Ask HN: What got you interested in programming/building/hacking? - sarthakjshetty
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ShiroiAkuma
My case was weird, I always wanted to have a computer. When I was 7 I got to
see computer first time, saw few things in basic and logo at school (not even
elementary) totally fascinated me. Love it, like wow I type using keyboard and
it shows on computer thats so amazing. I would hypothesize that each key must
have some sort of signal/signature that makes computer identify them. I still
remember LET A=5 LET B=6 LET C=A+B and then C's value would be 11. Teacher
taught us to draw rectangle in logo. After that when I was 11 I got my hands
on MS visual c++ 2006 or smthng, totally loved it. Didnt go as far as pointers
but had pretty much covered all that and Totally loved it. Sister would code
in C++ and I was amazed to see how similar they were (didnt knew c++ was super
set to C) Wanted to learn java php js by 12-13 years of age. Started using
ubuntu 12.04 hahaha. Linux commandline was very good different from cmd and
totally awesome. Started reading hacking books and realised this is what I
want to do. Currently I am still learning, I aint the sharpest tool but I can
atleast think in computer terms.

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Jugurtha
I was curious as a child to know how on earth that these programs did what
they did. You ran them and they did something useful, and a human made them. I
was just amazed at how they could do different things _on the same machine_.
The same machine could run a game, a calculator, or something else without you
having to change it. They all ran. How is this possible. I spent some time
opening them with EDIT on DOS and I gleaned a few strings and words.

I even created a text file and changed its extension to .COM and .EXE and
tried to run it. I'm not sure what I expected but I expected it to do
something and it didn't, it wasn't a valid application , so I wanted to learn
how to make a valid one.

I was a child and started learning BASIC. Mainly going through the help,
instruction by instruction. Typing in snippets from the help and running them,
then changing things, seeing what broke and trying to figure out failure
patterns and find causality. It may not have been the best strategy but I was
less than 9 in 96 and we didn't have Internet. I was able to ask my older
brother questions though.

It was just fascinating. The first program I was really proud of was a
geography one. I used to look up countries in dictionaries.

I got the idea that I could write a program that gave you all information. So
I entered all the countries painstakingly. The data was of course part of the
program.

The program takes the country name, in capital letters or it didn't work, and
it returns the details(population, surface area, capital).

It was not much and I recall trying to find "users" in my family members. "Say
you're curious about Bolivia and want to know more... What do you do?"

Answer: I look it up in the dictionary.

Me: _or_ you run this program and you type the country name in capital letters
and it gives you all the information you need.

I was hooked. Seeing those games and tools do what they did, I wanted to learn
to build things that were so useful.

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kratom_sandwich
Not meaning to hijack your question, but if anyone has ideas on what might get
today's youth interested in hacking (e.g. certain movies, books, twitch
streaming), I would love to hear some thoughts.

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muzani
As a kid, I loved the idea of making games. My sister used to draw little
characters and I'd try to make it into a game.

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gitgud
For me it was;

\- Lego

\- Which led to Lego mechanics

\- Which led to mechanical engineering

\- Which led to manufacturing

\- Which led to automation

\- Which led to programming

It's a long but surprisingly common path I've found...

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pesfandiar
There was a cartoon show in the 90's where the characters learned rudimentary
BASIC programming, and it blew my mind that you could make a computer do what
you wanted by typing a few commands. Later on, it was wanting to make video
games that completely hooked me on.

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throw_this_one
I’m not. I just do it for the (Relatively) easy income.

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non-entity
Some game (dont remember which) kept leaving weird text files on my desktop.
Turns out they were Java stack traces.

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pranit10
I was in 10th grade when the social network came out. I was inspired and
really wanted to make my own facebook.

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omnibrain
Watching Wargames and Tron as a child.

~~~
sarthakjshetty
What specifically about them got you interested? The storyline, characters,
the mechanics of the game?

~~~
omnibrain
The blinking lights.

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PaulHoule
Apple ][, PDP-8/10/11

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AnimalMuppet
My dad.

