Episode: 4437
Title: HPR4437: One Possible Definition of "Hacker"
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4437/hpr4437.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:41:21

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,437 for Tuesday the 5th of August 2025.
Today's show is entitled One Possible Definition of Hacker.
It is hosted by Semla's M. St. Louis and is about 10 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is A Definition of Hacker.
Hello folks of Hacker Public Radio.
Here is Antoine with you with One Possible Definition of Hacker.
A Hacker someone who invades computers.
A Hacker someone who codes.
Hacker is someone who loves technology.
Hacker is a geek who is a person that likes nerdy things.
All of these are more or less correct and of course you know someone that applies
one of the other popular concepts of the term.
I would defend one other that can be as imprecise as every one other but I feel brings
the concept closer to the general meaning of the word.
Hacker is someone in pursuit of efficiency and knowledge, be it in some specific field
or maybe in anything that can be known.
To be a Hacker is more a characteristic of the brain than of something someone does.
It is target to what achieve emotional, relevant responses to the person that has to do with
purpose.
Everyone has a purpose and we can see purpose as a matrix.
Very briefly.
Suppose we have four quadrants making a square from down to up that is from bottom to top
there is the importance.
A purpose that is on the top two quadrants is important.
From left to right on the matrix we have the success.
On the right the purpose is being fulfilled.
Purpose is what makes what make we get up.
Purpose is what makes we get up at morning.
Each one has one or more purposes.
A good purpose is one that you choose and then makes you more fulfilled personally.
That makes you grateful when you dedicate yourself to it.
It is the relevance on the top of the matrix.
A purpose being accomplished is well a purpose, a purpose to a word which you are
steps are effectively contributing for you to reach them.
It is the right part of the matrix, the success.
So you can have a good purpose and fail to accomplish it, top and left of the matrix.
A good that is relevant purpose and building effectively toward it that is top and right.
Or you can have a bad not relevant purpose to reach your fail reaching bottom left.
A bad purpose that you are walking to reach with success, bottom right.
And with the happy hacker located.
Let's remember a hacker is someone that seeks out meaning.
The definition proposed in this show is a hacker someone in pursuit of efficiency and knowledge.
So the blessed hacker is on the top.
So the blessed hacker is the one on the top of the matrix of purpose.
It is someone that has a purpose that is relevant to him.
He does not need success, he needs a reason to pursue it.
Even though the results are not always 100% dependent on him.
If someone gives him or her of course, one idea of purpose, like pursue it, pursue
it like society, sayings or media or a friend, family, and he adopts it as his personal search.
He can achieve great success, beat on any area you can imagine.
But if it is not of his heart, you will end up being less than he could be, feeling unsuccessful, unsuccessful.
Because the hacker is not searching for efficiency on the world.
He needs his brain inputted in what has relevance on his own intimate understanding of the universe.
And this is why a hacker is someone in pursuit of knowledge and the efficiency.
Both walking together, conveying as the meaning, a meaning the hacker dedicates himself
and that makes him happy even in days without observable results, months, years without results.
Because he knows he has given himself to something relevant to him.
Last page of my drafts with you here, that need of purpose is not common to humanity.
There are many, many people happy in working on what counts at hand, receiving the payment,
renting about the payment, and leaving the life.
Learning, pursuing purposes, lacking empathy as hackers sometimes do, are not trades of personality of many, many people.
They do not try to use their brains to maximally learning, to have transcending conversations,
to eventually teach other people formally or informally.
And why this contrast is presented here?
Because a hacker is someone different, not only in the tastes or preferences.
It's not a matter of what you like more or how you prefer to do or not to do things.
It is an entire different mind, more sensitive in some parts and more out of this world in some others.
Those were some points of a possible definition of hacker that involves efficiency and knowledge
as a particular composition of this thinking and feeling structure.
It's a human structure, different on thinking and feeling and maybe more senses and processes.
Passing through the show, the blessings and the difficulties of this particular mode of seeing the world, the universe, and so on.
So why this?
So this is why there are...
So this is why there are computer hackers, life hackers, hackers simply and not everyone will end their lives
knowing how to make a computer say a low world.
Because a hacker can...
Because a hacker can know and do many things, like crocheting clothes in second life,
but not necessarily we'll have any interest in programming.
And every hacker is different.
Are you one?
Do you think someone can become a hacker?
Or is this a form factor?
A person comes to be without operation of the world?
You may leave a comment or you can record an episode here at Hacker Public Radio, it's your opinion.
Here with you isn't one.
Bye-bye.
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