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Comment by timothychung | Hacker News Reader

I feel that it is more a crack than a hack. :-)

It's certainly a hack in the traditional MIT sense: http://hacks.mit.edu/

I just think a hack is an improvement to anything while the action in the post is just ruining the online voting system.

A hack would be to let the TIME web team to know the details of the crack and the solution to fix it.

Cheers. :-)

Classically, a subset of "hacks" are pranks, which are relatively-but-not-totally harmless (someone had to take down that car):

http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/misc/best_of.html

In the grand scheme of things, the ranking of TIME's list is relatively unimportant. I believe this is only the second time they've done a ranking poll, and it was effectively gamed last time as well (by a much larger group of people, though: Stephen Colbert fans and Rain fans).

Thanks for letting me to understand more about the definition of "hack".

I assume that a hack is the product from a hacker and I get my definition of hacker from the article "How to Become a Hacker" by Eric Steven Raymond. http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

It's a hack to me, and a pretty cool one. They wanted something done, they found a novel way of doing it. Probably taught themselves some valuable skills in the process.

Learn by doing. Get things done, one way or the other. The very essence of hacking!

I very much doubt that the gaming of the poll was merely an exercise in autodidacticism.

The moar you know.

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