

What is a 'Hacker'? - p4bl0
http://ben.balter.com/2013/02/16/what-is-a-hacker/

======
alan_cx
I still understand "hacker" to mean someone who re-tasks something from one
use to another. I dont see it as computer specific.

Computer hackers are a subset of that. They access or attack systems via
routes that were not designed for them to use and exploit in that way. Coding
hackers use existing code and modify it for another purpose. I don't see a
coder who starts with a blank page and libraries or APIs as a hacker as such.
They are creators, using tool provided for intended purpose.

Too widen it: an art hacker, for example, would take old bits of metal and
make a sculpture. An artist starts with a blank page and raw materials. People
who fix cars with anything around them in Africa or Cuba too are hackers. Im
not sure of the details, but when Apollo whatever number went wrong and they
had to help the astronauts get home, that was hacking. People who fit V8
engines to small FWD cars; hackers.

I also think its about targeted expertise, rather than over all expertise.
Hackers learn the small part they need to re-task, but don't have over all
knowledge. As well as that, I think its about cutting through the surrounding
crap. Getting the job done regardless of convention, rules, regulation, and
procedure. So, hacking is about how you get the job done.

That is how I see it, but of course in all that is room for debate and many
fine lines to argue over.

Ultimately to me, its a universal mentality. Macgyver was an ultimate
hacker!!!!

~~~
bittired
> I still understand "hacker" to mean someone who re-tasks something from one
> use to another. I dont see it as computer specific.

So, if I beat someone with a phone, I'm a hacker?

> when Apollo whatever number went wrong

13? Or was Zeus with the Apollo you speak and there were wacky antics with a
man in a thick mustache? I think that was "whatever P.I.", but I'm not sure.

> I don't see a coder who starts with a blank page and libraries or APIs as a
> hacker as such.

This I totally agree with you on. Every developer that creates something new
is not a hacker. Not long after PG started the site, it became a watering hole
for the top minds in development and technology. Then people like me joined
(years ago, under different name then), and now it is a more civil form of
slashdot mixed with MBA's, lawyers (it seems), and wannabe's. I count myself
in the wannabe's group not because I "want to be", but because despite many
years in the business, I know I don't pass muster as a "hacker". It's not PG's
fault that HN is filled with non-hackers. That is the normal way things
devolve with any kind of popular open club. To paraphrase Groucho Marx
(because there is apparently no official version of the quote): I don’t want
to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.

~~~
alan_cx
"So, if I beat someone with a phone, I'm a hacker?"

LOL, well sort of, yes. Especially if some sort of clever kung fu was used to
do so!!! And yes, I thick mustache should be part of the hacker uniform!!!!

I count myself as a hacker. I am not highly talented, but I can get stuff done
by utilizing bits and pieces of other's creations, or modifying things to fit
or work. But I have that mentality that I can apply to most problems. Im not
thinking Scrapheap Challenge. To me, those contestants are great hackers, but
in a mechanical subset.

Dont get me wrong, my "definition" is not perfect, its supposed to be a loose
general fit. Er, a hack!!!!

Damn. Even my replies are hacks......

I need to go away and have a think about that.

------
bittired
> Somewhat surprisingly, hacking isn’t at all about technology. It’s about
> community.

It's like a Sociology grad student (in this case, somewhat surprisingly, a Law
student) read the following from "How To Become A Hacker" and f'd it up in the
process: [http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-
howto.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html)

"There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking
wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing
minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this
culture originated the term ‘hacker’. Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made
the Unix operating system what it is today. Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make
the World Wide Web work. If you are part of this culture, if you have
contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a
hacker, you're a hacker."

Aha. It's in the credits:

> See Eric S. Raymond↩

------
iblaine
IMHO hacking is doing something you're not supposed to in such a unique way
that it is considered clever, skillful and attractive. Increasingly people
call themselves hackers by doing something that is trivial, unskilled or
uninteresting.

Brute forcing your way into banks to steal credit cards for the sake of
leaning how to do it (I may have done that as a kid among other things) is
hacking. Doing that to pay rent is where there's a departure. Hacking
shouldn't be offensive. Hacking shouldn't be boring. Writing Mario Bros 1.0 in
a couple lines of jQuery is boring. Hacking shouldn't be about money. If
you're at a startup participating in a hackathon then you're ultimately doing
it for money. It isn't hacking.

------
denzil_correa
I think PG puts the definition of a "hacker" in the best way I have ever read

    
    
        To the popular press, "hacker" means someone who breaks 
        into computers. Among programmers it means a good 
        programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To 
        programmers, "hacker" connotes mastery in the most 
        literal sense: someone who can make a computer do what 
        he wants—whether the computer wants to or not.
    

[http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html)

------
p4bl0
I very much like the paragraph entitled "The Hacker Ethic", because it also
perfectly describe academic research, except for the _decentralization_ part,
where we still have problems accessing papers published in closed-access
journals/conferences. I think it really point out how much this is a problem.

------
D9u
[http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-
howto.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html)

------
dobbsbob
Nobody remembers the Hacker Manifesto? Hackers choose to hack because it is a
way for them to learn, and because they are frustrated and bored by the
limitations of standard society and frustrated with how information is
controlled. To this day we still have paywalls and out of reach tuition costs
for most of the world. Thankfully that's changing because a lot of hackers
have propogated throughout industry and universities to free the info. In
other ways it's not changing with copyright lawyers going after anybody who
jailbreaks a phone or accesses a proprietary vehicle chip without being
"authorized".

------
dschiptsov
One who is capable to understand how a system works and why, and then improve
it, and he does it on a regular basis.

~~~
jebblue
I liked this explanation.

------
pjmlp
The word's meaning is so twisted in the media as someone that steals
information and breaks into systems, that I doubt society will ever adopt the
correct meaning for it.

~~~
p4bl0
I think that to some extent both meanings can co-exists, they're not even
entirely incompatible actually. Sure "stealing credit card numbers or
disabling public utilities" is not really in the spirit of hacking in the good
sense, but breaking into systems or other illegal stuffs can also be
hacktivism (think of a Robin Wood analogy to, for instance "stealing" research
papers back), and is part of what a hacker in the sense of the linked post may
do.

~~~
D9u

         >breaking into systems or other illegal stuffs can also be hacktivism
    

I'd refer to anyone who breaks into systms as a "cracker," regardless of their
motivations.

------
urza
Most importantly being entrepreneur does not make you a hacker.

------
future_grad
> See Eric S. Raymond

If you put this in the beginning you no longer have to write an article about
what a hacker is.

~~~
mwfunk
I started to agree with you, but only because my brain initially parsed your
statement as, "you no longer have the right to write an article about what a
hacker is". I would take anything ESR writes about hackers or "hacker culture"
(whatever that is) with a grain of salt the size of my clearly-unreliable
head.

There's a lot of interesting tidbits and trivia and observations in ESR's
hacker dictionary and other writings, but it became really clear to me about
10 years ago that ESR has this reductive wish-fulfillment streak that pretty
much invalidates his entire worldview. ESR really, really wants to believe
that a hacker is something more than a really talented programmer. He really
really wants to believe that hackers have a shared, unified culture that goes
back to the dawn of computing, and that this culture agrees on pretty much
everything that really matters to him, and that this culture is ultimately the
only group that matters where philosophical issues surrounding computing are
concerned.

If it wasn't obvious enough, he uses terms like "our tribe" to refer to the
culture, and "the elders of our tribe" to refer to the supposed universally-
agreed-upon elite of this imaginary meritocracy. Most importantly (and this is
where the wish fulfillment part comes in), he really wants to believe that he
is one of those elders. For all of his strengths (and he has many- he clearly
has a really active intellect), he comes across to me as a really insecure yet
conceited and arrogant guy (insecurity and arrogance frequently go together in
my experience). He ultimately just wants to believe that there is some vast
and old meritocratic subculture of intellectual elites, and that he is at or
near the top of that meritocracy.

All you have to do is read through his version of the hacker's dictionary for
any entries that attempt to define what a hacker is or what a hacker believes,
as opposed to the entries that just document trivia, history, and slang. It's
like reading Heinlein- every time he tries to define what an ideal hacker is
like, he's obviously describing himself. This goes all the way down to
political beliefs. At one time, there was a controversial entry that stated
that most or all hackers were libertarians. Guess what ESR was? At some point
in the 2000s, he changed it to read that most or all hackers were
neoconservatives. This coincided with his own self-identification as a
neoconservative. I don't know what it says now, I can't bring myself to look
at it.

The "surprised by wealth" essay was what initially soured me on the guy. He
was (briefly) very wealthy after VA Linux's IPO in 1999, and he felt compelled
to write a big long essay about how rich he was and how it validated
everything he'd been saying
([http://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-
writes-o...](http://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-writes-on-
surprised-by-wealth)). This was followed by all sorts of lovely things, like
his Bill Gates-as-Hitler artwork that I think is still on his site somewhere,
and many many many blowhard outbursts and incidents over the years.

EDIT: typos and a clarification

~~~
suppressingfire
I couldn't stop my self from looking the reference up. It's in the entry on
Politics:

[http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/politics.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/politics.html)

He's clearly injecting himself into the "definition" as a type (b).

FWIW, the way back machine indicates it's been like that for a decade:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20030609145128/http://www.catb.or...](http://web.archive.org/web/20030609145128/http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/politics.html)

------
peter303
To me a hacker is a type of artist who creates something either software or
computer/electronics. (The term "maker" is starting to supplant the hardware
side.) We respect cleverness and creativity among fellow hackers. This respect
is more important than monetary compensation.

------
qwertyboy
Douglas Adams had a brilliant definition (used originally for "nerd"): a
hacker is a person who uses the telephone to talk about telephones.

