I think this also describes those working on software in general. Everyone uses the same interesting-to-hackers low level parts of the stack. But the nature of software is that _use_ scales infinitely, so roughly the same small quantity of developers are needed the same as was needed in the 90s.
But technology use has exploded, so there's huge demand for developers working higher up in the stack, because the need for domain specific apps has exploded and that part doesn't scale. So the 90s hackers continue but are now dwarfed by app developers and web developers are many orders of magnitude more numerous.
Unfortunately because software is a commodity the use of the low level parts of the stack doesn't translate to money for the hackers working on them. Because just as it's a niche interest for developers in that area, so it's a niche business case to make money out of working in that area.
Traditionally, being a hacker is being a person who is very interested in learning how things work, and how to use those things in new ways. Historically, proper hackers have focused on things ranging from model railroads to pay phones to bureaucratic systems, to computers and more.
The most common early sign that a child is a hacker is when the child takes apart every machine they can lay their hands on.
I am aware, and I agree.
> Being a hacker has nothing to do with how far up the stack you operate.
I disagree. The workings further down the stack are interesting only to hackers, and those paid to work in that area. I think that's quite different from the reasons for interest further up the stack.
At any level of the stack, the hacker mindset of "learning how things work...(and utilizing that knowledge)" is generally applicable.
It's arguable that while, say, Steve Jobs wasn't a technically adept hacker, he was a business, product and people/behavior hacker.
I comment way more on non-programming topics because that's where I think I can contribute - most people on here are better programmers than I am but I have life experiences that are fairly unusual for this particular bubble. I do read the technical posts but I don't have much to say.
As for the 'somehow', I was raised by hackers and I used to be one - I'm too much of a generalist to fully commit to it but I'm 'culturally' a hacker/hacker adjacent. I imagine our ranks are growing for various reasons, which might explain some of the shift.
But one of the primary traits of hackers is that they tend to be generalists.
I'm very, very much a generalist. My other hobbies that straddle the line between hobby and professional interest (in that I do them for play but have gotten money for them) include fiction writing, marketing psychology, humanities and qualitative research, and bra fitting.
Currently I'm off on a spree about the physiological nature of emotions and I'm getting really into experiences that are primarily physical and learning about biology in my spare time, which means I don't spend it coding or tinkering.
I can still code/tinker/approach tech problems with a hacker mindset, but I don't like to pretend I'm as good as people who really love it. I'm a dilettante to my core.
I honestly think that one of the things that has diminished the hacker community to a degree is that it has become synonymous in most people's minds with computers. But really, computer hackers are just one subset of the larger hacker community. There are legit hackers who have no interaction with computers beyond what most people do.
By your definition, I would definitely count (as would, say, my cousin who is buying laptops for her kids to take apart and homeschooling them and taking a hacker's approach to parenting or the one who got really into theology for about ten years or my uncle who was obsessed with cameras or...), but I think the prevailing view sees hackerdom as tech (or at the very least mechanical) related and I also believe that hewing closely to a community's default understanding of a term is useful for communication, so I still wouldn't claim the title on HN. In an anthropological/historical/sociological exploration of hackerdom, I probably would. :)
As a hacker, I have a stubbornness and a strong sense of the justice of technical correctness, so I can't help but try keep the larger sense of the word alive. Even if only as part of a background chorus of hackers saying "well, actually..."
But I do try to remember that we're the weirdos here.
This site is a prime example. There can't be a post about a non-mainstream programming language without someone's comment saying "I don't get the point of this, it is really hard to hire for/it would be really hard to pick up for junior developers."
It seems every small project, library, language is evaluated in the context of the average FAANG developer, or whether it would fit in a startup environment. Hacking, as in enjoying the art of programming computers, is going the way of the dodo, especially on this site. The few remaining hackers are massively outranked by the "I only know Javascript" average dev, the Silicon Valley-adjacent MBAs and the huge number of those that somehow are here just to post and comment about non-programming topics.
On the rare occasion there's a post on Lisp or software-defined radios, for example, you often see the same faces. It seems that on here, the nucleus of hackers has remained more or less constant since 2010, while all other demographics flooded in.
As an average hacker, I must say that I don't give a rat's arse anymore about most mainstream programming topic you can find on this site's front page.