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> cheaply creates new things, as in "it's hacked together"

In other words it's marketing without much resources. Nothing much to do with hacking. When you repair your car with a used part or a part from a different model, are you "hacking your car" ?　

This word is getting way too much abuse, soon it won't mean anything anymore.

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If you fix your car by slapping together a bunch of junk then yes you most certainly have just "hacked it together". I don't see how you can call this abuse, crudely modifying and creating things is the original and primary use of the term. If anything it's the "high quality, open source programming in pursuit of interesting problems" crowd that's butchering it. "It's just something I hacked together" has never meant "I carefully crafted the shit out of it" except for maybe in a dishonest humblebrag sort of way.

> When you repair your car with a used part or a part from a different model, are you "hacking your car" ?

If you follow a popular on-line tutorial for that, then not really.

But if you find yourself with a broken car, and you figure out yourself that you can fix it by duct-taping some otherwise unrelated component into it, and the resulting solution somehow works better than original, then yes. Hacking is about playful cleverness.

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