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Comment by comeonnow | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the definition of hacker infact a cracker?

I don't think a community (not HN, just in general) can just coin a term and expect to change the definition for all.

> Hackers from this subculture tend to emphatically differentiate themselves from what they pejoratively call "crackers".

This has been going on for tens of years. Hackers feel like the media has wrongly appropriated the word, but nothing has changed in the meantime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28programmer_subculture...

I think there's a bit of an attempt to retroactively broaden the historical scope of this specific usage of "hacker", though, which is part of the confusion. Until at least the mid/late-1980s, "hacker" in this sense was more or less local MIT slang, used at MIT itself and at some MIT-linked organizations (the FSF, Symbolics, Lucid, etc.). I don't believe it was in use by people doing similar things in other locations, without MIT ties. For example, nowadays people cite Woz and the Homebrew Computer Club as archetypical examples of the hacker ethos, but as far as I know, they didn't use the term themselves in that period to describe what the HCC was doing.

I don't argue that there are two meanings on the word, but the true definition as per Oxford dictionaries is clear that a hacker is a cracker, but there is another informal definition.

All I'm saying is that surely it's not only the media that need to change, but also all definitions in general?

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/hacker

A minority community can take ownership of a pejorative. A pejorative is often a word appropriated by a majority. Both of the previous sentences apply here.

And no, you are incorrect.

Thanks for outright saying I'm was incorrect, really inspires confidence in one's self.

Thanks for shining some clarity on this for me. I was merely asking a question followed by a thought, I didn't claim to be correct. I was simply asking.

Answering, that is what questions are for.

Not for everyone, and the one we advocate isn't new at all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28term%29

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