Hack value
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hack value is the notion among hackers that something is worth doing or is interesting. This is something that hackers often feel intuitively about a problem or solution; the feeling approaches the mystical for some.
Doing something others think difficult or impossible, or solving a problem, and doing it in a way that has finesse, cleverness, or brilliance implies the solution has hack value. So creativity is an important part of the meaning. For example, picking a difficult lock has hack value; smashing a lock does not.
By way of another example, proving Fermat's last theorem by linking together most of modern mathematics has hack value; solving the four color map problem by exhaustively trying all possibilities does not (both of these have now in fact been proven). Writing a program to solve the four-color map problem exhaustively, however, does have hack value (as generating all the possibilities is itself potentially difficult).
The physicist Richard Feynman had a keen appreciation of hack value, and was a keen safecracker. At the Challenger Space Shuttle accident inquiry, he performed a classic hack, demonstrating the potential of O rings for causing the disaster by freezing an O ring in his glass of ice water and showing its failure to the audience, which included the press.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
 |
This computer-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
