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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I come from the same scene Beto O'Rourke comes from (though, not having grown up in Texas or Boston, I only had cDc friends, not "membership" myself).

I'm saying: there's the Steven Levy notion of "hackers", about exploration and getting extra slots on time-sharing computers and ordering sweet-and-sour bitter melon, and there's the Markoff and Hafner notion, about breaking into DEC for source code and owning up a sizable portion of the NSFnet Internet.

cDc is from the Markoff/Hafner side of "hackerdom".

(That's not a moral argument; there were good people among the Markoff/Hafner-type hackers, and holy shit were some of the white hats in the mid-1990s complete pricks).

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Why can't both of these groups be considered hackers?

They both are, with differing connotations.

So then what point are you even trying to make? If the lowest common denominator here is still a hacker, trying to make the argument that they aren't technically "hackers" doesn't make sense.

I'm sorry, I'm not going to let you pretend like this is unclear. The debate over the meaning of the word "hacker" is the most famous semantic debate in this community, and one of the most famous on the Internet. The meaning connoted by the title of this site derives from the MIT hacker community. The meaning connoted by cDc is the the one from the movie Wargames. And this hasn't "changed since the 1980s"; the debate itself dates back that far.

The argument isn't about whether Beto was a part of hacker culture at all. Clearly, he was. It just wasn't the hacker culture the OP was referring to.

I'm not pretending anything, and if you think I'm deceitfully engaging in this discussion you need to step back and consider that I have my own understanding of this matter and it may or may not be flawed.

> The meaning connoted by cDc is the the one from the movie Wargames

cDc engaged in much more than run-of-the-mill systems exploits. They produced a lot of literature and overall espoused hacker culture as an inclusive one. I'd be very interested to hear what each of them think about how broadly the term "hacker" can be applied, and I'm willing to bet they don't all share the same view.

> The argument isn't about whether Beto was a part of hacker culture at all. Clearly, he was. It just wasn't the hacker culture the OP was referring to.

You can't do that. You can't say "both definitions are valid" and then bristle up when someone doesn't use your preferred definition.

You are making up a debate that nobody else is having, and then putting me on the opposite side of it as yourself. We're thus talking past each other.

For what it's worth, and not apropos whatever that debate is, I'm very comfortable with how I'm characterizing cDc and what cDc members would in general think about what I'm saying, albeit that the Boston ones would claim that I am not giving them enough credit for also going to weird Boston nerd culture places like the MIT hackers did.

Making up a debate? I walked into a debate. Why are you so fixated on making my motives out to be sinister?

What debate exactly do you think I'm making up? This entire discussion stems from a disagreement about what qualifies as a "hacker", which is all that I have addressed.

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