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Comment by uniclaude | Hacker News Reader

Some responses in this thread surprise me, I thought the mindset exposed in this article was something most hackers shared. Therefore, after reading the post, I expected a bunch of mildly negative comments of people who built a lot of awesome things in their spare time. Well, I was wrong.

Anecdotal but surprising, my fellow musician friends are more prone to what I believe to be the hacker thinking than most of the software programmers I work with. Maybe it is because of some unfortunate psychological barrier, or the result of a strong focus on computer related things and discard for the rest, I honestly don't know.

Anyways, what this roommate did is super cool, and I'd suggest everyone here to start hacking outside of their comfort zone, it can be very rewarding for some. Building things feels great, and being able to apply your hacker thinking to various things is a very useful skill to have.

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Not to take away the intelligence of people but a hacker is someone who excels in situations as this - Limited time, limited resources/cheapness to spend money, Have objects X, Need functions Y.

That takes a hacker. Everything else is just a builder (be it building code, or cabinets, or robots). The core ideology of being a hacker is seeing beyond the normal functionality of the item like this roommate has seen. He looked at the wardrobe and saw a sliding table. That is hacking.

You just made me realize my dad (and MacGyver) are hackers!

They absolutely are. But in normal conversation when you speak to people about this, they'll most probably say "Wow, that's pretty smart man, I wouldn't have thought of using a pipe as a sound carrier" (or something like that).

I thought the mindset exposed in this article was something most hackers shared

That's what I think as well, and for me this mindset is a defining characteristic of hackers. Most of programmers nowadays are not hackers. They used to be, but then programming went mainstream and attracted people without the hacker mindset.

Also the term hacker got terribly diluted recently. Now everyone and their dog is a hacker just because they know that JavaScript is something that is used 'on the interwebz' (cf. "growth hacking"). I guess we need a new term for people like OP's roommate.

I've noticed the same thing in musician friends of mine, and I think it really isn't so much that their mindset is different from 'us' hackers, but rather that we spend so much time on virtual stuff that we don't learn to apply our mindset to the real world.

In fact, a lot of us probably under-perform when it comes to real-world hacking because we're so caught in the virtual. I know that's true for me.

This did give me a bit of a new perspective on things, and makes me wonder if I should start some more real-world hacking...

A couple of the most innovative hackers I know are also musicians. A big motivation is simply money. They've embraced the fact that they'll always be poor. Hacking is essential to build & maintain the tools they need for life and for work, as well as a great source of cheap entertainment.

I think you're right, money (or more, the lack thereof) must be a good trigger for the hacking brain to get turned on. Come to think of it, that's probably how I got started as a kid.

I had pretty serious musical training that lasted for a few years. Anyways, my teachers were crazy imaginative. They would also build stuff from what looked like scraps - insulated and strengthened jacks, book shelves, studio monitor stands, etc, etc.

I wonder what makes them tick like this!

I've never had serious musical training, but I've spent a lot of time picking tunes with old folkies. A lot of those guys are absolutely the same when it comes to this sort of creativity, and I picked up a lot of advice that I like to think has stuck with me ever since. I remember I was nervous as hell when I'd just started heading along to jams - here was me, having learned a bit about scales and a few chords, yet wondering how I could ever contribute to the wonderful sounds this group was creating. It was an old gentleman in his 70s who just turned around, saw me sat there overwhelmed, trying to figure out what was going on, and said "We've got seven notes in a scale, and most of these tunes'll barely use half of 'em!".

Music, at its heart, is the ultimate in making do with what you have - I just think that folkies are more likely to admit it!

Completely agree with the last sentence.

Before the days of time-sucking TVs and you-need-this prolific advertising and anything-anywhere-now product availability, people spent a lot of their time doing what they could with what they had. Radios out of scrap wire & fragmentary parts, goofy vehicles from whatever rods & panels available, toys from broken widgets, etc. "Lifehacking" was the norm. "Recycling" wasn't a different-colored trash bin, it was repurposing every part of everything conceivable; even food waste was turned into quality dirt. When a plane crashed near my great-grandparent's farm, they hauled the whole thing back to the farm and used every part of it. Partly out of frugal economic necessity, partly out of limited product availability, partly out of sheer raging boredom.

It's not so much that your teachers were crazy imaginative, it's that most people today are so freaking lazy and rich (while claiming overwork & poverty).

I built my own shop, where I cut things: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ld_JmaTr9k [video, obviously]

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