1001 Things To Hack Before You Die
There's already 1001 (places to visit|books to read|movies to see|{insert other activities}) before you die. Why not 1001 to hack/make/develop/design/start/attempt before you die that's more HN friendly:
1. Write a Hello World application from scratch. No C library, compiler, linker, nothing. You get a hex editor.
2. Write a non-bootstrapped compiler or interpreter using assembler.
3. Write a program that learns to play a game.
4. Develop a network protocol.
5. Write a web server. You can use the language of your choice, but nothing is allowed except a socket library.
6. Write a platform game that performs at least as well as the original Super Mario Brothers.
7. Design a circuit that has some sort of non-trivial purpose and build it.
8. Write Tetris in Javascript.
"To prepare a donut from scratch, you have to first create the universe."
Does this involve anything more than loading "Hello, world" into memory, setting up the registers/stack in a certain way, and invoking the syscall interrupt? (All the cool stuff happens in your terminal emulator. That's where 0x41 gets turned into the pixels that look like "A" on your screen, after all.)
I've never spent much time there, but some of the ideas are laid out well in this two part post: http://blog.ksplice.com/2010/04/libc-free-world-2/
Doing it with _just_ a hex editor (ie writing out the ELF headers and sections yourself) may not be exactly what the commenter did, though. Cos that sounds really tedious.
I imagine that even writing "Hello, World" in the simpler way that you describe, on a simpler system (Apple IIe or so), would probably teach me something. I remember trying to write 6502 machine code in hex (no assembler) on my IIe when I was about 10 years old. It never worked then, I wonder if it would work now?
http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.htm...
The idea is that you strip away everything that does something for you so that you are sure to completely understand the entire process with no "pushing the green compile button."
- Create a programming language
- Restore an old broken down pinball machine
- Build a mame arcade cabinet
- Write some Interactive Fiction
- Learn to make awesome programmatic artwork with something like Processing or Nodebox
- Create a roguelike
- Create an os in the language you designed above.
0001: Learn a functional language well enough to write something of some complexity
0010: Create a product with 100+ users
0011: Sell 100+ products (doesn't have to be the same as 0010)
0100: Get married!
0101: Learn either vim or emacs
0110: Learn Mandarin
0111: Become an expert at something tech *and* something non-tech
1000: Contribute to an OSS project
1001: edit: learned binary. thanks for pointing out my stupidity lol0010: Done that. the last project I openly released to the outside world now has at least that many users (6x that in downloads): http://dl.qj.net/psp/homebrew-applications/ebootr-v15.html
0011: Nope.
0100: Ditto.
0101: I use gvim and Nano. Sue me.
0110: Did that in high school. 我贏得了比賽
0111: Working on it.
1001: I run a few (ebooter, and my first work on Git: http://github.com/indrora/creed )
19 - Harness Zero Point Energy
20 - Publish a paper in a journal
21 - Present at a conference
22 - Hack food, make something new
23 - Modify your body (with something cool like magnets)
24 - Do something legally/morally questionable and get away with it, just enough to make you rethink boundaries but not enough to hurt someone.
25 - Modify your brain chemistry in an expansive way
26 - Build a great group of friends
27 - Put your projects down and spend some time with your family
28 - Learn assembly language
29 - Code an old school demo
30 - Write a cool program on an 8-bit computer
31 - Travel to another continent with a completely different culture and immerse yourself in it.
32 - Learn how to crack (i.e. break into) applications
33 - Learn how to crack (i.e. break copyright and write keygens) software
2 - start a blog
3 - learn *SQL
4 - develop a javascript site, (gmail.com)
5 - write your own planning/todo program (because others just don't work)
6 - read, sign up, make at least one post on HN
7 - start an open source software project
0001. master a keyboard-only text editor (vim/emacs)
0010. master your mind
0011. determine how to help the world the most with the least effort
0100. learn from your mistakes
0101. learn as many programming methodologies as you can
0110. create an awesome sheep for electricsheep
0111. reverse engineer a program from decompiled machine code
1000. write a book worth reading in 100 years
Definite up vote for answering a question about what to hack in the spirit of a hacker.
Also tried to convince them to get people to use SSH instead of telnet, but they took a few years to get around to deploying that and ignored me. In retrospect, the university president was the wrong person to tell; he had no clue what I was even talking about. Mind you, this was in 1998 and more than a few people had already figured out that it's not too hard to listen in to unencrypted traffic on a LAN. I'm assuming that the people who did bad things with that knowledge are the ones who actually got them to change the policy.
Also made them change the terms of use that forbade "downloading copyrighted material" to "downloading copyrighted material without permission" given that almost everything online is copyrighted.
I also ended up acting as an unofficial helpdesk member just because I was up there chatting to the real people too often. It's always fun to fix problems for people and when they ask how you know so much about the program they're using to point out that, in fact, you've never actually seen or used it before...
15 - Version your dotfiles and put them up online for others to learn from.
16 - Write and open source a plugin for your favorite text editor.
- Built a HAM radio-vacuum tubes were involved.
- Developed a useful library of JavaScript tools
- Developed my own MVC web framework
- Collaborated on the design of, developed and launched custom child-still tweaking that one for performance
- Started a successful business
- Be a part of a popular Open Source project
- Wired a house
- Participated in the saving of a few lives
Here are some of the things that I have done so far.
1. Write an editor based for card-image files in XPL (for the Sigma 5 RBM system) 2. Write a document processor along the lines of nroff for fixed-width character printers (think Courier). There were at least two of these I believe 3. Write a simulator to estimate the probability of a busy signal for a given call volume and a given number of phone lines. Oddly, when we later compared these results to similar simulations provided by the phone company, the phone company's numbers showed we needed more lines. 4. Write a code generator for an industrial compiler. 5. Write the (rough) equivalent of an IRC channel for AX-25 packet radio DX-spotting network. 6. Write the software necessary for the first real-time QSO-logging system used in a DXpedition. (Used in the YJ8V/YJ8PD trip.) 7. Contribute a very tiny piece of software that is part of a control-system analysis program used to decide where to locate Argonne National Labs. (And I mean really tiny.) First program I wrote for pay.
These are just a few of the more fun ones.
However, there is one challenge that has captured my imagination over the years. Imagine a final exam of programming skill that has the student in an electronically-locked room with a computer that controls the lock. There are but a few necessities in the room, no internet. The student needs to write a program that will unlock the door.
I haven't done this last one exactly, but sometimes it seems like a metaphor for some near-deathmarch projects I have gotten myself into.
Current homework includes writing an intercepting proxy in a handful of languages.
go ahead and add stuff, let me know if permissions are set incorrectly.
Make my own versions of these pieces of infrastructure in one or more variants of Lisp, using various novel approaches or combining some "old" approaches that are nevertheless not used as much as they should be today, and comprehensively document it all:
My own web framework (in progress), window manager, UI toolkit and layout system, 3D engine, video editor, image editor, video and sound codec, emacs-style editor, operating system, kernel, Common Lisp implementation, virtual machine, BIOS, OS bootstrapper.
Also, maybe an NES or SNES emulator, for fun and maybe trying to make a full blown modern development environment to make it easy to make whole new games for these consoles instead of just making more or less elaborate hacks to already existing games.
Learn to play the piano, guitar and violin. Learn to compose my own music.
Not that I expect or count on it, but it would be convenient if a treatment to stop aging appeared while it's not too late for me, cuz I'm pretty sure I'll be out of time before I'm doing what I want to do properly...
2 - Learn Python, Haskell, Lisp, Lua, Ruby and build you own f*cking good language.
3 - Discover what is a monad.
4 - Play with Arduino.
5 - Write a basic kernel from scratch.
6 - Forget about Vim and Emacs. Learn how to capture brainwaves, plug an usb cable on it and do an text editor based on thougths.
- Implement part of a networking stack.
- Interface with some piece of hardware in a way it wasn't designed.
- Create a browser extension.
- Add an easter egg that nobody ever finds.
- Code a strategy to a game and compete against other implementations.
- Discover a subtle bug in a very well used bit of code.
12 - Fall in love
13 - Donate
invent a device like this guy http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1308907...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Nut_Sheller
The thought that this machine is sometimes custom made to accommodate different environments and plants intrigues me.
- Use the fixed point combinator in Javascript for something.
- Make your own bike lights.
- Figure out how the monad laws really work.
- Write something that makes more than $100 on the App Store.
- Figure out how to get the plants in the garden to not die.
Enter a hacker/code competition.
Predict the outcome of a sporting event.
Virtual worlds have always fascinated me, but I've always been a command-line/server guy and never got around to learning the theory/math that goes into doing 3D graphics.
- Learn Erlang
- Learn to play the panflute
9 - poke somebody on facebook
10 - comment on techcrunch story
Bonus points: Make it capable of reconfiguring itself based on the program it's executing.
Bonus points if you hack the hardware together in the most power-efficient way. Or as small as possible. Or pretty. Or if it makes coffee too.
Oh, and in case someone hasn't seen Jaimie Manzel in all his retro 1990's site glory: http://jamius.com/
1. Making my own uC architecture and write it in HDL.
2. Make a lisp machine
3. Hacking a game for a old game console (not an emulator, you have to actually get it working on the physical machine).
4. Experiment with different types of OS on uControllers.
5. Hacking to gather a home automation system.
6. Implement a whole web server in the uController from scratch (means you have to make your own protocol stack and such things).
7. Make a widely used C library.
8. Get my long standing dream of localized electronics kit store to launch.
9. Get a patent on something new
10. Make a super computer cluster from home PC's
I know lot of these are very hard but hey I am just 19 and have a whole life ahead.