Enbeeone3 : A Freelancer

The Hacker/Nerd Connection

by admin on 08/03/08 at 1:09 pm

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 StyleAgain, 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.