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This is the kind of article that makes me scratch my head when I see it in the New England Journal of Medicine, because my preconceived notion of "docto

This is the kind of article that makes me scratch my head when I see it in the New England Journal of Medicine, because my preconceived notion of "doctor" includes "can perform thoracic surgery", in which case this knowledge is old hat (as he acknowledges). If you don't already know how to perform a heart bypass, nothing written here is going to shed much insight. There are lots of hackers with deep, deep knowledge in other areas of "hacking" that are miles away from Unix file descriptors and so forth. A lot of "true hacking" doesn't even involve Unix, just like a lot of talented medical doctors aren't qualified to perform a heart bypass. How about the crazy geniuses that made the first wire-wrapped Amiga prototypes? Or the heroic coders who pulled off various feats of assembly language coding on the incredibly constrained hardware in various game consoles? Or the people who write web frameworks. Or the people who build robots, or the people who built the chips that Unix runs on?

ild 11y ago
Word "hacker" has become very vague lately, but the definition used 10 years ago, did not include "people who build robots, or the people who built the chips that Unix runs on". Those were called Electric Engineers AFAIR. "Hacker" literally meant a guy involved with cybersecurity and therefore deeply into OS internals. Then the word went through transformation and today may easily mean "an Arduino hacker who made an automated bird feeder", "a RoR hacker who made a homepage with it etc.".
- luso_brazilian 11y ago
  I believe your view of the definition 10 years ago is the incorrect one. Paraphrasing he Djikstra (misatributed quote) [1] hacking is no more about computer security hacking than astronomy is about telescopes. AS can be seen in the Jargon File ("a collection of slang terms used by various subcultures of computer hackers" [2]) the definition for hacker "seems to have been first adopted as a badge in the 1960s" and "it was used in a sense close to this entry's by teenage radio hams and electronics tinkerers in the mid-1950s." [3] In the past years hacking (thanks to the connotation given by the mass media) became synonymous with "miscelaneous computer mischief, sometimes malicious and often related to computer network security" but that's a very recent phenomenon. [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Computer_science#Disputed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Computer_science#Disputed [2] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/introduction.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/introduction.html [3] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
- deleted 11y ago
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ild 11y ago

Word "hacker" has become very vague lately, but the definition used 10 years ago, did not include "people who build robots, or the people who built the chips that Unix runs on". Those were called Electric Engineers AFAIR. "Hacker" literally meant a guy involved with cybersecurity and therefore deeply into OS internals. Then the word went through transformation and today may easily mean "an Arduino hacker who made an automated bird feeder", "a RoR hacker who made a homepage with it etc.".

luso_brazilian 11y ago
I believe your view of the definition 10 years ago is the incorrect one. Paraphrasing he Djikstra (misatributed quote) [1] hacking is no more about computer security hacking than astronomy is about telescopes. AS can be seen in the Jargon File ("a collection of slang terms used by various subcultures of computer hackers" [2]) the definition for hacker "seems to have been first adopted as a badge in the 1960s" and "it was used in a sense close to this entry's by teenage radio hams and electronics tinkerers in the mid-1950s." [3] In the past years hacking (thanks to the connotation given by the mass media) became synonymous with "miscelaneous computer mischief, sometimes malicious and often related to computer network security" but that's a very recent phenomenon. [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Computer_science#Disputed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Computer_science#Disputed [2] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/introduction.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/introduction.html [3] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
deleted 11y ago
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