Hack value

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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.