15 lines of JavaScript that translates tweets from Russians, built in a newsroom setting to help cover a bombing in Moscow, is a cool hack. Hacks don't have to be technically complex, they should be smart solutions to problems.
I think of a hack as a non-obvious solution to a difficult technical problem. I'm not saying they didn't do a good job, this is just more what I would consider standard.
No argument from me, I think the focus was off a bit. This 'hack' was just a simple extension to a plugin I'd already written for parsing jsonp feeds to html. I consider the process more interesting than a specific piece of technology.