Hacker News Reader

I'm a geek, but I don't know a line of code to save my life. Does this make me a non-hacker? The wrong kind of poster? I lurk here because the threads, especially anything YC/VC/Start-up, are really informative and genuinely useful. The Erlang thing is a yawn, even though I have no idea what it's about. I'm with the OP, sure it was funny, but maybe time to move on.

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I find that I can visit this site daily and find a good six or seven things worth reading ... all done without salacious headlines.

I don't think the bar is set at coder, programmer or developer. I don't run, nor do I desire to run a start-up, but I read plenty about them here because the quality of submissions generally means I'm going to enjoy the post. And the items that fall into the "non-startup, non-development" category are often very interesting...even the ones I disagree with philosophically are often good reads.

I wonder what makes a hacker, exactly?

There area a number of schools of thought on that :)

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hacker.html

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-hack.html

http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

( I like the first one.)

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