Words mean what the majority of people take them to mean. The fight for Hacker vs Cracker was lost well before the turn of the millennia.

What? No, words mean different things in different contexts. For example, to most people a "graph" means a thing with an x and y axis, but to computer scientists it means a thing with nodes and edges.

So yeah, in certain contexts hacker means someone who breaks into computers. In the context of this site (and MIT culture where the term came from) it means someone who draws on their creativity to make something cool.

A niche population vs the general population. When paths cross, who wins? For matters of communication, usually the general population.

The fight happened on multiple fronts. Yes, it was lost on cnn.com, but it wasn’t lost in the comment section of HN.

Do you mean to imply that prescriptivists are completely illegitimate?

I'm laughing at thinking about how "CrackerNews" might sound somewhat hilariously off color.

you crack me up ;-)

I'm not thinking of crackers.

Hackers do create things. Sometimes malicious things and sometimes things that offer no real benefit to society, but things all the same. In this definition you have to take the good with the bad.

The actual definition is in the dictionary and this is how it would be described in a legal sense as well.

hack·er

1.a person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data. INFORMAL an enthusiastic and skillful computer programmer or user.

I would reverse those as to which one is formal and which is informal.

What year were you born? Because it's pretty clear there must be a generation of programmers who never grew up with the whole hacker mythos of the 90s or early 2000s. Some people's only experience with the word "hacker" is a person who makes cool nice things with code.

There was a time many ages ago when the word "hacker" was reserved only for the most dangerous and reckless breed of computer programmers.

I think you might have your timelines a bit reversed.

Afaik: From the 1960s to early-80s, it meant someone who creates. From the mid-80s to mid-00s, it meant someone who breaks into systems (driven by media reporting on FBI prosecution of the first network-enabled cyber crimes). From the mid-00s to now, it seems to be turning the corner again (co-mingled with the rise of maker culture).