I titled the post "Learn how to hack..." because of the "Ask YC: How do I become a hacker?" posts that keep coming up, not because I think that following these steps will make you a hacker. When people ask, "How do I become a hacker?" on this forum, they tend to mean, "How do I make web apps?" and that's the question that I answered.

I tried to correct that in some of the edits.