5 ms·
Isn't the literal name of this website using the same definition, as in tinkering with something?
by enlyth 4y ago
Isn't the literal name of this website using the same definition, as in tinkering with something?
- bee_rider 4y agoTrue! To my reading, "the hacking of Starlink terminals has begun" is a little bit ominous looking, but maybe the error is on my side.
- cgriswald 4y agoIn your defense, most media—especially media for general consumption—has spent most or all of my lifetime mostly using the term to mean something like "illegal or nefarious activities," often involving things that you or I might not even consider hacking.
- iso1631 4y agoFeels a bit Yodaish Begun, the hacking of Starlink terminals has
- enlyth 4y agoYeah I can totally see what you mean, the most popular definition is the nefarious one, and news websites always try to get more clicks. Although I have given them the pass on this occasion since their use of the word is technically correct.
- zdragnar 4y agoIIRC this website was born of a novel use of the term 'hacking' in the startup space- hacking business growth. Here, hacking is a more well established term- hacking networking hardware is something I suspect most people would associate with black-hat type hacking.
- gpm 4y agoAs I understand the website was born out of MITs use of the term "hacking" to mean... well... what the website means by it. Wikipedia claims the term was widespread by the 60s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacks_at_the_Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacks_at_the_Massachusetts_Ins...
- rfrey 4y agoI don't think so. Recall pg wrote "Hackers and Painters" before founding ycombinator and was/is a pretty well known Lisp hacker. I'd be surprised if he meant business hacking when he named this site.
- tlb 4y agoNo, Hacker News was named after the people who enjoy doing clever things with computers. At the time, using "hacker" to mean a black-hat was popular in the press, but not among actual hackers. And "growth hacking" was a metaphor for doing clever things to get growth, but not the primary association with "hacker".
- zdragnar 4y agoI probably should have specified that it was a novel usage within the startup space, not that that was where the term originated.
- Banana699 4y agoThere is an argument to be made that if a word has a very widely-known meaning, and a very niche meaning, then the niche usage requires clarification even among the niche group that invented the niche meaning. For example, when there is a certain word that you and your peer group use as an in-joke, you usually have to wink or smirk to invoke the joke meaning, that acts as a signal to the group to resolve the word to its group-specific meaning.