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Comment by pius | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to present that in a way that would make you feel like you need to get defensive.

I was trying to use Wikipedia for your benefit. My opinion is actually based on primary sources from my time at MIT (e.g. alums who were actually students back then).

Pontificating about my "poor academic form" is harsh, unnecessary, and, frankly, it doesn't suit you; not when your argument -- that you know the first hackers were black hats because you found some article in The Tech where someone said something negative about one -- lacks any semblance of validity to begin with.

Given that you're the one with a contrarian opinion, you should present strong evidence if you don't want people to be skeptical. The burden of proof is with you on this one.

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Actually I didn't find it, my post is based upon research by Fred Shapiro (editor of the The Yale Book of Quotations, and a highly respected language researcher), but that's beside the point.

It's pretty standard practice in etymology to research the history of a word by finding all the earliest usages of it, and that's what Fred did in this case. And the early usages pointed towards a "black hat" usage.

Etymologists don't normally use evidence based upon individual memory due to people being very bad at remember exact word usages from decades ago. A few years ago I did some work for the Oxford English Dictionary and while they would use people's memory to guide them to potential recorded sources of evidence, they wouldn't use someones memory alone due to the problems inherent with it.

Especially in a emotionally charged issues like this one where people are likely to "want" to remember things being a certain way.

btw, the poor academic form thing was about wikipedia (from whom which we would expect a reasonale academic form), not you personally, sorry if it came across that way.

That's cool -- my bad if I came off rude to you in anyway. I just don't agree with your conclusion.

I know I might be wrong, and that's one of the reasons I made the post. Maybe some who was in the TMRC in the 60s might read it and realize they have a diary or minutes from a meeting from that time which provides evidence for a non-"black hat" meaning.

But as probably one of the few people in the world who has credentials in both etymology and geekiness (I was president of a student computer society :P), I feel like it's my duty to let the world know what the current evidence points to :-)

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