Ask HN: How did you become a good hacker?

<i>break it down and solve it in a correct way</i><p>I do not believe hackers think in this way <i>being a correct way</i>. A hacker will pride themselves in finding a thousand ways to accomplish something with emphasis on finding the smallest, simplest, most unorthodox ways that nobody would have thought of. A hacker will not be bound by doing things the correct way. These are people with an incredibly powerful and unlimited imagination.<p>An example would be that someone writes a massive program to break encryption on something, then a hacker comes along and reverse engineers the protocol and writes a 10 line python script to exploit a design flaw&#x2F;bug and accomplish the same end goal in less time, using less memory and less CPU time.<p>Hackers are good at understanding the big picture and breaking things down into generalizations that can be attacked or can not be defended against. Another example would be corporations that make super expensive firewalls that are meant to prevent data exfiltration, then a hacker is told data exfil is not possible because of the $2 million dollar firewall. <i>Challenge accepted</i>. They will find a way around that can not be defended against. This is not a theoretical example. I observed a friend play this cat and mouse game with one of the biggest firewall vendors. In the end he could not be blocked. <i>Shout-out to The Godfather</i><p>I will leave the software development examples to the proper software devs here.

Define “good hacker.” The term “hacker” gets applied in so many ways I don’t think it describes anything specific.

I think it’s a combination of innate ability, deliberate practice, and opportunity (luck). The same answer to any question of the form “How does someone get really good at X.”

Investing time in getting my fundamentals right so I understand the inner workings, the tools, and the resources that could help me.

Whitehat or blackhat? (Or greyhat?)