<story><title>My Roommate&apos;s a Genius</title><url>http://www.farhadg.com/post/33834177117/genius-roommate</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>uniclaude</author><text>Some responses in this thread surprise me, I thought the mindset exposed in this article was something most &lt;i&gt;hackers&lt;/i&gt; shared. Therefore, after reading the post, I expected a bunch of mildly negative comments of people who built a lot of awesome things in their spare time. Well, I was wrong.&lt;p&gt;Anecdotal but surprising, my fellow musician friends are more prone to what I believe to be the &lt;i&gt;hacker&lt;/i&gt; thinking than most of the software programmers I work with. Maybe it is because of some unfortunate psychological barrier, or the result of a strong focus on computer related things and discard for the rest, I honestly don&amp;#x27;t know.&lt;p&gt;Anyways, what this roommate did is super cool, and I&amp;#x27;d suggest everyone here to start hacking outside of their comfort zone, it can be very rewarding for some. Building things feels great, and being able to apply your hacker thinking to various things is a very useful skill to have.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sigkill</author><text>Not to take away the intelligence of people but a hacker is someone who excels in situations as this - Limited time, limited resources&amp;#x2F;cheapness to spend money, Have objects X, Need functions Y.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;That&lt;/i&gt; takes a hacker. Everything else is just a builder (be it building code, or cabinets, or robots). The core ideology of being a hacker is seeing beyond the normal functionality of the item like this roommate has seen. He looked at the wardrobe and saw a sliding table. &lt;i&gt;That&lt;/i&gt; is hacking.</text></comment>
<story><title>My Roommate&apos;s a Genius</title><url>http://www.farhadg.com/post/33834177117/genius-roommate</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>uniclaude</author><text>Some responses in this thread surprise me, I thought the mindset exposed in this article was something most &lt;i&gt;hackers&lt;/i&gt; shared. Therefore, after reading the post, I expected a bunch of mildly negative comments of people who built a lot of awesome things in their spare time. Well, I was wrong.&lt;p&gt;Anecdotal but surprising, my fellow musician friends are more prone to what I believe to be the &lt;i&gt;hacker&lt;/i&gt; thinking than most of the software programmers I work with. Maybe it is because of some unfortunate psychological barrier, or the result of a strong focus on computer related things and discard for the rest, I honestly don&amp;#x27;t know.&lt;p&gt;Anyways, what this roommate did is super cool, and I&amp;#x27;d suggest everyone here to start hacking outside of their comfort zone, it can be very rewarding for some. Building things feels great, and being able to apply your hacker thinking to various things is a very useful skill to have.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mercer</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve noticed the same thing in musician friends of mine, and I think it really isn&amp;#x27;t so much that their mindset is different from &amp;#x27;us&amp;#x27; hackers, but rather that we spend so much time on virtual stuff that we don&amp;#x27;t learn to apply our mindset to the real world.&lt;p&gt;In fact, a lot of us probably under-perform when it comes to real-world hacking because we&amp;#x27;re so caught in the virtual. I know that&amp;#x27;s true for me.&lt;p&gt;This did give me a bit of a new perspective on things, and makes me wonder if I should start some more real-world hacking...</text></comment>