
Most people have no idea what the word hacker means - shakes
http://www.betabeat.com/2011/07/26/hacked-to-death-how-journalists-are-ruining-the-word-hacker/
======
sequoia
I find this debate/discussion ("who's _really_ a hacker??") boring and
pointless; it's a mainstay of 2600 editor "Emmanuel Goldstein" on the 2600
radio show ( <http://www.2600.com/offthehook/> ). His view is that once you're
a malicious criminal (or do something he doesn't like, e.g. Anonymous ddos's)
you're not a hacker. "I don't like what you're doing! You're not a _real_
hacker! You give hackers a bad name!"

Now to make myself a hypocrite: One aspect of this phenomenon that I find
amusing is how low the bar is set in terms of programming to qualify as a
"hacker." e.g. "I hacked together this RoR site over the weekend" makes me
think, "You used a popular, well documented website building framework for
it's intended purpose... how exactly is this hacking?" "I hacked together a
cake this weekend; even hacked my own cream cheese frosting!" People (like
myself) who would once have had to settle for a more boring title like
"software engineer" or "computer scientists" are all "hackers" now. :p /my 2¢

~~~
zck
>"I hacked together this RoR site over the weekend" makes me think, "You used
a popular, well documented website building framework for it's intended
purpose... how exactly is this hacking?"

It's a _third_ sense of the word, meaning something like "put together without
a plan, by trying things until they worked". When someone says "I hacked
together this program", they mean "I threw code at it, and now it seems to do
what I want".

~~~
archgoon
Related:

"This is a bit of hack" to describe a solution that is very fragile and
subject to breaking, or just ignores good practices.

Technically, you could argue that this is in fact the original usage, as the
solution's fragility typically is due to ignoring the conventional semantics
and exploiting the actual underlying implementation of something.

------
simonsarris
Most people have a different primary definition of the word "hacker" than the
author, in other words.

Most people know exactly what the word "hacker" means within their respective
social circles.

It seems almost bizarrely religious to me for someone to say something to the
effect of, "the way most people use a word is not the same as my own way or
its origin, therefore most people ought to change."

------
grinich
_In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like
that._

    
    
        -- Linus Torvalds

~~~
Ideka
That's just wrong :(.

~~~
DanielStraight
If your goal in speaking is to communicate something to the listener, then
it's helpful to use terms in ways that will make sense to the listener.

How is that wrong?

~~~
kragen
He's helping himself by disassociating himself from the community that
supports him. That's a prisoner's-dilemma defection: if everyone is afraid to
acknowledge being a hacker when they're talking to journalists, journalists
will only ever learn the criminal definition.

------
wccrawford
"But typing the default password “1111” into the voicemail box of a murdered
girl is not hacking."

Actually, technically, it is. It just so happened that it was really, really
easy.

~~~
sequoia
Ironically the same Kevin Mitnick who declared using default passwords "not
hacking" gave a talk at HOPE <http://thenexthope.org/> about his adventures
avoiding law enforcement in which social engineering played a __central
__role. Is lying to someone on the phone to get a password "hacking?" Maybe,
maybe not, but he would have been unable to complete his goals without those
crucial soft skills.

Perhaps password guessing and SQLi is "script kiddie stuff" but it makes me
think of a "skilled thief" who scales a building and deftly opens a locked
window 3 stories up, while a less experienced accomplice tries the back door
and finds it unlocked. It's silly to condemn someone for using a simple method
if that method is effective.

EDIT: Kevin Mitnick is cool guy, I don't mean to criticize him.

~~~
bad_user
I think social hacking is far harder than trying to find vulnerabilities in a
public server. It requires a whole different set of skills -- and I don't view
it as being a "soft skill".

~~~
umright
Yeah, right. Social Engineering is much easier than gaining access through
some 0-day attack you have devised yourself, or even finding some working
skiddie method (when dealing with a specific target). For one thing, you don't
actually need any actual skill, you just need to be a good liar and have a
good story. That's not skills, it's just a sociopathic trait some people are
born with.

Kevin Mitnick was a social engineer
primarily.[[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick#Computer_hacking)]
Thus, him calling anyone 'not a real hacker' as in the context presented in
the article is ironic.

------
andrewcross
My acid test for finding out the mainstream definition of a word is to ask my
parents (50-ish but relatively tech-savvy).

In this case hacker means someone who tries to steal your shit by breaking
into their computer with viruses.

------
jfruh
Since we're talking about language use, this quote from Kevin Mitnik:

"What News Corp. did, guess pin codes, spoofing voicemails, that is amateur
script kiddie stuff."

Is itself kind of interesting, as there's no use of computer scripting
languages at all here. He's using "script kiddie" to mean not "someone who
uses pre-written scripts to break into computer systems and then boasts of
their skills" but rather "someone whose skills I don't respect."

------
mindcrime
I find this to be a silly discussion. Word have multiple meanings, words are
confusing and ambiguous, people are confused and ambiguous. But somehow we
muddle through, despite different people assigning different meanings to
"hacker." I really just don't care about this.

Then again, I consider the meaning of "hacker" to include both the "amateur
script kiddie" types AND people like Peter Norvig, Gerald Sussman, and Rob
Pike. It's just a matter of degree and of focus, with context to provide
illumination.

------
philcrissman
Maybe this is nitpicking, but did the author this article do zero fact-
checking?

>Mr. Mitnick, who ... is publishing his first book in August...

Er... Following the link to his "first book" leads to Mr. Mitnick's website,
whose products page lists his... other books...

Not to mention the well-known tech writer Stevy Levy. :-)

------
iterationx
If your favorite word has been co-opted, then make up a new word.

~~~
bproper
people tried cracker vs hacker, but it never caught on.

Then techies reclaimed hacker as a positive, even if the media doesn't uses it
another way.

Now there is hacker, the compliment among engineers, and hacker, the computer
criminal in the press.

~~~
utefan001
I have thought a lot about this and think "computer ninja" is our best option.

~~~
cema
Oh no not that please. It sounds so cheesy and cartoonish.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Well at least the bad guys can be 'computer pirates' and we can debate which
is better pirates or ninjas. And if we somehow managed to get the pirate vs
ninja meme into public debate then that would be a very clever hack indeed.

~~~
cema
Thieves versus robbers, sounds like.

------
vorg
"A hack" = a quick and dirty fix to some code to make it do something extra as
required by some non-technical manager

"Hacking" = trying out different random changes to a codebase until you
stumble on the one that does what you want

Those are the definitions (from 1980's Australia/NZ) that stick in my brain,
despite being exposed to the "new", more positive, definition from Hacker
News.

------
WalterBright
Hackers have been complaining about that since at least the mid-seventies.
Yes, I was there.

~~~
dlubarov
Yes... this is very, very old news.

~~~
padrack
The debate is very old. But the explosion of news coverage around the word
hacker has happened in the last three years.

------
ChuckMcM
So here is a sad prediction, we'll get to the point where we start calling it
'the h word' and technical people will call each other hackers and laugh but
if some non-technical type calls someone a hacker, well that will be
completely unacceptable.

And while you think "OMG did he just compare calling someone a hacker to the
scourge of racism that we have yet to purge ourselves from?" Yes, I did. You
see at some point I suspect it will become, from a non-technical person, a
vicious form of character smear to insinuate that a technical person uses
their skills to steal from society. And these 'technists' if you will, will
arise from a population that is afraid because they depend heavily on
technology in their day to day lives and yet they don't understand it, and
they are at the mercy of people who _do_ understand it, and that makes them
angry because for some, they will feel inferior. And folks who are angry and
afraid lash out in vicious and brutal ways to try to salve that fear and
anger.

I've tried for years to split the meaning by using 'cracker' vs 'hacker' or
simply 'criminal' but to no avail.

------
cydonian_monk
I'm a Hacker and an Engineer. I'll be damned if I stop using either title just
because they were sullied by criminals, confused by the press, or
misunderstood by the public.

[Late Edit] I was rather suprised by the implication that the term hacker came
from the M.I.T. model rail club. As a model railroader I've never heard the
term used in the community. Bash (ie: kitbash) is way more popular.

~~~
Symmetry
They also originated a bunch of other words, like using foo as a metasyntactic
variable. <http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TMRC.html>

~~~
cydonian_monk
Interesting. Thanks. I really should read Levy's book one of these days...
I've only got three copies of it.

~~~
erikpukinskis
You are a model railroader and software engineer who vehemently defends his
identity as a hacker, and you own three unread copies of _Hackers_?

s/will wish I had done it years ago when I/should/

~~~
cydonian_monk
Valid point. Considering two of those three copies are electronic, I have
increasingly few excuses.... Going to move it up in the rotation.

------
asreal
Glad that was cleared up. All this time, I thought a 'hacker' was a navel
gazing, media junky who happens to know a bit of ruby on rails and javascript!

------
a3_nm
I occasionally wear a T-shirt indicating "I'm a hacker". It has generated a
surprising number of comments from strangers in public places.

~~~
genieyclo
What kinds of comments?

~~~
a3_nm
They're usually surprised. Some were faintly rude, others were nicer. My
canned reply is that they should understand "hacker" in the MIT sense, and
that it's not necessarily related to computer security or even computers in
general. They usually lose interest at this point.

The most articulate chat that I had was with someone who asked me if I was
into social engineering, and explained that he had read _The Art of Deception_
and found it quite inspiring.

------
anateus
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman>

------
ig1
The term "hacker" has multiple meaning, and the use of hacking to manipulate a
phone system is not only valid but was also the original use of the term when
it originate at MIT in the 1960s.

<http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/>

------
Rhapso
The best way to define hacking in the positive engineering sense I have ever
heard is:

"To make furniture with an ax"

To take tools at hand, oft not ideal for the goal, use them to make the more
ideal tools if time allows, then to make something beautiful entirely due to
the skill, talent, and/or creativity of the wielder.

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zb
Unless the title of the article has changed, there's some editorialising going
on in the headline here of a type that is usually frowned upon on HN. And the
result is, in a sense, completely absurd.

Most people have no idea what the word hacker means _to us_.

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sp332
That's because it's slang. How do you define a "jerk", "mensch", "momma's
boy", or "hoopy frood"?

------
cafard
Most pedants have hobby horses.

