The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.

The Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.

The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.

It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers came near its owner's property has experienced the essential continuity between animal territoriality and human property. Our domesticated cousins of the wolf know, instinctively, that property is no mere social convention or game, but a critically important evolved mechanism for the avoidance of violence. (This makes them smarter than a good many human political theorists.)