HN is mostly people trying to get rich selling themselves to VCs, so I'm not convinced that this is where the spirit of "hacker" is kept alive.

I think that is rather uncharitable, there is a pretty good mix of people here.

Yes, some are trying to sell themselves, which may be distasteful to you but people need to eat.

Others are activists, pushing their views.

Others here are just reading and occasionally commenting, like myself.

But there are also a lot of very passionate and smart people here who are pushing boundaries and limits with what they can do in terms of hardware and software.

and here we have the problem, defense. stop defending people “trying to eat”. we all are, and many of us are programmers. many of us are not here to have others buy our meal.

I'm here to read articles about hardware, software, and social hacking in the sense of "exploiting a system for fun, education, and only occasionally profit".

I’m just here for the occasional Don Hopkins mega posts.

"However, the Jargon File reports that considerable overlap existed for the early phreaking at the beginning of the 1970s. An article from MIT's student paper The Tech used the term hacker in this context already in 1963 in its pejorative meaning for someone messing with the phone system."

https://web.archive.org/web/20071025200829/http://listserv.l...

I would disagree.