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So, a hacker is basically a scientist? Cool.

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.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the kind of people who used to go into physics now hack. After all, I have a phd in physics, and I find hacking to be really fun...

This comment is very, very interesting... I keep reading about physics people who now are running 2.0 companies and that kind of stuff. But my question for you is: don't you miss science when working on a 2.0 environment? Or how do you correlate one subject with the other?

Yes, I miss practicing science a lot. It was a blast to do (I did theoretical work, which included a lot of computer modeling). But really, being a scientist is a frame of mind. Being a practicing scientist is a different story.

I don't consider mine a 2.0, incidentally.

Thanks a lot for your interesting reply, I was very curious about it.

My immediate thought was hacker is an artist to the engineer's pragmatist... getting something to work is more important than its beauty, elegance or how few LOC are used, rather than something that is ..err.. hacked together(!?)

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