What is a 'Hacker'?
ben.balter.com
ben.balter.com
Computer hackers are a subset of that. They access or attack systems via routes that were not designed for them to use and exploit in that way. Coding hackers use existing code and modify it for another purpose. I don't see a coder who starts with a blank page and libraries or APIs as a hacker as such. They are creators, using tool provided for intended purpose.
Too widen it: an art hacker, for example, would take old bits of metal and make a sculpture. An artist starts with a blank page and raw materials. People who fix cars with anything around them in Africa or Cuba too are hackers. Im not sure of the details, but when Apollo whatever number went wrong and they had to help the astronauts get home, that was hacking. People who fit V8 engines to small FWD cars; hackers.
I also think its about targeted expertise, rather than over all expertise. Hackers learn the small part they need to re-task, but don't have over all knowledge. As well as that, I think its about cutting through the surrounding crap. Getting the job done regardless of convention, rules, regulation, and procedure. So, hacking is about how you get the job done.
That is how I see it, but of course in all that is room for debate and many fine lines to argue over.
Ultimately to me, its a universal mentality. Macgyver was an ultimate hacker!!!!
So, if I beat someone with a phone, I'm a hacker?
> when Apollo whatever number went wrong
13? Or was Zeus with the Apollo you speak and there were wacky antics with a man in a thick mustache? I think that was "whatever P.I.", but I'm not sure.
> I don't see a coder who starts with a blank page and libraries or APIs as a hacker as such.
This I totally agree with you on. Every developer that creates something new is not a hacker. Not long after PG started the site, it became a watering hole for the top minds in development and technology. Then people like me joined (years ago, under different name then), and now it is a more civil form of slashdot mixed with MBA's, lawyers (it seems), and wannabe's. I count myself in the wannabe's group not because I "want to be", but because despite many years in the business, I know I don't pass muster as a "hacker". It's not PG's fault that HN is filled with non-hackers. That is the normal way things devolve with any kind of popular open club. To paraphrase Groucho Marx (because there is apparently no official version of the quote): I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.
Only if you beat him with phone you made or with new kung foo style you created.
LOL, well sort of, yes. Especially if some sort of clever kung fu was used to do so!!! And yes, I thick mustache should be part of the hacker uniform!!!!
I count myself as a hacker. I am not highly talented, but I can get stuff done by utilizing bits and pieces of other's creations, or modifying things to fit or work. But I have that mentality that I can apply to most problems. Im not thinking Scrapheap Challenge. To me, those contestants are great hackers, but in a mechanical subset.
Dont get me wrong, my "definition" is not perfect, its supposed to be a loose general fit. Er, a hack!!!!
Damn. Even my replies are hacks......
I need to go away and have a think about that.
He has made important contributions, and at one point could have been considered so, but what has he created lately that is worthy of the title? Some titles like "doctor" are really indicative of the education, not of being a current practitioner, but "hacker" is not one of those titles.
Maybe someone should create an official overseeing body of hackers like "The U.S. Board of Hackers" and a social organization called "The Hacking Society" to go with it, and I could go to school and come out and in front of my name on all formal letters would thereafter be "Hacker". But, until then, I think he was but isn't.
I really don't see the need to formalize what a hacker is and who correspond to those criteria, especially the way you present it where it would be tied to one country, which is not really compatible with the hacker culture as I see it.
My point is this: will we consider RMS to be a hacker when he is 98 years old after he has given up coding for years? If he was a doctor, we'd still call him a doctor, but I'm not sure that holds true for hacker. Now, if you call RMS a hacker and enough people do, maybe that is enough to show that he meets the definition still? Is creativity and the ability to write code in C enough when the language and environment has completely changed in the future?
It's like a Sociology grad student (in this case, somewhat surprisingly, a Law student) read the following from "How To Become A Hacker" and f'd it up in the process: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
"There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture originated the term ‘hacker’. Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today. Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make the World Wide Web work. If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker."
Aha. It's in the credits:
> See Eric S. Raymond↩
Brute forcing your way into banks to steal credit cards for the sake of leaning how to do it (I may have done that as a kid among other things) is hacking. Doing that to pay rent is where there's a departure. Hacking shouldn't be offensive. Hacking shouldn't be boring. Writing Mario Bros 1.0 in a couple lines of jQuery is boring. Hacking shouldn't be about money. If you're at a startup participating in a hackathon then you're ultimately doing it for money. It isn't hacking.
To the popular press, "hacker" means someone who breaks
into computers. Among programmers it means a good
programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To
programmers, "hacker" connotes mastery in the most
literal sense: someone who can make a computer do what
he wants—whether the computer wants to or not.
>breaking into systems or other illegal stuffs can also be hacktivism
If you put this in the beginning you no longer have to write an article about what a hacker is.
There's a lot of interesting tidbits and trivia and observations in ESR's hacker dictionary and other writings, but it became really clear to me about 10 years ago that ESR has this reductive wish-fulfillment streak that pretty much invalidates his entire worldview. ESR really, really wants to believe that a hacker is something more than a really talented programmer. He really really wants to believe that hackers have a shared, unified culture that goes back to the dawn of computing, and that this culture agrees on pretty much everything that really matters to him, and that this culture is ultimately the only group that matters where philosophical issues surrounding computing are concerned.
If it wasn't obvious enough, he uses terms like "our tribe" to refer to the culture, and "the elders of our tribe" to refer to the supposed universally-agreed-upon elite of this imaginary meritocracy. Most importantly (and this is where the wish fulfillment part comes in), he really wants to believe that he is one of those elders. For all of his strengths (and he has many- he clearly has a really active intellect), he comes across to me as a really insecure yet conceited and arrogant guy (insecurity and arrogance frequently go together in my experience). He ultimately just wants to believe that there is some vast and old meritocratic subculture of intellectual elites, and that he is at or near the top of that meritocracy.
All you have to do is read through his version of the hacker's dictionary for any entries that attempt to define what a hacker is or what a hacker believes, as opposed to the entries that just document trivia, history, and slang. It's like reading Heinlein- every time he tries to define what an ideal hacker is like, he's obviously describing himself. This goes all the way down to political beliefs. At one time, there was a controversial entry that stated that most or all hackers were libertarians. Guess what ESR was? At some point in the 2000s, he changed it to read that most or all hackers were neoconservatives. This coincided with his own self-identification as a neoconservative. I don't know what it says now, I can't bring myself to look at it.
The "surprised by wealth" essay was what initially soured me on the guy. He was (briefly) very wealthy after VA Linux's IPO in 1999, and he felt compelled to write a big long essay about how rich he was and how it validated everything he'd been saying (http://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-writes-o...). This was followed by all sorts of lovely things, like his Bill Gates-as-Hitler artwork that I think is still on his site somewhere, and many many many blowhard outbursts and incidents over the years.
EDIT: typos and a clarification
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/politics.html
He's clearly injecting himself into the "definition" as a type (b).
FWIW, the way back machine indicates it's been like that for a decade: http://web.archive.org/web/20030609145128/http://www.catb.or...