[magic_beans]

That's really confusing. And although I love HN, I find the term "hacker" to refer to any sort of programmer or software developer to be increasingly idealistic (bordering on lame), especially when there are very real and very destructive hackers out here.

[lordCarbonFiber]

I, and I think many here, find the media's insistence that all hackers are cybercriminals far more disturbing. To hack has meant to create long before the popular consensus tried to demonize it. Pretending the only interesting thing you can do with a computer is criminal activity is part of the reason why the US is so far behind in the space.

[tremendo]

I refer you to the creator of this site you're commenting on (BTW titled Hacker News): http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

[tnecniv]

This nomenclature didn't start on HN and goes back quite a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture

[watwut]

For me too. When I heard term hacking in relation to pprograming, it always meant "unmaintennable mess full of dirty tricks holding together with duck tape". Not positive.

[khedoros1]

It's heavily context-dependent for me. Based on the situation, I'd expect it to be:

- A network intrusion

- A cool, clever piece of programming, without any other expectation of quality besides "it works"

- A "clever" (in a bad way), ugly, and (hopefully) temporary mess, done knowingly because of time constraints

- A program, usually put together quickly, to do a specific job

"Hacked into" would imply the first meaning, the others could be differentiated with further adjectives "clean", "dirty", "ugly", "cool", "quick", etc. Whether it's positive or negative really depends on the situation.