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Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

115 points| jamiecollinson | 5 years ago

Background: technical founder wondering what reading to recommend to a business focused founder for them to grok the hacker mindset. I've thought perhaps Mythical Man Month and How To Become A Hacker (Eric Raymond essay) but not sure they're quite right.

Any suggestions?

(In case it helps an analogue in the mathematical world might be A Mathematician's Apology or Gödel, Escher, Bach.)

105 comments

order

tensor|5 years ago

I have to admit, even I'm not sure what a "hacker mindset" is. As one technical cofounder to another, I think the most important thing is for you to understand the business side. Most importantly, how interpersonal skills matter and how emotions play out in a business setting.

Beyond that, a solid understanding of scientific approaches to understanding is the second most important. Being able to tease apart correlation and causation, and being rigorous about what you accept as real knowledge vs mere opinion or anecdote. The business world, and the tech world, has a lot of "opinion" that masquerades as fact. E.g. "well I did X and I'm successful so clearly X must work!"

derefr|5 years ago

> As one technical cofounder to another, I think the most important thing is for you to understand the business side.

But the OP isn't asking for help themselves, and has said nothing about needing help themselves. Maybe they already understand the business side?

zoomablemind|5 years ago

> As one technical cofounder to another, I think the most important thing is for you to understand the business side.

Totally on-the-point advice! The mind of a business-mate is often less ranged and logical than a techy-mate would prefer. So could be your biz patner's way of understanding and discovering what makes a techy mind tick.

If this is to improve understanding between you two, the best way is to agree on zones of responsibility and what it takes to come to trust in result. The hardest for biz folks is to relinquish control, while hardcore tech guys don't like to compromise. Somehow these need to balance.

max_effort|5 years ago

> Beyond that, a solid understanding of scientific approaches to understanding is the second most important.

Are there any good resources for learning more about this?

_curious_|5 years ago

"well I did X and I'm successful so clearly X must work!"

If they did something...and that thing was successful then by definition that thing they did...it works, right?

mosselman|5 years ago

Do you know of any resources (books preferably) on learning to understand the business and emotional side that you are referring to?

tptacek|5 years ago

Maciej Ceglowski has a good bit in one of his idlewords posts about how the "what makes hackers tick" genre is full of pieces that are really "how to be someone just like the author". There's probably nobody that remark applies to more than ESR, and ESR is probably not someone you'd want to work to resemble more closely.

So, in reality, if you want to understand your technical cofounders, it is probably not a good idea to take ESR seriously when he says that you should find a "real" Unix (your technical cofounders are, actuarially speaking, almost certainly macOS people), hand-write lots of HTML, or "serve" th "tribal elders of open source". And the idea that "attitude is not a substitute for competence" among hackers is both funny on a variety of levels, and also a singularly bad note for understanding software developers you work with.

The Mythical Mammoth doesn't have any of these problems, and is a great book, and one worth reading simply so you can have a sense of what building software actually entails (Dynamics of Software Development is another older book that has aged somewhat well --- as have all of Joel Spolsky's posts on Joel on Software; in fact, I'd probably start there). But while this stuff will help you understand the work that's happening on your team, it probably won't do much to help you with the mindset of your team members.

There probably isn't a substitute for just talking to your cofounders, a lot, and asking lots of questions.

tedunangst|5 years ago

Mythical Mammoth is a delightful correction.

pen2l|5 years ago

I had to wiki ESR, I'd needed to remind myself who he was.

And, tptacek, guess whose name I stumbled upon while I was reading his wiki page? Incidentally, I think that section of the wiki is poorly written. I'm left even more confused due to lack of context.

m463|5 years ago

A few tips:

Lots of hackers are introverts. They are wired differently from founders and ceos (who have gravitated towards a life full of constant interactions with people). Hackers don't mind being "in the zone" for hours at a time to work on a problem. Sometimes this means coding, but sometimes this just means having enough quiet time to just sit an think while they turn a problem over in their mind. This is required.

Another side to the introvert thing -- I believe "open plan seating" is a fundamental disconnect between extroverted decision-makers and introverted knowledge workers. It is not surprising to me that productivity has skyrocketed for problem-solvers working from home.

Another tip is to ask "what do you think?" then listen. Then wait even longer and listen some more. The absolute best business people I've worked with were masters of this. The worst would already have made decisions and questions were just checkboxes.

(this works everywhere in life, but is particularly relevant to the really smart people at the top of the tech tree)

also, hacker doesn't mean criminals who break into computers. Go with the original meaning (well, the one after carriage driver)

reading:

https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

gundmc|5 years ago

> It is not surprising to me that productivity has skyrocketed for problem-solvers working from home.

Do you have a source with data to back that up? The early indicators of the efficacy of WFH that I've seen have been pretty mixed.

peter_d_sherman|5 years ago

Let me sum up all possible books about understanding the "hacker" (terrible word by the way, because of multiple meanings, which meaning are we talking about?) mindset, to a management perspective:

1) True "hackers" value knowledge over money.

2) True "hackers" value doing things once and doing them right, no matter how long that takes. (Compare to the business mindset of "we need it now", or "we needed it yesterday")

3) True "hackers" value taking ownership in their work, that is, whatever they work on becomes an extension of themselves, much like an artist working on a work of art.

4) True "hackers" are not about work-arounds. If/when work-arounds are used, it's because there there's an artificial timeframe (as might be found in the corporate world), and there's a lack of understanding in the infrastructure which created the need for that work-around.

But, all of these virtues run counter to the demands of business, which constantly wants more things done faster, cheaper, with more features, more complexity, less testing, and doesn't want to worry about problems that may be caused by all of those things in the future (less accountability) -- as long as customer revenue can be collected today.

You see, a true "hacker's" values -- are completely different than those of big business...

And business people wonder why there's stress and burnout among tech people...

akerl_|5 years ago

I’m not a hacker if I’d rather hack together something quickly, even if it’s a bit hacky? That would seem to violate your #2 rule for “true” “hackers”. Or if I like hacking my way through a problem instead of doing it the expected way? That would seem to violate #4.

And I’m not a “true” “hacker” if I want to make money?

I thought I was a hacker. But if this is what hackers are, I’m pretty ok with being voted off the island.

westurner|5 years ago

> 3) True "hackers" value taking ownership in their work, that is, whatever they work on becomes an extension of themselves, much like an artist working on a work of art

There's something to be said about owning your work, but I have to disagree that unhealthy attachment to work products is a universal attribute of technical founder hackers. It's not a kid, it's a thing that was supposed to be the best use of the resources and information available at the time.

I must have confused this point with vanity and retention in projecting my own counterproductive anti-patterns.

Prolific is not the objective for a true hacker, but not me but a guy I know mentioned something about starting projects and seeing the next 5 years of potentially happily working on that project, too.

sudosteph|5 years ago

I don't think there is a hacker mindset. We don't all have the same experiences or motivations for why we build, tinker, break, and fix. We just all happen to do that stuff. Some of the most impressive "hackers" I've ever met were old HAM radio enthusiasts with thick country accents who live in the middle of nowhere. Those folks have almost nothing in common with the extremely educated liberal developers in SF. But both groups collect knowledge and apply it in the real world in creative ways.

So being a hacker is a practice, and in some cases it's a lifestyle (when you orient your life around hacking). But it's not a mindset. Some folks are compulsive hackers, some are methodical, some are opportunistic, others are hackers out of necessity - but they're all united by what they do, not how they think.

cat199|5 years ago

> But both groups collect knowledge and apply it in the real world in creative ways.

so maybe use your hacker mindset to deduce this is the mindset then?

jonahbenton|5 years ago

I'm with the people asking "why."

There is almost no real reason for a business side founder to "grok" a hacker mindset. If hackers/developers are the business' customer, then the business owner just needs to find ones to talk to.

Forgive the directness but what I hear in the way the question above is framed is that there is actually some communication misalignment between the tech founder- who considers himself to have a "hacker mindset"- and the business founder, and the "hacker mindset" is a crutch the tech founder is using to protect against some fear or concern being probed by the business founder.

If that is the case, the solution is to drop the defensiveness and just talk about it, not point to some resource as though it is an authority that business people have to worship offering tenets for them to adhere to. A new business only has a chance to succeed if the founders succeed in building a relationship that permits each other to fail and recover, and where they grok each others' mindsets, not some caricature that Eric Raymond made up.

Happy to be completely wrong.

Cheers.

Myrmornis|5 years ago

I don't think I agree with this. I think what the poster is looking for is how to help the more businessy founder understand the engineers that (s)he's necessarily going to be hiring and working with. That strikes me as a perfectly sensible and worthwhile goal and one that will probably help their start up have a healthy culture in its early months/years.

omniscient_oce|5 years ago

How do you even define a 'hacker mindset' anyway. It seems too hard to really pin down a definition so I'm not sure it's worth the time anyway.

Pmop|5 years ago

The word "hacker" has been re-purposed so many times.

IMO hacker culture includes but is not limited to computer engineering and science. It is about being so curious about a domain of knowledge that you end up learning it in its little details, and as result, you can bend that domain to your will. Hackers are often working on experimental stuff that have little to no commercial value but are still valuable in their own way. You can read a bit about computer hacker culture in the Jargon file.

Examples of (people I consider) hackers are (YouTube channels) Applied Science, cnhlor, and styropyro.

duskwuff|5 years ago

> You can read a bit about computer hacker culture in the Jargon file.

The Jargon File is an artifact of "hacker culture" as it existed in the 1980s and early 1990s. I would hesitate to recommend it nowadays -- it's rather dated, and could lead an unaware reader to some false impressions.

emsign|5 years ago

The single most important thing that made me understand the hacker mindset as a teenager was the Jargon File. And the publications and conference videos of the Chaos Computer Club also had a great influence on me, as well as Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg.

Read books by hackers, watch conference talks. And ofc get to know hackers, go to hack spaces. Keep an open mind and be curious. That's a good starting point to see how hacker culture really is. It's mostly about unorthodox curiosity and having fun with machines and systems. Think of children playing with toys, who grew up and never stopped playing with toys.

Don't waste your time on pop culture presentations of hackers, like movies or reading articles about "great" hacks or hackers, it's misleading and not going to transform your mind to think like a hacker in any way.

vertex-four|5 years ago

Most technical people you work with, even in early startups, will not be "hackers" in any way, shape or form. Hacking doesn't usually equate to doing things that tend to make businesses lots of money. Sometimes it does, but not usually.

emsign|5 years ago

Yep, I think hacking became kind of a buzzword in the new economy. Facebook deciding to name their corporate grounds to "1 Hacker Way" is such an example of how tech companies have appropiated the term to mean something that doesn't really have anything to do with the hacker mindest. They just think it's cool and it attracts young talents. It's part of their brand marketing and hiring strategy.

The only connection between Facebook and hacking I can think of is that their software may have relied on "dirty hacks" and crutches in the past to make it work.

Hacker culture by nature is very anti-corporate, anarchistic and against subordinating everything under the dictatorship of profit maximization.

If the OP thinks "hacker mindest" equals being on a path to create the next big app or service, you are being mislead big time.

hprotagonist|5 years ago

Worldview indoctrination is a fun game, I suppose. A mix of fiction and biography is probably about right:

Fiction:

Douglas Copeland's "Microserfs"

Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash" and perhaps especially "Cryptonomicon" (the early randy chapters and anything about Eiphphyte in particular)

Real Genius (the film).

Nonfiction:

Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. All the elder gods are here.

Cliff Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg.

webel0|5 years ago

Maybe you could say a bit more about why you’re asking. In some cases others would be right to suggest that you find material relevant to business for yourself.

The one case that I can think of off the top of my head that might apply to this situation is if there are disagreements re:product refinement/feature set/bug prevalence. (Basically, “why doesn’t this work as seamlessly as X?”) In that case you might do well to find the MVPs (and later iterations) of famous startups.

tejtm|5 years ago

Wild guess here. Think of your problem/goal starting from the other end.

(crass generalization) non technical people tend to see the "idea" they have isolated out of the sea of possibilities as the important thing.

Now that this important idea has been identified I just need someone to stuff some "supports" under it and we are done!

top down

From the other direction, great ideas are a dime a dozen. Enormous amounts of (outwardly invisible) time have been spent exploring the landscape these "supports" would need to sit on the down to the bedrock. There may be things that are just to obvious to consider explaining why that particular idea is not worth the effort. Maybe it is boring or sub optimal or infeasible, or just dumb.

A hacker (what ever that means anymore) would be more apt to consider what they had on hand and where they were and most importantly, how they could inject some cleverness into the building of their supports, then climb up and see where they had gotten themselves.

bottom up

All obvious gross simplifications for illustration purposes.

If you are endeavouring to address a disconnect, first of all kudos to you for making the effort.

Two paths that could help are

Better illustrator of "the idea". The everyday marketing of the idea to the masses is not going to help here. You would need to demonstrate the value added that would make what ever reluctance there is be set aside.

The other is experience what is causing the reluctance; get some blisters yourself.

king_magic|5 years ago

A lot of us technical folks think the "hacker mindset" is an unfortunate, childlike simplification of what we do. I personally prefer solid engineering to "hacking".

I strongly encourage you to make your non-technical folks aware of good engineering practices, instead of this "everyone needs to learn to code and have special snowflake hacker skills" mindset that has so permeated the industry.

imesh|5 years ago

I'm a "hacker" in my free time, doing projects to tinker, have fun and learn. At my job I am not a hacker. I am an engineer. I engineer solutions to corporate problems. It's not that interesting.

schkkd|5 years ago

True spherical hackers in the vacuum want to be undisputable experts in complex topics and as this often mixes with sheer egoism, they like to flex with this knowledge and remind others how unsophisticated others are. But ideal spherical hackers are rare. Moreover, smart people like to learn new stuff not only about the tech side of things, so if they sniff you're trying to manipulate them, they'll pay you back with the same coin and you'll get a team of cynical snarky devs. If you want to become a leader for them, you'll have to earn their respect (again, a lazy attempt to earn it by slipping how you know some python will dump your rating that very moment, as that would be seen as a cheap manipulation). A leader for them can be a super knowledgeable jerk (e.g. Linus) or a super humble guy who sends the message "you know more than me, so I'll step out of your way". In other words, if you really want to step on their ego by telling them what to do, you'd better be an undisputable expert, or expect a delayed counter reaction.

wool_gather|5 years ago

The turn of phrase "true spherical hackers in the vacuum" is quite clever and entertaining, but I submit that it is unlikely to be grokked by someone who does not already have familiarity with hacker-isms/culture. :)

(And of course they likely wouldn't understand "grok" either").

throwaway55554|5 years ago

>... recommend to a business focused founder for them to grok the hacker mindset.

From 1000 ft, what's different between the two? It's all about solving problems.

The business focused founder sees a problem, a business/market opportunity. He/She needs to figure out how to solve it, how to come up with a way to satisfy that market. If a product exists, how do they get that product into the hands of the customer. If the product doesn't exist, how to get it into existence and then get it into the hands of the customer.

The hacker/developer/whatever sees a problem and He/She tries to develop a product that satisfies that problem based on the requirements they're either given or suss out themselves. The hacker mindset is an insatiable need for knowledge. How to do a thing. How to make a thing. How did others make a thing. Don't business people think that way, also? Probably one big difference might be that the hacker mindset shares knowledge. Business people are more protective of it. (Generally)

intrepidhero|5 years ago

I would add that most folks who go into business are motivated primarily by seeing the dollars appear, while most "hackers" I know are primarily motivated by the rush they get when they've understood the new problem/solution.

That's painting with broad strokes obviously and a person can be motivated by both. But that's the axis I would draw the distinction on.

factorialboy|5 years ago

It's not that hard. Try to build / construct something. You will soon discover a layer of detail that you never anticipated. And then some more.

Hackers / programmers are trained to be cognizant of these details and complexities that aren't obvious on first glance.

Heck sometimes this weighs us down. I'd rather have someone ignorant and brave on my team. :)

adamsea|5 years ago

The book "Coders At Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming".

It is not a technical book.

It'll be as good as anything : ).

"Peter Seibel interviews 15 of the most interesting computer programmers alive today in Coders at Work, offering a companion volume to Apress’s highly acclaimed best-seller Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. As the words “at work” suggest, Peter Seibel focuses on how his interviewees tackle the day-to-day work of programming, while revealing much more, like how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others, and what kinds of problems they find most interesting.

Hundreds of people have suggested names of programmers to interview on the Coders at Work web site: www.codersatwork.com. The complete list was 284 names. Having digested everyone’s feedback, we selected 15 folks who’ve been kind enough to agree to be interviewed:

Frances Allen: Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo! L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1 Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker"

ilaksh|5 years ago

Since it's actually about you and for that one guy, you should just tell him what it is that is set in your mind.

The thing about it though, is that mindsets are not readily transferable. They are basically worldviews which are formed slowly and because of their foundational place in cognition are remarkably resistant to change.

One challenge is technical debt. To start to understand it, find a tool that he uses regularly (assuming such a thing exists). Maybe it is Excel. Now have him solve some kind of problem with it. And then schedule a meeting with his friend the following week to review his spreadsheet. Then add requirements that his spreadsheet must handle. Tell him he must hurry so that those requirements are complete before his meeting. Ensure that there are too many requirements for the spreadsheet or that there isn't time to properly reorganize it.

In the meeting, explain to his friend that he has been the mastermind of this spreadsheet design. Have him first demo the calculation features of the spreadsheet. The have him walk through the design, show the formulas in the cells, explain his naming scheme.

The goal of this exercise is to demonstrate why engineers seem to be so concerned about their code organization and technical debt. Which is that they have their name on any mess they make in the code, and they have to maintain it as it changes. Without ever having done that part of it, it is difficult for a business person to really understand the developer's point of view.

DoreenMichele|5 years ago

I think you need to make it clear that you are a maker and your limitations are more in the realm of physics -- what can work and what won't work.

Business people tend to be more social-oriented, people-oriented. And one of the pitfalls of that is that most such people think if you just make the right friends, find the right words, push the right emotional buttons, you can make magic.

And sometimes that's true. But sometimes what they want is a case of "Something cannot be both heavy and light at the same time. I can be light and large -- like a cloud -- but it can't be both heavy and light. Pick one."

I do a lot of studying of social things and I hate people who are manipulative. A lot of people with serious social skills are manipulative.

In short, many of them lie when it's convenient because they don't want to deal with negative emotions or whatever.

So I would have them watch the Jim Carrey movie "Liar, Liar." and challenge them to use their social skills to tell the actual truth in a more acceptable manner instead of fudging.

I would also recommend negotiating books. Hard skills when it comes to dealing with people helps make it possible to be both honest and diplomatic.

The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator is research based and very meaty.

Getting to Yes is also research based, but a quick, easy read.

qntty|5 years ago

"The Jargon File" might be a good place to start. From there, maybe read one of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Soul of a New Machine, or Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

I read Fire in the Valley when I was young and it impacted me, although there might be a better book that's similar. I might also recommend something by Jaron Lanier or Stallman if you don't might being a little political.

Zaheer|5 years ago

A 'Hacker' is just a technically literate 'Hustler'. There are likely more books or resources for developing a hustler mindset you can find. It's a more generic mode of thinking and can apply beyond just technical.

nobodywillobsrv|5 years ago

Founders need to be technical about something. The idea of a "non-technical" founder is nonsense. I have seen it and they were basically a VC with expensive friends just creating a job for social reason to get them out of the house.

Technical need not mean "code". It could be a medical expert working with a wide array of people to build something. Or a tax-expert. Or an employment expert etc.

Founder is what "product manager" should be. Instead it seems "product manager" is just some glue person at a large organization who is usually not great at accessing optionality and time and money costs.

Myrmornis|5 years ago

The answer's simple. You're looking right at it!

Don't give them Mythical Man Month or Eric Raymond or any of that stuff: dated and esoteric. My interpretation of your post is basically that the business founder is going to be (involved in) hiring, and will be working with several software engineers soon. And you want to help them understand what makes the engineers tick: the sorts of things they find interesting, the sorts of ways they talk about it.

So that's easy. Tell them to look at HN, pick an article with a technical theme that's getting a lot of attention. Read the article, and then read the comment threads.

munchbunny|5 years ago

What are you hoping for the business focused founder to get out of this exercise?

The reason I ask is that in my experience the "hacker mindset" is a very nebulous thing. There's sort of a "hacker ideal", but in practice actual developers, white/blackhats, makers, etc. come from all sorts of backgrounds, have all sorts of ways of thinking about problems, and are motivated by all sorts of different things.

Are you hoping for the business founder to better understand how to effectively work with technical people?

andrelgomes|5 years ago

Paul Graham's Makers vs Managers - http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

sloaken|5 years ago

Wow that was very enlightening. I had been wondering why meetings used to bug me, and now I have no issue. Oh did I mention I am a manager now, I scheduled this in an appropriate time slot. I cannot wait to get back to hating meetings.

vogelke|5 years ago

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0932633420/

The Psychology of Computer Programming

by Gerald M. Weinberg

Written in 1971, and still completely relevant. Topics include egoless programming, intelligence, psychological measurement, personality factors, motivation, training, social problems on large projects, problem-solving ability, programming language design, team formation, the programming environment, etc.

joejerryronnie|5 years ago

I don’t have any suggested reading material but my rule of thumb is to just assume that anything which appears simple to build is about 10x more complex for “reasons”. The simpler a feature is to use, the longer it will take to develop. And any major change in scope/priority adds 2x to the original timeline.

If you want to understand the details behind these general statements, you’ll need to spend the next several years in the trenches delivering dozens of technical projects.

jacknews|5 years ago

I think many here (and maybe you too) would find the opposite valuable.

How to understand the business/sales/marketing/leadership/political mindset. Without cynicism.

aSplash0fDerp|5 years ago

I don`t watch these videos for entertainment, but this person has gained a little notoriety for this gig he started after his grandmother with dementia was scammed.

https://kitboga.com/

I was left agasp by some of the language (some is NSFW) and techniques ised by the scammers, but you would be the grandmother with dementia (non-technical user) vs someone who will say/do anything for money.

someproduct|5 years ago

I've found the book "New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World" really instructive on this point.

It focuses on the "rise of the developer," if you will, as an influential decision-making and budget-holding role within a company. It also includes lots of perspective on appealing to developers and avoiding marketing and business jargon.

As a nontechnical founder myself, it's been really helpful.

mhh__|5 years ago

Watch DEFCON and Hackaday talks? Not so much a mindset but insights into how people think and what people find interesting (to have been selected).

gameman144|5 years ago

"Masters of Doom" is a pretty demonstrative and entertaining bit of non-fiction that walks through the early days of id Software. Though not a manual or how-to, or anything like that, I'd recommend it to a non-technical founder or manager because it does a great job evoking the thrill of creation/breakthrough that is pretty central to the "hacker mindset".

enz|5 years ago

Maybe "Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age" by Graham. As a bonus, some of the chapters are business-oriented.

MrQuincle|5 years ago

For me the mindset means a lot of different things.

1. Go beyond what people tell you. Discover your own truth.

2. The love for tinkering.

3. The idea that what you bought is your own and you can do anything with it.

4. To use something in a way that is completely not how it is intended.

5. Deep reverse engineering dives.

6. The guilty pleasure of picking digital locks.

I think I've books in all those directions.

jandrusk|5 years ago

I would recommend Steve Levy's: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution: 25th Anniversary Edition.

billme|5 years ago

Hacker mindset to me is the predictable ability to swap between divergent and convergent thinking at will to discover optimal paths to desired outcomes regardless of means, context, biases, etc. — frequently just for the fun of it, to learn more, to be intentionally different, etc.

d0m|5 years ago

Might be interesting to do a few hours of pair programming too; i.e. implement and ship a small feature

LiamPa|5 years ago

Ghosts in the Wire, Kevin Mitnick

Made me realise that many just do it because they like the challenge.

mch82|5 years ago

Steve Wozniak’s biography, “iWoz”. He perfectly explains how to combine off the shelf parts in novel ways so that 100% of R&D is focused on closing gaps unique to the business problem at hand.

Pandabob|5 years ago

Perhaps "The Innovators" by Walter Isaacson. If nothing else, it introduces the reader to many of the pivotal people in the history of computing.

redcat7|5 years ago

I see how everything works. Humans, businesses, societies, machines, myself - everything. And I use that to have fun.

pedalpete|5 years ago

Paul Graham's Hackers & Painters?

kevinali3|5 years ago

Halt and Catch Fire seasons 1 and 2.

dominotw|5 years ago

ER is blacklisted in tech community. Finishing GEB is no easy task.

I recommend hackers and painters by pg.

dynamite-ready|5 years ago

The book written by the guy who runs this site.

Skims on the painting part, I thought, but it makes for an interesting insight into the personal philosophy of someone who values both creativity and logic.

Many of his ideas are universal (probably why I'm here!). Others don't port so well (or are specific to his experience).

Well worth the OPs time, given the question.

Joel on Software is also a fantastic read. More concrete in talking about specific aspects of a software developers' working experience, and ideas towards technology in general.

A mentor of mine suggested I should read it alongside Hackers and Painters.

I can't thank him and his friends enough, frankly...

rb808|5 years ago

I liked Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston, but it isnt clear what you mean.

werber|5 years ago

Eloquent JavaScript, even if you only go through the first few chapters

syngrog66|5 years ago

read Hackers by Steven Levy. one of the best histories of 70s and 80s era of computing. gave great feel for how programmers think

itronitron|5 years ago

Elements of Programming Interviews (jk)

krapp|5 years ago

The Hacker Manifesto

The Anarchist's Cookbook

Industrial Society and Its Future (the Unabomber Manifesto)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

asdf21|5 years ago

[deleted]

some_furry|5 years ago

> I've thought perhaps Mythical Man Month and How To Become A Hacker (Eric Raymond essay) but not sure they're quite right.

Please don't recommend Eric Raymond's work to people.

> technical founder wondering what reading to recommend to a business focused founder for them to grok the hacker mindset

What does "the hacker mindset" mean to you?

If you ask me: The most important thing about a hacker mindset is that it must exist outside of technology. A hacker mindset is not a "techy" mindset, it's something far more sublime, and is portable across different fields.

Hacking is about creativity and problem solving, but not in a formalized way. That doesn't always involve computers and related technology. Hacking should be fun, regardless of what industry or specialization it manifests in (which doesn't always translate well in business settings).

That isn't something that you're going to inject into someone by recommending them read a book. They have to seek it out for themselves. Without curiosity, hackers do not exist.

If they're going to be able to understand the mindset without having experienced it themselves, you might as well just share my comment here with them. If it sinks in, great! If not, I don't believe a few hundred pages of prose will have a different outcome.

dang|5 years ago

Please review and stick to the site guidelines here. Note this one: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

lwhalen|5 years ago

What's wrong with ESR's work? I know the man himself can sometimes be controversial, but many of us came up on his works like The Jargon File, Cathedral and Bazaar, etc.