Hacker News Reader

Comment by antegamisou | Hacker News Reader

Seriously I was never aware how badly the word's meaning has been butchered by the SV techbros until I joined the site.

I first heard it used to traditionally describe computer security whizzes like Kevin Mitnick, Diffie & Hellman, Robert Morris (Morris worm) etc. But apparently the last ~15 years it's just a compliment for the next random corporate grifter who has 0 technical experience and is just in for the $$$.

However Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years before or right after dropping out of Harvard by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=922367...

View on HN

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.

As far as I know you have it reversed: Mitnick & co. should be called "crackers", while "hackers" is the wrong term.

I found this article (I only skimmed it and didn't look for counter evidence, sorry) https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/a-short-...

> computer security whizzes like Kevin Mitnick

Strange because Mitnick puts most of his exploits down to social engineering, not technical prowess.

But then taking anything a self-confessed social engineer says about themselves at face value is obviously problematic.

I know but it certainly was one of the most prominent names when I was googling for best hackers ( :-) ) back in 2005.

Still, I prefer having someone like Kevin in mind when saying the word instead of any other desperate "growth hacker" that is trying to mislead VCs with their trite ideas that will forever change tech the way we know it.

We have Eric S Raymond to thank for corrupting the meaning of "Hacker" to include himself.

Plate of Shrimp:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537629

https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

>I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of schlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the "what is a hacker?" essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond. Dave Winer has recently and mercifully moved his essays off to audio, but you can still hear him snorfling cashew nuts and talking at length about what it means to be a blogger[7] . These essays and this writing style are tempting to people outside the subculture at hand because of their engaging personal tone and idiosyncratic, insider's view. But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.

Your claim is that solving a hard math problem (which takes smarts for sure!) is more "hacker" than bulding a web app (Zck) or an operating system (Gates)?

I understand why you would think that's what I meant to say, but no.

If we aren't talking about computer security, hacker imo would be someone with remarkable technical/scientific contributions. Indeed, there may be some personal bias for math hackers (cryptographers, theorists) but then their skillsets with the respective programmer ones converge.

> ...he had helped make some significant contributions a few years back...

Article says his paper on it was published in 1979, which was 43 years ago. I wouldn't call that 'a few years back'. I interpreted your comment as he took a break from his philanthropy to come up to an efficient solution to the problem like 3-5 years ago.

Holy shit that's a very misleading typo. Thanks for pointing it out.

No problem. It's still cool, still makes him a hacker, just slightly less impressive than if he had done it while juggling the needs of his Foundation.

> Seriously I was never aware how badly the word's meaning has been butchered by the SV techbros until I joined the site.

Spot on.

> However Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years back by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field.

Wait, what?

> Wait, what?

Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years back by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field.

It might be Gates and Papadimitriou (1979): Bounds for Sorting by Prefix Reversal.

https://dodona.ugent.be/exercises/189028897/media/gates1979....

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012365X79...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com