Earlier this year Pastebin was under heavy attack by a hacker.
    This person was creating about 500 new pastes per second, all
    which were very much alike. Each item contained an email
    address and a message saying that I had to contact that email
    address if I wanted this attack to stop.

    The requests came from thousands of different IP’s, but I
    managed to stop it for a few minutes until the hacker came up
    with another type of attack. Eventually I contacted the person
    in question. He replied that he was very impressed with my
    infrastructure, and that he wanted to know on what kind of
    hardware and software I was running.

    He was a big fan of Pastebin, and simply wanted to test the
    infrastructure. Of course I was fuming with anger at the time
    of the attack. Funnily enough, over time we got to know each
    other, and since then he has helped me guard off various other
    attacks.

This quote from the story is the more important to me. It's a great example to explain to people what is a hacker when all they know about the word is what the television says.

So a hacker is someone who fucks up your website till you do what he demands?

I don't think this is a good example of what a hacker is.

Not exactly what a hacker is, but why he does what he does. Here it was simple curiosity and the fact that he actually liked the service (spare the rod and spoil the child), not at all an evil plan. I think it's a good example to give while trying to explain what a hacker can be (rather than "is", given that there are multiple valid definitions), but I agree that this text on its own it's clearly not sufficient.

'The code was originally written to operate from a single open-source PHP file with the code posted publicly so that users could hit “view source” to see how it operated.'

Is this true, they put their PHP source into the HTML document? Or is this just an instance of a confused reporter?

There would have been a link somewhere on the page to the .phps copy of itself

Yeah, but you don't view that with 'view source' in the browser. I think the author was confused about the difference between code that runs on the server and the client.

I think they simply create a paste with the source code of pastebin itself.

I'd say a 'cracker hangout', but that's just me, not willing to let the popular media bastardize the true meaning of hacker.

Oh, c'mon. You lost that fight at least 15 years ago.

And have been completely obliterated lately due to all the "Someone hacked my Facebook" people -- what actually happened is they left it logged in and some intelligent fellow posted some horribly amusing and unique status message.

As long as programmers know the difference, I think that's all that matters. The media will do what it wants.

Came here to say that -- Although it has been my perception lately that we've been making progress in stealing the term 'hacker' back.

Only to have it co-opted to mean doing anything. "Hey, I just hacked my resume together in Microsoft Word!", "I just hacked dinner together with some pans and some food!", "That was a great hack putting together that email!"

Bah, they can have the verb. It's the noun, 'hacker', that doesn't have a satisfactory equivalent, IMO.

I'd like to verb to stay linked to the name too. I hacked that app in one night, sounds pretty good to me. Blame it on Hollywood.

I wonder if publicly calling yourself a hacker could be used as proof by law enforcement that you admit to engage in illegal activity.

The proper modern term is busticati.

I thought it got changed to anonymous?

This was brought up last week: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595066