[viraptor]

I think this is phrased wrong. I get what you mean, but this is just gate keeping. First, what do you even mean by hacker? There are many ways to describe this.

Sure, if you mean the creativity, bending the rules of what's possible, general interest in discovery... that's traits people have in the first place before being called hackers. But that's not the only way.

[whynotminot]

I find gatekeeping in the hacker world to be some of the worst in tech.

There's a strong "if you can't figure it out on your own you're too stupid to help" vibe to it, while the rest of the dev world has actually made some decent strides toward valuing inclusion and education.

[vertex-four]

I find that this is largely the American hacker community - European hackers, and especially Germans, tend to be incredibly supportive of people with the drive to learn. They also tend to expand their hacker mindset to things other than computers - wherever there's a complex system, they're critical of it, enjoy learning how it works, learning how to break it and bend it.