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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

That's not what a prototypical hacker is at all. I have the benefit of being able to talk to most of the "prototypical hackers", the TMRC crowd, decades ago and being a hacker had nothing to do with sticking it to authorities. It was all about personal ingenuity and generally lacking self-discipline (from an outsider's perspective -- as people didn't refer to themselves as hackers for decades, it started as a derisive term from more "respectable" researchers).

The whole freedom-fighting hacker thing came about later, mostly from the 2600 and BBS crowd as a self-aggrandizement despite all of the laws that they were breaking: mainly related to use of telephone lines, wire & mail fraud, drug use/trafficing and age of consent violations.

You're literally trying to tell me about my own tribe and you don't have the slightest clue.

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Dunno about your friends, but I imagine the original, old school MIT hackers -- the ones who lockpicked doors for fun and fought tooth and nail against any restrictions on access to computer systems -- would chuckle at an infodump like this, not clutch their pearls.

it seems as though you’re reaching extraordinarily far back in time to apply a definition that simply doesn’t exist anymore. hell, the time period you’re referencing (…80 years ago!) is when “gay” still meant “happy”.

obviously, you’re free to use whatever words you like, but your clinging to outdated terminology and being perpetually misunderstood is not a failure of other people.

It was the parent poster that reached for the idea of "prototypical hacker", but then missed the mark by several decades.

Words have meaning.

Also my usage very much matches early "computer hackers" in a cultural sense. If I was just going off of the word origin itself we'd be talking about horse and carriage drivers...

Words also have multiple meanings, and change over time.

And saying "prototypical" is reaching for a specific point in time.

If I said "prototypical automobile", I can only really be talking about a Ford Model T. I couldn't be talking about a 60s Mustang, no matter their popularity/familiarity.

My friend, no. Again, words can have multiple meanings. Right now, when I highlight and define prototypical, I get the following:

"denoting the first, original, or typical form of something".

An example: "the phone emerged as the prototypical example of point-to-point communication".

The usage of "prototypical hacker" by tastyface above fits neatly in the "typical form", while you're using the "original form".

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