[zem]

i think two things drove it out:

1. the long-standing confusion between "someone who tinkers with programs" and "someone who maliciously breaks into systems"

the tinkering contingent fought diligently against letting the black hat contingent coopt the term, but then

2. the tech-bro/marketer crowd caught hold of it, and it became associated with other cringy terms like "ninja" and "rockstar". (tangentially, "wizard" also got dragged down that way).

so now if you call yourself a hacker, people are more likely to think of both black hats and tech bros than of the (still out there!) people who just want to do interesting stuff with computers.

[darksaints]

Hacker culture and cracker culture go hand in hand, and it has been that way since the very beginning of it all. Hacker culture primarily evolved from phreaking culture, which was reverse engineering and security bypassing...cracking, essentially. And for personal gain, no less. Nearly all of the famous hackers have histories of legally questionable actions.

And it should be that way. If you want any chance of knowing how to build good things, you need to know how to break them. That's as true for a bridge engineer as it is for Woz.

Personally, I find the attempt to distinguish between hacker and cracker to be some sort of no-true-scotsman retcon. I've always viewed the whole concept of hacker culture to be amoral...and the attempt to distinguish between "good" or "bad" hackers has just watered down the term.

[jayd16]

I most often hear "hacks" and "hacky code" to refer to unmaintainable shortcuts and/or "clever" tricks, these days. So in that sense a "hacker" would not be something I would want to be called or call a coworker considering the modern usage.

[tkgally]

For those reasons, I personally would not object if YC decided to change the name of Hacker News to something else. The current name seems misleading, at least to me.

[ddingus]

That would be a shame really.

[sigmaprimus]

Yes, the whole idea sounds like a progressive attack by the word police looking for another target to cancel. A not so long time ago there were these thick stacks of paper bound in twine, glue and leather called dictionaries that contained words and their understood meanings and it made it far more difficult to change a words meaning, it seems as with everything in this modern world the time for a meaning to be changed has accelerated to the point that ridiculous definitions can be twisted and imposed upon any word now.

Personally I prefer the darker meaning of hacker than the 2000s "G rated" version of hacker but that's probably because of my age.

So

To all the hackers, crackers and phreaks still out there...all your bases are belong to us, we are legion, we do not forget, expect us.

[AndrewDucker]

What's particularly funny here is that the "has fun making computers do things" definition of hacker predates the "breaking into things" definition. What you're referring to was called a "cracker"until the 90s.

[ddingus]

Exactly right.

[ddingus]

You know if I were you, I would take the labeling and blaming out of this, and just recognize that there is a sort of attack going on.

Many of us you came up during a far less authoritarian, and somewhat simpler time, definitely feel it.

And I think that is a discussion worth having, but I don't think it's one that we should further politicize.