How to become a hacker

How to become a hacker:

Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help.

...to be a hacker you have to get a basic thrill from solving problems, sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence.

...the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it

If you don't have functional English, learn it.

There's a natural progression from helping test programs to helping debug them to helping modify them.

Being something of a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking.

Learn to write your native language well. Though it's a common stereotype that programmers can't write, a surprising number of hackers (including all the most accomplished ones I know of) are very able writers.

Learn to play some musical instrument well, or how to sing.

Work as intensely as you play and play as intensely as you work. For true hackers, the boundaries between "play", "work", "science" and "art" all tend to disappear, or to merge into a high-level creative playfulness... Hackers don't do things by halves; if they invest in a skill at all, they tend to get very good at it.