IMHO hacking is doing something you're not supposed to in such a unique way that it is considered clever, skillful and attractive. Increasingly people call the

IMHO hacking is doing something you're not supposed to in such a unique way that it is considered clever, skillful and attractive. Increasingly people call themselves hackers by doing something that is trivial, unskilled or uninteresting. Brute forcing your way into banks to steal credit cards for the sake of leaning how to do it (I may have done that as a kid among other things) is hacking. Doing that to pay rent is where there's a departure. Hacking shouldn't be offensive. Hacking shouldn't be boring. Writing Mario Bros 1.0 in a couple lines of jQuery is boring. Hacking shouldn't be about money. If you're at a startup participating in a hackathon then you're ultimately doing it for money. It isn't hacking.