Ask HN: How do you become a great hacker in today's world? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you become a great hacker in today's world?

9 points_g2lm3 comments

From what I read, it seems like 10-20 years ago, if you wanted to write some program, you had to do it (mostly) yourself. Nowadays it seems like someone else has already written the code, and you're just taking really big blocks of code and plugging them together. This is basically web development up to a point.

Often I need to implement some new functionality and get excited about it, only to realize someone else already did it. I might have learned a lot writing it myself, but there's already such a good implementation out there--written by better programmers than me, well-tested, etc.-- that I can't help but simply use it. Rarely do I run into a problem so novel that, say, some jQuery library or Python module hasn't already been written for it.

Have the rules for hacking changed? How can I find hard problems to work on?

Becoming a "great hacker" doesn't rely on novelty of solution. It relies on ingenuity.

I'm currently writing a book, and in that book I make a claim: "engineers are addicted to problem solving." This ends up making the engineer apt to searching for a problem where there isn't one. If a problem has a solution, it is no longer a problem.

The real question you are asking, or should be asking, is how do I figure out what the next unsolved problems are?

The answer to that often lay here in the HN comments. We all have new needs daily. Find your needs, or others' needs, and discern whether those needs have solutions. If they do not have an existing solution, or if the existing solution is poorly constructed, there's a good place to start.

Remember, you stand on the shoulders of those who come before you. Just because jQuery solves a problem doesn't mean its time to put jQuery on the shelf. It means it's time to push jQuery to its limits, use it and abuse it. That's what a hacker does.

What if you find a hard problem but can't solve it?

There's no shame in solving a problem yourself which someone else has already solved. You may find a better solution. You may just learn a lot. Either way, you get practice seeing a problem and solving it, which is what programming is all about.

hacking itself is about quick wins - finding a clever shortcut, instead of sweating. no?

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