I have a pretty good friend on here that has The Best answer to the "hacked" question, and I would never, ever be co-founders with him because he's impossible. There's often a trade-off between "naughtiness" and "friendship."
At Startup School, there was a line of several hundred people waiting for lunch, which consisted of a dozen or so different kinds of pizza stacked in piles of 7-10 boxes each. We had a group of 3-4 people, looked at the line, and someone said, "This line is ridiculous. How can we hack this system?" Someone suggested going somewhere else on campus to eat, but we wanted to stay and mingle. Someone else in the group knew people farther up in the line, and suggested skipping ahead in the line. Ultimately, I simply squeezed through near the front of the line, grabbed a whole box of pizza, and took it back for our group to share.
This kept our group from further clogging the line and seemed much more efficient than 3-4 of us waiting to select our 1-2 pieces each. Hopefully no hungry Startup School attendees were upset by our line hackery, as we thought it was a pretty win-win hack.
My definition of a hack is to add value to the an existing system by modifying a property, not changing a zero-sum situation in your favor. for example, in your case, the number of pizzas are fixed, so it's a zero-sum situation. A better hack I usually propose in situations like this is to use both sides of the table, simple but generally people tend to pick pizza from one side only.
That seems like a nice definition of hack, but I don't think it's completely accurate. For example, if a college only accepts a certain number of people and you come up with clever way to get accepted, that's changing a zero-sum situation in your favor, and I would still call it a hack.
I agree, however, that the hack seems a little wrong. More clever would have been for the friends to grab another table, set it up opposite the original one with room for two lines, and then switch half the pizza boxes to the other table. (This works better than being on both sides of a single table because the way pizza boxes open typically blocks access from one side.) Another possibility would be to just grab a box each and carry it down the line offering pizza to everyone starting from the front.
Also, people who grabbed boxes often walked up the line and offered pizza. Hack + good deed.
It's not zero sum, though; if you're a genuinely better student than the student who didn't get accepted because you got his spot, it's you++, him--, university++, so still positive-sum.
To your point of the "better hack", we advocated the "use both sides of the table" for breakfast, but with pizza it is unwieldly because the lids of pizza boxes only open one way. Yes, reconfiguring the tables would have also probably improved things.. but is much more difficult with 25-50 people trying to access the pizza boxes, and no readily available unused tables on hand.
My Dad owns a wholesale fence company and when the fire and police dept wanted to rewrite the fire code for gated neighborhoods they wanted to do something different EDIT: By code, obviously I mean as in LAW, not as in programming, my Dad being a fenceman is obviously not a programmer lol. So they came to my Dad and asked him to help a write a forward thinking code for the city, what they eventually settled on was an RFID card system where every police and fire dept vehicle has a card which constantly emits a signal that opens the gate of any neighborhood which has this reciever (it is mandatory for the two parishes nearest to us). So being young (13) and new to programming at the time (this was almost 10 years ago) I decided to try to reverse engineer one of the cards. I took it apart piece by piece looked at the programming software they were using and eventually (after much tinkering) made my own card.
Obviously this is highly illegal and so I was slightly worried about putting it on there, but I also thought it showed characteristics of curiosity and a will to find a better way... In case you are wondering, yes, i still get into any gated house or subdivision in a two parish radius without hassle :P lol