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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

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A somewhat odd question and the best we can do is theorize and come up with opinions gathered from those who knew or associated with her. Maybe others who worked with her will comment here. We do know that the people who worked at the Draper Lab were "hackers" given one definition of hackers as a group of people who were fascinated with computers and systems that interconnected them. The Draper folks were certainly part of that early MIT culture.

I know from personal experience working with Draper alums that many of them had very close personal and economic ties to the military and other government agencies and were not at all into Kevin Mitnick-type hackers.

She certainly kept a low profile and maybe wouldn't want to be memorialized or maybe just didn't care. We are so used to people promoting and pushing their accomplishments these days, she seems somewhat of an anomaly; an extremely skilled and influential technologist who was content to continue doing the work that suited her without endless self-promotion and aggrandizement.

She did accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom, so she was willing to accept some accolades.

I think she would consider it insulting to be called a "hacker", and not because she thought the term referred to computer criminals.

Guess it's no surprise hackernews has forgotten what a hacker is. Hint: Margaret Hamilton was a hacker.

Absolutely. She was pushing tons of limits and exploring tons of things, with no real financial prize.

Margaret Hamilton was 1,000% a hacker. She basically pioneered the foundations of asynchronous code and was one of the first people to work on rockets at a time when software engineering was in its infancy.

I'm well aware of her impressive achievements. But she had to share computing resources with the original "hackers", the ones who gave us the word, and I don't think she was very fond of them, or of the hacking approach in general; her ingenuity was great but not especially playful. So I don't think she would want to be memorialized here.

I don't particularly care what you think about what she would think about the definition of a word used in the site name. She's a person worth remembering and honoring.

Let your weird fixation on the word stop you from honoring her here if you want. It won't stop me.

Rest in peace, Margaret.

What's your definition of "hacker"

In the Hacker News sense, its those of us who use tools to "hack" together solutions, not in the "hack" systems to gain entry

https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

> It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".

I do not think that Margaret Hamilton would appreciate her exploration of the limits of what is possible, which was extensive, being described as dedicated to a spirit of playful cleverness.

I shudder to think of Stallman’s idea of “playful cleverness”

I suggest reading the linked page to see what he thought was an especially good example. It involved using chopsticks to eat Korean food in an unnecessarily difficult way.

I think it's very disrespectful for you to be speaking for someone who has just died, and at that, someone whom many of us on this website consider to be personal hero.

It is very disrespectful to come to a memorial where people are mourning a great loss and tell them that they are not allowed to mourn here.

You should frankly be incredibly ashamed. This is not a place or time to argue either, I have zero interest in carrying on a conversation with you and this is not the thread for it, so don't waste your time replying.

> In the Hacker News sense, its those of us who use tools to "hack" together solutions, not in the "hack" systems to gain entry

You may not realize this depending on what computer culture you fell into / timeframe, but they're often the same people.

I know a staggering number of CEOs, CTOs, CISOs that were "messing around" with everything from FBI, NSA, etc sites in their teenage years.

Of course, but none of this is relevant to what Margaret Hamilton thought about hackers, except in the sense that she didn't appreciate people "messing around" with the systems she depended on, in ways that had very little to do with computer security, which wasn't a thing in that context. (Though other researchers on campus were working on it.)

Your point? Whatever her opinion, her contributions are undeniable.

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