



To understand the distinction, as well as the causes of many of the most famous tech decisions of the past century, by everyone from Steve Jobs, to Satoshi Nakamoto, you’re going to need to understand the secret code of hackers.Īll hackers (good and evil) share a core belief that information should be free. Steve Wozniak is a hacker, and yet Bill Gates, while he certainly has displayed hacker-ish qualities, clashed quite seriously with the hacker community in the mid-70s when he famously began selling his software. Hackers express themselves with computer code and use their skills to solve problems. Black hat hackers are an unfortunate distraction from all the kickass white hat hackers out there - the people who built and are continuing to build the internet that billions of people use every day! Those people certainly exist, but a hacker who hacks maliciously or for personal gain is a specific type of hacker known as a black hat hacker. Most computer programmers are hackers, but not all of them.įor some, the word hacker conjures up images of Soviet tech experts breaking into CIA computers, or criminals wearing Guy Fawkes masks, Mr. The name has an “I know it when I see it” ring to it. Eventually, I decided I wouldn’t just learn to code: I would become a hacker.ĭefining hacker isn’t so straightforward. But most notably, he introduced me to The Hacker Ethic - four principles that differentiate ordinary computer programmers from hackers.
