[polemic]

I'm not a hacker, so I can't.

FYI I'm referring to 'trying to break into a system, possibility illegally, with time pressure, hackers', rather than HackerNews hackers. Which I thought was reasonably obvious from the context.

If you're actually trying to crack a system, you're generally trying a lot of different things very rapidly. Tweaking performance and nicely formatting code you're going to immediately discard is... a misappropriation of resources.

[rbanffy]

Sorry if I look harsh, but this is not the meaning of "hacker" I like to see promoted.

On the movie, also, the girl was not trying to crack into a computer - she seemingly had full MySQL console access.

[scott_s]

I think that ship has sailed, and we just have to use context to disambiguate.

[chimeracoder]

I prefer to think of 'hack' and its variants as neutral terms that can, in context be either good ('Look what I hacked together!') or bad ('They hacked into the servers').

(Actually, the way usually explain it to non-techies: duct tape. Everyone understands what duct tape is meant for: it won't necessarily win any awards for style[1], but it's powerful, and it sure as heck gets the job done in a pinch, and quickly too! I find that analogy generally holds well enough, whether we're talking about black-hat hacking or 'real' hacking.)

[1] Most of the time, that is: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=duct%20tape%20cloth...