Fair point. What I mean by "hacker" may well be different from what other people mean. I just mean a mindset which some people may think reckless but that others may find exhilarating: tinkering with something, trying to figure out empirically how it works and how you can improve on it, while ignoring learning all the theory and sensible basics until/unless you find you need to understand it to get past a particular obstacle. Probably not a good way to build a career, but great fun to a certain kind of person (like me). It's what I used to do as a kid, and I had great success with it. I'm hoping it's possible to replicate in some aspect of modern computing, but I'm put off by the layers of systems and tools and SDKs that I get the impression are involved in most programming these days. So I'm looking for a context in which this kind of "hacker" (to me) mindset might still be alive and well.