At the risk of stating the obvious, the word "hacker" has (at least) two distinct meanings. The article talks about people who try to break into systems, and Hacker News is about people who like to hack away at their keyboard to program interesting things.
The world might have been a better place if we used the terms "cracker" and "tinkerer" instead.
Doubt it; it's utterly naive and wishful thinking to think that those two things are easily separable; it's never as simple as Good Guys wear White, Bad Guys wear Black, which is the level of intelligence this idea operates at.
The world might have been a better place if we used the terms "cracker" and "tinkerer" instead.