Lots of people have tried to capture this distinction, I'm sure I'll do a worse job here briefly than you can find around, but for me the tell is how people sp

Lots of people have tried to capture this distinction, I'm sure I'll do a worse job here briefly than you can find around, but for me the tell is how people spend their time, and an attitude. Hackers in the sense that I mean it have an innate need to understand things deeply, and a tendency to value achieving this directly (e.g. do something, don't just read up about it). As a result most hackers with any real talent will have achieved an unusually high level of expertise/mastery in at least one, often a few, technical areas. This is a result of having really spent a lot of time with it, in ways that may look "obsessive" to others. This is by no means restricted to software. Another common characteristic is a tendency to take things apart (physically or virtually) to see how they tick.