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Hacker still gets me. The dilution of the term to simply mean "programmer" or perhaps more specifically "startup programmer in his 20s who crushes it" causes a little pain in my side every time.


I have two[0] separate buckets in my head under the same key "hacker" - one for actual hackers, per old meaning, and the other for "just a programmer" & "a random startup person".

Sometimes this confusion actually gets beneficial for the old-word-meaning crowd - you can get +10 to marketing of your hackerspace on startup events based solely on the tern "hacker" meaning something else than the crowd there think it means :).

[0] - actually three, if you count "hacker as a criminal" thing




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