When the word hack is used, despite other elite explanations available in Oxford or Cambridge dictionaries people[1] will take it wrong - Hacker is a person who will make harm to your machine or the person who will break your computer.<p>Convince me, and I will others that Hacker the term itself defines a nice human/person living behind.<p>or I would like to know why people say so.<p>Edit:
[1](Your mother or your friend who doesn't know what HN is )
It's not a bad way to discriminate between people based on how much they think about technology. The less informed only see the term when it appears in a bad news headline. Others know there is more that one meaning.<p>At Hacker Dojo we have experienced this first hand. Once we had a tv crew show up asking about the arrest of some Anonymous members. Nothing at all to do with us. There have been a couple of times we wished the name was the Mountain View Yacht Club.
The term hacker as someone who fiddles with technology out of curiosity predates the negative term for a malicious computer user. I believe it even predates computers.
Hacker is fine, all job descriptions looking for a "ninja hacker" or for that matter any job descriptions prefixed with the word ninja should be ignored. I have never met someone serious about programming that liked to be called a ninja or thought of themselves as such. I have met many people who were very into start-ups but had no CS or Engineering background that loved to give themselves and others silly prefixes though. In a nut shell call yourself what you like, but be wary of those too interested in titles as they are probably trying to make up for something.
This will answer all your questions: <a href="http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html" rel="nofollow">http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html</a>