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Comment by can16358p | Hacker News Reader

Exactly.

This might be the perfect test for ones born in 60s-mid 80s but anyone later born will have probably score much lower than their actual "hackerness" (is there such a word?) and the test would really not reflect the truth simply because the used tools and techniques and memes of the era.

(But hey the test is from 1989 so it makes perfect sense)

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I see it more as a piece of history than any actual measurement of someones "hackerness". It's a fun way of peering into the realm of 80s hacker culture and seeing what was popular or cutting-edge at the time ("Have you ever programmed in the X windowing system?")

Mid-80s is a bit late for a test from 1989. Most of these questions would need you to be in university or work. I'd say mid 40s to early 70s is more realistic. My uncle was born around '48 and was working at Cambridge Computer Lab in 1989, so I'm sure would have answered this.

Indeed Mid-80s would be either using Debian/Slackware, writting a device driver for Linux/BSD, tampering with Video4Linux, cracking TV cards by nearly decoding Nagra by hand, writting something akin to minimodem/tempest for Eliza, hacking a cable-modem to get free internet access, smashing the stack, doing anything close to what Fabrice Bellard did and so on.

Agreed. I was born in '81, and by the time I got my first computer (coincidentally, probably '89, when this test was compile), a ton of the questions on that list would have required you to have been in the industry for a couple decades already. I feel like even a hacker born in 1970 would have a trouble answering "yes" to many of those questions.

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