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Comment by pak | Hacker News Reader

Jesus, it was reverse-engineered, not "hacked". Did Linux engineers "hack" into every single piece of hardware they wrote drivers for? The overuse of this term in headlines drives me nuts. It's not like people can drive by your house and break into your XBox by waving their arms. And that's the colloquial meaning, which has sadly displaced the original, more positive meaning.

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> Jesus, it was reverse-engineered, not "hacked". Did Linux engineers "hack" into every single piece of hardware they wrote drivers for?

I think reverse-engineering definitely falls under the "hacking" umbrella. I would go so far as to call the winner of the Adafruit prize a hacker, not to mention kernel devs who manage to get a device working without proper documentation.

Yes, I would call people that work on this hackers in the older more positive sense, but the common, inflammatory meaning of the word "hacked" usually has something to do with a security exploit. As in Headline: "Blahblah.com was recently hacked." As a headline, you would never think that means blahblah was reverse-engineered, but that it was vandalized or people's accounts were stolen.

I see it as a positive thing that the media is shifting to using the word 'hacked' as it was intended to be. Sure it may confuse some people but over time it may return to being used exclusively in the older sense.

I was the one who added the post and appended that title. Originally I was going to use the term "reverse-engineered" but HN made me clip it so that the title fell below 80 characters.

I apologize for any offense or confusion it may have caused.

OK, you're right, that character limit is very annoying. Sorry to sound off about something tangential to your post.

Err - nowhere in this article does Matt Cutts say it was "hacked".

He says people are hacking on it. In the sense of this definition: http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html

Though, my bet is you're just having a whinge, as opposed to actually commenting on this article.

I was referring to the title of the HN submission. The submitter commented and said it was due to the character limit for HN titles, so I suppose I should be "whinging" about that instead.

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