What's your definition of "hacker"

In the Hacker News sense, its those of us who use tools to "hack" together solutions, not in the "hack" systems to gain entry

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kragen 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

> It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".

I do not think that Margaret Hamilton would appreciate her exploration of the limits of what is possible, which was extensive, being described as dedicated to a spirit of playful cleverness.

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mcmcmc 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I shudder to think of Stallman’s idea of “playful cleverness”

	▲	kragen 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I suggest reading the linked page to see what he thought was an especially good example. It involved using chopsticks to eat Korean food in an unnecessarily difficult way.

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esseph 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> In the Hacker News sense, its those of us who use tools to "hack" together solutions, not in the "hack" systems to gain entry

You may not realize this depending on what computer culture you fell into / timeframe, but they're often the same people.

I know a staggering number of CEOs, CTOs, CISOs that were "messing around" with everything from FBI, NSA, etc sites in their teenage years.

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kragen 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Of course, but none of this is relevant to what Margaret Hamilton thought about hackers, except in the sense that she didn't appreciate people "messing around" with the systems she depended on, in ways that had very little to do with computer security, which wasn't a thing in that context. (Though other researchers on campus were working on it.)

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