to par if they can't walk in these mythical shoes.
The truth is very different from that. There's a huge world out there for software engineers. There are real problems to be solved. And, no, not everything in software engineering lives and dies on a web browser or a smart phone.
Is the OP saying that she needed to feel like a hacker to feel legitimate? That would be sad.
What the hell is a hacker anyway? Definitions abound. In many ways it is more about how someone might approach hardware and software problems than anything else. You don't have to be YC material to be a legitimate software engineer. One could very easily argue there are tons of software engineers out there doing far more important work than almost any YC developer has done to date. Most of them are invisible. Think about the people writing code for MRI machines, aircraft avionics or even your car's ABS system.
If you are young and love software engineering please don't think that building websites is the only way you are going to become somebody in this business. Explore what's out there and dare to learn about other interesting problems you might be able to solve.
> Is the OP saying that she needed to feel like a hacker to feel legitimate? That would be sad.
Hi! I am not, and I agree that it would be sad. I am happy to be satisfied with who I am, what I do, and where I'm going. I may not identify with the term "hacker" due to some of its connotations, but I do feel like I get to playfully work on difficult things--one of the few definitions of a hacker I relate to and fortunately the one that I think best embodies its true spirit.
Unfortunately, many people I know who have yet to feel established in the field do feel at least a small need to relate to the "hacker" to feel like a software engineer. As there are parts of this I could relate to (even if they are not bringing me down right now), I thought I'd share my experiences.
You've accomplishe a lot. Realize you will never know everything there is to know in CS. How you approach what you don't know is what makes a difference.
There's a lot of folklore going around in places like HN. Very soon kids are going to think that if they don't use vim, reject the mouse and do away with Windows they will never be real software developers. It's a bunch of macho nonsense.
I started programming sprite and 3D demos in DirectDraw/Direct3D at age 11. I wrote a microkernel for a hobby in high school.
I'm in grad-school now, and I still don't feel like a "hacker" or a "real computer scientist", because I don't eat and drink RFCs, crypto specs, deep-learning algorithms, and every web technology under the sun. And because I'd much rather spend my time at an anime convention than A/B testing a new website feature or cross-validating a recommendation algorithm.
Plenty of very competent professionals are merely very good at what we do and not actually married to the job.
From personal experience, this resonated with me, complete from the rocky start with high school CS in Logo onward.
I know the feeling, and (though I'm male) I recognize many of the waypoints described. And I, too, don't feel like a real hacker. But of course, the word means wildly different things to different people. Even though I love programming very much and I'm doing it all the time, and especially doing it for fun, it was only after joining HN that it dawned on me I could be considered a hacker in some circles.
Still, my primary definition of being a hacker is someone who is insanely active in hacker and cracker culture, someone very interested in systems security, someone who knows to debug a defunct DSL modem given only an oscilloscope and a bit of tinfoil. That's not me.
If I were to apply for a VC program that looks for hackers, I'd probably feel like a bad fit or a complete fraud. Nevertheless, I probably am a hacker. Labels are always an imperfect solution.
One other thing about getting people to program: Male or female, I wouldn't know where to start either. In school I was literally the only kid into actual programming, out of about 500 students. It was only much later in life that I made my first actual programmer friend, and I also recruited an unhappy English major into programming, but most people just aren't interested. And of those who can, and by necessity must, program most would never do it in their spare time for fun.
- The guys at hack-a-day or nyc resistor are hackers.
- Fabrice Bellard is a hacker, for reasons you can see at http://bellard.org/
- People who are _really good_ at *nixen are hackers, because of the nature of the beast. Unix isn't about learning everything from a book, instead you could hack it with what you know.
- PG is a hacker for using LISP to build Viaweb (and ARC etc), but not for "hacking" the startup ecosystem (that's just overuse of the term).
- DHH is a hacker, for the creative ways in which he pushed Ruby
The key thing is "hack value". Hack value is about your technical expertise and your creativity, and both of these things have to be present.
Okay, thanks for the correction. You confirmed my suspicions, I'm not really a hacker. And neither are most people on HN I wager. That's yet another club where a geek can fail to get into. Maybe we shouldn't be here, but I can honestly say it's the most interesting community out there that matches my favorite subjects.
I'm definitely neither Bellard, nor a LISP millionaire, nor remotely DHH, and I already talked about the hack-a-day guys in my oscilloscope comment. The verdict is in: I can't call myself a hacker. So what's the message here for people like me? I guess the conclusion is for starters that I really am an impostor in a lot of ways, including participating on this site.
Dude, who care if you are a hacker, and in which case, according to which definition. Like many people here, you post insightful comments and have interesting side projects - I recall one of your post where you explained how you made a new language from scratch in five weekends with no experience in compiler theory or language design.
I don't know what it makes you, but I think that's pretty awesome - and since I'm not a hacker myself (for the same reasons you say you are not really a hacker), me saying you're a hacker wouldn't make any sens.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not really concerned about being an impostor, I actually rather enjoy being an impostor of somewhat horrifying dimensions in real life. ;)
> you explained how you made a new language from scratch in five weekends with no experience in compiler theory or language design.
I agree that the term is pretty meaningless, but I am pretty certain this would qualify under the most stringent of definitions. Personally, I prefer the term 'tinkerer', since it does not come with all the baggage but captures the spirit.
I'm definitely neither Bellard, nor a LISP millionaire, nor remotely DHH ... The verdict is in: I can't call myself a hacker
Bellard, pg and dhh are all human. So clearly you cannot be human. Please forgive the snark, I just found your reasoning very suspect here. The fact that a number of people fall within a category has no bearing on what the full extent of that category is.
I think you completely missed the point. Just because an example was a LISP millionaire, doesn't mean you aren't a hacker because you aren't a LISP millionaire.
Your post comes off as if someone said you don't belong, just because they tried to take some of the most famous examples that many people would classify as hackers.
It's like if I showed you a picture of a Ferrari as an example of a car and you said, "oh, I guess my Ford doesn't count as a car, I better just walk from now one".
In my post I said something along the lines of: I mostly tend to feel like an impostor, but maybe I am some kind of hacker according to some definitions. To which jeswin replied (paraphrased) "No, you see, hackers are actually this, that and the other", so I conceded the point that according to jeswin I'm very very far from being a hacker, and so is the vast majority of HN users. I also said earlier that I believe these labels are problematic anyway.
So I think your criticism should probably be addressed at jeswin, Ferrari analogy and all. Personally, I don't really care if I myself or anybody else here is officially considered a hacker | a real man | a successful person, or whatever.
I was about 9/10, not sure exactly, I came across some article that taught you how to create a virus using the windows notepad (lame, I know), turns out the "virus" was just a fork bomb written in ms-batch.
I quickly got into the hacker culture, I went into some underground forum where there was a big "ms-batch scene", I have no idea why, but this guys were implementing games in ascii, trojans, interpreters... all in Batch.
And so I started learning, Batch is a horrible language, yet pretty simple to learn, in the meantime I heard about this mythical developers who wrote code in C or Python, languages I thought inaccessible and extremely complex.
I remember my first "big" project, I wrote some kind of graphical adventure where you were a "hacker" trying to "hack" into someone's PC by using commands such as "ping" and "telnet" (I had no idea about system administration or pentesting at the time).
Thinking about that horrid code, take in mind this was Batch, so no private variables, no functions, no structs... just an endless pile of GOTOs.
This is even more funny considering that this was 5 or 6 years ago, in a time where Python, Ruby and Javascript were a thing, I could have gone the easy way, but I took the side-path... and I'm glad.
I am now 16, I still have a lot to learn yet I've also learnt a lot. I do consider myself a hacker, just because I write code for fun and like reinventing the wheel when possible. But the definition of "hacker" is very wide, for me, a "hacker" is everyone who enjoys writing code, maybe they work 8-17 writing Java in the Enterprise, but, if you enjoy what you do, if you come back home and keep writing code, if you want to improve: then you are a hacker.
I can relate to a lot of this though I'm not female I had some of the same early experiences. I did some BASIC on a VIC-20, some Logo on the school's Apples. Some programming in a specialized adventure game development tool on a Mac. I got lots of ad-hoc "systems" experience because I wanted to know how things worked behind the scenes. I never really considered doing "programming" as a career because it was "too much like math" or something. I didn't find out about Linux till I was 20 (this was in 1996, but still...not much cred!). I never would have had this career except for a lucky first job where I had so much time on my hands I learned how to program and automate all my tedious help-desk work. So they gave me more. Later took some comp-sci classes though never did finish a degree in it - its too hard to schedule 300+ level classes at night at a real university. I remember reading the description for the first batch of YCombinator and thinking "thats not me...". Now - I feel more like a hacker at 37 then ever before.
Anyway, Paul was really talking about the fact that he can't make someone into a hacker in three months. Never did he say that people can't become a hacker at the advanced age of 22.
I want the education sector to start treating the ability to programme as they do literacy and numeracy. Everyone should know how to write a letter and read, but not necessarily write a novel. Everyone should know how to count, but not need to win the Fields Medal. I believe that everyone should be comfortable with looking at a script and tweak it to their needs, but not necessarily have to create a AAA game from scratch.
I was vaguely aware of programming as a child, but had no education (unless you count mailmerge and a broken floor-turtle) and certainly no encouragement at school (in the UK if my spelling hasn't given it away). I basically forgot all about it until the middle of my degree (physics) when C was mandatory. It took until two years after a PhD to work out that a career in programming was what I really wanted.
Do I regret the way I got here? Nope. I learnt a lot of cool stuff along the way. But had it not been for that C course I may never have worked out what I wanted. I got lucky, and luck should not be a factor.
> I was vaguely aware of programming as a child, but had no education (unless you count mailmerge and a broken floor-turtle) and certainly no encouragement at school (in the UK if my spelling hasn't given it away).
I too was very vaguely aware, but in the mid nineties all I ever came across was Windows. Hell, I didn't start programming until I was 31, everyone else on this thread makes me feel like a real late starter.
> I basically forgot all about it until the middle of my degree (physics) when C was mandatory.
I thought FORTRAN would have been a good candidate for a mandatory language in a physics degree.
It was an option the year before, but not enough people wanted to take it and the class was cancelled. I'm glad to have learnt C, because it came with an introduction to bash and ssh. Whilst the terminals we used were windows, we were logging into a linux box via putty. This way I got to learn the UNIX way of writing tiny, single purpose programs that operate on STDIN and STDOUT for piping together. I guess the philosophical education was at least as important as the code itself.
> It was an option the year before, but not enough people wanted to take it and the class was cancelled.
Makes me wonder, if you were taking a physics degree now what would be on the table?
I started on C++, then downgraded to C, I prefer life to be simple (?$%?). I also threw out the IDE's and installed ubuntu alongside Windows.
A few weeks ago I lost my desktop and could only work in recovery mode. It was great, like living in the 1970's. tty only, using Vim and Joe as editors and reading help pages with elinks. Bash is smashing.
I believe python is popular these days, but I think C is still the language of choice. A few years back when I was a TA I was tutoring on a C course at Leeds university, and Sussex (where I did my undergrad) they're pretty hardcore, so I reckon it's still C with the occasional course in F77.
I started on emacs with that C course. These days I use sublime text for my own machines, and vim elsewhere (although I'm not very good). The end result of all this? I finish sentences with a semicolon and save with colon-w-q (or x, but wq is way more satisfying);
:wq
I was wondering if Haskell would be good for scientific computation. It has bignum like Python, but I think it is more popular among mathematicians than physicists.
Joe can emulate Emacs, Pico and another editor called WordStar (which I think is hardly ever used these days), but it doesn't emulate Vi. Perhaps the guy who wrote it hates Vi. Interestingly I believe Vi was designed for writing C source. Bill Joy was working on the first BSD OS around the same time, the original Vi was probably involved in the bootstrapping process.
To me, a hacker is someone who thinks creatively about problems, and who views technology as a set of tools to solve them. The YC question about "the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage" is, to me, most resonant of the 'hacker' ethos. Although many answers I've seen to this question involve using a computer system to solve a non-computer problem, the sheer variety of non-tech "hacks" out there speaks volumes about what a 'hacker' is and does.
To me, the label 'hacker' isn't claimed, it's earned. I call myself a hacker, though I didn't until someone else did. I've never broken into secure systems armed only with a 28.8 bps modem and active matrix screen, though -- I use it entirely in the 'problem-solver' sense of the word, and proudly.
Having programmed since childhood doesn't make me a hacker. I owe far more to years of Latin study, an unhealthy interest in logic problems and strategy games, and being trained via school that there is always a solution to every problem if you apply yourself hard enough.
But on the other hand, if I were just learning to program now, how much of the 'hacker' mindset would come along with it? Very little, in and of itself; I tutor beginning students and I'm always trying to teach them how to solve problems and look for answers, how to be creative and elegant, and how to reuse other people's work -- it wasn't until I started mentoring that I realised how little of this some people do naturally, and I still don't know the reasons why that is.
On a side note, and having just re-read Little Women, I have a thought about hacking and poverty. When you are poor, you have to be creative. How much of that mindset overlaps with what makes a good hacker? How many hackers grew up in disadvantaged circumstances and learned to make the most of the resources they had? How many hackers hung out in libraries, absorbing information like sponges, because it was free and warm and both their parents were at work?
In humans, differences in physical and behavioral traits tend to lead to isolation, which leads to cultural differences¹. That’s why the general trait of being very curious, experimental and focused on technology and problem-solving has given rise to (among others) the hacker culture and its associated persona. But, one need not consider oneself a part of the hacker culture if one does not want to. Indeed, one can be a programmer without having any of the above traits and/or consider oneself part of the hacker culture.
1) Regarding physical traits leading to culture, the same development can be seen to have given rise to Deaf culture, and also in the very concepts of “men” and “women”, which are more cultural in nature than most people think.
"Hacker" is more about confidence, it seems, and cowboy coding isn't really a good thing in most cases. Don't get me wrong: there are a lot of good things about hacker culture's emphasis on flowful programming, fast iteration, and frequent engagement (demo early and often). Those are all good things, but I feel like (especially thanks to the VC chickenhawking) there is now more of an emphasis on the superficial-- the overblown confidence that is usually just massive ego and upper-middle- to upper-class entitlement-- that if you don't have that arrogant air, you're not seen as a real hacker. This is sad, because we need technologists more than ever to attack the truly hard problems (cancer, oil scarcity, global warming, economic inequality) and instead, the VC's have created this Disneyfied technology economy that is 99% hot air. It wouldn't be a problem if that nonsense were self-limiting, but it's now transferred so much wealth to undeserving people as to have set off a terrible and probably permanent housing price problem in the Bay Area.
Being a programmer does not make you a hacker. In fact, being a brilliant programmer does not make your a hacker. I suppose its like being a driver does not make you a racing driver. Hacking existed long before computers and programming.
This resonated a lot with me as well -- elementary school computer science education in the '90s wasn't very developed. I went to a high school that had one of the better computer science programs for that level (in that it existed), but it still wasn't anything compared to the university level. The people who really learned the stuff were a self-motivated group who interacted outside of class as a club. These kinds of extracurricular studies were at best ignored by school faculty, and for students like myself, who was falling behind the curve in the school's demanding math/science/language program, were actively discouraged.
There's a crucial distinction between my experience and hers, though. I had the support of a core group of computer nerds, egging each other on and making simple games and the like. This group was almost entirely male, and were mostly interested in other stereotypical geeky hobbies like video games, anime, and tabletop role-playing games. We weren't consciously exclusionary, but anyone who didn't match the profile was probably going to feel very out of place.
I remember in my CS course, there were two girls in the class, and they were most definitely not part of the clique, even though they were brilliant by most objective definitions. One of them was definitely in the "gifted" category, and while the rest of the class was concerned with making video games, she was writing an equation plotter. We didn't talk to her all that much.
My point with all this rambling is that there's a lot of bundling of interests that goes on, all of them male-dominated, and if you aren't into those things, you don't get the same peer education as somebody who is. I think this explains a lot of the gender disparity we see in CS education today, and I don't know what to do about it. Education should not be tied to social cliques, but in reality, it often is.
My initial reaction was "that's not the definition of hacker" but when I tried to find a written definition that matched what was in my head, I kept running into the related stereotypes and connotations (e.g. being completely obsessed with computers, Richard Stallman talking about coding until 7 in the morning).
My takeaway is this: a lot of us feel impostor syndrome, feel that we'll never be a true hacker. The difference is it appears easier for men, for whatever reason, to ignore or move beyond those feelings. And you know maybe that's a problem we should take seriously.
>Despite these feelings of difference, we find that male students report less distress, are less affected by the perceived difference between themselves and their peers, and leave the major in smaller proportion; and despite resistance to total absorption in computing, they do not feel like frauds. The 36% of male CS majors who say they feel different from their CS peers, regardless of experience level or obsession level, do not question their ability to become computer scientists if they choose to do so.
That's basically what I had in mind, with liberal use of the word "clever" thrown in for good measure. A concrete example outside of tech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6921316
My concern, however, is even if you can produce a benign definition the term still has additional baggage that may be harmful.
There's an argument to be made for the negative connotations contributing to the term's longevity and adoption. In an environment where the myth of the genius is alive and kicking, taboos need to be broken to qualify for the label, though it's not always important what those taboos (social or otherwise) are as long as you have some worthy advocates.
A lot of this labeling is done in hindsight, unsurprisingly, and it's going to become more tame as the definition gets generalized and romanticized. Even the coding part is slowly becoming less important, as shown in some of the posts and links here. Eventually there will be some other club to place the exceptional in. We can pretend there's no value judgement in calling someone a "hacker" all we want, but that doesn't ring true. FWIW, my favorite hacker: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author)
That article could have been written about music and musicians. I'm a working jazz musician, and the number of women who I encounter on the bandstand is depressingly small.
The inroads made by women in classical music, especially when compared with other areas of the music business, are striking. And the levels of physical and emotional stamina needed to compete on the orchestral audition circuit are _staggering_.
The ultimate coding interview. ;-)
I've never had to compete at that level. Almost all of my calls are based on word-of-mouth. But I still remember my first paid gig. Talk about impostor syndrome!
>And you know maybe that's a problem we should take seriously.
Why? I'm not trying to be snarky; I just don't see how this is a big deal at all, or why it's worth trying to "fix" it (if you believe that anything is "broken").
What happens if there are fewer women studying CS? Do we reach critical levels and then people stop caring like how nobody says anything about the lack of men in hospitality and child care?
That was my initial reaction also. I think our minds are old. I recently wrote a post (http://jonblack.org/2014/01/01/everyones-hacker/) about how the definition of "hacker" seems to be far broader than it used to be.
I consider myself a professional, and not a hacker or a hack. It is a somewhat derogatory, and as a programmer I can tell you don't have to accept it. Just correct them if someone call you.
There is an application for a incubator, they asked if there are any hackers on the team. We 3 programmers looked at each other and filled out: no, no hackers in our company.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadhttp://pando.com/2014/01/02/from-coding-to-the-catwalk-this-...
I'm not really saying we need to promote pizza and staying up all night coding, it's that we need to maybe make it more inclusive, to encourage more people to join the tech party.
Yet, I am arguably successful. I got a job offer from Amazon at the start of my senior year and took it, and of course, I eventually want to start my own company that's why I'm on this site. I understand the stigma because I personally have never told anyone I only started programming in college. I've never been asked either. I love playing around with new languages and learning all I can about software, but I don't feel I'm that far behind people who started programming early if even behind at all.
We need to stop acting like people who have been programming since kids have a huge advantage. It is much more about what you constantly put in, and there are numerous other ways to be a hacker then just programming. Most people who didn't program might already have the "hacker" in them and just need to attach the programming element of it.
But perhaps what I see is that this is really nice, and why can't we share it with more people? Hacking isn't a zero-sum game. If we double the number of people trying to write open source, isn't that a win for everybody?
It's not like encouraging somebody else to write code takes my job away, or dilutes the amount of genius to go around.
Think positively, my friend. "Socialism" may or may not work when we're building massive factories built out of atoms, but perhaps the economy of bits works differently than the economy of atoms.
Disclosure: http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/01/03/hello-my-name-is-...
I never suggested that we should'nt be encouraging more hackers, the point I was making is that the article is suggesting that the hacker stereotype is bad because it makes people feel inferior.
I'm not in the same category at all, but I think of people like Feynman, he was not shy about criticizing policies he disliked, but he also worked tirelessly to bring more people into science.
(I listened to your interview on Javascript Jabber.)
But I also ran into some very encouraging people at key moments in my youth, for example there were various students at UofT who encouraged me to tinker with WATFIV and SNOBOL programs on punch cards. Some even let me use their terminals to play with APL.
I cannot say what would have happened if they had shooed me away and/or called security, but I think that my longevity in programming owes something to people who were welcoming.
The stereotype of prodigies in sports is also hurting everyone like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, why should other sports people be disadvantaged by not starting at an early age. Really?
"Hacker" doesn't equate to the best software engineer, the best founder, or much of anything other than having benefited from a longer period of time to gain experience—extra time that may or may not have been used effectively to gain additional knowledge
This hasnt been my experience, seems like a lot of what ifs.
I wanted to use internet so bad but I was not allowed a computer so I always hung out at the public library and I wished more than anything to use the internet as much as possible.
I thought by asking how does the computer know when the 30 minute is up? There must be a timer! Can I prevent the timer?
Sure enough, for half a second there's a dos terminal in windows 95 that is displayed when I restart the computer. It took a few tries but I managed to close it. 30 minutes passed and I was still on it. then an hour, another hour passes and I'm still not logged out!
I used the internet all the day from morning to dark. I let my sister use it too when I wanted to take a 'break'. I would see people check the wait list look over at me and leave very annoyed.
The next week, the librarian who remembered me told me they would need my library card as collateral, and that they will be keeping tabs on the time. the jig was up.
This was my hacker moment. not exactly sophisticated but I wanted something so bad and I got it.
I was primarily interested in gamehacking and web exploitation. I made a few friends from these communities and we often shared stupid exploits with eachother such as uploading some html file deep in a large corporations file structure and linking it between us for laughs.
My friend messages me one day that he managed to upload a c99 shell on a large website. He linked me to it, but deep within the structure to a plain text database of millions of credit cards.
Fast forward two months later: I'm ratting out every connection I know along with emails/names/info to the police, after they kicked my door down and seized literally every computing device in my house.
Phones, computers, tablets, desktop computers, and my NAS'. It's been 8 years and I have yet to hear from the police and they have dodged my emails, in person visits, and calls every time.
I lost over $10,000 worth of computer equipment. This was my hacker moment.
Pre-internet, early 80s, I had my first computer, a Commodore 64. I was pretty active on the local BBS's and some long distance ones via an open modem relay I discovered at a local General Motors plant while wardialing.
I started using a new service called Quantum Link and hung out with a lot of shady characters that were doing phreaking and credit card number passing.
That's a path I probably would have continued down until one day I received a call from a guy saying he was with the FBI, that they new what I was doing, and were going to be paying me a visit.
Being something like 12, 13 years old, I freaked out and quickly hid all my pirated floppies and took my C=64 down to my friends house to hide it.
After a couple of weeks my patience wore out and I got my system back, but kept my nose clean after that (other than copying software, you couldn't have a C=64 and not trade with friends:).
It was only after four or five years later that I found out that the "FBI agent" was actually a friend of my friend's older brother. Doh! Probably all for the best.
The computers at the local public library had Windows (XP maybe?), we could use them for an hour or more depending on how many people wanted to use the computers. They also had computers in a kid section which had some games and limited internet access (the library's portal) and some more computers in another section which only had access to the library's portal. Once I was using a computer which was only supposed to be used to check books, somehow I discovered that a lot of times the library's portal also had a link to the item in Amazon, and from Amazon I could get into Google and then to any website. I got caught and scolded by a librarian, she told me "If you ever used this computers to get into the internet again, we are going to cancel your library card" or something like, well I never used those computers for the internet again. I used the ones in the kids section and it felt awesome.
Another significant thing that at that time didn't seem that significant was when I checked out a thick programming book on C or C++ I am not sure. I had a vague idea about what a program was and I had read thick books before. I didn't even had a computer at my house but I was so curious. I opened it tried to make sense out of the text but I couldn't, it seemed like Chinese. The next day I returned the book and I never again got interested in programming until high school.
What sparked my interest soon after that was creating my own website after my dad helped me host it on a free server. I still have a copy of it backed up on a cd somewhere. It was created with Netscape Navigator. I showed my teacher and classmates. It was magic. It was so awesome.
I took a course that taught Visual Basic and also QBasic in junior high. It bored me because we were making very simple apps that I already knew. Wasn't learning anything new. Also whenever I sped ahead or began working on other things instructor would emphasize that I was to follow her step by step in an excruciatingly slow pace that the rest of the students had to follow. If she saw someone speeding ahead she would get angry and say STOP. Killed my interest in programming.
Then came along counter-strike and and things pretty much went downhill from there. It ruined my academic career playing it so much. I found out that the guy who created counter strike also graduated from the university I would attend some years after.
It wasn't until I saw my high school friend (nerdy guy who I used to tease in high school but was secretly jealous of his programming knowledge) in University that he inspired me to do what I thought was unthinkable, learn how to code again. "You just stick with it" is what he told me when I asked how he did it. He would show me the windows apps he made and I would be amazed how one could create something from nothing. Even now, that is the magic that drives me. Something out of nothing, and I stuck with it.
I miss those days, being a youngster and programming: doing without totally understanding but still learning. I still do stuff on my own, though, but no one will look at it or care.
But now all I do is fix bugs. I got one job after school, where I created something new. Looking back on it now, it was garbage but it was my garbage. That was the last time, though. Now I do 'sustaining' work. I don't mind but it feels like the industry as a whole has turned their back on me. I'm considering doing a startup sooner or later.
Spending a few hours over the evenings and weekends is totally doable, and within a few weeks you'll have gotten further than you may think!
That's true. I do try to do stuff like this bug it's hard to find meaning, though.
I dont remember that being the stereotype for hackers. I would be interested to hear from other people about what they think? But to me it has been someone who is intensely interested in computers and is very good at it. What they wear (wow really shallow much) hasnt really ever factored into it.
Growing up my stereotype of 'hackers' was of unfit boys with an almost monk-like isolation and dedication to their projects surrounded by fizzy drinks. ... Which, for all that I liked programming, wasn't something that made me identify with that role.
Perhaps an unfair characterisation. If you want to be among the best at anything it's going to demand a massive amount of your time, which necessarily has to be drawn from time making friends outside of that area and engaging in other more widely pro-social activities. And things always appear more extreme from the outside than they actually are. I don't know. I just know that, looking back, I can't think of anyone who identified themselves as a hacker who had any friends that any of us knew about.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/dress.html
Certainly for me, that entire section of his website (and also his hacker-howto.html) was something that I took seriously when I was in grade school and first learning about hacker culture. Even today I doubt there are things on the web with better claims to defining and documenting the hacker stereotype as Eric Raymond's writings.
I think the issue is that the word hacker has too many meanings, and some of them contradictory. A hacker can be a prankster, a skilled programmer, a creative programmer, a skilled/creative programmer with some vague ideology that supports freedom of information, a computer security breacher, a person who tinkers with electronics, a person who subverts any type of system or authority (reality hacker/culture jammer), any sort of whimsical and creative fellow who applies unorthodox solutions to his everyday life, etc.
In addition, a hack can mean: an unskilled or untalented person, a charlatan, an inelegant but efficient solution to a problem (a kludge), an inelegant and inefficient solution to a problem (cruft), an elegant but unconventional solution to a problem, a skilled application of marketing (growth hack), a culture jam (reality hack), hacking off a limb, a prank, a computer security exploit or breach, a program to cheat at video games and so forth.
As far as I know, the "hacker" stereotype is that of the skilled but evil and socially isolated computer criminal.
One example of this is what I will generically call the "Google Interview". I know brilliant engineers how have done massive non-trivial projects that have generated millions of dollars in revenue who could not pass such an interview.
The other aspect is the constant exposure to the language-of-the-day and framework-of-the-day club. I can see a young aspiring developer becoming utterly disappointed when realizing it is nearly impossible to keep up with it all. Where do you start? How do you learn this stuff? Someone could very easily think they are not up to par if they can't walk in these mythical shoes.
The truth is very different from that. There's a huge world out there for software engineers. There are real problems to be solved. And, no, not everything in software engineering lives and dies on a web browser or a smart phone.
Is the OP saying that she needed to feel like a hacker to feel legitimate? That would be sad.
What the hell is a hacker anyway? Definitions abound. In many ways it is more about how someone might approach hardware and software problems than anything else. You don't have to be YC material to be a legitimate software engineer. One could very easily argue there are tons of software engineers out there doing far more important work than almost any YC developer has done to date. Most of them are invisible. Think about the people writing code for MRI machines, aircraft avionics or even your car's ABS system.
If you are young and love software engineering please don't think that building websites is the only way you are going to become somebody in this business. Explore what's out there and dare to learn about other interesting problems you might be able to solve.
Hi! I am not, and I agree that it would be sad. I am happy to be satisfied with who I am, what I do, and where I'm going. I may not identify with the term "hacker" due to some of its connotations, but I do feel like I get to playfully work on difficult things--one of the few definitions of a hacker I relate to and fortunately the one that I think best embodies its true spirit.
Unfortunately, many people I know who have yet to feel established in the field do feel at least a small need to relate to the "hacker" to feel like a software engineer. As there are parts of this I could relate to (even if they are not bringing me down right now), I thought I'd share my experiences.
There's a lot of folklore going around in places like HN. Very soon kids are going to think that if they don't use vim, reject the mouse and do away with Windows they will never be real software developers. It's a bunch of macho nonsense.
I started programming sprite and 3D demos in DirectDraw/Direct3D at age 11. I wrote a microkernel for a hobby in high school.
I'm in grad-school now, and I still don't feel like a "hacker" or a "real computer scientist", because I don't eat and drink RFCs, crypto specs, deep-learning algorithms, and every web technology under the sun. And because I'd much rather spend my time at an anime convention than A/B testing a new website feature or cross-validating a recommendation algorithm.
Plenty of very competent professionals are merely very good at what we do and not actually married to the job.
I know the feeling, and (though I'm male) I recognize many of the waypoints described. And I, too, don't feel like a real hacker. But of course, the word means wildly different things to different people. Even though I love programming very much and I'm doing it all the time, and especially doing it for fun, it was only after joining HN that it dawned on me I could be considered a hacker in some circles.
Still, my primary definition of being a hacker is someone who is insanely active in hacker and cracker culture, someone very interested in systems security, someone who knows to debug a defunct DSL modem given only an oscilloscope and a bit of tinfoil. That's not me.
If I were to apply for a VC program that looks for hackers, I'd probably feel like a bad fit or a complete fraud. Nevertheless, I probably am a hacker. Labels are always an imperfect solution.
One other thing about getting people to program: Male or female, I wouldn't know where to start either. In school I was literally the only kid into actual programming, out of about 500 students. It was only much later in life that I made my first actual programmer friend, and I also recruited an unhappy English major into programming, but most people just aren't interested. And of those who can, and by necessity must, program most would never do it in their spare time for fun.
- http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
- http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
- The guys at hack-a-day or nyc resistor are hackers.
- Fabrice Bellard is a hacker, for reasons you can see at http://bellard.org/
- People who are _really good_ at *nixen are hackers, because of the nature of the beast. Unix isn't about learning everything from a book, instead you could hack it with what you know.
- PG is a hacker for using LISP to build Viaweb (and ARC etc), but not for "hacking" the startup ecosystem (that's just overuse of the term).
- DHH is a hacker, for the creative ways in which he pushed Ruby
The key thing is "hack value". Hack value is about your technical expertise and your creativity, and both of these things have to be present.
I'm definitely neither Bellard, nor a LISP millionaire, nor remotely DHH, and I already talked about the hack-a-day guys in my oscilloscope comment. The verdict is in: I can't call myself a hacker. So what's the message here for people like me? I guess the conclusion is for starters that I really am an impostor in a lot of ways, including participating on this site.
I don't know what it makes you, but I think that's pretty awesome - and since I'm not a hacker myself (for the same reasons you say you are not really a hacker), me saying you're a hacker wouldn't make any sens.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not really concerned about being an impostor, I actually rather enjoy being an impostor of somewhat horrifying dimensions in real life. ;)
I agree that the term is pretty meaningless, but I am pretty certain this would qualify under the most stringent of definitions. Personally, I prefer the term 'tinkerer', since it does not come with all the baggage but captures the spirit.
Bellard, pg and dhh are all human. So clearly you cannot be human. Please forgive the snark, I just found your reasoning very suspect here. The fact that a number of people fall within a category has no bearing on what the full extent of that category is.
Your post comes off as if someone said you don't belong, just because they tried to take some of the most famous examples that many people would classify as hackers.
It's like if I showed you a picture of a Ferrari as an example of a car and you said, "oh, I guess my Ford doesn't count as a car, I better just walk from now one".
In my post I said something along the lines of: I mostly tend to feel like an impostor, but maybe I am some kind of hacker according to some definitions. To which jeswin replied (paraphrased) "No, you see, hackers are actually this, that and the other", so I conceded the point that according to jeswin I'm very very far from being a hacker, and so is the vast majority of HN users. I also said earlier that I believe these labels are problematic anyway.
So I think your criticism should probably be addressed at jeswin, Ferrari analogy and all. Personally, I don't really care if I myself or anybody else here is officially considered a hacker | a real man | a successful person, or whatever.
I was about 9/10, not sure exactly, I came across some article that taught you how to create a virus using the windows notepad (lame, I know), turns out the "virus" was just a fork bomb written in ms-batch.
I quickly got into the hacker culture, I went into some underground forum where there was a big "ms-batch scene", I have no idea why, but this guys were implementing games in ascii, trojans, interpreters... all in Batch.
And so I started learning, Batch is a horrible language, yet pretty simple to learn, in the meantime I heard about this mythical developers who wrote code in C or Python, languages I thought inaccessible and extremely complex.
I remember my first "big" project, I wrote some kind of graphical adventure where you were a "hacker" trying to "hack" into someone's PC by using commands such as "ping" and "telnet" (I had no idea about system administration or pentesting at the time).
Thinking about that horrid code, take in mind this was Batch, so no private variables, no functions, no structs... just an endless pile of GOTOs.
This is even more funny considering that this was 5 or 6 years ago, in a time where Python, Ruby and Javascript were a thing, I could have gone the easy way, but I took the side-path... and I'm glad.
I am now 16, I still have a lot to learn yet I've also learnt a lot. I do consider myself a hacker, just because I write code for fun and like reinventing the wheel when possible. But the definition of "hacker" is very wide, for me, a "hacker" is everyone who enjoys writing code, maybe they work 8-17 writing Java in the Enterprise, but, if you enjoy what you do, if you come back home and keep writing code, if you want to improve: then you are a hacker.
Anyway, Paul was really talking about the fact that he can't make someone into a hacker in three months. Never did he say that people can't become a hacker at the advanced age of 22.
I was vaguely aware of programming as a child, but had no education (unless you count mailmerge and a broken floor-turtle) and certainly no encouragement at school (in the UK if my spelling hasn't given it away). I basically forgot all about it until the middle of my degree (physics) when C was mandatory. It took until two years after a PhD to work out that a career in programming was what I really wanted.
Do I regret the way I got here? Nope. I learnt a lot of cool stuff along the way. But had it not been for that C course I may never have worked out what I wanted. I got lucky, and luck should not be a factor.
I too was very vaguely aware, but in the mid nineties all I ever came across was Windows. Hell, I didn't start programming until I was 31, everyone else on this thread makes me feel like a real late starter.
> I basically forgot all about it until the middle of my degree (physics) when C was mandatory.
I thought FORTRAN would have been a good candidate for a mandatory language in a physics degree.
Makes me wonder, if you were taking a physics degree now what would be on the table?
I started on C++, then downgraded to C, I prefer life to be simple (?$%?). I also threw out the IDE's and installed ubuntu alongside Windows.
A few weeks ago I lost my desktop and could only work in recovery mode. It was great, like living in the 1970's. tty only, using Vim and Joe as editors and reading help pages with elinks. Bash is smashing.
I started on emacs with that C course. These days I use sublime text for my own machines, and vim elsewhere (although I'm not very good). The end result of all this? I finish sentences with a semicolon and save with colon-w-q (or x, but wq is way more satisfying); :wq
Joe can emulate Emacs, Pico and another editor called WordStar (which I think is hardly ever used these days), but it doesn't emulate Vi. Perhaps the guy who wrote it hates Vi. Interestingly I believe Vi was designed for writing C source. Bill Joy was working on the first BSD OS around the same time, the original Vi was probably involved in the bootstrapping process.
If you want a massive list of editors:
http://texteditors.org
To me, the label 'hacker' isn't claimed, it's earned. I call myself a hacker, though I didn't until someone else did. I've never broken into secure systems armed only with a 28.8 bps modem and active matrix screen, though -- I use it entirely in the 'problem-solver' sense of the word, and proudly.
Having programmed since childhood doesn't make me a hacker. I owe far more to years of Latin study, an unhealthy interest in logic problems and strategy games, and being trained via school that there is always a solution to every problem if you apply yourself hard enough.
But on the other hand, if I were just learning to program now, how much of the 'hacker' mindset would come along with it? Very little, in and of itself; I tutor beginning students and I'm always trying to teach them how to solve problems and look for answers, how to be creative and elegant, and how to reuse other people's work -- it wasn't until I started mentoring that I realised how little of this some people do naturally, and I still don't know the reasons why that is.
On a side note, and having just re-read Little Women, I have a thought about hacking and poverty. When you are poor, you have to be creative. How much of that mindset overlaps with what makes a good hacker? How many hackers grew up in disadvantaged circumstances and learned to make the most of the resources they had? How many hackers hung out in libraries, absorbing information like sponges, because it was free and warm and both their parents were at work?
1) Regarding physical traits leading to culture, the same development can be seen to have given rise to Deaf culture, and also in the very concepts of “men” and “women”, which are more cultural in nature than most people think.
There's a crucial distinction between my experience and hers, though. I had the support of a core group of computer nerds, egging each other on and making simple games and the like. This group was almost entirely male, and were mostly interested in other stereotypical geeky hobbies like video games, anime, and tabletop role-playing games. We weren't consciously exclusionary, but anyone who didn't match the profile was probably going to feel very out of place.
I remember in my CS course, there were two girls in the class, and they were most definitely not part of the clique, even though they were brilliant by most objective definitions. One of them was definitely in the "gifted" category, and while the rest of the class was concerned with making video games, she was writing an equation plotter. We didn't talk to her all that much.
My point with all this rambling is that there's a lot of bundling of interests that goes on, all of them male-dominated, and if you aren't into those things, you don't get the same peer education as somebody who is. I think this explains a lot of the gender disparity we see in CS education today, and I don't know what to do about it. Education should not be tied to social cliques, but in reality, it often is.
I then read this link given in the article and I think I understand better http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/gendergap/www/geekmyth....
My takeaway is this: a lot of us feel impostor syndrome, feel that we'll never be a true hacker. The difference is it appears easier for men, for whatever reason, to ignore or move beyond those feelings. And you know maybe that's a problem we should take seriously.
>Despite these feelings of difference, we find that male students report less distress, are less affected by the perceived difference between themselves and their peers, and leave the major in smaller proportion; and despite resistance to total absorption in computing, they do not feel like frauds. The 36% of male CS majors who say they feel different from their CS peers, regardless of experience level or obsession level, do not question their ability to become computer scientists if they choose to do so.
Specifically, "Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking."
My concern, however, is even if you can produce a benign definition the term still has additional baggage that may be harmful.
The inroads made by women in classical music, especially when compared with other areas of the music business, are striking. And the levels of physical and emotional stamina needed to compete on the orchestral audition circuit are _staggering_.
The ultimate coding interview. ;-)
I've never had to compete at that level. Almost all of my calls are based on word-of-mouth. But I still remember my first paid gig. Talk about impostor syndrome!
Why? I'm not trying to be snarky; I just don't see how this is a big deal at all, or why it's worth trying to "fix" it (if you believe that anything is "broken").