I first heard of pg through a slashdot article on his book Hackers and Painters. I remember lots of people writing that that word "hacker" was utterly lost and should be retired. The mere existence of the petitioner in this article—Hacker Rank—a company that is taken seriously by the tech industry shows how wrong those commenters were. That the site I write this comment on—Hacker News—is so heavily trafficked by creative builders rather than malicious intruders is icing on the cake.

It's hard to change the meaning of a word, but in this one case a reclamation is well underway.