Worry not! Your gravitation is well-founded.

The earliest documented use of 'hack' is from "AN ABRIDGED DICTIONARY of the TMRC LANGUAGE", written in 1959 by Peter Samson. (TMRC was the Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT.) The definition was itself a playful example of what it was defining:

  HACK: 1) something done without constructive end; 2) a project undertaken on bad self-advice; 3) an entropy booster; 4) to produce, or attempt to produce, a hack.

  HACKER: one who hacks, or makes them.

Samson (2005): "I saw this as a term for an unconventional or unorthodox application of technology, typically deprecated for engineering reasons. There was no specific suggestion of malicious intent (or of benevolence, either). Indeed, the era of this dictionary saw some 'good hacks': using a room-sized computer to play music, for instance; or, some would say, writing the dictionary itself."

https://www.gricer.com/tmrc/dictionary1959.html

The 'malicious' connotation (e.g. breaking into someone else's system) dates from early 1960s phone phreaking. The claim that the malicious sense came earlier than the creative sense was made in 2003 by a researcher [1] who retracted it when this 1959 usage was pointed out:

"as soon as the 1959 citation was discovered I conceded that I was probably wrong about "hacker" originally having malicious connotations" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416623)

I'm not sure Peter Samson would agree that it was "discovered", but never mind.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20051023131548/http://listserv.l...

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Edit: The phone-phreaking instance dates from 1963: https://blog.historyofphonephreaking.org/2013/09/document-of...

The wrong idea that the so-called 'malicious' usage came first was widespread for a while—here's an example: https://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/

Paul Graham himself wrote an essay about the word and it's meaning. [0]

Another text that might describe the HN communities understanding of the word is "How to become a hacker" by Eric S. Raymond. [1]

You can go back more in time towards the origins of the term, the MIT labs of the 50s and 60s, see the hacker ethic. [2] But it's not like the folks in the valley would care that much for those values nowadays.

The wiki page for the term hacker also is quite helpful, hn crowd is talking about the first kind of hacker. [3]

[0] https://paulgraham.com/gba.html

[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker#Definitions

Look in the hacker jargon file