Makes you wonder what Hacker News has to do with any of these words well said.
The stakes are higher, both risk and reward, but some of the most important similarities remain.
Those two guys named Steve were just a couple of law-breaking hippy hackers before they went on to build that company called Apple.
The innovation that came from open Internet and from open source technology that can be accessible to everyone can mostly be traced back to the original underground scene.
People have been breaking into MIT systems (like Aaron Swartz did) for as long as there have been systems there for us to hack, and we owe a great debt to some of those guys for innovative technologies we have to day.
With the recent political suicide we're all painfully aware of the risks, but not nearly enough coverage is given to the positive contributions many hackers make.
In some societies people turn to self-immolation as a form of protest. In others we have hackers.
One day, after the smoke clears, we may look back at the "hacker scene" as one of the most important counter-cultural movements of the 20th Century.
It makes me think of civil disobedience. And it makes me wonder: hackers today are used to tinkering with machines, whereas earlier hackers often worked with people. It feels like we lost something there. So many hackers today look at the world and The System and say, "It's too hard. Let's not try."
There's a book detailing the rise of hacker culture. There's a bit about hackers 'borrowing' tools from someone. The contempt they showed that man, and his tools, shows that working with people was even then not a skill that all of them had.
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.