hacker (n.)
What do you think of when you hear the word “hacker”? Probably a person in a black room in a black hoodie staring at a screen that looks like the matrix with lime green text flowing not horizontally, but vertically.
The notion that hacking involves illicit activity with a computer is wrong. Or rather, it is incomplete. Our culture has hijacked this term and given it this negative connotation.
So what does it actually mean?
To answer this, we have to go back to the early 1970s. During this time, the creators and users of the early Internet at various universities created a file that contained certain terms related to the systems they were working on. This file became known as the Jargon File. The Jargon File contains many terms commonly used in hacker subcultures, and some such as “bug” and “troll” have had widespread adoption by society today. The Jargon File offers several definitions of hacker:
hacker: (n) A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users’ Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.
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An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.
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One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
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[deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover senstive information by poking around. Hence password hacker, network hacker. The correct term for this sense is cracker.
This definition does a much better job of capturing the true essence of hacking. It underscores the essential traits of hacking: deep understanding, competence, curiosity, and creativity. A hacker is someone who comes to grok a system so deeply, they can discover novel ways of (ab)using it. They are especially skilled at combining systems in unexpected ways, beyond the original design of either system, to overcome the boundaries and limitations of either system.
The only thing I would add to the definition above is that hacking applies to any complex system, not just computer systems. And in this sense I agree with society’s generalization of the word “hack” to domains outside of computers. There are biohackers, gym hackers, growth hackers, food hackers, work hackers, life hackers, etc. Hacking is a mindset which can be applied to any domain of life in which there are observable inputs and outputs. Hackers try a bunch of inputs and observe how the system behaves. Even if the internals of the system are a complete black box, you can learn a great deal from just observing what inputs lead to what outputs.
The difference between a hacker and non-hacker is that the hacker
becomes consciously aware of the inputs to the system
intentionally finds and feeds unconventional inputs to it.
Cold showers are a good example of this. Cold showers were an unconventional input to the standard morning routine. Then some influential biohackers tried them out and found they provide many health benefits that you would miss out on if you stuck to the conventional input of a warm shower. Sometimes the unconventional input is no input at all. This is colloquially referred to as hacking the test.
Hacking the test involves pruning the inputs that involve extra effort, because you’ve figured out that the system doesn’t reward you for them. Or that you can still achieve a favorable outcome without them. This is what business hacker Charlie Munger meant by “show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome”. The incentives are the feedback from the output to the input. When someone says they have no incentive to do something, they’ve figured out that they can safely prune that something from the input with no detrimental effect to the outcome. AI systems do this as well, especially in reinforcement learning. This “reward hacking” involves finding clever bypasses around the rules of their environment. These workarounds are examples of another characteristic of hacking. Hackers play with the rules rather than within the rules of the system. These examples show that hacking itself is similar to a technology, a tool that can be used for good or bad.
Since hacking is a mindset, a way of questioning the world, it can be learned. It is a skill that can be devleoped. It is a skill that I intend to keep developing in myself and to help others develop it as well.