3 ms·
> In fact, considering anything other than someone’s skill seems somehow anti-hacker. The term hacker was never about pure skill or knowledge, it's about ethos
by kedean 7y ago
> In fact, considering anything other than someone’s skill seems somehow anti-hacker.
The term hacker was never about pure skill or knowledge, it's about ethos and mentality. A fast implementation is nothing if it doesn't carry an interesting twist that got it there, for example.
- ahuth 7y agoTrue. Guess I meant that educational background doesn’t seem like an important thing for someone’s “hackerness”. Having the skill/knowledge/experience/taste is more important than how you got it.
- anonsivalley652 7y agoTwist, or a lot of trial-and-error, happy accidents and incremental improvements. Reminds me in undergrad when architecting a MIC-1 microcode implementation: - I built a macro-instruction profiling emulator to Huffman encode the micro-instructions from all of the sample programs. - Every micro-instruction served several purposes (it was similar to VLIW but shorter). - I used progressive decoding to save micro-ops. Then, the resulting project was not only the shortest micro-code by far (37 micro-ops long) but significantly faster in terms of total micro-ops executed than the next submission. Note 0: I refuse to call myself a "hacker," it would be like referring to myself with a title like "king" or "lord" in the third-person. Note 1: I first learned to code without manuals per se or the internet, but sitting in front of the incredibly-complete and useable Turbo Pascal IDE and obsessively trial-and-error-ing. Then adding inline assembly, Borland C++, and so on.