[texthompson]

I don't think that the title or the content claimed that "presenting mathematics in an understandable way" is a hack. "Statistics for Hackers" sounds to me like hackers are the intended audience.

This method of presentation makes sense to me. Most statistics classes that I've experienced were taught from the point of view of abstract math. That's certainly one way to do it, but I knew a lot of people for whom that wasn't the optimal presentation strategy. Now that computing is cheap and there is a large audience of people with programming knowledge, I think that teaching statistics through examples of simulation, bootstrapping shuffling and cross validation is a great way to learn things.