How to Become a Hacker

Programming would be awesome without having to mess with customers.

> Just curious, what would be the 'MVE' (minimum viable evidence) such that you would choose to believe?

I'm simply answering this honestly and I'll confess that I'm not a model citizen on this. In any case, I'm too lazy to think about it. That's the answer. It's why I have a bit of an over the top heuristic. But I also think: surely if one is all powerful, that's not an issue.

> How you can you know 100%? That doesn't make any sense.

God is all powerful, God can devise a scheme in which I'll know it 100%. Here's one for you: I believe that humans have powers that are to quite similar to telepathy, not the same though. We call it WhatsApp. That's extraordinary evidence in such a way that I'll know it 100%. Currently we're moving to machine learning inferring brain patterns. We might actually get to real telepathy.

To me that just sounds insane! But it's true! What?! I am the type of person that finds it quite easy to imagine that I'm simply just a human and nothing more than that. From that baseline our modern world is so crazily magical. It would be awesome if God is in that, but it doesn't need to be in its sheer magicalness.

I have one hypothetical reason why a God (or god-like civilization) might exist. That would be the simulation argument. Also, if we're capable of reproducing consciousness and run simulations, then who is to say that someone isn't already running one? What I do believe is that we might have the potential of becoming Gods as a species. We're trying our damn hardest anyway.

If we're capable of engineering anything and travel anywhere, then one might ask if we can create the exact same universe as we are in right now where (if determinism is real, big if) and if we can do that... Well then again, we might wonder, has this happened before?

So interestingly enough, in my mind, the process of science can turn out to be a very very religious endeavour. Or it might be able to completely dispell it.

It's all speculation during my lifetime though. So I like to keep it to the realms of highly reproduced science (aka engineering and to a big extent physics).

But yea, that doesn't say much about the Christian God, or any religion really. Science is my religion, I simply like the process more of having evidence for things than believing a certain book is the holy word and that I should take it seriously.

I'm sorry if I ranted a bit too much. I don't usually talk about this stuff as it is highly speculative and I have better things to do with my time such as focusing on reality.

I appreciate the non-judgemental tone of the questions by the way.

The term hacker is indeed pretty old. As far as I know the MIT model train club divided themselves into the artists who worked on the scenery on top of the board and the hackers who worked on the underside of the board on the fancy electrical switching they had adapted (hacked) from telephone exchanges. When computers first arrived at MIT this latter group moved their focus to them and the term "hacker" moved with them into computing.

Other comments have mentioned "cracker" in relation to invading systems. Before computers we had "safe-crackers".

With this knowledge one can become a hacker. It's that simple. I've hacked into systems by using my curiosity and this background knowledge.

A hacker is defined as someone who's curious about technology. If you have this knowledge and apply your curiosity to understanding more of it, especially on how systems shouldn't behave but somehow do, then you're a hacker. An example of this type of hacking is creating Tetris in the game of life.

If you break into a computer system (legal or illegal), you're a hacker.

This knowledge helps you to both goals. It helps towards the broadest definition of what being a hacker is, no matter which person you talk to. There is of course the requirement that you're curious as well. But IMO if you're capable of successfully passing this, then you are curious and when given free reign, it'll be applied and you'll learn even more about computer systems.

It's not the only way, but it's one way of doing it. It's not the best way either, but it does answer the question: I want to become a hacker? How? Well, follow this path, tick off every box, notice the change within you and your thinking and voila. You're a hacker.

Obviosly, this is simply my opinion. Feel free to disagree. But I do view that it is that simple. Bear in mind that this path takes at least 2 years if you don't know how to program. So it's much easier said than done. It took me 8 years to get to this point (I studied a lot of other things).

Given that explanation, is there something you don't get? It's a genuine question.

Yup, on hacker news, that doesn't mean I like the name of this page, right?