[schwonder]

Are you sure you meant to say "Hackers"? Not "programmers" or "engineers"? How is hacking different from programming? I have always thought that a hack is making something unexpected out of things that aren't supposed to be used this way, hence "iPhone hacking" is an oxymoron since all iPhone programmers are using iPhone SDK in a way Apple permits/tells them to. Same goes for most web apps that follow various standard best practices and recipes - that's as opposite from hacking as you can get.

So why destroy a word then? Hacking != Programming,

[apgwoz]

> I have always thought that a hack is making something unexpected out of things that aren't supposed to be used this way

Ideally that'd be the type of thing that people present at this group, though I'm fairly certain that not everyone will present these types of innovations. That's OK by me. I just want to develop a platform for people to get help offline with their projects, which may encourage "hacking" as you discuss. It's an experiment to see what happens. Zed Shaw's Freehacker's Union failed, I think, because he put this sort of restriction on it. "YOU HAVE TO PRESENT SOMETHING AND IT HAS TO BE COOL AND HAVE VALUE OR YOU CAN'T COME BACK" is not a language we'll speak here.

[dzlobin]

http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

[joubert]

what great hackers have in common according to pg: http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

[drmironov]

That may have nothing to do with linguistics: quality hacks are hard so they just aren't that common. So yeah, most of what hackers do isn't "hacking"