{"id":7127,"date":"2011-01-10T16:29:18","date_gmt":"2011-01-10T21:29:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=7127"},"modified":"2018-09-18T15:45:58","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T19:45:58","slug":"qotd-geeks-and-hackers-defined","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/01\/10\/qotd-geeks-and-hackers-defined\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Geeks and Hackers defined"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>One of the interesting things about being a participant-observer anthropologist, as I am, is that you often develop implicit knowledge that doesn\u2019t become explicit until someone challenges you on it. The seed of this post was on a recent comment thread where I was challenged to specify the difference between a geek and a hacker. And I found that I knew the answer. Geeks are consumers of culture; hackers are producers.<\/p>\n<p>Thus, one doesn\u2019t expect a \u201cgaming geek\u201d or a \u201ccomputer geek\u201d or a \u201cphysics geek\u201d to actually produce games or software or original physics &mdash; but a \u201ccomputer hacker\u201d is expected to produce software, or (less commonly) hardware customizations or homebrewing. I cannot attest to the use of the terms \u201cgaming hacker\u201d or \u201cphysics hacker\u201d, but I am as certain as of what I had for breakfast that computer hackers would expect a person so labeled to originate games or physics rather than merely being a connoisseur of such things.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>All hackers are, almost by definition, geeks &mdash; but the reverse is not true.<\/p>\n<p>Eric S. Raymond, <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=2856\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Geeks, hackers, nerds, and crackers: on language boundaries&#8221;, <em>Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2011-01-09<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the interesting things about being a participant-observer anthropologist, as I am, is that you often develop implicit knowledge that doesn\u2019t become explicit until someone challenges you on it. The seed of this post was on a recent comment thread where I was challenged to specify the difference between a geek and a hacker. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28,41,15],"tags":[109,262,1235,129,58],"class_list":["post-7127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-media","category-quotations","category-technology","tag-computers","tag-culture","tag-esr","tag-hack","tag-internet"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1QX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7127"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7888,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7127\/revisions\/7888"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}