Hackers are clever techies.
The word “hacker” actually has nothing to do with crime: a brilliant engineer would hack out a smart solution to the problem at hand, and consider it a compliment to be called a hacker. There’s a whole culture built on this idea: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture.
We are a community dedicated to learning and teaching. We don’t think knowledge should be deep, dark and secret – far from it. Everyone with the interest should be free to pursue hacking. Sure, if you want to, you can learn Linux and bash and networking. But you don’t have to do all those things, or any of those things, to be a hacker.
Consider how we do higher education: you are expected to take out loans and spend years living in poverty to get a college degree that may not fit anything in the job market, or even worse, might be passed by while you’re getting it. Who makes money on this arrangement? Hint: It is not designed for your benefit. You can be a brilliant hacker by learning skills that give you power – power because you are in demand. Hack the whole system by getting someone else to pay for your education!
We don’t restrict our discussion of hacking to just Linux, programming and networking, though we do talk about those things a lot. Feel welcome to bring us food hacks, lifestyle hacks, hacks of any and every system. Because that’s what we do: hack it to learn it, and hack it to teach it.