>>460Whoa, thanks! OP here, I'd thought nobody really cared about this stuff and considered this thread dead
In any case, I guess I'll post something new so that the bump isn't empty
>a fun story about a magic switchhttp://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html>my personal experience, how I found out about hacker cultureI was just a kid when I... sigh... became curious about becoming a "hacker", in the mainstream meaning of the term. The reason I think was that at the time I heard about the "Anonymous hacker group" and obviously was extremely fascinated by it. I mean, they were fighting for good, and were epic hackers! And they did it all from their bedrooms, and were otherwise pretty ordinary people like me!
Thing is, surprisingly enough on one of the websites which claimed to be associated with "Anonymous" I found a link to catb, specifically the "how to become a hacker" page
And that page encouraged me to learn more about programming languages, which had a big impact on me, as discovering langs other than java, python and c exposed me to new and different ideas that I probably wouldn't have heard much of otherwise until much later. It's also indirectly what got me into emacs. The culture itself really inspired me at the time too, and even though sadly I didn't become a hacker, I think those ideas influenced me growing up. Later my focus shifted to other things, and gradually I forgot about all this up until recently, when after revisiting some old places and reading some new things I made this thread