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jeswin

catb has the best definition of hacker I have seen:

- http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html

- http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

- The guys at hack-a-day or nyc resistor are hackers.

- Fabrice Bellard is a hacker, for reasons you can see at http://bellard.org/

- People who are _really good_ at *nixen are hackers, because of the nature of the beast. Unix isn't about learning everything from a book, instead you could hack it with what you know.

- PG is a hacker for using LISP to build Viaweb (and ARC etc), but not for "hacking" the startup ecosystem (that's just overuse of the term).

- DHH is a hacker, for the creative ways in which he pushed Ruby

The key thing is "hack value". Hack value is about your technical expertise and your creativity, and both of these things have to be present.

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Okay, thanks for the correction. You confirmed my suspicions, I'm not really a hacker. And neither are most people on HN I wager. That's yet another club where a geek can fail to get into. Maybe we shouldn't be here, but I can honestly say it's the most interesting community out there that matches my favorite subjects.

I'm definitely neither Bellard, nor a LISP millionaire, nor remotely DHH, and I already talked about the hack-a-day guys in my oscilloscope comment. The verdict is in: I can't call myself a hacker. So what's the message here for people like me? I guess the conclusion is for starters that I really am an impostor in a lot of ways, including participating on this site.

Dude, who care if you are a hacker, and in which case, according to which definition. Like many people here, you post insightful comments and have interesting side projects - I recall one of your post where you explained how you made a new language from scratch in five weekends with no experience in compiler theory or language design.

I don't know what it makes you, but I think that's pretty awesome - and since I'm not a hacker myself (for the same reasons you say you are not really a hacker), me saying you're a hacker wouldn't make any sens.

Wow, thanks! :)

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not really concerned about being an impostor, I actually rather enjoy being an impostor of somewhat horrifying dimensions in real life. ;)

> you explained how you made a new language from scratch in five weekends with no experience in compiler theory or language design.

I agree that the term is pretty meaningless, but I am pretty certain this would qualify under the most stringent of definitions. Personally, I prefer the term 'tinkerer', since it does not come with all the baggage but captures the spirit.

I'm definitely neither Bellard, nor a LISP millionaire, nor remotely DHH ... The verdict is in: I can't call myself a hacker

Bellard, pg and dhh are all human. So clearly you cannot be human. Please forgive the snark, I just found your reasoning very suspect here. The fact that a number of people fall within a category has no bearing on what the full extent of that category is.

I think you completely missed the point. Just because an example was a LISP millionaire, doesn't mean you aren't a hacker because you aren't a LISP millionaire.

Your post comes off as if someone said you don't belong, just because they tried to take some of the most famous examples that many people would classify as hackers.

It's like if I showed you a picture of a Ferrari as an example of a car and you said, "oh, I guess my Ford doesn't count as a car, I better just walk from now one".

No, I don't mean it like that.

In my post I said something along the lines of: I mostly tend to feel like an impostor, but maybe I am some kind of hacker according to some definitions. To which jeswin replied (paraphrased) "No, you see, hackers are actually this, that and the other", so I conceded the point that according to jeswin I'm very very far from being a hacker, and so is the vast majority of HN users. I also said earlier that I believe these labels are problematic anyway.

So I think your criticism should probably be addressed at jeswin, Ferrari analogy and all. Personally, I don't really care if I myself or anybody else here is officially considered a hacker | a real man | a successful person, or whatever.

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