HN Explorer

Ask HN : Is hacker a good terminology?

7 points by bo_Olean ↗ HN
When the word hack is used, despite other elite explanations available in Oxford or Cambridge dictionaries people[1] will take it wrong - Hacker is a person who will make harm to your machine or the person who will break your computer.

Convince me, and I will others that Hacker the term itself defines a nice human/person living behind.

or I would like to know why people say so.

Edit: [1](Your mother or your friend who doesn't know what HN is )

13 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 58.8 ms ] thread
T_S_
It's not a bad way to discriminate between people based on how much they think about technology. The less informed only see the term when it appears in a bad news headline. Others know there is more that one meaning.

At Hacker Dojo we have experienced this first hand. Once we had a tv crew show up asking about the arrest of some Anonymous members. Nothing at all to do with us. There have been a couple of times we wished the name was the Mountain View Yacht Club.

thetabyte
This will answer all your questions: http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
bo_Olean
I've read every line of ESR's hacker how to. Yes, I know what it means to respect a hacker or to be a hacker..

But why, you may like to re-read my question, as i already mentioned above, people think hacker is not a person with good motives. Who is playing the role here between you HNers and the people ?

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
mhd
This would be much more applicable if there'd be a culture distinguishing the two kinds here at HN. Most submissions about Anonymous or "cyberwar" call them hackers, i.e. there's no "hackers vs. crackers" mentality. (Never mind that for me, having grown up in the 80s, a "cracker" is someone who circumvents the copy protection of a game)

Still, considering that the term has morphed once again into something greater ("life hackers" etc.), I don't see a real danger in the name of this site. Never mind that we've got way more capitalistic neo-yuppies here than phreaking aging hippies…

mindcrime
I expect that most of us just assume that context will be a sufficient discriminator, and don't feel the need to always call out the distinction explicitly.
mhd
I think that's the core of it. Someone who plasters stickers on their Ikea coffee table is a "hacker", as is someone who breaks into the NSA, as is someone who, well, creates yet another specialized social network using RoR… (I'd say complaining about the loss of meaning would be a much better topic than arguing about a potential bad reputation)
mkr-hn
People think a lot of wrong things. It's more productive to inform them when it comes up than it is to change the word you use.
parasitius
I tried but...

"a terminology"? "a person who will make harm"?

English? Can you speak it?

uvTwitch
Clearly not that well, perhaps it's not their native language.

Polite, motherfucker, can you be it?

nhannah
Hacker is fine, all job descriptions looking for a "ninja hacker" or for that matter any job descriptions prefixed with the word ninja should be ignored. I have never met someone serious about programming that liked to be called a ninja or thought of themselves as such. I have met many people who were very into start-ups but had no CS or Engineering background that loved to give themselves and others silly prefixes though. In a nut shell call yourself what you like, but be wary of those too interested in titles as they are probably trying to make up for something.