A place to learn new things

Free Training Reveals How to Make Money in 2019

2019-04-15T05:33:00.001-07:00

Hey guys, I'd like to share a free training I found, it explains from A - Z how to make over $2,000 every month just by promoting ClickFunnels. Clickfunnels is a must-have tool for online and offline business owners and marketer looking to create good landing pages and funnels. Everything in Clickfunnels is automatic and if done right, maximum sales and conversion are guaranteed!

A single action, such as a click on this link; FREE TRAINING will surely and definitely change your life just as it did mine. If you've failed with Affiliate Marketing before, you won't fail with this one if you follow the step by step training which is 100% free.

To set up the whole business shouldn't take more than 15 - 20 mins of your time and the whole business can be set up without you spending a dime, here's the link once again; FREE TRAINING LINK. Stay blessed.

What is Recharge and Get Paid?

2019-04-15T05:21:00.002-07:00

You’ve probably heard the popular term; Recharge and Get Paid. And I mentioned “popular”, because the term Recharge and Get Paid gets over 18,000 search volumes per month on Google alone. Recharge and Get Paid is an MLM business or a network marketing business in Nigeria that gives an average Nigerian the map to financial freedom. Learn more on ARIYA Nigeria

The Story of Ice Cream

2011-09-02T02:57:00.000-07:00

By Cathy Mallare

The story of ice cream begins a long, long time ago in a most beautiful place. The story of ice cream begins over 3,000 years ago in China. Lots of cool things were invented in China. Umbrellas, glasses and fireworks were all invented in China but the tastiest and coldest Chinese invention is snow ice cream. The Emperors of China were the first people, we know about who were lucky enough to get to eat snow ice cream. Their cooks mixed snow and ice from the mountains with fruit, wine and honey to make a tasty treat for their rulers to enjoy when they wanted to relax.

How the Romans came up with the idea of making snow ice cream we do not know. But what we do know is that in 62 A.D. the Roman Emperor Nero wanted to eat snow ice cream so badly he sent slaves up to the mountains to bring back snow and ice so his cooks could make it for him. Nero's cooks mixed the ice and snow the slaves brought back with nectar, fruit and honey and then Nero ate it.

In 1295, Marco Polo, a great adventurer, returned from China to Italy with a new recipe for making snow ice cream. His recipe called for mixing yak milk into snow in order to make it creamy. The idea of mixing a mammal's milk into snow ice cream caught on and soon the rich people of Italy were enjoying frozen milk.

In 1533, Catherine de Medici of Florence, Italy became the Queen of France when she married the French king, Henry II. One of the things she took with her when she moved from her home in Italy to her castle in France was her recipe for making frozen milk. Soon many of the cooks in France were making the delicious treat. One French chef opened a shop to sell the tasty treat. He was the first cook to add flavors like chocolate and strawberry to the frozen milk.

When Charles I of England visited France in the 1600s, he was served frozen milk. He loved it so much, he asked the French chef who served it to him to sell him the recipe. Charles I took the recipe back to England with him and the rich people of England began to eat the delicious cold dessert.

In 1700, Governor Bladen of Maryland, who was from England, served ice cream to his guests. Seventy-six years later, the first ice cream parlor in America opened in New York City.

Dolly Madison, the president's wife loved ice cream so much, she served it to her White House guests in 1812. In 1843, an American woman named Nancy Johnston invented the hand-cranked ice cream freezer, which made making ice cream easier. In 1851 Jacob Fussel opened the first ice cream factory in the United States of America in Baltimore, Maryland. He sold his ice cream from a wagon. In 1899, August Gaulin, who lived in France, invented the homogeniser. This invention helped give ice cream a really smooth texture. In 1902, August Gaulin invented a new kind of ice cream freezer that helped make ice cream freeze faster.

In 1903, Italo Marchiony, a man who sold ice cream from a pushcart he pushed through the streets of New York City, invented the ice cream cone and patented his idea. He invented the waffle cup because he was tired of people walking off with or breaking the glasses he used to serve ice cream from his pushcart.

A year later in 1904, E.A. Hamwi introduced the waffle cone at the St. Louis World Fair. People say he began making the waffle cones when an ice cream vendor at the fair ran out of bowls.

The closing of bars that sold wine and beer in 1919 led to the opening of many ice cream parlors in the United States. The more Americans ate ice cream the more they wanted to eat ice cream. This demand for ice cream led to the invention of the first chocolate covered ice cream bar. The first chocolate ice cream bar was called the I-Scream Bar but later its name was changed to the Eskimo Pie. You can buy an Eskimo pie at the grocery store if you want to find out what it tastes like. You can also buy a Good Humor Bar which was invented in 1920 and was the first ice cream sold on a stick. But if you're like me, you'll head to Baskin-Robbins, which first opened in 1946 in California, and buy a scoop of Cookies 'N Cream which is made with real Oreo cookies. This ice cream flavor was invented in 1983. Others like Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough have been invented since 1983 but Cookies 'N Cream will always be my favorite. Of course, vanilla ice cream with honey on top is also very good. I'm so glad someone in China decided to mix snow and ice with honey and that now even poor people like me can afford to eat tasty frozen treats each and every day of the week, just like Mr. Baskin and Mr. Robbins intended.

Samsung 'ChatON' Messaging to Challenge Apple and BlackBerry

2011-08-31T03:50:00.000-07:00

By Jared Newman on August 30, 2011

SAMSUNG

Related Tags: ChatON, samsung, smartphones, text messaging, texting

A war's brewing between BlackBerry Messenger and Apple's upcoming iMessage, and Samsung isn't content to sit on the sidelines. The phone and tablet maker plans to launch its own mobile messaging service called "ChatON," with the promise of supporting even its competitors' smartphones.

Like BBM and iMessage, ChatON will let users send text, images and videos to other phone and tablet users for free. Of course, the service will be available on Samsung's Android and Bada devices, but ChatON apps will also be available for iPhone, BlackBerry and other Android phones, while a web client will let users continue the conversation on their PCs.

(MORE: Guess What Texting Costs Your Wireless Provider)

Users can chat one-on-one, or in groups. (It's not yet clear whether Samsung will copy some of BBM's hallmark features, like the ability to see when someone's typing, but ChatON has some frilly features of its own, like animated messages and an "interaction rating" for every contact.)

It all sounds peachy, especially when set to the awesome music in the official video. Just one problem: No one's going to use it. Or at least, most people won't use it unless the people who do can convince iPhone owners not to use iMessage, BlackBerry users not to use BBM and everyone else not to use alternative programs such as WhatsApp and TextPlus -- let alone the core text messaging services that are built into every phone. None of that is going to happen.

That's not to say we don't need cross-platform messaging. The explosion of smartphones means it's a lot easier to communicate without traditional text messaging, allowing users to buy smaller texting plans. (AT&T has already responded to the trend by forcing customers into more expensive packages.) But with so many companies offering their own solutions--not to mention the messaging that's built into Facebook, Google+, AOL Instant Messenger and so on--the traditional text message remains the most reliable way to send a quick note to someone regardless of phone or operating system.

In a perfect world, phone makers would create integrated messaging services that work across their respective platforms, but that's never going to happen either because it'd diminish the competitive advantage for any single phone maker. At least Samsung's heart is in the right place.

On this day...

2011-08-30T03:33:00.000-07:00

August 30: Constitution Day in Kazakhstan (1995); Victory Day in Turkey

1835 – European settlers landing on the north banks of the Yarra River in Southern Australia founded the city ofMelbourne (Parliament House pictured).
1862 – American Civil War: James Longstreet andStonewall Jackson led their Confederate troops to a decisive victory againstJohn Pope's Union Army at the Second Battle of Bull Run in Prince William County, Virginia.
1918 – Fanny Kaplan shot and wounded Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, helping to spark the Red Terror in the future Soviet Union, a repressionagainst Socialist-Revolutionary Party members and other political opponents.
1992 – German race car driver Michael Schumacher won his first Formula One race at the Belgian Grand Prix.
1995 – Bosnian War: NATO began its bombing campaign against theArmy of Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

On this day...

2011-08-29T06:01:00.000-07:00

August 29: Feast day for the Beheading of St. John the Baptist (Gregorian calendar); National Heroes' Day in the Philippines (2011)

1533 – Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire: Conquistador Francisco Pizarro executed the last Inca Emperor Atahualpa(pictured) in Cajamarca.
1885 – Gottlieb Daimler patented the world's first internal combustion motorcycle, the Reitwagen.
1930 – The last 36 residents of St Kilda, Scotland, aUNESCO World Heritage Site, voluntarily evacuated to Morvern.
1984 – Followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh deliberately contaminatedsalad bars in The Dalles, Oregon with salmonella, the first and single largestbioterrorist attack in United States history.
1996 – Vnukovo Airlines Flight 2801 crashed on approach to Svalbard Airport, Norway, killing all 141 aboard.

More anniversaries: August 28 – August 29 – August 30

Did you know...

2011-08-29T05:58:00.000-07:00

From ibbjimohlearn's newest content:

... that Sweden's Gun Hägglund (pictured) was the world's first female TV news presenter?
... that for most of its history, Ixtonton was the most important Maya city in the upper Mopan Valley of Guatemala?
... that the largest roller derby competition ever held outside of the United States was hosted by Adelaide Roller Derby and won by the Victorian VRDL All Stars?
... that the cotton manufacturer John Horrocks is commemorated twice by St Mary's Church, Penwortham, Lancashire?
... that Kristian House did not finish first in the London – Surrey Cycle Classic but did win its King of the Mountains award?
... that, shortly before sunrise, mass spawning by sea grapes may create a green cloud?

Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

2011-08-29T04:08:00.000-07:00

Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

Main article: Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

The Great Pyramid of Giza, the only wonder of the ancient world still in existence.

The Colosseum in Rome.

The Great Wall of China.

Hagia Sophia.

Stonehenge.

Taj Mahal.

Empire State Building.

Golden Gate Bridge.

CN Tower.

Chichen Itza.

Old City of Jerusalem.

The Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights.

Grand Canyon

The Great Barrier Reef.

The London sewerage system's original Abbey Mills pumping station.

Machu Picchu.

The historian Herodotus (484 – ca. 425 BCE), and the scholar Callimachus of Cyrene (ca. 305 – 240 BCE) at the Museum of Alexandria, made early lists of seven wonders but their writings have not survived, except as references. The seven wonders included:

The earliest lists had the Ishtar Gate as the seventh wonder of the world instead of the Lighthouse of Alexandria.

The list known today was compiled in the Middle Ages—by which time many of the sites were no longer in existence. Today, the only ancient world wonder that still exists is the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Medieval World

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, some writers claimed that lists of wonders of the world have existed during the Middle Ages, although it is unlikely that these lists originated at that time because the word medieval was not invented until the Enlightenment-era, and the concept of a Middle Age did not become popular until the 16th century. Brewer's refers to them as "later list[s]"^[2] suggesting the lists were created after the Middle Ages.

Many of the structures on these lists were built much earlier than the Medieval Ages, but were well known.^[3] These lists go by names such as Wonders of the Middle Ages (implying no specific limitation to seven), Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages, Medieval Mind and Architectural Wonders of the Middle Ages.

Typically representative are:^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]

Other sites sometimes included on such lists:

Wonders of the modern world

Many organisations have made lists of the greatest structures built during modern times, or of the greatest wonders existing today. Some of the most notable lists are presented below.

American Society of Civil Engineers

The American Society of Civil Engineers compiled a list of wonders of the modern world:^[10]

Wonder	Date started	Date finished	Location
Channel Tunnel	December 1, 1987	May 6, 1994	Strait of Dover, between the United Kingdom and France
CN Tower	February 6, 1973	June 26, 1976, tallest freestanding structure in the world 1976–2007.	Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Empire State Building	January 22, 1930	May 1, 1931, Tallest structure in the world 1931–1967. First building with 100+ stories.	New York, NY, U.S.
Golden Gate Bridge	January 5, 1933	May 27, 1937	Golden Gate Strait, north of San Francisco, California, U.S.
Itaipu Dam	January 1970	May 5, 1984	Paraná River, between Brazil andParaguay
Delta Works/Zuiderzee Works	1920	May 10, 1997	Netherlands
Panama Canal	January 1, 1880	January 7, 1914	Isthmus of Panama

New7Wonders Foundation

Main article: New Seven Wonders of the World

In 2001 an initiative was started by the Swiss corporation New7Wonders Foundation to choose the New Seven Wonders of the World from a selection of 200 existing monuments.^[11] Twenty-one finalists were announced January 1, 2006.^[12] Egyptians were not happy that the only surviving original wonder, the Great Pyramid of Giza, would have to compete with the likes of the Statue of Liberty, the Sydney Opera House, and other landmarks, calling the project absurd. In response, Giza was named an honorary Candidate.^[13] The results were announced on July 7, 2007:^[14]

Wonder	Date of construction	Location
Great Wall of China	5th century BCE – 16th century CE	China
Petra	c.100 BCE	Jordan
Christ the Redeemer	Opened 12 October 1931	Brazil
Machu Picchu	c.1450 CE	Peru
Chichen Itza	c.600 CE	Mexico
Colosseum	Completed 80 CE	Italy
Taj Mahal	Completed c.1648 CE	India
Great Pyramid of Giza (Honorary Candidate)	Completed c.2560 BCE	Egypt

USA Today's New Seven Wonders

In November 2006 the American national newspaper USA Today in conjunction with the American television show Good Morning Americarevealed a list of New Seven Wonders as chosen by six judges.^[15] The wonders were announced one per day over a week on Good Morning America. An eighth wonder was chosen on November 24, 2006 from viewer feedback.^[16]

Number	Wonder	Location
1	Potala Palace	Lhasa, Tibet, China
2	Old City of Jerusalem	Jerusalem^{[n 1]}
3	Polar ice caps	Polar regions
4	Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument	Hawaii, United States
5	Internet	Earth
6	Mayan ruins	Yucatán Peninsula, México
7	Great Migration of Serengeti and Masai Mara	Tanzania and Kenya
8	Grand Canyon (viewer-chosen eighth wonder)	Arizona, United States

Footnotes

^ Both the USA Today article and the Good Morning America broadcast described this wonder as "Jerusalem's Old City, Israel." However states and scholars alike are divided over the legal status of Jerusalem under international law. See Positions on Jerusalem.

Secrets images in Popular logos!

2011-08-29T03:53:00.000-07:00

You’ve seen these famous logos countless times on billboards, passing by on trucks, and at the grocery store, but there is more to them than meets the eye. If you take a closer look, you will find that these recognized logos have hidden images and messages. Check out these inventive designs that cleverly use white space and optical illusions to display subliminal messages.

FedEx

This logo appears to be very simple, but if you look at the white space between the "E" and "x" in “Ex," you'll find it is more complex than you thought. Can you spot the arrow?

Tostitos

These popular party chips are a staple at many backyard BBQs, but chances are, you've never noticed the hidden celebration scene concealed within the letters. The second and third "t’s" are sharing a chip over an "i" that is dotted with a salsa bowl. Yum!

Do Subliminal Messages Really Work?

Le Tour de France

Named the world's most famous and prestigious cycling race, bike-lovers and non-cyclists alike are familiar with the event's emblem. However, you might be missing out on the logo's most interesting aspect. After careful examination, you'll notice an image of a person riding a bicycle; the yellow circle is the front wheel and the r is the body.

Amazon.com

Amazon.com has become a go-to source for electronic commerce. Clearly there is an arrow under Amazon, but have you ever thought about its significance? Take a look at where the arrow begins and ends: a and z. This secret message seems to conveys that Amazon offers everything from A to Z!

Hershey's Kisses

The Kisses logo doesn’t have much to it, but if you look at it sideways, you might see a chocolate kiss formed between the K and the I.

Toblerone

There’s a slightly obscured bear within the Matterhorn Mountain if you look closely. That’s because the candy bar hails from Bern, Switzerland, a city supposedly named for a bear.

The Funniest News Bloopers

Big Ten

Penn State became the 11th member of this university athletic conference, hence the embedded “11” in this logo. That is, until the University of Nebraska–Lincoln became number 12, ushering in a new logo era.

This Year's Wackiest College Courses

Northwest Airlines

Before merging with Delta, Northwest’s logo was one of the best in the industry. The N and W within the circle are fairly obvious, but did you know the circle also serves as a compass? And guess which direction the arrow in the upper-left-hand corner (or the beginning of the w) is pointing?

Frequently asked questions about Hacking

2011-08-28T12:55:00.001-07:00

Q:	How do I tell if I am already a hacker?
A:	Ask yourself the following three questions: Do you speak code, fluently? Do you identify with the goals and values of the hacker community? Has a well-established member of the hacker community ever called you a hacker? If you can answer yes to all three of these questions, you are already a hacker. No two alone are sufficient. The first test is about skills. You probably pass it if you have the minimum technical skills described earlier in this document. You blow right through it if you have had a substantial amount of code accepted by an open-source development project. The second test is about attitude. If the five principles of the hacker mindset seemed obvious to you, more like a description of the way you already live than anything novel, you are already halfway to passing it. That's the inward half; the other, outward half is the degree to which you identify with the hacker community's long-term projects. Here is an incomplete but indicative list of some of those projects: Does it matter to you that Linux improve and spread? Are you passionate about software freedom? Hostile to monopolies? Do you act on the belief that computers can be instruments of empowerment that make the world a richer and more humane place? But a note of caution is in order here. The hacker community has some specific, primarily defensive political interests â€” two of them are defending free-speech rights and fending off "intellectual-property" power grabs that would make open source illegal. Some of those long-term projects are civil-liberties organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the outward attitude properly includes support of them. But beyond that, most hackers view attempts to systematize the hacker attitude into an explicit political program with suspicion; we've learned, the hard way, that these attempts are divisive and distracting. If someone tries to recruit you to march on your capitol in the name of the hacker attitude, they've missed the point. The right response is probably â€œShut up and show them the code.â€ The third test has a tricky element of recursiveness about it. I observed in the section called â€œWhat Is a Hacker?â€ that being a hacker is partly a matter of belonging to a particular subculture or social network with a shared history, an inside and an outside. In the far past, hackers were a much less cohesive and self-aware group than they are today. But the importance of the social-network aspect has increased over the last thirty years as the Internet has made connections with the core of the hacker subculture easier to develop and maintain. One easy behavioral index of the change is that, in this century, we have our own T-shirts. Sociologists, who study networks like those of the hacker culture under the general rubric of "invisible colleges", have noted that one characteristic of such networks is that they have gatekeepers â€” core members with the social authority to endorse new members into the network. Because the "invisible college" that is hacker culture is a loose and informal one, the role of gatekeeper is informal too. But one thing that all hackers understand in their bones is that not every hacker is a gatekeeper. Gatekeepers have to have a certain degree of seniority and accomplishment before they can bestow the title. How much is hard to quantify, but every hacker knows it when they see it.
Q:	Will you teach me how to hack?
A:	Since first publishing this page, I've gotten several requests a week (often several a day) from people to "teach me all about hacking". Unfortunately, I don't have the time or energy to do this; my own hacking projects, and working as an open-source advocate, take up 110% of my time. Even if I did, hacking is an attitude and skill you basically have to teach yourself. You'll find that while real hackers want to help you, they won't respect you if you beg to be spoon-fed everything they know. Learn a few things first. Show that you're trying, that you're capable of learning on your own. Then go to the hackers you meet with specific questions. If you do email a hacker asking for advice, here are two things to know up front. First, we've found that people who are lazy or careless in their writing are usually too lazy and careless in their thinking to make good hackers â€” so take care to spell correctly, and use good grammar and punctuation, otherwise you'll probably be ignored. Secondly, don't dare ask for a reply to an ISP account that's different from the account you're sending from; we find people who do that are usually thieves using stolen accounts, and we have no interest in rewarding or assisting thievery.
Q:	How can I get started, then?
A:	The best way for you to get started would probably be to go to a LUG (Linux user group) meeting. You can find such groups on the LDP General Linux Information Page; there is probably one near you, possibly associated with a college or university. LUG members will probably give you a Linux if you ask, and will certainly help you install one and get started.
Q:	When do you have to start? Is it too late for me to learn?
A:	Any age at which you are motivated to start is a good age. Most people seem to get interested between ages 15 and 20, but I know of exceptions in both directions.
Q:	How long will it take me to learn to hack?
A:	That depends on how talented you are and how hard you work at it. Most people who try can acquire a respectable skill set in eighteen months to two years, if they concentrate. Don't think it ends there, though; in hacking (as in many other fields) it takes about ten years to achieve mastery. And if you are a real hacker, you will spend the rest of your life learning and perfecting your craft.
Q:	Is Visual Basic a good language to start with?
A:	If you're asking this question, it almost certainly means you're thinking about trying to hack under Microsoft Windows. This is a bad idea in itself. When I compared trying to learn to hack under Windows to trying to learn to dance while wearing a body cast, I wasn't kidding. Don't go there. It's ugly, and it never stops being ugly. There is a specific problem with Visual Basic; mainly that it's not portable. Though there is a prototype open-source implementations of Visual Basic, the applicable ECMA standards don't cover more than a small set of its programming interfaces. On Windows most of its library support is proprietary to a single vendor (Microsoft); if you aren't extremely careful about which features you use â€” more careful than any newbie is really capable of being â€” you'll end up locked into only those platforms Microsoft chooses to support. If you're starting on a Unix, much better languages with better libraries are available. Python, for example. Also, like other Basics, Visual Basic is a poorly-designed language that will teach you bad programming habits. No, don't ask me to describe them in detail; that explanation would fill a book. Learn a well-designed language instead. One of those bad habits is becoming dependent on a single vendor's libraries, widgets, and development tools. In general, any language that isn't fully supported under at least Linux or one of the BSDs, and/or at least three different vendors' operating systems, is a poor one to learn to hack in.
Q:	Would you help me to crack a system, or teach me how to crack?
A:	No. Anyone who can still ask such a question after reading this FAQ is too stupid to be educable even if I had the time for tutoring. Any emailed requests of this kind that I get will be ignored or answered with extreme rudeness.
Q:	How can I get the password for someone else's account?
A:	This is cracking. Go away, idiot.
Q:	How can I break into/read/monitor someone else's email?
A:	This is cracking. Get lost, moron.
Q:	How can I steal channel op privileges on IRC?
A:	This is cracking. Begone, cretin.
Q:	I've been cracked. Will you help me fend off further attacks?
A:	No. Every time I've been asked this question so far, it's been from some poor sap running Microsoft Windows. It is not possible to effectively secure Windows systems against crack attacks; the code and architecture simply have too many flaws, which makes securing Windows like trying to bail out a boat with a sieve. The only reliable prevention starts with switching to Linux or some other operating system that is designed to at least be capable of security.
Q:	I'm having problems with my Windows software. Will you help me?
A:	Yes. Go to a DOS prompt and type "format c:". Any problems you are experiencing will cease within a few minutes.
Q:	Where can I find some real hackers to talk with?
A:	The best way is to find a Unix or Linux user's group local to you and go to their meetings (you can find links to several lists of user groups on the LDP site at ibiblio). (I used to say here that you wouldn't find any real hackers on IRC, but I'm given to understand this is changing. Apparently some real hacker communities, attached to things like GIMP and Perl, have IRC channels now.)
Q:	Can you recommend useful books about hacking-related subjects?
A:	I maintain a Linux Reading List HOWTO that you may find helpful. The Loginataka may also be interesting. For an introduction to Python, see the tutorial on the Python site.
Q:	Do I need to be good at math to become a hacker?
A:	No. Hacking uses very little formal mathematics or arithmetic. In particular, you won't usually need trigonometry, calculus or analysis (there are exceptions to this in a handful of specific application areas like 3-D computer graphics). Knowing some formal logic and Boolean algebra is good. Some grounding in finite mathematics (including finite-set theory, combinatorics, and graph theory) can be helpful. Much more importantly: you need to be able to think logically and follow chains of exact reasoning, the way mathematicians do. While the content of most mathematics won't help you, you will need the discipline and intelligence to handle mathematics. If you lack the intelligence, there is little hope for you as a hacker; if you lack the discipline, you'd better grow it. I think a good way to find out if you have what it takes is to pick up a copy of Raymond Smullyan's book What Is The Name Of This Book?. Smullyan's playful logical conundrums are very much in the hacker spirit. Being able to solve them is a good sign; enjoying solving them is an even better one.
Q:	What language should I learn first?
A:	XHTML (the latest dialect of HTML) if you don't already know it. There are a lot of glossy, hype-intensive bad HTML books out there, and distressingly few good ones. The one I like best is HTML: The Definitive Guide. But HTML is not a full programming language. When you're ready to start programming, I would recommend starting with Python. You will hear a lot of people recommending Perl, but it's harder to learn and (in my opinion) less well designed. C is really important, but it's also much more difficult than either Python or Perl. Don't try to learn it first. Windows users, do not settle for Visual Basic. It will teach you bad habits, and it's not portable off Windows. Avoid.
Q:	What kind of hardware do I need?
A:	It used to be that personal computers were rather underpowered and memory-poor, enough so that they placed artificial limits on a hacker's learning process. This stopped being true in the mid-1990s; any machine from an Intel 486DX50 up is more than powerful enough for development work, X, and Internet communications, and the smallest disks you can buy today are plenty big enough. The important thing in choosing a machine on which to learn is whether its hardware is Linux-compatible (or BSD-compatible, should you choose to go that route). Again, this will be true for almost all modern machines. The only really sticky areas are modems and wireless cards; some machines have Windows-specific hardware that won't work with Linux. There's a FAQ on hardware compatibility; the latest version is here.
Q:	I want to contribute. Can you help me pick a problem to work on?
A:	No, because I don't know your talents or interests. You have to be self-motivated or you won't stick, which is why having other people choose your direction almost never works. Try this. Watch the project announcements scroll by on Freshmeat for a few days. When you see one that makes you think "Cool! I'd like to work on that!", join it.
Q:	Do I need to hate and bash Microsoft?
A:	No, you don't. Not that Microsoft isn't loathsome, but there was a hacker culture long before Microsoft and there will still be one long after Microsoft is history. Any energy you spend hating Microsoft would be better spent on loving your craft. Write good code â€” that will bash Microsoft quite sufficiently without polluting your karma.
Q:	But won't open-source software leave programmers unable to make a living?
A:	This seems unlikely â€” so far, the open-source software industry seems to be creating jobs rather than taking them away. If having a program written is a net economic gain over not having it written, a programmer will get paid whether or not the program is going to be open-source after it's done. And, no matter how much "free" software gets written, there always seems to be more demand for new and customized applications. I've written more about this at the Open Source pages.
Q:	Where can I get a free Unix?
A:	If you don't have a Unix installed on your machine yet, elsewhere on this page I include pointers to where to get the most commonly used free Unix. To be a hacker you need motivation and initiative and the ability to educate yourself. Start now...

Historical Note: Hacking, Open Source, and Free Software

2011-08-28T12:54:00.001-07:00

When I originally wrote this how-to in late 1996, some of the conditions around it were very different from the way they look today. A few words about these changes may help clarify matters for people who are confused about the relationship of open source, free software, and Linux to the hacker community. If you are not curious about this, you can skip straight to the FAQ and bibliography from here.

The hacker ethos and community as I have described it here long predates the emergence of Linux after 1990; I first became involved with it around 1976, and, its roots are readily traceable back to the early 1960s. But before Linux, most hacking was done on either proprietary operating systems or a handful of quasi-experimental homegrown systems like MIT's ITS that were never deployed outside of their original academic niches. While there had been some earlier (pre-Linux) attempts to change this situation, their impact was at best very marginal and confined to communities of dedicated true believers which were tiny minorities even within the hacker community, let alone with respect to the larger world of software in general.
What is now called "open source" goes back as far as the hacker community does, but until 1985 it was an unnamed folk practice rather than a conscious movement with theories and manifestos attached to it. This prehistory ended when, in 1985, arch-hacker Richard Stallman ("RMS") tried to give it a name â€” "free software". But his act of naming was also an act of claiming; he attached ideological baggage to the "free software" label which much of the existing hacker community never accepted. As a result, the "free software" label was loudly rejected by a substantial minority of the hacker community (especially among those associated with BSD Unix), and used with serious but silent reservations by a majority of the remainder (including myself).
Despite these reservations, RMS's claim to define and lead the hacker community under the "free software" banner broadly held until the mid-1990s. It was seriously challenged only by the rise of Linux. Linux gave open-source development a natural home. Many projects issued under terms we would now call open-source migrated from proprietary Unixes to Linux. The community around Linux grew explosively, becoming far larger and more heterogenous than the pre-Linux hacker culture. RMS determinedly attempted to co-opt all this activity into his "free software" movement, but was thwarted by both the exploding diversity of the Linux community and the public skepticism of its founder, Linus Torvalds. Torvalds continued to use the term "free software" for lack of any alternative, but publicly rejected RMS's ideological baggage. Many younger hackers followed suit.
In 1996, when I first published this Hacker HOWTO, the hacker community was rapidly reorganizing around Linux and a handful of other open-source operating systems (notably those descended from BSD Unix). Community memory of the fact that most of us had spent decades developing closed-source software on closed-source operating systems had not yet begun to fade, but that fact was already beginning to seem like part of a dead past; hackers were, increasingly, defining themselves as hackers by their attachments to open-source projects such as Linux or Apache.
The term "open source", however, had not yet emerged; it would not do so until early 1998. When it did, most of hacker community adopted it within the following six months; the exceptions were a minority ideologically attached to the term "free software". Since 1998, and especially after about 2003, the identification of 'hacking' with 'open-source (and free software) development' has become extremely close. Today there is little point in attempting to distinguish between these categories, and it seems unlikely that will change in the future.
It is worth remembering, however, that this was not always so.

Points For Style

2011-08-28T12:53:00.002-07:00

Again, to be a hacker, you have to enter the hacker mindset. There are some things you can do when you're not at a computer that seem to help. They're not substitutes for hacking (nothing is) but many hackers do them, and feel that they connect in some basic way with the essence of hacking.

Learn to write your native language well. Though it's a common stereotype that programmers can't write, a surprising number of hackers (including all the most accomplished ones I know of) are very able writers.
Read science fiction. Go to science fiction conventions (a good way to meet hackers and proto-hackers).
Train in a martial-arts form. The kind of mental discipline required for martial arts seems to be similar in important ways to what hackers do. The most popular forms among hackers are definitely Asian empty-hand arts such as Tae Kwon Do, various forms of Karate, Kung Fu, Aikido, or Ju Jitsu. Western fencing and Asian sword arts also have visible followings. In places where it's legal, pistol shooting has been rising in popularity since the late 1990s. The most hackerly martial arts are those which emphasize mental discipline, relaxed awareness, and control, rather than raw strength, athleticism, or physical toughness.
Study an actual meditation discipline. The perennial favorite among hackers is Zen (importantly, it is possible to benefit from Zen without acquiring a religion or discarding one you already have). Other styles may work as well, but be careful to choose one that doesn't require you to believe crazy things.
Develop an analytical ear for music. Learn to appreciate peculiar kinds of music. Learn to play some musical instrument well, or how to sing.
Develop your appreciation of puns and wordplay.

The more of these things you already do, the more likely it is that you are natural hacker material. Why these things in particular is not completely clear, but they're connected with a mix of left- and right-brain skills that seems to be important; hackers need to be able to both reason logically and step outside the apparent logic of a problem at a moment's notice.
Work as intensely as you play and play as intensely as you work. For true hackers, the boundaries between "play", "work", "science" and "art" all tend to disappear, or to merge into a high-level creative playfulness. Also, don't be content with a narrow range of skills. Though most hackers self-describe as programmers, they are very likely to be more than competent in several related skills â€” system administration, web design, and PC hardware troubleshooting are common ones. A hacker who's a system administrator, on the other hand, is likely to be quite skilled at script programming and web design. Hackers don't do things by halves; if they invest in a skill at all, they tend to get very good at it.
Finally, a few things not to do.

Don't use a silly, grandiose user ID or screen name.
Don't get in flame wars on Usenet (or anywhere else).
Don't call yourself a â€˜cyberpunkâ€™, and don't waste your time on anybody who does.
Don't post or email writing that's full of spelling errors and bad grammar.

The only reputation you'll make doing any of these things is as a twit. Hackers have long memories â€” it could take you years to live your early blunders down enough to be accepted.
The problem with screen names or handles deserves some amplification. Concealing your identity behind a handle is a juvenile and silly behavior characteristic of crackers, warez d00dz, and other lower life forms. Hackers don't do this; they're proud of what they do and want it associated with their real names. So if you have a handle, drop it. In the hacker culture it will only mark you as a loser.

The Hacker/Nerd Connection

2011-08-28T12:53:00.000-07:00

Contrary to popular myth, you don't have to be a nerd to be a hacker. It does help, however, and many hackers are in fact nerds. Being something of a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking.

For this reason, many hackers have adopted the label â€˜geekâ€™ as a badge of pride â€” it's a way of declaring their independence from normal social expectations (as well as a fondness for other things like science fiction and strategy games that often go with being a hacker). The term 'nerd' used to be used this way back in the 1990s, back when 'nerd' was a mild pejorative and 'geek' a rather harsher one; sometime after 2000 they switched places, at least in U.S. popular culture, and there is now even a significant geek-pride culture among people who aren't techies.
If you can manage to concentrate enough on hacking to be good at it and still have a life, that's fine. This is a lot easier today than it was when I was a newbie in the 1970s; mainstream culture is much friendlier to techno-nerds now. There are even growing numbers of people who realize that hackers are often high-quality lover and spouse material.
If you're attracted to hacking because you don't have a life, that's OK too â€” at least you won't have trouble concentrating. Maybe you'll get a life later on.

Status in the Hacker Culture

2011-08-28T12:52:00.001-07:00

1. Write open-source software
2. Help test and debug open-source software
3. Publish useful information
4. Help keep the infrastructure working
5. Serve the hacker culture itself

Like most cultures without a money economy, hackerdom runs on reputation. You're trying to solve interesting problems, but how interesting they are, and whether your solutions are really good, is something that only your technical peers or superiors are normally equipped to judge.
Accordingly, when you play the hacker game, you learn to keep score primarily by what other hackers think of your skill (this is why you aren't really a hacker until other hackers consistently call you one). This fact is obscured by the image of hacking as solitary work; also by a hacker-cultural taboo (gradually decaying since the late 1990s but still potent) against admitting that ego or external validation are involved in one's motivation at all.
Specifically, hackerdom is what anthropologists call a gift culture. You gain status and reputation in it not by dominating other people, nor by being beautiful, nor by having things other people want, but rather by giving things away. Specifically, by giving away your time, your creativity, and the results of your skill.
There are basically five kinds of things you can do to be respected by hackers:

1. Write open-source software

The first (the most central and most traditional) is to write programs that other hackers think are fun or useful, and give the program sources away to the whole hacker culture to use.
(We used to call these works â€œfree softwareâ€, but this confused too many people who weren't sure exactly what â€œfreeâ€ was supposed to mean. Most of us now prefer the term â€œopen-sourceâ€ software).
Hackerdom's most revered demigods are people who have written large, capable programs that met a widespread need and given them away, so that now everyone uses them.
But there's a bit of a fine historical point here. While hackers have always looked up to the open-source developers among them as our community's hardest core, before the mid-1990s most hackers most of the time worked on closed source. This was still true when I wrote the first version of this HOWTO in 1996; it took the mainstreaming of open-source software after 1997 to change things. Today, "the hacker community" and "open-source developers" are two descriptions for what is essentially the same culture and population â€” but it is worth remembering that this was not always so. (For more on this, see the section called â€œHistorical Note: Hacking, Open Source, and Free Softwareâ€.)

2. Help test and debug open-source software

They also serve who stand and debug open-source software. In this imperfect world, we will inevitably spend most of our software development time in the debugging phase. That's why any open-source author who's thinking will tell you that good beta-testers (who know how to describe symptoms clearly, localize problems well, can tolerate bugs in a quickie release, and are willing to apply a few simple diagnostic routines) are worth their weight in rubies. Even one of these can make the difference between a debugging phase that's a protracted, exhausting nightmare and one that's merely a salutary nuisance.
If you're a newbie, try to find a program under development that you're interested in and be a good beta-tester. There's a natural progression from helping test programs to helping debug them to helping modify them. You'll learn a lot this way, and generate good karma with people who will help you later on.

3. Publish useful information

Another good thing is to collect and filter useful and interesting information into web pages or documents like Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) lists, and make those generally available.
Maintainers of major technical FAQs get almost as much respect as open-source authors.

4. Help keep the infrastructure working

The hacker culture (and the engineering development of the Internet, for that matter) is run by volunteers. There's a lot of necessary but unglamorous work that needs done to keep it going â€” administering mailing lists, moderating newsgroups, maintaining large software archive sites, developing RFCs and other technical standards.
People who do this sort of thing well get a lot of respect, because everybody knows these jobs are huge time sinks and not as much fun as playing with code. Doing them shows dedication.

5. Serve the hacker culture itself

Finally, you can serve and propagate the culture itself (by, for example, writing an accurate primer on how to become a hacker :-)). This is not something you'll be positioned to do until you've been around for while and become well-known for one of the first four things.
The hacker culture doesn't have leaders, exactly, but it does have culture heroes and tribal elders and historians and spokespeople. When you've been in the trenches long enough, you may grow into one of these. Beware: hackers distrust blatant ego in their tribal elders, so visibly reaching for this kind of fame is dangerous. Rather than striving for it, you have to sort of position yourself so it drops in your lap, and then be modest and gracious about your status.

Basic Hacking Skills

2011-08-28T12:51:00.002-07:00

1. Learn how to program.
2. Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it.
3. Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML.
4. If you don't have functional English, learn it.

The hacker attitude is vital, but skills are even more vital. Attitude is no substitute for competence, and there's a certain basic toolkit of skills which you have to have before any hacker will dream of calling you one.
This toolkit changes slowly over time as technology creates new skills and makes old ones obsolete. For example, it used to include programming in machine language, and didn't until recently involve HTML. But right now it pretty clearly includes the following:

1. Learn how to program.

This, of course, is the fundamental hacking skill. If you don't know any computer languages, I recommend starting with Python. It is cleanly designed, well documented, and relatively kind to beginners. Despite being a good first language, it is not just a toy; it is very powerful and flexible and well suited for large projects. I have written a more detailed evaluation of Python. Good tutorials are available at the Python web site.
I used to recommend Java as a good language to learn early, but this critique has changed my mind (search for â€œThe Pitfalls of Java as a First Programming Languageâ€ within it). A hacker cannot, as they devastatingly put it â€œapproach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware storeâ€; you have to know what the components actually do. Now I think it is probably best to learn C and Lisp first, then Java.
There is perhaps a more general point here. If a language does too much for you, it may be simultaneously a good tool for production and a bad one for learning. It's not only languages that have this problem; web application frameworks like RubyOnRails, CakePHP, Django may make it too easy to reach a superficial sort of understanding that will leave you without resources when you have to tackle a hard problem, or even just debug the solution to an easy one.
If you get into serious programming, you will have to learn C, the core language of Unix. C++ is very closely related to C; if you know one, learning the other will not be difficult. Neither language is a good one to try learning as your first, however. And, actually, the more you can avoid programming in C the more productive you will be.
C is very efficient, and very sparing of your machine's resources. Unfortunately, C gets that efficiency by requiring you to do a lot of low-level management of resources (like memory) by hand. All that low-level code is complex and bug-prone, and will soak up huge amounts of your time on debugging. With today's machines as powerful as they are, this is usually a bad tradeoff â€” it's smarter to use a language that uses the machine's time less efficiently, but your time much more efficiently. Thus, Python.
Other languages of particular importance to hackers include Perl and LISP. Perl is worth learning for practical reasons; it's very widely used for active web pages and system administration, so that even if you never write Perl you should learn to read it. Many people use Perl in the way I suggest you should use Python, to avoid C programming on jobs that don't require C's machine efficiency. You will need to be able to understand their code.
LISP is worth learning for a different reason â€” the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot. (You can get some beginning experience with LISP fairly easily by writing and modifying editing modes for the Emacs text editor, or Script-Fu plugins for the GIMP.)
It's best, actually, to learn all five of Python, C/C++, Java, Perl, and LISP. Besides being the most important hacking languages, they represent very different approaches to programming, and each will educate you in valuable ways.
But be aware that you won't reach the skill level of a hacker or even merely a programmer simply by accumulating languages â€” you need to learn how to think about programming problems in a general way, independent of any one language. To be a real hacker, you need to get to the point where you can learn a new language in days by relating what's in the manual to what you already know. This means you should learn several very different languages.
I can't give complete instructions on how to learn to program here â€” it's a complex skill. But I can tell you that books and courses won't do it â€” many, maybe most of the best hackers are self-taught. You can learn language features â€” bits of knowledge â€” from books, but the mind-set that makes that knowledge into living skill can be learned only by practice and apprenticeship. What will do it is (a) reading code and (b) writing code.
Peter Norvig, who is one of Google's top hackers and the co-author of the most widely used textbook on AI, has written an excellent essay called Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. His "recipe for programming success" is worth careful attention.
Learning to program is like learning to write good natural language. The best way to do it is to read some stuff written by masters of the form, write some things yourself, read a lot more, write a little more, read a lot more, write some more ... and repeat until your writing begins to develop the kind of strength and economy you see in your models.
Finding good code to read used to be hard, because there were few large programs available in source for fledgeling hackers to read and tinker with. This has changed dramatically; open-source software, programming tools, and operating systems (all built by hackers) are now widely available. Which brings me neatly to our next topic...

2. Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it.

I'll assume you have a personal computer or can get access to one. (Take a moment to appreciate how much that means. The hacker culture originally evolved back when computers were so expensive that individuals could not own them.) The single most important step any newbie can take toward acquiring hacker skills is to get a copy of Linux or one of the BSD-Unixes or OpenSolaris, install it on a personal machine, and run it.
Yes, there are other operating systems in the world besides Unix. But they're distributed in binary â€” you can't read the code, and you can't modify it. Trying to learn to hack on a Microsoft Windows machine or under any other closed-source system is like trying to learn to dance while wearing a body cast.
Under Mac OS X it's possible, but only part of the system is open source â€” you're likely to hit a lot of walls, and you have to be careful not to develop the bad habit of depending on Apple's proprietary code. If you concentrate on the Unix under the hood you can learn some useful things.
Unix is the operating system of the Internet. While you can learn to use the Internet without knowing Unix, you can't be an Internet hacker without understanding Unix. For this reason, the hacker culture today is pretty strongly Unix-centered. (This wasn't always true, and some old-time hackers still aren't happy about it, but the symbiosis between Unix and the Internet has become strong enough that even Microsoft's muscle doesn't seem able to seriously dent it.)
So, bring up a Unix â€” I like Linux myself but there are other ways (and yes, you can run both Linux and Microsoft Windows on the same machine). Learn it. Run it. Tinker with it. Talk to the Internet with it. Read the code. Modify the code. You'll get better programming tools (including C, LISP, Python, and Perl) than any Microsoft operating system can dream of hosting, you'll have fun, and you'll soak up more knowledge than you realize you're learning until you look back on it as a master hacker.
For more about learning Unix, see The Loginataka. You might also want to have a look at The Art Of Unix Programming.
To get your hands on a Linux, see the Linux Online! site; you can download from there or (better idea) find a local Linux user group to help you with installation.
During the first ten years of this HOWTO's life, I reported that from a new user's point of view, all Linux distributions are almost equivalent. But in 2006-2007, an actual best choice emerged: Ubuntu. While other distros have their own areas of strength, Ubuntu is far and away the most accessible to Linux newbies.
You can find BSD Unix help and resources at www.bsd.org.
A good way to dip your toes in the water is to boot up what Linux fans call a live CD, a distribution that runs entirely off a CD without having to modify your hard disk. This will be slow, because CDs are slow, but it's a way to get a look at the possibilities without having to do anything drastic.
I have written a primer on the basics of Unix and the Internet.
I used to recommend against installing either Linux or BSD as a solo project if you're a newbie. Nowadays the installers have gotten good enough that doing it entirely on your own is possible, even for a newbie. Nevertheless, I still recommend making contact with your local Linux user's group and asking for help. It can't hurt, and may smooth the process.

3. Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML.

Most of the things the hacker culture has built do their work out of sight, helping run factories and offices and universities without any obvious impact on how non-hackers live. The Web is the one big exception, the huge shiny hacker toy that even politicians admit has changed the world. For this reason alone (and a lot of other good ones as well) you need to learn how to work the Web.
This doesn't just mean learning how to drive a browser (anyone can do that), but learning how to write HTML, the Web's markup language. If you don't know how to program, writing HTML will teach you some mental habits that will help you learn. So build a home page. Try to stick to XHTML, which is a cleaner language than classic HTML. (There are good beginner tutorials on the Web; here's one.)
But just having a home page isn't anywhere near good enough to make you a hacker. The Web is full of home pages. Most of them are pointless, zero-content sludge â€” very snazzy-looking sludge, mind you, but sludge all the same (for more on this see The HTML Hell Page).
To be worthwhile, your page must have content â€” it must be interesting and/or useful to other hackers. And that brings us to the next topic...

4. If you don't have functional English, learn it.

As an American and native English-speaker myself, I have previously been reluctant to suggest this, lest it be taken as a sort of cultural imperialism. But several native speakers of other languages have urged me to point out that English is the working language of the hacker culture and the Internet, and that you will need to know it to function in the hacker community.
Back around 1991 I learned that many hackers who have English as a second language use it in technical discussions even when they share a birth tongue; it was reported to me at the time that English has a richer technical vocabulary than any other language and is therefore simply a better tool for the job. For similar reasons, translations of technical books written in English are often unsatisfactory (when they get done at all).
Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise). His fluency in English has been an important factor in his ability to recruit a worldwide community of developers for Linux. It's an example worth following.
Being a native English-speaker does not guarantee that you have language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many hackers (including myself) will tend to ignore you. While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong â€” and we have no use for sloppy thinkers. If you can't yet write competently, learn to.

Attitude of an Hacker

2011-08-28T12:51:00.000-07:00

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.

2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.
4. Freedom is good.
5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.

Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help. To be accepted as a hacker, you have to behave as though you have this kind of attitude yourself. And to behave as though you have the attitude, you have to really believe the attitude.
But if you think of cultivating hacker attitudes as just a way to gain acceptance in the culture, you'll miss the point. Becoming the kind of person who believes these things is important for you â€” for helping you learn and keeping you motivated. As with all creative arts, the most effective way to become a master is to imitate the mind-set of masters â€” not just intellectually but emotionally as well.
Or, as the following modern Zen poem has it:

Â Â Â Â ToÂ followÂ theÂ path:
Â Â Â Â lookÂ toÂ theÂ master,
Â Â Â Â followÂ theÂ master,
Â Â Â Â walkÂ withÂ theÂ master,
Â Â Â Â seeÂ throughÂ theÂ master,
Â Â Â Â becomeÂ theÂ master.

So, if you want to be a hacker, repeat the following things until you believe them:

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.

Being a hacker is lots of fun, but it's a kind of fun that takes lots of effort. The effort takes motivation. Successful athletes get their motivation from a kind of physical delight in making their bodies perform, in pushing themselves past their own physical limits. Similarly, to be a hacker you have to get a basic thrill from solving problems, sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence.
If you aren't the kind of person that feels this way naturally, you'll need to become one in order to make it as a hacker. Otherwise you'll find your hacking energy is sapped by distractions like sex, money, and social approval.
(You also have to develop a kind of faith in your own learning capacity â€” a belief that even though you may not know all of what you need to solve a problem, if you tackle just a piece of it and learn from that, you'll learn enough to solve the next piece â€” and so on, until you're done.)

2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.

Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn't be wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many fascinating new problems waiting out there.
To behave like a hacker, you have to believe that the thinking time of other hackers is precious â€” so much so that it's almost a moral duty for you to share information, solve problems and then give the solutions away just so other hackers can solve new problems instead of having to perpetually re-address old ones.
Note, however, that "No problem should ever have to be solved twice." does not imply that you have to consider all existing solutions sacred, or that there is only one right solution to any given problem. Often, we learn a lot about the problem that we didn't know before by studying the first cut at a solution. It's OK, and often necessary, to decide that we can do better. What's not OK is artificial technical, legal, or institutional barriers (like closed-source code) that prevent a good solution from being re-used and force people to re-invent wheels.
(You don't have to believe that you're obligated to give all your creative product away, though the hackers that do are the ones that get most respect from other hackers. It's consistent with hacker values to sell enough of it to keep you in food and rent and computers. It's fine to use your hacking skills to support a family or even get rich, as long as you don't forget your loyalty to your art and your fellow hackers while doing it.)

3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.

Hackers (and creative people in general) should never be bored or have to drudge at stupid repetitive work, because when this happens it means they aren't doing what only they can do â€” solve new problems. This wastefulness hurts everybody. Therefore boredom and drudgery are not just unpleasant but actually evil.
To behave like a hacker, you have to believe this enough to want to automate away the boring bits as much as possible, not just for yourself but for everybody else (especially other hackers).
(There is one apparent exception to this. Hackers will sometimes do things that may seem repetitive or boring to an observer as a mind-clearing exercise, or in order to acquire a skill or have some particular kind of experience you can't have otherwise. But this is by choice â€” nobody who can think should ever be forced into a situation that bores them.)

4. Freedom is good.

Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you're being fascinated by â€” and, given the way authoritarian minds work, will generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and other hackers.
(This isn't the same as fighting all authority. Children need to be guided and criminals restrained. A hacker may agree to accept some kinds of authority in order to get something he wants more than the time he spends following orders. But that's a limited, conscious bargain; the kind of personal surrender authoritarians want is not on offer.)
Authoritarians thrive on censorship and secrecy. And they distrust voluntary cooperation and information-sharing â€” they only like â€˜cooperationâ€™ that they control. So to behave like a hacker, you have to develop an instinctive hostility to censorship, secrecy, and the use of force or deception to compel responsible adults. And you have to be willing to act on that belief.

5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.

To be a hacker, you have to develop some of these attitudes. But copping an attitude alone won't make you a hacker, any more than it will make you a champion athlete or a rock star. Becoming a hacker will take intelligence, practice, dedication, and hard work.
Therefore, you have to learn to distrust attitude and respect competence of every kind. Hackers won't let posers waste their time, but they worship competence â€” especially competence at hacking, but competence at anything is valued. Competence at demanding skills that few can master is especially good, and competence at demanding skills that involve mental acuteness, craft, and concentration is best.
If you revere competence, you'll enjoy developing it in yourself â€” the hard work and dedication will become a kind of intense play rather than drudgery. That attitude is vital to becoming a hacker.

How to Hack

2011-08-28T12:49:00.001-07:00

Table of Contents

Why This Document?

What Is a Hacker?

The Hacker Attitude

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.
4. Freedom is good.
5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.

Basic Hacking Skills

1. Learn how to program.
2. Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it.
3. Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML.
4. If you don't have functional English, learn it.

Status in the Hacker Culture

1. Write open-source software
2. Help test and debug open-source software
3. Publish useful information
4. Help keep the infrastructure working
5. Serve the hacker culture itself

The Hacker/Nerd Connection

Points For Style

Historical Note: Hacking, Open Source, and Free Software

Other Resources

Frequently Asked Questions

Why This Document?

As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed this vital question, so I started this one. A lot of hackers now consider it definitive, and I suppose that means it is. Still, I don't claim to be the exclusive authority on this topic; if you don't like what you read here, write your own.
If you are reading a snapshot of this document offline, the current version lives at http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html.
Note: there is a list of Frequently Asked Questions at the end of this document. Please read theseâ€”twiceâ€”before mailing me any questions about this document.
Numerous translations of this document are available: Arabic Belorussian Chinese (Simplified), Danish, Dutch, Estonian, German, Greek Italian Hebrew, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Romanian Spanish,Turkish, and Swedish. Note that since this document changes occasionally, they may be out of date to varying degrees.
The five-dots-in-nine-squares diagram that decorates this document is called a glider. It is a simple pattern with some surprising properties in a mathematical simulation called Life that has fascinated hackers for many years. I think it makes a good visual emblem for what hackers are like â€” abstract, at first a bit mysterious-seeming, but a gateway to a whole world with an intricate logic of its own. Read more about the glider emblem here.

What Is a Hacker?

The Jargon File contains a bunch of definitions of the term â€˜hackerâ€™, most having to do with technical adeptness and a delight in solving problems and overcoming limits. If you want to know how tobecome a hacker, though, only two are really relevant.
There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture originated the term â€˜hackerâ€™. Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today. Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make the World Wide Web work. If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker.
The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music â€” actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them â€˜hackersâ€™ too â€” and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that originated the term â€˜hackerâ€™.
There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren't. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people â€˜crackersâ€™ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word â€˜hackerâ€™ to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.
The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.
If you want to be a hacker, keep reading. If you want to be a cracker, go read the alt.2600 newsgroup and get ready to do five to ten in the slammer after finding out you aren't as smart as you think you are. And that's all I'm going to say about crackers.