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Hacking traditionally refers to prototyping like, "quickly hacking something up" and was pretty common in the Perl/dot com bubble days where everything was some clever hack, just to get it out the door as quickly as possible.

Depends on whom you ask. For many if not most computer people, "hacking" is synonymous to coding, and indeed something very positive.

In the public however, "hacking" is often more used synonymous to "cracking", which I find very unsettling and sad. At least there is nowadays some awareness that there is a different meaning to it. I guess that the word "hackathon" helped to change the public perception.

For a certain cohort that likely has a lot of exposure here on HN, "hacker" used to mean "good programmer" sounds perfectly normal.