In the "I can't say what it is, but I can point to one" sense, hackers to me are the ones who show you lines of code they've written for some app, as if to say

In the "I can't say what it is, but I can point to one" sense, hackers to me are the ones who show you lines of code they've written for some app, as if to say "This is the magic bit. Look what I've got this language to do!" They're the bright-eyed people who show you how they managed to make a program do something that nobody else with access to the same program can do. They come from the same school as people who build Antikythera Mechanism emulators and Babbage Difference Engines out of Lego. That's a hacker, to me: someone who can make something do cool things. If it makes them money as well, that's just the icing on a very big cake.