A for-profit company's name isn't really the right venue for that. No matter how successful Hacker School is, it's unlikely that a significant enough fraction of the population will have positive personal associations with it to alter their emotional perception. Newspaper articles don't count, generally; they reflect the popular mood more than they influence it.
The way to reclaim "hacker" is to use it and adopt it, personally, in 1-on-1 social conversation. Preferably with non-techies who you are close to. That way people's positives associations with you rub off on the terms that you use to describe yourself. We don't use "negro" these days because most of us know and have positive associations with black people in social contexts; that makes its old connotation of inferiority incongruent with our personal experience. Similarly, the LGTBQA movement is succeeding because a large number of people now realize they have friends and neighbors who are gay, and it's much harder to cast that as deviant behavior when you personally know good people who self-identify as gay.
The way to reclaim "hacker" is to use it and adopt it, personally, in 1-on-1 social conversation. Preferably with non-techies who you are close to. That way people's positives associations with you rub off on the terms that you use to describe yourself. We don't use "negro" these days because most of us know and have positive associations with black people in social contexts; that makes its old connotation of inferiority incongruent with our personal experience. Similarly, the LGTBQA movement is succeeding because a large number of people now realize they have friends and neighbors who are gay, and it's much harder to cast that as deviant behavior when you personally know good people who self-identify as gay.