Farls: Hackers in the Bazaar

Reading Graham's essays were honestly such a breath of fresh air. This dude is writing exactly what I'm thinking--I completely resonate with his perception of the hacker and, more importantly, what the hacker sets out to do. "And then at the other extreme you have the hackers, who are trying to write interesting software, and for whom computers are just a medium of expression, as concrete is for architects or paint for painters. It's as if mathematicians, physicists, and architects all had to be in the same department." If anything, these writings make hacking more  desirable. When I was a senior in high school, my teachers would (naturally) ask me what I wanted to study in undergrad. "Computer science." They would laugh, "there's no world in which you sit in a cubicle and write code all day--you talk too much." I took this as a compliment. For context: I was a theater kid. While I've always enjoyed being a creative-type, there was, and

When asked during the first lecture what my greatest 'hack' was, I realized that I either a) have a bad memory or b) have never created anything for fun. When reading about twelve-year-olds writing compilers and building ping-pong robots, I realized that it might be too late for me to do anything original in my life. If every reading puts these thoughts in my head, this is going to be a fun class. "There were enough obstacles to learning already--why bother with stupid things like brown-nosing teachers and striving for grades?" The first part of Hackers  makes it very clear exactly what a 'hack' is. If there has been one common theme across these seven chapters, it has been the loss of self that hacking requires. Three distinct qualities are needed to be a "True Hacker:" Motivation to create something new Willingness to give your full self to your hack Selflessness, knowing your hack is not privately owned but instead an open-source contribution to t