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I've never been able to truly differentiate between what some people would call hacking and what others would call programming. Most of what gets called hacking

I've never been able to truly differentiate between what some people would call hacking and what others would call programming. Most of what gets called hacking is "tinkering" that directly involves programming. I sometimes see people use "hacked" as in "I hacked the city bus to give me free passes by only paying X amount on X day after I told the guy I'm eating ramen noodles." In those cases hacking is about some kind of process or tweak that caused an unexpected or rare thing to occur. It's an ill-defined word to say the least.

gue5t 14y ago
To expound a bit more on what I said in my earlier post: the way I see it, hacking could be described as the 'outer edge' of computing/programming. Hacking is getting systems to do things they weren't intended to do. When that overlaps with a social environment the line does become very fuzzy, but for digital systems it ends up referring to programs that have some surprising and unexected attribute (examples include being tiny, being exceptionally fast, running on obscure, difficult, or new hardware, using new techniques or algorithms, being written in 'alternative' langauges [like brainfuck], performing unintended tasks [like privilege escalation or tetris-in-sed], and various others), and is more specific than "programming", which is increasingly often a very practical topic, as computers are embraced by more and more industries and fields. A "hack" is almost by definition, then, not for profit and not well-funded, because it is on the edge of what's possible and quite often far outside what's useful; good business knows better than to invest in high risk, low-return projects. Compare this with the idea of Y Combinator, which if I understand correctly funds companies with high-risk ideas in the hope of achieving high return-on-investment via runaway successes. But most YC companies I hear about have minimal technical progress associated therewith. Social progress seems more their goal, in the majority of cases. And please don't let it seem that I'm denigrating either mainstream programming nor funding ugly-ducking companies for social change. Hackers don't pop out of nowhere, and most can agree how important social change is. But I think it would be great to have a place to discuss hacking, and Hacker News definitely attracted many (myself included) via the implicit siren-call of being such a place. Given that it is so-named, we can work to make it live up to that standard, unless there's some other community I'm missing where such things would be more appropriate. If this is still exclusively Startup News: let pg rename it that, and don't waste hackers' headspace and search engine result space.

gue5t 14y ago

To expound a bit more on what I said in my earlier post: the way I see it, hacking could be described as the 'outer edge' of computing/programming. Hacking is getting systems to do things they weren't intended to do. When that overlaps with a social environment the line does become very fuzzy, but for digital systems it ends up referring to programs that have some surprising and unexected attribute (examples include being tiny, being exceptionally fast, running on obscure, difficult, or new hardware, using new techniques or algorithms, being written in 'alternative' langauges [like brainfuck], performing unintended tasks [like privilege escalation or tetris-in-sed], and various others), and is more specific than "programming", which is increasingly often a very practical topic, as computers are embraced by more and more industries and fields. A "hack" is almost by definition, then, not for profit and not well-funded, because it is on the edge of what's possible and quite often far outside what's useful; good business knows better than to invest in high risk, low-return projects. Compare this with the idea of Y Combinator, which if I understand correctly funds companies with high-risk ideas in the hope of achieving high return-on-investment via runaway successes. But most YC companies I hear about have minimal technical progress associated therewith. Social progress seems more their goal, in the majority of cases. And please don't let it seem that I'm denigrating either mainstream programming nor funding ugly-ducking companies for social change. Hackers don't pop out of nowhere, and most can agree how important social change is. But I think it would be great to have a place to discuss hacking, and Hacker News definitely attracted many (myself included) via the implicit siren-call of being such a place. Given that it is so-named, we can work to make it live up to that standard, unless there's some other community I'm missing where such things would be more appropriate. If this is still exclusively Startup News: let pg rename it that, and don't waste hackers' headspace and search engine result space.