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
Be a little careful with things like Raymond's guide, which is one of those documents that says "the way to be X is to be more like the author". Raymond's stewardship of the old "jargon file" is pretty infamous for the same reason.