Hacking then and hacking now has an air of subversion to it. Coming up with an exploit like Firesheep is hacking. Figuring out how to use PS3s as a supercomputer--and simultaneously subverting the entire business of building and selling supercomputers for ginormous amounts of money AND the business of selling gaming consoles--is hacking. Super-logging out of Facebook is hacking. Renting a botnet and using it to extort money from a business is not hacking, fine, that's just criminal.

But yeah, calling yourself a "hacker" ought to mean frowns from establishment types. "Hacker" is almost the antonym of "professional." If you want to be a super-genius who works within the system, the word you're looking for is "nerd."

I categorically reject the idea that the word needs to be "reclaimed" from script kiddies. If anything, I want the word reclaimed from money-grubbing bourgeois poseurs who happen to be interested in technology businesses.

I respect and admire people who want to start businesses. I respect and admire people who love to create great software. But if someone is ashamed of being associated with Steve Wozniak or John Draper, maybe they need to ask if they are really a hacker rather than asking if the word "hacker" is being improperly used.

p.s. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1914498

There's nothing shameful in being associated with Wozniak or Draper or any of the great technological innovators.

There is something shameful in being associated with the "l33t h4x0r kr3w" (or Iranian Cyber Army) and those who participate in mass defacements etc.

edit:

Also, I really don't like the idea that you're pushing, that you have to work 'outside the system' in order to be a hacker. I completely agree that important attributes of being a hacker are the ability to see problems from non-traditional viewpoints, to come up with unusual solutions, to challenge the de rigeur way of doing things, to disrupt. And those attributes are shared by many subversives.

But the important difference to me is that a hacker is constructively subversive.

I'm sure lots of salespeople cringe at the thought of being associated with the slimeballs. But yet... It's all Sales and they are all salespeople.

EDIT: By all means call yourself "constructive." But it is not a requirement of hacking. How was stealing telecommunications services constructive for the telecommunications companies?

But I'd like both of those to be great examples of hacking.

Is the important distinction motivation then? That phreaks weren't motivated by an urge to crash the system but by an undying curiosity about how things work?

That's a little like saying that Jazz died with Miles Davis and that we should call it "African-American Classical Music" and when kids do something offensive today like slapping a saxophone reed or a tuba mouthpiece with their tongues (James Carter and John Sass, respectively), it's not Jazz, it's noise.

I just don't trust myself to know how to say that subverting the telephone system by emulating tones is hacking but routing 15% of the world's IP traffic through your computers for military purposes is not hacking. I can only say that I admire the first and deplore the second.

p.s. And yeah, Go Go Lego! I suggest there's an "air" of subversion involved with hacking, but just a whiff. If it makes you happy, Hack On!

I suggest that the net harm to society from slimeball salespeople outweighs the net harm to society from black hat hackers by so many orders of magnitude that a comparison involves astronomical entities like red giants being compared to planetoids.

I would ask you to think about the computer business if we could remove the enterprise salespeople, but my mouth is watering so much that I can't finish typing my comment...

I think one problem is that there's no other word to describe such people. The media associates any computer related crime to hacking. Last week the guy who broke into Sarah Palins email account, in the media known as the 'Palin Hacker', was sentenced to jail. Is this guy a hacker? If not, what should he be called instead?

In this context, this article is interesting: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/11/palin-hacker-de/

Hacking absolutely did not start with exploiting security vulnerabilities in telecommunications equipment.

It is true that phone phreaking and the like have a long distinguished history in the technology community. See for instance almost any issue of the 2600 magazine [The Hacker Quarterly]. However, indicating that "hacking" as an activity is about exploiting security vulnerabilities misappropriates the term.

There has been much debate on the correct definition of the work "hacker." For instance a quick google of "define: hacker" gives both positive an negative definitions. In contrast RFC 1392 explicitly defines it in the postive:

   hacker
      A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the
      internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in
      particular.  The term is often misused in a pejorative context,
      where "cracker" would be the correct term.  See also: cracker.

Thus, today discussion of the word hacker needs to be sensitive to both definitions. Your post is not. You reject a long history of positive definitions for a negative one.

I agree, I don't think it's so much reclaiming the word as making it to something new. Doing something out of curiosity, or just because it is fun, has always been a big part of hacking. Looking at actions alone Goldman Sachs would probably have some of the best hackers around.

I also think there are differences between the US and Europe, when it comes to programming as a business versus as a subculture. If someone has some thoughts on that from a North American perspective I'd love to hear them.

Sure, here on Hacker News we all use hacker to mean something, but I think outside of this little group little has changed.

Equally, I think stressing about this is a total waste of time. The average joe thinks of a hacker as someone who breaks stuff. Oh well. I've got better things to do then have a silly argument about the meaning of a word.

[1] - hackaday, lifehacker, hackathon, etc etc. Still a specialist audience, but I can't see lifehacker being born while hacker still meant 'the manifesto'.

edit:

> Within the computer world I don't think the meaning of hacker ever really went away.

I'm not so sure about that at all. I've only been a developer for ten years (which isn't that long really), so perhaps it's just that I've moved into more aware circles, but when I started web dev work, 'hack' meant 'break into a computer'. The word hack in terms of 'a hacky solution' or 'put a little hack in there' wasn't so popular, but I concede that it was around back then.

But today I can talk to almost any developer and talk about hacking on such-and-such a project and they know exactly what I'm talking about. So I think progress has been made.

Example: My roommate, a person who thinks I'm boring because I'm in CS (his comment upon seeing my schedule of mostly cs classes next semester: "At least you're taking one interesting class" [class in question is intro to astronomy]), saw me reading HN one night. This led to a half hour discussion on how I'm not committing illegal activities (that I'm aware of).

I had to learn about the group behind the site to understand. I still think that calling it "Hacker News" will prove misleading for some, but I've long since become used to the theme of this site.

If it was called startupnews, everyone would complain about the technical posts.

"Hacker" news seems to not even be the second most popular topic of discussion here. Startup crap and politics shit both do a great job of drowning it out.

Then you have the always creepy "article about steve jobs' personal life, which has absolutely nothing to do with computing or even his business"...

In the world of the internets the most commonly associated meaning (rightly or wrongly) of the word Hacker is for computer nerds.

In that sense "Hacker News" has nothing to do with hacking, Startup News is more apt description of this community.

HN has always a lot of interesting stuff that has nothing to do with startups. E.g. general CS, psychology, physics ans so on...

Hacking really means going against the status quo, and that's a different thing altogether.

Example: building something like Facebook is not hacking. That's just good engineering and opportunistic use of human nature.

The simplest test you can have to call something a hack or not: did other people laugh or got angry when hearing about it?

Of course you can still call yourself a hacker, for feeling good and all that, but I like how ESR puts it: you're not a hacker until other people start recognizing you as one.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575487

To paraphrase raganwald, "Hacking is the exploitation of unexpected side effects".

There are good hackers and bad hackers.I have been on both sides of the fences since the beginning of the 80s. We were always known as hackers. Crackers were always a subclass of hackers that "cracked" software protection schemes, but they were hackers, too.

Virtually everyone inside and outside of the OSS community uses it correctly, but still this small element of ESR followers try to ram it down our brain stems. And then a new, young crowd discovers ESR's essay and attempts to repeat the same with false authority.

Reading Hackers and Painters (the essay not the book) was the first time I'd realised that what I did had a name. I now take it for granted that other developers consider themselves hackers. I'd argue that the term filtering down to lifehacker and popular journalists is a consequence of that kind of mindset change. Which you have helped with.

Once upon a time, a hacker was more like what the Maker/MAKE Magazine/MakerFaire scene is now. It was people with a passion for creating and tinkering and creating and tinkering some more. While much of that spirit still remains, it also seems to have gained an air of entitlement about it, and a fixation with legal issues like licensing. I think that, impressively enough, RMS is the main driver behind this, but I think a lot of poorly behaved businesses helped drive his point home.

Don't believe me? Think that the hacker ethos is inextricably or necessarily tied to the free-as-in-speech and open software movement? Counterexamples: Apple and Intel. Both these companies are very closed, but you'd find few people willing to revoke the title of hacker from the hardworking software/hardware engineers and designers at Apple or Intel. These companies are successful, and they are that way in no small part because they manage to tap their employee's passion for doing the the best work they possibly can and effectively channeling that into a product.

But even the MIT meaning of the word is diluted now to the point that it just means "someone who possibly knows how to write programs".

PS the people who can't use the terminal probably can never create a facebook (imho).

(thanks tineye)