:General Appearance: ====================
Intelligent. Scruffy. Intense. Abstracted. Surprisingly for a sedentary profession, more hackers run to skinny than fat; both extremes are more common than elsewhere. Tans are rare.
:Dress: =======
Casual, vaguely post-hippie; T-shirts, jeans, running shoes,
Birkenstocks (or bare feet). Long hair, beards, and moustaches are
common. High incidence of tie-dye and intellectual or humorous `slogan'
T-shirts (only rarely computer related; that would be too obvious).
A substantial minority prefers `outdoorsy' clothing —- hiking boots ("in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the machine room", as one famous parody put it), khakis, lumberjack or chamois shirts, and the like.
Very few actually fit the `National Lampoon' Nerd stereotype, though it lingers on at MIT and may have been more common before 1975. These days, backpacks are more common than briefcases, and the hacker `look' is more whole-earth than whole-polyester.
Hackers dress for comfort, function, and minimal maintenance hassles rather than for appearance (some, perhaps unfortunately, take this to extremes and neglect personal hygiene). They have a very low tolerance of suits and other `business' attire; in fact, it is not uncommon for hackers to quit a job rather than conform to a dress code.
Female hackers almost never wear visible makeup, and many use none at all.
:Reading Habits: ================
Omnivorous, but usually includes lots of science and science fiction. The typical hacker household might subscribe to `Analog', `Scientific American', `Co-Evolution Quarterly', and `Smithsonian'. Hackers often have a reading range that astonishes liberal arts people but tend not to talk about it as much. Many hackers spend as much of their spare time reading as the average American burns up watching TV, and often keep shelves and shelves of well-thumbed books in their homes.