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_posts/2013-04-26-hackers.md

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+---
+title: Hackers
+layout: post
+---
+
+*The following is a non-fiction essay I wrote for my* ENGH 396: Intro to
+Creative Writing *class. I decided to write about my experience with
+discovering and getting involved with the eccentric community of hackers that I
+met since the past two internships I've had at [Valti](https:/www.valti.com/)
+and [Humbug](https://humbughq.com/) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Seeing as it
+encapsulated what I've learned culturally since then, I decided to post it here
+as well.*
+
+Hackers -- not your malicious meddling Hollywood-style speed-typists -- but the
+type who sees a toaster and turns it into a computer capable of etching emails
+into the crispy surface of toast. Those who would create a programming language
+consisting exclusively of expletives and then use it to filter out offensive
+words from websites just for the irony. They would never steal a password or
+cause any harm -- unless, perhaps, you gave them a powerful rocket and a bad
+idea. Their curiosity leaves them with a burning desire to break all
+assumptions and to answer "what if" questions as if they were a challenge to
+their very existence.
+
+My personal foray within the realm of hackers began with Boston. I had snagged
+an internship with a startup called Valti started by a couple of Harvard
+students who wanted to create an online platform that enabled college students
+to exchange dresses. Startup businesses are dime a dozen in the hacker culture.
+With so many wild ideas going around, every once in a while a profitable one
+comes by. Hackers despise cubicles and big corporations, so starting their own
+company on their own rules is the usual course of action.
+
+While Harvard's snobby atmosphere put me off, MIT seemed to call out to the
+hacker within me. Now, MIT is arguably the birthplace of the hacker, so when I
+say that I was thrown into the thick of the hacker culture all at once, it is
+no over-exaggeration. This is the place where people would regularly discuss
+mathematical and computer science theories over a casual lunch with each other.
+Computer Science is the de facto "undecided" major at MIT. You would be
+hard-pressed to find a student who didn’t know their way around a Linux
+terminal. Now imagine the computer club of such a university.
+
+The Student Information Processing Board, or SIPB for short, was at least one
+such computer club of MIT that I began to get involved with. This club, which
+was established in the 60s, packaged their own operating system and distributed
+computing environment called Project Athena that was good enough that the
+university installed it on all of their computers. The members were laughably
+out of my league in terms of computer science experience; I would find myself
+regularly searching Wikipedia for every other word they would mention while in
+a heated discussion concerning some technology. But, what surprised me the most
+was not the depth of their knowledge, but the breadth; each of them seemed to
+have an unlimited capacity for various trivial tidbits of knowledge from the
+etymology of words to the physics of the universe. Being around that kind of
+intelligence was fascinating, while at the same time frustrating, since it was
+often hard to follow.
+
+Whenever I wasn't building the website for Valti, I was out in the city going
+to various meetups to meet people and learn about new upcoming technologies.
+This was a totally new world for me. Hackers didn't exist in high school, they
+were just those weird nerds in the computer classes. And, even at George Mason,
+there still wasn't the same atmosphere of ingenuity as in Boston that gave me
+the motivation to want to change the world. I had the feeling most CS students
+at Mason were only there for the degree just so they could go work at some
+boring government contractor in DC when they graduated. After seeing the hacker
+culture in Boston, that type of job seemed like death to me.
+
+Hackers, a world-wide amorphous group of people who enjoy discussing (and
+arguing) various topics, naturally congregate among sites like Slashdot,
+Reddit, and Hacker News (often abbreviated to HN -- hackers, much like the
+military, are fond of their abbreviations) to get quick syndicated news and to
+have large in-depth discussions in the comments. Locally, there are groups that
+meet to discuss certain technologies or set up spaces where hackers can easily
+build prototypes (usually referred to as "hackerspaces"). Unsurprisingly, the
+hubs for these local communities are usually centered around cities that are
+hosts to major computer science universities: San Fransisco, Boston, New York,
+etc.
+
+Their awareness of the languages they use and their fondness of breaking beyond
+the norm lends hackers a great affinity to the game of word play, and thus they
+have created their own lexicon of slang that borrows much from the jargon of
+computer science. "Foobar," "grok," "cruft," "distro," "kluge," "phreaking,"
+the words that are common knowledge among those already within the society put
+a barrier in front of those like me looking to understand the culture.
+
+Many of the students I met at MIT use a chat protocol called Zephyr as cross
+between email and instant messaging to communicate with each other. Zephyr was
+created in the 80’s as one of the first instant-messaging systems (the other,
+more popular protocol being IRC), and, because of the culture surrounding the
+program, it is still widely used at the university. "Zephyrisms" have developed
+over the years to aid in simplifying communication. For example, "==" is used
+to indicate agreement and "++" is used by what would probably be the equivalent
+to a "Like" on Facebook. Both can find their parallels as symbols used in many
+programming languages, the former for equality and the later for incrementing
+an integer by one. Other more obscure zephyrisms include "starking," or
+reviving an old thread of conversation, "prnf" which stands for "Pseudo-Random
+Neuron Firings", and "i, i" which would mean "I have no point here, I just like
+saying" and would usually prefix some snarky comment in reply to an otherwise
+serious thread of conversation (some people would just omit the "i, i" and put
+quotes around said snarky comment instead). Even though these zephyrisms seemed
+completely arbitrary to me when I first encountered them, after a while of use
+they came to me naturally, and I would even accidentally use them outside
+Zephyr to the confusion of my friends. It was easy to see how such conventions
+of speech developed originally.
+
+The Free Software Foundation (FSF), which advocates for free, open-source,
+non-proprietary software (free as in "free speech," not "free beer"), is based
+in Boston and is one of the focal points of the hacker culture. The president,
+Richard Stallman (who is often referred to as RMS), a big, heavily bearded
+fellow, is particularly legendary in the community. Being nearly militant about
+the goals of FSF, he refuses to use software that contains any proprietary code
+at all: no cellphone, only uses a laptop developed completely open-source,
+doesn’t use a browser to view the internet, and even refuses to use a key card,
+which makes it difficult for him to get into his office at MIT. Though often
+painfully stubborn about his ideas, he is the ultimate activist for hackers:
+making sure the government and big corporations do not misuse people's
+information or kill off the hacker culture.
+
+While nowadays I like to call myself an aspiring hacker, I’m not so sure I
+could ever match the intelligence and indestructible curiosity of those that I
+met in Boston. Perhaps it is their unique culture of constantly questioning the
+norm and striving for knowledge of the world around them that allows them to
+transcend into true hackerdom. Either way, I now know never to tell a hacker
+that something is impossible, because they will surely find a way to prove me
+wrong.