> How about the most blatant redefinition -- from "a guy hacking trees with an axe"? I'm not saying that words cannot get new meaning in some new emerging cont

> How about the most blatant redefinition -- from "a guy hacking trees with an axe"? I'm not saying that words cannot get new meaning in some new emerging contexts. Languages evolve, that goes without saying. But when people start to deteriorate their meaning within the same context, mostly to be able to use these terms themselves, thus feeling a bit better or cooler (because these terms used to describe exceptional people), then something wrong is happening. > As such, a lot of people here don't do deep hacking stuff. They do simple web services... And it's fine, really. I'm not bashing HN community for submitting stories not worth of "hacking" (according to "old meaning", as you named it) emblem (it's really nice when such stories appear, though), because on-topic is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". I'm criticizing overuse of all hack* nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs and what not. I believe that most people here can tell the difference between slick and shiny CSS date picker and system emulation done using JS for instance (to stay in the browser realm). Not everyone is like Bellard, but does it mean we need to redefine "hacker" to allow its wider use and prevent covering this term in dust as the time goes? Hell no. > So, seeing that HN has tons of introductory or trivial Node, Mongo and similar articles, why should you expect to see the "old meaning" of hacker here? Because it's part of computer-related legacy. Doing fun things (everyone perceive "fun" differently) doesn't need to be hard and is quite healthy. Sharing and spreading the fun is definitely ok too. But let's not pretend that doing anything fun in CS field is immediately hacking, because it's not. HN is thankfully full of people aware of it, so I'm not afraid about HN future, yet.