How To Be A Hacker Essay Research (стр. 2 из 2)

3. Publish useful information.

Another good thing is to collect and filter useful and interesting information into Web pages or documents like FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions lists), and make those generally available.

Maintainers of major technical FAQs get almost as much respect as open-source authors.

4. 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.

5. Serve the hacker culture itself.

Finally, you can serve and propagate the culture itself (by, for example, writing an accurate primer on how to become a hacker

). This is not something you’ll be positioned to do until you’ve been around for while and become well-known for one of the first four things.

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.

The Hacker/Nerd Connection

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 a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking.

For this reason, many hackers have adopted the label `nerd’ and even use the harsher term `geek’ as a badge of pride — it’s a way of declaring their independence from normal social expectations. See The Geek Page for extensive discussion.

If you can manage to concentrate enough on hacking to be good at it and still have a life, that’s fine. This is a lot easier today than it was when I was a newbie in the 1970s; mainstream culture is much friendlier to techno-nerds now. There are even growing numbers of people who realize that hackers are often high-quality lover and spouse material. For more on this, see Girl’s Guide to Geek Guys.

If you’re attracted to hacking because you don’t have a life, that’s OK too — at least you won’t have trouble concentrating. Maybe you’ll get one later.

Points For Style

Again, to be a hacker, you have to enter the hacker mindset. 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.

Read science fiction. Go to science fiction conventions (a good way to meet hackers and proto-hackers).

Study Zen, and/or take up martial arts. (The mental discipline seems similar in important ways.)

Develop an analytical ear for music. Learn to appreciate peculiar kinds of music. Learn to play some musical instrument well, or how to sing.

Develop your appreciation of puns and wordplay.

Learn to write your native language well. (A surprising number of hackers, including all the best ones I know of, are able writers.)

The more of these things you already do, the more likely it is that you are natural hacker material. Why these things in particular is not completely clear, but they’re connected with a mix of left- and right-brain skills that seems to be important (hackers need to be able to both reason logically and step outside the apparent logic of a problem at a moment’s notice).

Finally, a few things not to do.

Don’t use a silly, grandiose user ID or screen name.

Don’t get in flame wars on Usenet (or anywhere else).

Don’t call yourself a `cyberpunk’, and don’t waste your time on anybody who does.

Don’t post or email writing that’s full of spelling errors and bad grammar.

The only reputation you’ll make doing any of these things is as a twit. Hackers have long memories — it could take you years to live it down enough to be accepted.

Other Resources

Peter Seebach maintains an excellent Hacker FAQ for managers who don’t understand how to deal with hackers.

The Loginataka has some things to say about the proper training and attitude of a Unix hacker.

I have also written A Brief History Of Hackerdom.

I have written a paper, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which explains a lot about how the Linux and open-source cultures work. I have addressed this topic even more directly in its sequel Homesteading the Noosphere.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Will you teach me how to hack?

Since first publishing this page, I’ve gotten several requests a week from people to “teach me all about hacking”. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or energy to do this; my own hacking projects take up 110% of my time.

Even if I did, hacking is an attitude and skill you basically have to teach yourself. You’ll find that while real hackers want to help you, they won’t respect you if you beg to be spoon-fed everything they know.

Learn a few things first. Show that you’re trying, that you’re capable of learning on your own. Then go to the hackers you meet with specific questions.

Q: Would you help me to crack a system, or teach me how to crack?

No. Anyone who can still ask such a question after reading this FAQ is too stupid to be educable even if I had the time for tutoring. Any emailed requests of this kind that I get will be ignored or answered with extreme rudeness.

Q: Where can I find some real hackers to talk with?

The best way is to find a Unix or Linux user’s group local to you and go to their meetings (you can find links to several lists of user groups on the LDP page at Sunsite).

(I used to say here that you wouldn’t find any real hackers on IRC, but I’m given to understand this is changing. Apparently some real hacker communities, attached to things like GIMP and Perl, have IRC channels now.)

Q: What language should I learn first?

HTML, if you don’t already know it. There are a lot of glossy, hype-intensive bad HTML books out there, and distressingly few good ones. The one I like best is HTML: The Definitive Guide.

But HTML is not a full programming language. When you’re ready to start programming, I would recommend starting with Python. You will hear a lot of people recommending Perl, and Perl is still more popular than Python, but it’s harder to learn.

C is really important, but it’s also much more difficult than either Python or Perl. Don’t try to learn it first.

Q: But won’t open-source software leave programmers unable to make a living?

This seems unlikely — so far, the open-source software industry seems to be creating jobs rather than taking them away. If having a program written is a net economic gain over not having it written, a programmer will get paid whether or not the program is going to be free after it’s done. And, no matter how much “free” software gets written, there always seems to be more demand for new and customized applications. I’ve written more about this at the Open Source pages.

Q: How can I get started? Where can I get a free Unix?

Elsewhere on this page I include pointers to where to get the most commonly used free Unix. To be a hacker you need motivation and initiative and the ability to educate yourself. Start now…