Moreover, our industry has a questionable habit of describing all kinds of human accomplishments as "brilliant" "innovations" done by "geniuses". Being a compe

Moreover, our industry has a questionable habit of describing all kinds of human accomplishments as "brilliant" "innovations" done by "geniuses". Being a competent professional engineer requires some raw intelligence, true, but also determination, interpersonal communication skills, organizational skills, time, training, resources, access to the infrastructure you want to work with, and no small amount of luck. Those all interact in complicated ways, and most can be used to buttress the others depending on where one's personal talents lie. There's probably some minimum necessary raw intelligence necessary to become a hacker, but I suspect that bar is much lower than HN would like to admit. And I am very sure that there's no maximum past which the rest of the list ceases to matter.