Maybe there’s hope for me yet:
- The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
- No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
- Boredom and drudgery are evil.
- Freedom is good.
- Attitude is no substitute for competence.
On the other hand, even if I don’t turn out to be a hacker per se, I think these are easily applied to other arenas and life in general. For instance it goes on:
Basic Hacking Skills
- Learn how to program.
- Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it.
- Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML.
- If you don’t have functional English, learn it.
The hacker attitude is vital, but skills are even more vital. Attitude is no substitute for competence, and there’s a certain basic toolkit of skills which you have to have before any hacker will dream of calling you one.
This toolkit changes slowly over time as technology creates new skills and makes old ones obsolete. For example, it used to include programming in machine language, and didn’t until recently involve HTML.
One more great quote which charmed me:
… trying to learn to hack under Windows [is like] trying to learn to dance while wearing a body cast, I wasn’t kidding. Don’t go there. It’s ugly, and it never stops being ugly.
