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Comment by nathan_f77 | Hacker News Reader

I actually don't think too many engineers are 'hackers'.

I certainly don't consider myself much of a hacker, and I don't think many here are either.

We are programmers. We build stuff. We need to know everything there is to know about security risks, but most of us stopped coding windows trojans and worms after high school.

I don't think many of us know (or care) how to write keygens and cracks for games, or invisibly extract cash from a bank via social engineering.

That's the definition I subscribe to. Hackers are highly specialized in computer security, whether they're white-hat or black-hat.

So Reuters is not using the wrong definition. It just feels like school kids giving new meanings to words, then laughing at their 'lame' parents who don't understand.

"Tinkering" sounds kind of lame, but it is what it is.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I'm posting on Hacker News! The new meaning is fine, but don't act like other people are stupid for not getting it.

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To be clear, I don't know that it's a new meaning. Stallman always says that the "tinkerer" is the original meaning, and that the "tinkerer with security holes" subset became the popular definition later.

I think it might be better to say that in the days when the meaning of the word "hacker" was still entirely up in the air, getting at the insides of things (especially infrastructural things) was often associated with being "one of the bad guys."

And the "thing" (for lack of a better word) about computing (and also to some extension all sorts of other fields) that interested the relevant loosely-defined subculture consisted, while certainly not entirely, at least substantially of the insides of things. So you ended up dealing with security even if that wasn't your primary interest.

That's about as clearly as I can put it, anyway. Please do note that I'm not saying it's a good thing.

You've got your history backwards. The "tinkering" meaning is the original, the "security expert" meaning is the new one, and we're all clinging to/trying to bring back the old one.

That's not true. I'm all in favour of our beloved eponymous usage, but the earliest known occurrence of "hacker" did have to do with breaking into forbidden systems.

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-of...

The TMRC might want to have a word with you. The usage by them dates back to the 50s at least.

People say that, but does anyone have an earlier confirmed source? Let's not just believe what we want to.

Chapter 1 of "Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/729

What? We all know that book was published in 1984. 20 years later doesn't count as an "earlier confirmed source".

What's proven is that by 1963, people were writing "hacker" to mean "security breaker". To insist this is a perversion is rather silly when the "perversion" occurs so early and is in fact the earliest citation.

It seems likely the two usages are coeval. The benign one is how hackers saw themselves and the malicious one is how they were perceived by authorities.

Is this what you mean?

http://tmrc.mit.edu/hackers-ref.html

Wow, I had no idea it went this far back. I've always been curious about etymology. After seeing this whole thread, I dug up these references:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hacker.html

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/security/hackers-and-cracke...

Every programmer I know I'd call a hacker or a prankster, and a tinkerer. The kind of person laughing at the WAT video from recent past, or the kind of someone who would program his talking bathroom scale to read your weight in a foreign language. Hackers make things, and are still changing the world, and having a great time doing it too.

So, just on the off chance Mark Zuckerberg ever has any doubts about writing that letter, or takes any ribbings for it: yeah, it was the right thing to do.

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