Word "hacker" has become very vague lately, but the definition used 10 years ago, did not include "people who build robots, or the people who built the chips that Unix runs on". Those were called Electric Engineers AFAIR. "Hacker" literally meant a guy involved with cybersecurity and therefore deeply into OS internals. Then the word went through transformation and today may easily mean "an Arduino hacker who made an automated bird feeder", "a RoR hacker who made a homepage with it etc.".
I guess "hacker" doesn't really mean what it used to mean. I thought it used to mean people who are curious and like to tinker. Maybe it now means "busy people who have no time to actually tinker but like the idea of tinkering".
I don't think this is a "SV techbro" thing. In the 80s (when I was in college), "hacker" had a connotation of someone who built cool things in software, usually outside the "normal" approach. It was sort of the opposite of what eventually became software engineering - quick and dirty "tricks" that explored the edges of operating system. We looked up to hackers as repositories of esoteric knowledge. Long hair and hiking boots were common.
Certainly, some of what they hacked on might be related to security. Or maybe they wrote little games. Or threw together a curses-based interface to the Unix shell. Or some other cool utility.
As I recall, there was a concerted attempt to distinguish between people who exploited security vulnerabilities (aka "crackers") from people who could quickly build these useful things ("hackers").
I feel like the modern use of hacker (ala "hackathon") is actually pretty well in line with the usage I grew up with.
Sometimes the dictionary definition isn't enough to understand the meaning of a word in a new context. "Hacker", up to about a decade ago, certainly meant "an expert at solving problems with a computer", but that meaning is not what people are referring to now. The dictionary hasn't caught up with modern parlance yet. Today's meaning is more along the lines of "A person whose expertise in a subject allows them to do things in new and innovative ways." To be described as a "<something> hacker" is a compliment.
I kind of feel like "hacker" used to be a title that you had to earn from other hackers, and could apply to people of any skillset; and now it's mostly synonymous with "programmer".
With the size of the internet these days, it was probably inevitable that the word would get diluted, but... I feel like we no longer have a suitable word to describe people who build things like "self-balancing unicycle" or "linux hosted on an x86 emulator in javascript" or "homemade airplane" or "UNIX". And that makes me a little sad.
I agree. I think the generally accepted meaning has evolved over time. Hacker, to most people, now means cracker/intruder.
Perhaps a more positive way to approach this is to popularise a different term for what we mean by hacker (tinkerer, maker). It's not admitting defeat by abandoning the original meaning - it's taking the path of least resistance and evolving with the language.
The word hacker is so abused for marketing purposes it now means entry level programmer of whatever trendy fad of the times. (e.g. node.js hacker, rails ninja, mongodb god)
* Originally (70s-80s) hackers were programmers/technicians who could
modify programs or machines to perform tasks beyond their original
intended use (for good or bad).
* Afterwards (90s), journalists hyped the word to mean security
hackers, people expert on security issues of software (itself a
subset of original hackers).
* And then further journalist confusion, changing it to refer to
people cracking into systems
* In the last few years it became a glorified buzzword losing any
useful meaning.
A lot of insecure people who need cool names use it to describe themselves. There's no substance and no way to verify their claims. This is like ghetto cars with neon lights and flaps.
By the late 90s this is exactly how I understood the terms.
Even now I don't hear many people in the local tech community (Scotland) refer to hackers as we mean here (unless it's prefixed with something, for example "Python hacker").
It's changed over the years.. in the early 80s, a hacker was a programmer who knew their computer inside out, so they could do anything they wanted, not what they were supposed to be doing. I had a computer with a Z80, and read a series called "The Hacker's Handbook" which featured stuff like inserting little machine language routines into the comments of your BASIC program so you could do whatever you wanted, and very fast. Later I wrote assembler routines, hand-translated them to machine code and inserted them into Turbo Pascal functions. That definitely counted as hacking then..
Reading Kevin Mitnick's books, he could do almost anything programmer-hackers can do, and a lot more besides, just by making a few phone calls, and by knowing a lot about the organizations/systems/codes/protocols/authorizations involved.
Sprite of spritesmods.com says "I'm an avid hacker...I enjoy ripping different pieces of hardware apart and using them in a way they weren't meant to use"
The popular sense of the word today is more like.. a criminal, breaking laws and stealing from people and organizations with their bash expertise.
i think everyone here assumes hackers means programmers..and also sometime those who build stuff often creatively..the word hacker i guess is much abused by the media to refer to whom most hackers call crackers
I think programmers are special kind of engineers. We could call them software engineers. My feeling is that the word 'hacker' is invented to state that hackers are somehow more than engineers. As if engineers were dumb people without creativity, who can only follow predefined processes. As if there were no engineer geniuses. As if engineers could not be enthusiast and as if sometimes engineering could not be treated as art the same way programming can be. 'Hacker' is a romantic word some people use to describe _themselves_, not a word society describes these people. In my opinion this wording is not really necessary. There were/are/will-be bad/good/exceptionally-good engineers in history of mankind. I just have a feeling that 200 years later the word 'hacker' will be forgotten but the word engineer will still live. (This is just my feeling.)
3-4 years ago when I started programming right out of school, the word Hacker used to have a negative connotation. I always wanted to call myself that but people would say "Hackers are people that just hack things together and cannot build scalable solutions" and programmers are ones that build real solutions. Glad to see that is changing now.
Well, words do change with the times. The world hacker once meant the guy with an axe, hacking things.
But it's not like its diluted to the point where it can mean "anything and everything".
Now, the original meaning that the parent laments (something like the historical MIT hackers), has been long gone (as an exclusive meaning).
All through the late eighties - nineties "hacker" in the mass media meant the computer intruder. Like the movie "Hackers" and all. Geeks have tried for years to get them to use "cracker" instead.
Later (circa 1998-2000), it was mostly re-associated with the OSS crowd, Linux, the Mozilla guys, et al.
Nowadays, it seems to mean the developer in general (when used casually) and the more "adventurous" kind of developer --e.g one that dabbles in multiple languages, knows his Lisp etc (when used in a more positive way).
Perhaps the only kind of developers disqualified by the current use of the terms are "corporate drones", Java/Visual Basic guys making tedious enterprise stuff and the like.
Hacker always was positive. It gained popularity to mean the people who played around with hardware to make home computers before the PC became a commercial product, or who found novel ways to play around with the phone system- like you could record and play back touch tone sounds on a tape recorder to make calls.
The negative connotation came from the bust of Kevin Mitnick and the American public's shameful lack of knowledge about computers, combined with 1984 style propaganda to scare the public.
Hacker or hacking always meant someone who approaches problems in novel ways. Cracker, like a safe cracker, is someone who breaks in for malicious reasons. The kids on 4chan who follow a guide to DDOS a website are script kiddies, by the way.
That's what these terms always meant, and we're starting to move back after an era of propaganda.
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