I'm a little nervous describing myself as a "hacker", because I am not really sure I qualify for that label yet, and maybe I never will --- I'm no Stallman or LPD or JWZ or Landon Dyer or James Hague or Chuck Moore or Bill Gosper. But I seem to have more or less been accepted as at least a proto-hacker. I won't call myself an entrepreneur until my company is profitable and has expenses of more than twice my and my wife's salary.
I get what you're saying about hackers, but I don't see why you'd necessarily correlate hackers with entrepreneurs. There's a very narrow overlap in that Venn diagram, precisely because hackers (orig. definition) don't do what they do to make money or build businesses. Hacker/founder/entrepreneurs are a rare enough breed.
"I'm a.." & "I'm interested in.." are not really the same thing. Also, "I'm a hacker" or "I am more interested in the business and entrepreneurship side of HN," don't really cover all the options. You could be a non programmer interested mostly in programming. Many of the programming related articles here are relatively abstract & do not require an understanding of programming to read.
Another thin. 'Hacker' might not be the right word for your purpose. It implies all sorts of things.
great analogy. gabe weinberg is absolutely correct. Being a tech person, I can build sites quickly and put them out there... but the real difference between a startup/entrepreneur and just a hacker is what you do after the site is released and your commitment to the product. As a side note: maybe the term for changing directions should have a term that carries more weight as @jbyers suggests.
I didn't use the word entrepreneur, either. That's a bad stab at replying to me, and you know it. You often imply, although in not so many words, that the essence of what it means to be a "hacker" is to do a "startup".
I don't know if either one fits me. I don't like hacking so much as I like making stuff work. But I don't tinker. If something works well enough, I don't try to take it apart.
Similarly, I love money very much, but I'm not obsessed with it. I'm more into making things. So I guess designer, if anything?
I usually go with programmer/web developer. It doesn't roll off the tongue as easy as hacker but the latter term has negative connotations among the majority of humans.
I'm a bit puzzled by the notion and expectation by Y Combinator & folks on this forum that you absolutely need to be a "hacker" to have any shot at being a good entrepreneur. Even the application form for startup school asks you about what systems you've hacked in the past.
I am a fairly intelligent guy, if I can say so myself, who somehow ended up in computer science, ended up going to grad school but realized later on that my true interests and calling really lie somewhere else. I'm not a hacker so to say and I don't particularly enjoy programming - certainly not to the extent that I could have orgasms doing it and spend countless hours just doing it for fun. I look at it as a means to an end, do it to get my job done and happen to be decently good at it. I'm in the process of launching a site here and have already launched a beta version of it in India (our initial target audience). I learned RoR/AJAX/CSS and all else associated with deploying it in my spare time (my day job is a systems one with C coding). I truly enjoy the process of taking an idea from concept to launch and building a successful business around it. I spend much time thinking and working on it, learning about all aspects from the engineering to the business side. I've been working on my idea for over an year and half now, all in my spare time, riding many ups and downs and persevering through.
But please explain, why this ridiculous idea that to be an Internet entrepreneur, you should just absolutely be in love with programming & hacking anything and everything to death!
This is kind of off topic but imho "everyone else" coopted hacker away from those of us who consider ourselves hackers.
And for the record I don't consider semi-technical entrepreneur to be the definition of hacker I apply to myself. For me it's more about someone who can take two things and make something new with them, regardless if they should be able to or not.
In any case, its a form of cultural identity, so its up to those who identify with it to define it. If the mainstream doesn't recognize it, its our responsibility to fix that.
When I talked this idea out in my head, it was originally "Scientist vs Engineer", but I changed it to Hacker for the article because of the kind of people that read my blog.
I wish people(hackers) would spend same amount of time building and marketing/selling their idea. Unfortunately, i think its human nature, it is always easy to start with the fun part, and give up when the steps need to be taken become uninteresting/difficult.
Hackers love creating stuff, but when it comes to the selling that idea to their potential users, they dont have enough energy.
Dude, get this once and for all: I said we should forget labels for a while, didn't I? So, fuck the words "hacker" and "business people".
BTW, I am not a nerdy, deluded, emotionally retarded teenager who is enchanted with PG's essays. I have been in the start-up world since 2002, so I know how reality works.
If you had cared to read my previous comment, you would have understood that the distinction is not between hackers and business people, but rather between people who take the risks, and people who reap the rewards. Ideally, high-risk means high-rewards. The whole fucking point I was trying to make is that smart people position themselves to have disproportionally high rewards for the low risk profile they adopt. That's the whole idea.
I feel like a better distinction would be academic hacking and counterculture hacking. One is founded in clever solutions/information-related ideology from an academic context, and the other in subversion from an outsider context (and of course there could be overlap). Of course a CEO could be a hacker in one of those senses.
Initially coming from a mechanical engineering background, I was always puzzled by the "hacker" expression. The qualities that people attribute to "hackers" on this site are the qualities of any good engineer; the ability to find creative "shortcut"-like solutions to hard problems, the ability to apply advanced mathematics (or computer science, in this case) to real-world problems, to understand business needs, etc. Needless to say that many start-up founders are engineers themselves.
But this is really just a terminology question so if people here prefer calling themselves hackers instead of engineers or computer programmers, well, I can live with that.
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