Re:Hacking Airline Lounges for Free Meals
by p4bl0 on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @10:52AM
(#7178156)
I agree that the word is overused. Just like "hacker" is. For instance I don't think half the articles linked here on Hacker News have anything to do with hacking (I'm not saying this is bad), and a lot of them pretend to be by having "hacker" in the title (and this, I think, is bad: no, it's not because you coded that in Ruby or Node.js instead of PHP that your blogging platform is for hackers…).
But clearly "hacking" can be used for things other than computer related stuff, and I feel like calling a clever trick "hacking" is less harmful (well, it's even harmless IMHO). Getting back to your comment, I feel that here it is a valid usage of the word. Take something similar for instance: calling Steal This Book [1] a kind of society hacking cookbook (it is mostly outdated though) feels completely right to me.
Defending the meaning of the word may be important, but wanting to restrain its usage all the time is useless and counterproductive.
But clearly "hacking" can be used for things other than computer related stuff, and I feel like calling a clever trick "hacking" is less harmful (well, it's even harmless IMHO). Getting back to your comment, I feel that here it is a valid usage of the word. Take something similar for instance: calling Steal This Book [1] a kind of society hacking cookbook (it is mostly outdated though) feels completely right to me.
Defending the meaning of the word may be important, but wanting to restrain its usage all the time is useless and counterproductive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Book