Reading 01 Response

From my experience hackers have always been the ones that do work such as finding exploits and breaking into systems (can be done for good or bad) or creating malicious code that can take your computer hostage (always bad). For the longest time those were the types of people that I associated with the label "hacker." And though that is still a correct label for those people, the article Hackers and Painters made me realize that the word "hacker" can belong to a much larger group of people than just the two which I listed before. Through the reading I started to think more about the way in which I code, which is to throw some code in the editor and then debug and work on it until it does what I want it to do. I use my own knowledge of how to program along with online code examples and source code from open-source repositories to create or “hack” together some type of final product. In this way the Hackers and Painters reading compares hacking to painters and architects. We, hackers and painters, both start out with a blank canvas and throw bits and pieces onto it, whether those be strokes of paints or functions, to create something good. In that way we are all “makers” or people that use their given talents, knowledge, and resources to put together a final product and thats what I believe a hacker is now. 
From the article “The Hacker Hacked” we get that a characteristic for the archetype of a hacker is “essentially that of an individual attempting to live an empowered and unalienated life. It is outsider in spirit, seeking empowerment outside the terms set by the mainstream establishment.” From The Conscience of a Hacker we get that a characteristic is that of a programmer/coder that want to explore technologies that are free and open to there use in order to seek knowledge and gain information. From Mark Zuckerberg’s letter we can get that hackers are those that don’t focus on getting things right the first time, but continuously add on and push forward in innovation. And finally from Hackers and Painters we get that hackers are “makers” who just want to create something beautiful just like Van Gogh created Starry Night. 

From those four characteristics, I would say that I do not consider myself a hacker. And I am fine with not being a hacker. I don’t think there is anything elite about being a hacker in my opinion, just a title given to certain people that may show those characteristics above. I am fine with just being a guy that enjoys to code and sit all day looking at a computer screen while making small changes to a program as he slowly plucks all the hairs out of his head due to the amount of bugs that the compiler has found. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading 13 Response

Patents is an agreement with the government and a form of intellectual property which gives an inventor/creator a 20 year monopoly over their idea/invention as long as they disclose it. A patent doesn't give a right to make or sell the invention but does give the right to choose who can and can not make your invention or use your idea. There are many reasons for granting patents. One of the reasons is to protect the inventor from losing out on the benefits of his/her work if a larger company finds out about his/her idea and mass produces it without giving them anything. Another reason may be in order to spur innovation, because if an inventor can be convinced that their idea is safe to let other people know about then maybe they will make it public and allow others to build on to and improve on the idea. I think that patents should be granted as they do help inventors keep control over their ideas and help preserve their work while not harming the abilities of others to innovat
Read more

Post 1

    My name is Alex Mukasyan. I am a first generation Russian-American that lives with his parents and has a older brother that is 40, married, and has two kids. The reason to mention my brother is that he is the reason that I am studying computer science at ND. He is a CEO of a tech company in Russia but before any of that he was a programmer. As I grew up he would always show me the newest tech in computers, phones, toys, etc.. He always made sure that I had the newest technology too and that really sparked my interest in building computers and eventually coding. Over the past two summers I have taken on internships which gave me work in data analytics as well as data engineering. Through these internships I learned SQL as well as helpful Python packages for data manipulation such as Pandas. Due to a dying love for writing software and a deep-ish dive into big data and data engineering, I want to pursue being a big data engineer when I graduate in the Spring.     From this class I
Read more

Reading Response #9

Net neutrality, which is also known as the open internet, " is the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) should give consumers access to all legal content and applications on an equal basis, without favoring some sources or blocking others." What this means is that an ISP such as AT&T would not be able to charge content providers, like Netflix, a premium fee in order for their service to propagate through the ISPs network quicker than other services and they ISP would also not be allowed to throttle the performance of services which are provided by their competitors via their network.  The arguments for net neutrality are that it allows an even playing field for businesses that depend on the internet for their service to be provided and provides an open forum for internet discussion and general activity as well as taking away power from an industry that is already a monopoly in most areas. Net neutrality allows all businesses equal access and priority to an
Read more