Reddit reviews Hacker's Handbook

I was going to agree with you. I had a post written, including an analogy with the word "gay" about changes in common usage. To demonstrate a point, I looked up "hacker" on Google Ngrams. It was, uh, surprising.

• Up to the mid-1980s: "Hacker" was last name, a taxi driver, or a person very bad at golf. This overlapped with a very, very niche subculture usage of the term to mean tinkerer, as you said. It was so niche that almost nobody wrote about it. Ever.
  
  
• 1976: This book possibly uses the term in a negative connotation, but you can't see the whole book, so I'm not sure.
  
  
• 1981: Science Digest writes an article about "computer addicts", in which it defines the term hacker in the "obsessive hobbyist" sense. They're depicted as somewhat pathological computer users.
  
  
• 1983: The film WarGames doesn't actually use the word "hacker".
  
  
• 1983: This is the earliest usage of computer hacker I can find that's definitely the "unauthorized intruder" sense.
  
  
• 1985: The Palm Beach Post uses the term to mean "illegal intruder". The term is generally used in "quotes" in this period, as though it's still a specialist term.
  
  
• 1986: A book, The Hacker's Handbook by Hugo Cornwall, was published, and included many illegal techniques.
  
  
• 1990: The New York Times uses the term to mean "illegal intruder".
  
  
• 1992: The film Sneakers also doesn't use the word "hacker".
  
  So it looks like, to my surprise, the "hobbyist-tinkerer" sense has always been niche, so niche that nobody actually used the term in the media. Since the general public has used the term applied to technology, it has always meant an unauthorized computer user. Despite our subcultural usage, the general public have never used it any other way.
  
  Edit: formatting on the Post link