Though the term hacker originated at MIT in the 1960s and was used to refer to a particular group of computer and software enthusiasts, to many, the term has broader meaning.

Eric Steven Raymond How to Become a Hacker

• The World is full of facinating problems waiting to be solved.

• No problem should ever have to be solved twice.

• Boredom and drudgery are evil.

• Freedom is good.

• Attitude is no substitute for competence.

At the forefront of the hacker movement is the Hacker News community a news aggregation site contributed to by followers of Paul Graham's Y Combinator entrepreneurial incubator program. The program tends to fund small teams of hackers who have used their skills and hacker attitude to build cool products that solve problems:

UserVoice demoncratizes customer support. Reddit democratizes news. Dropbox provides an easy, automatic backup solution. and AirBNB turns extra bedrooms into places for travelers to stay.

Hackers are the scribes of the modern world. They build products and businesses that not only communicate, but users interact with and use to communicate with each other. Armed with a laptop, and idea, and a few hours to code, a hacker can build something that reaches millions.

Hackers are able to accomplish so much so little time because they come from a community that's build upon sharing knowledge. They benefit from billions of collective hours that these members of this community have invested in writing software, manuals, and other tutorials, and other tutorials with which to empower one another.

They can learn whatever it is that they need to learn to solve the problem at hand. If they run into a coding problem, they can do a quick Google search or real a manual. If their business takes off and they have to do accounting or bookkeeping, they can find more of what they're looking for on the Internet or read a book from the library.

The one subject that is exceedingly frustrating for hackers to try to learn is design. Hackers know that in order to compete against corporate behemonths with just a few lines of code, they need to have good, clear design, but the resources with which to learn design are simply hard to find. They might hire a designer to help them out, but good designers are expensive and, when you're bootstrapping a startup, you just don't have the money to spend.

The main reason for the difficulty in learning design is probably that designers tend to have difficulty articulating the process through which they make decisions. Many designers are, in face, born ith some degree of innate talent and interest in design, and through countless hours of practice and experimentation, they've developed their particular approach to design. As a result, much of the design advice that exists is either too simple or too complicated. Have you ever heard anyone tell you simply to use white space, for example? If you don't get it, she may just shrug her shoulders and say that she was just born knowing how to design.

I see how the proportions between various parts of the engineer relate to one another. I noticed how the engineer achieved clarity in differentiating pieces of information. And I see how the engineer relate to one another to communicate and emote.