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Comment by masida | Hacker News Reader

I expect HN people to get their vocabulary straight and use the word "hacker" only for the people that build things. This story is obviously about a cracker.

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Unfortunately nobody cares. So re-claiming the word hacker for the good guys is an exercise in futility.

And like many English words Hacker has several meanings and trying to go back to the 60's usage at MIT is I afraid a pointless exercise just Like King Cnut trying to hold back the tide.

The creative and transgressive meanings of the word "hacker" have been around about equally long and both go back to the MIT milieu. Its first appearance in print referred to breaking into phone networks. (Sorry I don't have links handy but this has been discussed many times on HN.) So it's not true that the word started out good and was corrupted by misunderstanding... but I bet that claim is also about as old as both usages!

Agreed about pointlessness in any case.

I thought that the MIT Model railroad club usage was well before phone phreaks and blue boxing - not sure when STD dialing came in in the states

This is what I was thinking of:

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-of...

https://web.archive.org/web/20060715031620/http://listserv.l...

So do you enjoy frequently posting on this computer criminal news website? How would you feel if that fact were to be disseminated in the media, were you of sufficient importance for someone to do so?

Usage is important.

Of course it is important. But it is also simply too late. If you wanted to change the way the word hacker is being used you'd need access to a flux capacitor and a DeLorean first, and we all know how that one will end.

It's "simply too late" in the same way that "third parties never win elections" - a self fulfilling prophecy, fulfilled by a lack of action.

No, that's entirely different. Usage of a word by a very small part of the population in a way that is inconsistent - if historically correct - has an extremely small chance of overcoming the predominant usage. You'd basically be fighting all the way and I personally don't attach too much value to any word to go and worry about what people think when I call myself a hacker.

The 'third parties never win elections' thing is likely in reference to America's mostly two-party system. This is for reasons unrelated to usage of words and has much more to do with campaign financing, gerrymandering, media control and so on. It's orders of magnitude more harmful but it is more or less by design and it will take a massive restructuring of American politics before something resembling proportional representation (aka democracy) will be a real possibility.

Hacker News is trying to preserve the original wording on the article (which, to be honest, is more in line with the readership's understanding than "cracker").

The Washington Post is owned by a tech guy (Jeff Bezos), so maybe you could try to get him to use a different word :)

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