What constitutes a hack has changed. Once upon a time it was clever things you could do with hardware. Like how Carmack figured out how to do smooth side-scrol

What constitutes a hack has changed. Once upon a time it was clever things you could do with hardware. Like how Carmack figured out how to do smooth side-scrolling on EGA hardware, leading to Commander Keen. These days, it seems a hack is often duct-taping together a bunch of third-party stuff, often for visual effect. E.g. connecting a database of some kind to a map, or a funky visualization. With a broader audience online, something that relates to a wider audience gets more traction. I think there is overlap between both of these kinds of hack and startups, but the overlap is bigger with the latter kind. Building a business using as many shortcuts as you can, leveraging what other people built, is much more efficient than doing almost everything yourself, which is what was required in the early days. The early days was about exploiting hardware; these days, it's about exploiting existing software and data. Detailed posts about languages and libraries isn't really hack territory IMO, unless they're exploits of some kind.