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How do I become a better hacker? I mean in the traditional sense. I've been on this journey for a while but haven't been productive imo. Are there any forums/textboards I can refer to?

This is a very generic question, may I ask what is your purpose, what kind of skills you want to develop? The basic idea is: 1) get curious about something 2) learn how it works 3) think about how it can be used in ways that were not intended 4) go to no. 1 If you want to be productive as in producing something of interest of others, just put your time into the same thing for longer periods of time, and build some tool out of your knowledge.

As lainon said, it's a generic question. It's hard to give advice which isn't "meta", so I'm going to assume that you want to make the world better by writing cool new things that work. Here is what I've found useful from general improvement advice, minimally adapted to programming: I'd recommend spending time focusing on "skills" or "mechanics", like finding your way around large codebases and fixing trivial bugs in them without wasting time. Putting attention towards speed like this pays off, same with high typing speeds, knowing your text editor, etc. There's a lot of brainless stuff involved in dealing with software, and the more you don't have to think about it, the better. Another thing you should spend time on is experimenting. Try something that sounds kinda stupid and see if it works, etc. The main point of this is to gain understanding. Understanding is important, and differentiates the people who can make stuff work by copying and trial and error from those who can make something truly new and innovative. Understand your tools, understand the problem you're working on. It's also good to have a high level of both input and output. That means reading (not necessarily books) a lot and writing a lot (probably code in this case). This leads to you getting the most out of what you're reading, and there's enough good material online and offline to last a lifetime. Past this there's also general productivity advice: The main thing is finding an environment you can concentrate in. This includes diet, exercise, etc. People have different requirements for this, but as long as you're self aware and make incremental improvements, you too can end up being one of those people who seems to come up with an idea for a cool new project and have a working implementation by the end of the day. It's no superpower, it's a high level of those "mechanics" combined with a good understanding of the problem space, and the environment required to concentrate for several hours at once. I'm not far along in this journey but I'm mostly sure these are the right things to do, and I'm trying to follow them. For me, the next steps are getting into a more regular rhythm of reading, and interacting with the community around projects I'm interested in. I don't know where you're at in your journey, but hopefully you can see what's missing from your formula.

>>53652 Thanks. I have fiddled with some open source code bases but don't feel productive enough while doing it. >>53664 Thanks! Very nicely worded.

>>53646 I've gotten relatively far (like, eliminated a few uni courses) just by asking myself questions about how things work and researching them.

Obligatory https://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

>>53646 If you truly want to become something you want you need to find inspiration. If you've seen someone do it and thought it was "cool" that is all you will ever need.. This applies to almost anything. Most musicians were inspired by strong memory either from a band show, a troupe, an acquaintance or parents performing some god-like skills. You only have two decisions after the experience: "It's impossible" or "I can be like that some day". Inspiration doesn't need to be the person itself and you don't even need to be with that person, they could be a total stranger to you, fictional, or unveiled from a dream. You can even just make an ideal (You) in your mind that you want to be, creating your own inspiration all by yourself thus you become your own author. It doesn't even matter if your ideal self is unrealistic, maybe you're just a pioneer if you do. You view the unrealistic only to make it real. It's quite funny since most of the mainstream media representation of hacking over shows are terrible and unrealistic that most people who had zero knowledge get the wrong idea forever. Maybe the most accurate ones are those books that were written by actual real-world hackers, those are a good read if you want to be in their shoes, learn from their mistakes and follow their mindset but at the end of the day it is their shoes. Old shoes, old tricks. New tricks is where it's at. Most of these skills are built with the foundation called creativity and there's many ways to do it but I'll tell you to stick with routines and probably keep on creating and trying. There is a difference between being good at doing something others already did (like being good at executing a musical piece or someone's exploit) but at the end of the day it does not originate from you. You need to be the originator (the record producer, the maestro) not the follower (the cover band with no new tricks).

>>53715 Haha that's the first thing I read about hacking:)

>>53734 Yeah shows like Mr.Robot and The Social Network made me get deeper into this stuff.

>>53734 This is the longest post with the least amount of substance I've ever seen. Do you work for an MLM by chance? Point people to actual things, like CTF sites or something, god. Here is an example that answers the OP and fills in your swiss cheese response simultaneously: https://www.hackthebox.com/

>>53784 https://learnaifromscratch.github.io/theabsolutestateofsoftware.html hackthissite.org/ capturetheflag.withgoogle.com/ cryptopals.com/ ctftime.org/ microcorruption.com/ kitctf.de/learning/

>>53784 >>53734 On the contrary I found your post rather illuminating. It's appreciated. You're teaching men how to fish, yet they still beg for food And a shame most don't see its weight. From inspiration forms the rest!

I have another question. I'm knowledge hungry. Like a fuarrrk ton. I'm 18 and I've taught myself to code, networking, pentesting. I feel like I could've achieved a lot more only if I were more disciplined.I can't stop downloading ebooks and not finishing them. How do I overcome this? I wanna be disciplined how the fuarrrk do I do that?

>>55837 Having a goal has always helped me. Just reading soykaf to read it isnt a good way to learn, if you actually have a problem, you can structure your study and have more motivation to focus on it, and the reading should become more interesting and capitvating as it relates to your active interests.

>>55838 Exactly. My problem is that I lack discipline and structure. It's not like these things aren't interesting to me as they are, I live for this soykaf. I'm also just not patient enough.

>>55352 HTS is finally dead rest in piece sweet prince.

>>53715 ESR is so cool. I've got a copy of the New Hackers Dictionary 3rd ed. It's such a fun read.

>>57991 Is ESR still relevant? It was my understanding that he was a grifter that was in the right place at the right time. Wrote a book so that corporate suits could understand what open source software was. Had very limited contributions code-wise and rants on his blog about how much of a martial arts badass he his, even though he's got cerebral palsy.

Write a word wrapper program that doesn't let lines go beyond 80 characters.

>>58018 I'm actually not too sure how much stuff he has contributed code-wise to 'hacker-dom' (lol). I like the posts he writes, they're very informative. The jargon file and the Hacker's Dictionary are all just fun to look through.

>>58018 Documentation and advocacy is useful also. Code-wise, he's been fuarrrking with NTP lately? He writes little code, but it is always high impact, so make of that what you will.

(imo) I Produce for the sake of production (in the Deleuzian sense). What you produce isn't the focus, the process of producing it is what's important (not saying that you shouldn't care or make useful things, just that it shouldn't be the focus). Its retarded to think you can own information, and that you are entitled to ownership of it. Information (unlike physical matter) can be copied without any cost etc. Knowledge wants to be free. II Deterritorialize. The "clever playfulness" interpretation of the hacker, often involves looking at things outside of any established cultural / territorialized framework. Taking control of concepts and make them do what you want / need. III Learn how to learn things. After a while you get a general sense of what things are from experience. This really motivates you to learn new things, and not only stick to a single thing. Almost as important is the motivation to want to learn things, which combined is very powerful. IV Get confident in yourself. If you don't have much confidence you won't get very far. Stop avoiding things out of the fear of failture, failing is how you learn. V Don't be identity driven. Try and not strave for a "hacker aestetic" or try to reach some form of "cool" hacker identity you have seen in movies. This will only restrict you in terms of potential, and make you stop to care about any substance behind what you seem to be.

>>58065 I'm so fuarrrking sick of listening to you dorks and your reciting of your own personal stupid fuarrrking mantra. Do something else with your time besides littering imageboards with this old fuarrrker bullshit.

>>58068 hahaha wtf calm down dude, why would anyone have that as a mantra, literally just made it up in like 15min to try and answer his question.

>>58068 Post your mantra lain >inb4 he Does something else with your time besides littering imageboards with this old fuarrrker bullshit