I guess one actually realistic version of the fully-jacked-in-hacker fantasy is network guys who are in so deep that they can read bin/hex numbers fluently without consciously "converting", etc. This I know of, and from there, I can conceive of someone who has become familiar with the binary representations of certain instructions? Or something? But I guess it would have to be a very specific (and probably read-only) situation. And, unless I'm missing something, it wouldn't amount to a deeper or more enlightened understanding of anything meaningful to software concerns