A new word for hacker?

This post# https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766979 brought up something I have thought about before.

People have asked me in my previous post to make acronyms clear at the beginning of my posts. I think I should do the same with the main assumption of this post.

In the traditional sense a hacker is a person who is extremely interested in exploring the things and recondite workings of any computer system. Most often, hackers are the expert programmers.

It troubles me how almost no one tends to recognize the original meaning. The more frustrating fact is that the original hackers and the community as a whole still tend to stick to the same world. A couple of days I was trying to find out some Quora or HN Post which describes something along the lines of “how the hacker culture has changed over time and what are the modern day hackers doing today?” I am curious about this because I want to know how people manage to spend serious time on things they like and still go along with their daily jobs. This bothers me as I tend to totally mess this up while finding the balance between EnI and what I would like to study.

A few days back Github introduced an option to add a bio. From what I see it has not really caught up yet (at least in my circle). As I have been reading a lot about hackers this summer I decided to use something like ‘An Aspiring Hacker’. But finally, I decided not to go with it thanks to the number of people I know who would confuse it with a cracker. I have a feeling that this problem is especially more severe among Indians. Credits to the charlatan Ankit Fadia.

In the end, I have finally decided to go with ‘Aiming for 10k Hours’ - inspired by Peter Norvig’s essay about the same topic. I guess this makes more sense for me. Reason being that I totally lack certain excellent qualities that define a hacker. I spend more time worrying than I spend on hacking stuff. Also, I spend a lot of time reading how to do stuff instead of actually doing it. But overall making stuff is what makes me feel the best. The reason why I spend less time doing it is probably because I treat it as a reward for going through the rest of the material. Should I change that? I am not sure.

# Don’t ask me how I got to such an old post.

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