The way I look at it now is that a hacker is the dual of an engineer.
An engineer first makes sure that something is correct, then tries to build it. A hacker first builds something, then tries to make sure it is correct.
Oooh - Brian Harvey. Brings up happy memories of CS60B; C, MIPS ASM, and the SPIM simulator. This guy is one of the best lecturers/speakers I know of.
I took CS61A from him freshman year, loved it, then TA'd it a couple years later (cause I needed my Scheme fix!).
So when did the meaning of hacker change from someone who breaks in to computer systems, either as a white hat or black hat, to basically a programmer?