AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
what a good meme – it encodes something that is invisible yet palpable to those with the right mindset. An aspiration. There must be something analogous in other fields, some platonic aim.
If there is a spiritual component to hacking it is probably to be found there.
The default commonsense observation is that whatever hacking is, some people are just naturally good at it while others do not get it at all. Like math, it is both something that everybody is supposed to be able to do a little bit.
In a way hacking is sort of watered-down math. No way inferior but it is less pure, it entrains similar patterns of mind but in a much more down-to-earth concrete way. But it involves other skills besides math, specifically design.