Initially coming from a mechanical engineering background, I was always puzzled by the "hacker" expression. The qualities that people attribute to "hackers" on

Initially coming from a mechanical engineering background, I was always puzzled by the "hacker" expression. The qualities that people attribute to "hackers" on this site are the qualities of any good engineer; the ability to find creative "shortcut"-like solutions to hard problems, the ability to apply advanced mathematics (or computer science, in this case) to real-world problems, to understand business needs, etc. Needless to say that many start-up founders are engineers themselves. But this is really just a terminology question so if people here prefer calling themselves hackers instead of engineers or computer programmers, well, I can live with that.