:Other Interests: =================
Some hobbies are widely shared and recognized as going with the culture: science fiction, music, medievalism (in the active form practiced by the Society for Creative Anachronism and similar organizations), chess, go, backgammon, wargames, and intellectual games of all kinds. (Role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons used to be extremely popular among hackers but they lost a bit of their luster as they moved into the mainstream and became heavily commercialized.) Logic puzzles. Ham radio. Other interests that seem to correlate less strongly but positively with hackerdom include linguistics and theater teching.
:Physical Activity and Sports: ==============================
Many (perhaps even most) hackers don't follow or do sports at all and are determinedly anti-physical. Among those who do, interest in spectator sports is low to non-existent; sports are something one *does*, not something one watches on TV.
Further, hackers avoid most team sports like the plague (volleyball is a notable exception, perhaps because it's non-contact and relatively friendly). Hacker sports are almost always primarily self-competitive ones involving concentration, stamina, and micromotor skills: martial arts, bicycling, auto racing, kite flying, hiking, rock climbing, aviation, target-shooting, sailing, caving, juggling, skiing, skating (ice and roller). Hackers' delight in techno-toys also tends to draw them towards hobbies with nifty complicated equipment that they can tinker with.
:Education: ===========
Nearly all hackers past their teens are either college-degreed or self-educated to an equivalent level. The self-taught hacker is often considered (at least by other hackers) to be better-motivated, and may be more respected, than his school-shaped counterpart. Academic areas from which people often gravitate into hackerdom include (besides the obvious computer science and electrical engineering) physics, mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy.
:Things Hackers Detest and Avoid: =================================
IBM mainframes. Smurfs, Ewoks, and other forms of offensive cuteness.
Bureaucracies. Stupid people. Easy listening music. Television
(except for cartoons, movies, the old "Star Trek", and the new
"Simpsons"). Business suits. Dishonesty. Incompetence.
Boredom. COBOL. BASIC. Character-based menu interfaces.
:Food: ======