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Comment by megakwood | Hacker News Reader

IMO the beauty of a hack comes from two places:

1) Doing something that can't be done by hand, OR 2) Replacing repetitive manual work, this saving time in the long run

IMO there's nothing "cool" about a hack that will only be used once and could be replaced by Mark (or anyone standing nearby) pre-typing the message and then posting the status to Facebook seconds after he pushes the Nasdaq button.

You could also argue that it might have been an opportunity for the engineers to learn something, but IMO you could think of more worthwhile hacks to learn from.

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> IMO the beauty of a hack comes from two places:

"In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation."

"Hacking might be characterized as `an appropriate application of ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it."

So it has nothing to do with automation, perfecting your craft, saving time, making money, impressing Paul Graham, "hacking education" (?), putting in tremendous amounts of work, being irreverent, growing a neckbeard, or linking up a button to a cell phone.

It boils down to somebody else saying "are you fucking kidding me?" and you get to say: "no."

> It boils down to somebody else saying "are you fucking kidding me?" and you get to say: "no."

Yeah, the "are you fucking kidding me?" comes from the fact that you did something awesome, i.e. something can't be done trivially by some far simpler means. So I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me :)

The only "are you fucking kidding me?" that this hack evokes is "you spent all that time and talent to do /that/?".

My image of you is now a cranky old man who never learned how to have fun.

I assume you're similarly annoyed by any Rube Goldberg machine?

Well, we now have Facebook established precedent of letting physical actions trigger Open Graph events. That's kinda cool!

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