There is a community, a shared
culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the
first time-sharing minicomputers and
the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The
members of this culture originated
the term ‘hacker.’ There is another group of people
who loudly call themselves hackers,
but aren't. These are people who get
a kick out of breaking into computers
and phreaking the phone system.
Real hackers call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers object that being able to break
security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being
able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. There are people who apply the true hacker attitude to
other things, like electronics or music — but in the rest of
this article we will focus the skills and attitudes of software
hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that
originated the term ‘hacker.'
STEPS TO BECOMING A HACKER
Thinking Like a Hacker
Adopt the mindset of a hacker. Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and
voluntary mutual help. To be accepted as a hacker, you
have to behave as though you have this kind of attitude
yourself. And to behave as though you have the attitude,
you have to really believe the attitude. So, if you want to
be a hacker, repeat the following things until you believe them: The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to
be solved. Successful athletes get their motivation
from a kind of physical delight in making their bodies
perform, in pushing themselves past their own
physical limits. Similarly, you have to get a basic thrill
from solving problems, sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence. No problem should ever have to be solved twice. The
thinking time of other hackers is precious — so much
so that it's almost a moral duty for you to share
information, solve problems and then give the
solutions away just so other hackers can solve new
problems instead of having to perpetually re-address old ones. Boredom and drudgery are evil. When hackers are
bored or have to drudge at stupid repetitive work,
they aren't doing what only they can do — solve new
problems. To behave like a hacker, you have to want
to automate away the boring bits as much as
possible. Freedom is good. The authoritarian attitude has to be
fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and
other hackers. Not all authority figures are
authoritarian, however; authoritarians thrive on
censorship and secrecy. And they distrust voluntary
cooperation and information-sharing. Attitude is no substitute for competence. Hackers
won't let posers waste their time, but they recognize
competence — especially competence at hacking,
but competence at anything is valued. Competence at
demanding skills that few can master is especially
good, and competence at demanding skills that involve mental acuteness, craft, and concentration is
best.
Earn respect as a hacker. Like most cultures without a monetary economy, hackerdom runs on reputation.
You're trying to solve interesting problems, but how
interesting they are, and whether your solutions are
really good, is something that only your technical peers
or superiors are normally equipped to judge. This is why
you aren't really a hacker until other hackers consistently call you one. Specifically, hackerdom is what
anthropologists call a "gift culture." You gain status and
reputation in it not by dominating other people, nor by
being beautiful, nor by having things other people want,
but rather by giving things away: your time, your
creativity, and the results of your skill. Write open-source software. Write programs that other hackers think are fun or useful, and give the
program sources away to the whole hacker culture to
use. Hackerdom's most revered demigods are people
who have written large, capable programs that met a
widespread need and given them away, so that now
everyone uses them. Help test and debug open-source software. Any open-
source author who's thinking will tell you that good
beta-testers (who know how to describe symptoms
clearly, localize problems well, can tolerate bugs in a
quickie release, and are willing to apply a few simple
diagnostic routines) are worth their weight in rubies. Try to find a program under development that you're
interested in and be a good beta-tester. There's a
natural progression from helping test programs to
helping debug them to helping modify them. You'll
learn a lot this way, and generate good karma with people who will help you later on. Publish useful information. Another good thing is to
collect and filter useful and interesting information
into web pages or documents like Frequently Asked
Questions (FAQ) lists, and make those generally
available. Maintainers of major technical FAQs get
almost as much respect as open-source authors. Help keep the infrastructure working. The hacker
culture (and the engineering development of the
Internet, for that matter) is run by volunteers. There's
a lot of necessary but unglamorous work that needs
done to keep it going — administering mailing lists,
moderating newsgroups, maintaining large software archive sites, developing RFCs and other technical
standards. People who do this sort of thing well get a
lot of respect, because everybody knows these jobs
are huge time sinks and not as much fun as playing
with code. Doing them shows dedication. Serve the hacker culture itself. This is not something
you'll be positioned to do until you've been around
for a while and become well-known for one of the
four previous items. The hacker culture doesn't have
leaders, exactly, but it does have culture heroes and
tribal elders and historians and spokespeople. When you've been in the trenches long enough, you may
grow into one of these. Beware: hackers distrust
blatant ego in their tribal elders, so visibly reaching
for this kind of fame is dangerous. Rather than
striving for it, you have to sort of position yourself so
it drops in your lap, and then be modest and gracious about your status.
LEARNING PROGRAMMING
Learn how to program. The best way to learn is to read some stuff written by masters of the form, write some
things yourself, read a lot more, write a little more, read
a lot more, write some more, and repeat until your
writing begins to develop the kind of strength and
economy you see in your models. To be a real hacker,
however, you need to get to the point where you can learn a new language in days by relating what's in the
manual to what you already know. This means you
should learn several very different languages. Besides
being the most important hacking languages, the
following represent very different approaches to
programming, and each will educate you in valuable ways: Python is a good language to start off with because it's cleanly designed, well documented, and relatively
kind to beginners. Despite being a good first
language, it is not just a toy; it is very powerful and
flexible and well-suited for large projects. Java is an alternative, but its value as a first programming
language has been questioned. If you get into serious programming, you will have to
learn C, the core language of Unix (C++ is very closely related to C; if you know one, learning the other will
not be difficult). C is very efficient with your
machine's resources, but will soak up huge amounts
of your time on debugging and is often avoided for
that reason (unless machine efficiency is essential). Perl is worth learning for practical reasons; it's very widely used for active web pages and system
administration, so that even if you never write Perl
you should learn to read it. Many people use Perl to
avoid C programming on jobs that don't require C's
machine efficiency. LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the
profound enlightenment experience you will have
when you finally get it. That experience will make
you a better programmer for the rest of your days,
even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot. You can
get some beginning experience with LISP fairly easily by writing and modifying editing modes for the
Emacs text editor, or Script-Fu plugins for the GIMP.
Familiarizing Yourself With Unix
Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and
run it. Unix is the operating system of the Internet. While you can learn to use the Internet without knowing Unix,
you can't be an Internet hacker without understanding
Unix. For this reason, the hacker culture today is pretty
strongly Unix-centered. So, bring up a Unix (like Linux but there are other ways and yes, you can run both Linux and
Microsoft Windows on the same machine). Learn it. Run
it. Tinker with it. Talk to the Internet with it. Read the
code. Modify the code. There are other operating systems in the world
besides Unix. But they're distributed in binary — you
can't read the code, and you can't modify it. Trying to
learn to hack on a Microsoft Windows machine or
under any other closed-source system is like trying to
learn to dance while wearing a body cast. Under Mac OS X it's possible, but only part of the system is open
source — you're likely to hit a lot of walls, and you
have to be careful not to develop the bad habit of
depending on Apple's proprietary code. Download Linux online or (better idea) find a local Linux user group to help you with installation. While other distros have their own areas of strength, Ubuntu is far and away the most accessible to Linux newbies. A good way to dip your toes in the water is to boot
up what Linux fans call a live CD, a distribution that
runs entirely off a CD without having to modify your
hard disk. This is a way to get a look at the
possibilities without having to do anything drastic.
Learning HTML
Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML. Most of the things the hacker culture has built do their
work out of sight, helping run factories and offices and
universities without any obvious impact on how non-
hackers live. The Web is the one big exception, the huge
shiny hacker toy that even politicians admit has changed
the world. For this reason alone (and a lot of other good ones as well) you need to learn how to work the Web.
This doesn't just mean learning how to drive a browser
(anyone can do that), but learning how to write HTML, the Web's markup language. If you don't know how to
program, writing HTML will teach you some mental
habits that will help you learn. So build a home page. Try
to stick to XHTML, which is a cleaner language than classic HTML.
Tips
Work as intensely as you play, and play as intensely as
you work. For true hackers, the boundaries between
"play," "work," "science," and "art" all tend to disappear,
or to merge into a high-level creative playfulness. Don't be content with a narrow range of skills. Though
most hackers describe themselves as programmers, they
are very likely to be more than competent in several
related skills — system administration, Web design, and
PC hardware troubleshooting are common ones. Hackers
don't do things by halves; if they invest in a skill at all, they tend to get very good at it. You don't have to believe that you're obligated to give
all your creative product away, though the hackers that
do are the ones that get most respect from other
hackers. It's consistent with hacker values to sell enough
of it to keep you in food and rent and computers. It's
fine to use your hacking skills to support a family or even get rich, as long as you don't forget your loyalty to your art and your fellow hackers while doing it. Contrary to popular myth, you don't have to be a nerd to
be a hacker. It does help, however, and many hackers
are in fact nerds. Being something of a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important
things, like thinking and hacking. If you can manage to
concentrate enough on hacking to be good at it and still
have a life, that's fine. Mainstream culture is much
friendlier to techno-nerds now. To be a hacker, you have to enter the hacker mindset,
and there are some things you can do when you're not
at a computer that seem to help. They're not substitutes
for hacking (nothing is) but many hackers do them, and
feel that they connect in some basic way with the
essence of hacking (hackers need to be able to both reason logically and step outside the apparent logic of a
problem at a moment's notice). Write your native language well. Though it's a
common stereotype that programmers can't write,
a surprising number of hackers are very able
writers. Read science fiction. Go to science fiction conventions (a good way to meet hackers and
proto-hackers). Train in a martial art. The kind of mental discipline required for martial arts seems to be similar in
important ways to what hackers do. The most
hacker-ly martial arts are those which emphasize
mental discipline, relaxed awareness, and control,
rather than raw strength, athleticism, or physical
toughness. Tai Chi is a good martial art for hackers. Study an actual meditation discipline. The perennial favorite among hackers is Zen (importantly, it is possible to benefit from Zen
without acquiring a religion or discarding one you
already have). Develop an analytical ear for music. Learn to appreciate peculiar kinds of music, and to play some musical instrument well, or how to sing. Develop your appreciation for puns and wordplay. Master creative thinking. The hacker mentality is
driven by creatively solving problems. This
creativity gives you the ability to solve problems
others see as unsolvable. If you don't speak English, it might be a good idea to learn it. English is the working language of the hacker culture and the Internet, and you might need to know it
to function in the hacker community. Translations of
technical books written in English are often
unsatisfactory (when they get done at all). Being a native
English-speaker does not guarantee that you have
language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled
with misspellings, many hackers will tend to ignore you.
culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the
first time-sharing minicomputers and
the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The
members of this culture originated
the term ‘hacker.’ There is another group of people
who loudly call themselves hackers,
but aren't. These are people who get
a kick out of breaking into computers
and phreaking the phone system.
Real hackers call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers object that being able to break
security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being
able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. There are people who apply the true hacker attitude to
other things, like electronics or music — but in the rest of
this article we will focus the skills and attitudes of software
hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that
originated the term ‘hacker.'
STEPS TO BECOMING A HACKER
Thinking Like a Hacker
Adopt the mindset of a hacker. Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and
voluntary mutual help. To be accepted as a hacker, you
have to behave as though you have this kind of attitude
yourself. And to behave as though you have the attitude,
you have to really believe the attitude. So, if you want to
be a hacker, repeat the following things until you believe them: The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to
be solved. Successful athletes get their motivation
from a kind of physical delight in making their bodies
perform, in pushing themselves past their own
physical limits. Similarly, you have to get a basic thrill
from solving problems, sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence. No problem should ever have to be solved twice. The
thinking time of other hackers is precious — so much
so that it's almost a moral duty for you to share
information, solve problems and then give the
solutions away just so other hackers can solve new
problems instead of having to perpetually re-address old ones. Boredom and drudgery are evil. When hackers are
bored or have to drudge at stupid repetitive work,
they aren't doing what only they can do — solve new
problems. To behave like a hacker, you have to want
to automate away the boring bits as much as
possible. Freedom is good. The authoritarian attitude has to be
fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and
other hackers. Not all authority figures are
authoritarian, however; authoritarians thrive on
censorship and secrecy. And they distrust voluntary
cooperation and information-sharing. Attitude is no substitute for competence. Hackers
won't let posers waste their time, but they recognize
competence — especially competence at hacking,
but competence at anything is valued. Competence at
demanding skills that few can master is especially
good, and competence at demanding skills that involve mental acuteness, craft, and concentration is
best.
Earn respect as a hacker. Like most cultures without a monetary economy, hackerdom runs on reputation.
You're trying to solve interesting problems, but how
interesting they are, and whether your solutions are
really good, is something that only your technical peers
or superiors are normally equipped to judge. This is why
you aren't really a hacker until other hackers consistently call you one. Specifically, hackerdom is what
anthropologists call a "gift culture." You gain status and
reputation in it not by dominating other people, nor by
being beautiful, nor by having things other people want,
but rather by giving things away: your time, your
creativity, and the results of your skill. Write open-source software. Write programs that other hackers think are fun or useful, and give the
program sources away to the whole hacker culture to
use. Hackerdom's most revered demigods are people
who have written large, capable programs that met a
widespread need and given them away, so that now
everyone uses them. Help test and debug open-source software. Any open-
source author who's thinking will tell you that good
beta-testers (who know how to describe symptoms
clearly, localize problems well, can tolerate bugs in a
quickie release, and are willing to apply a few simple
diagnostic routines) are worth their weight in rubies. Try to find a program under development that you're
interested in and be a good beta-tester. There's a
natural progression from helping test programs to
helping debug them to helping modify them. You'll
learn a lot this way, and generate good karma with people who will help you later on. Publish useful information. Another good thing is to
collect and filter useful and interesting information
into web pages or documents like Frequently Asked
Questions (FAQ) lists, and make those generally
available. Maintainers of major technical FAQs get
almost as much respect as open-source authors. Help keep the infrastructure working. The hacker
culture (and the engineering development of the
Internet, for that matter) is run by volunteers. There's
a lot of necessary but unglamorous work that needs
done to keep it going — administering mailing lists,
moderating newsgroups, maintaining large software archive sites, developing RFCs and other technical
standards. People who do this sort of thing well get a
lot of respect, because everybody knows these jobs
are huge time sinks and not as much fun as playing
with code. Doing them shows dedication. Serve the hacker culture itself. This is not something
you'll be positioned to do until you've been around
for a while and become well-known for one of the
four previous items. The hacker culture doesn't have
leaders, exactly, but it does have culture heroes and
tribal elders and historians and spokespeople. When you've been in the trenches long enough, you may
grow into one of these. Beware: hackers distrust
blatant ego in their tribal elders, so visibly reaching
for this kind of fame is dangerous. Rather than
striving for it, you have to sort of position yourself so
it drops in your lap, and then be modest and gracious about your status.
LEARNING PROGRAMMING
Learn how to program. The best way to learn is to read some stuff written by masters of the form, write some
things yourself, read a lot more, write a little more, read
a lot more, write some more, and repeat until your
writing begins to develop the kind of strength and
economy you see in your models. To be a real hacker,
however, you need to get to the point where you can learn a new language in days by relating what's in the
manual to what you already know. This means you
should learn several very different languages. Besides
being the most important hacking languages, the
following represent very different approaches to
programming, and each will educate you in valuable ways: Python is a good language to start off with because it's cleanly designed, well documented, and relatively
kind to beginners. Despite being a good first
language, it is not just a toy; it is very powerful and
flexible and well-suited for large projects. Java is an alternative, but its value as a first programming
language has been questioned. If you get into serious programming, you will have to
learn C, the core language of Unix (C++ is very closely related to C; if you know one, learning the other will
not be difficult). C is very efficient with your
machine's resources, but will soak up huge amounts
of your time on debugging and is often avoided for
that reason (unless machine efficiency is essential). Perl is worth learning for practical reasons; it's very widely used for active web pages and system
administration, so that even if you never write Perl
you should learn to read it. Many people use Perl to
avoid C programming on jobs that don't require C's
machine efficiency. LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the
profound enlightenment experience you will have
when you finally get it. That experience will make
you a better programmer for the rest of your days,
even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot. You can
get some beginning experience with LISP fairly easily by writing and modifying editing modes for the
Emacs text editor, or Script-Fu plugins for the GIMP.
Familiarizing Yourself With Unix
Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and
run it. Unix is the operating system of the Internet. While you can learn to use the Internet without knowing Unix,
you can't be an Internet hacker without understanding
Unix. For this reason, the hacker culture today is pretty
strongly Unix-centered. So, bring up a Unix (like Linux but there are other ways and yes, you can run both Linux and
Microsoft Windows on the same machine). Learn it. Run
it. Tinker with it. Talk to the Internet with it. Read the
code. Modify the code. There are other operating systems in the world
besides Unix. But they're distributed in binary — you
can't read the code, and you can't modify it. Trying to
learn to hack on a Microsoft Windows machine or
under any other closed-source system is like trying to
learn to dance while wearing a body cast. Under Mac OS X it's possible, but only part of the system is open
source — you're likely to hit a lot of walls, and you
have to be careful not to develop the bad habit of
depending on Apple's proprietary code. Download Linux online or (better idea) find a local Linux user group to help you with installation. While other distros have their own areas of strength, Ubuntu is far and away the most accessible to Linux newbies. A good way to dip your toes in the water is to boot
up what Linux fans call a live CD, a distribution that
runs entirely off a CD without having to modify your
hard disk. This is a way to get a look at the
possibilities without having to do anything drastic.
Learning HTML
Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML. Most of the things the hacker culture has built do their
work out of sight, helping run factories and offices and
universities without any obvious impact on how non-
hackers live. The Web is the one big exception, the huge
shiny hacker toy that even politicians admit has changed
the world. For this reason alone (and a lot of other good ones as well) you need to learn how to work the Web.
This doesn't just mean learning how to drive a browser
(anyone can do that), but learning how to write HTML, the Web's markup language. If you don't know how to
program, writing HTML will teach you some mental
habits that will help you learn. So build a home page. Try
to stick to XHTML, which is a cleaner language than classic HTML.
Tips
Work as intensely as you play, and play as intensely as
you work. For true hackers, the boundaries between
"play," "work," "science," and "art" all tend to disappear,
or to merge into a high-level creative playfulness. Don't be content with a narrow range of skills. Though
most hackers describe themselves as programmers, they
are very likely to be more than competent in several
related skills — system administration, Web design, and
PC hardware troubleshooting are common ones. Hackers
don't do things by halves; if they invest in a skill at all, they tend to get very good at it. You don't have to believe that you're obligated to give
all your creative product away, though the hackers that
do are the ones that get most respect from other
hackers. It's consistent with hacker values to sell enough
of it to keep you in food and rent and computers. It's
fine to use your hacking skills to support a family or even get rich, as long as you don't forget your loyalty to your art and your fellow hackers while doing it. Contrary to popular myth, you don't have to be a nerd to
be a hacker. It does help, however, and many hackers
are in fact nerds. Being something of a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important
things, like thinking and hacking. If you can manage to
concentrate enough on hacking to be good at it and still
have a life, that's fine. Mainstream culture is much
friendlier to techno-nerds now. To be a hacker, you have to enter the hacker mindset,
and there are some things you can do when you're not
at a computer that seem to help. They're not substitutes
for hacking (nothing is) but many hackers do them, and
feel that they connect in some basic way with the
essence of hacking (hackers need to be able to both reason logically and step outside the apparent logic of a
problem at a moment's notice). Write your native language well. Though it's a
common stereotype that programmers can't write,
a surprising number of hackers are very able
writers. Read science fiction. Go to science fiction conventions (a good way to meet hackers and
proto-hackers). Train in a martial art. The kind of mental discipline required for martial arts seems to be similar in
important ways to what hackers do. The most
hacker-ly martial arts are those which emphasize
mental discipline, relaxed awareness, and control,
rather than raw strength, athleticism, or physical
toughness. Tai Chi is a good martial art for hackers. Study an actual meditation discipline. The perennial favorite among hackers is Zen (importantly, it is possible to benefit from Zen
without acquiring a religion or discarding one you
already have). Develop an analytical ear for music. Learn to appreciate peculiar kinds of music, and to play some musical instrument well, or how to sing. Develop your appreciation for puns and wordplay. Master creative thinking. The hacker mentality is
driven by creatively solving problems. This
creativity gives you the ability to solve problems
others see as unsolvable. If you don't speak English, it might be a good idea to learn it. English is the working language of the hacker culture and the Internet, and you might need to know it
to function in the hacker community. Translations of
technical books written in English are often
unsatisfactory (when they get done at all). Being a native
English-speaker does not guarantee that you have
language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled
with misspellings, many hackers will tend to ignore you.
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