hack
/hăk/
intransitive verb
- To let out (a horse) for hire.
- To make banal or hackneyed with indiscriminate use.
- To drive a taxicab for a living.
Hack job has an interesting history. The sense of hack in play here probably originates with the oldest uses of the word as meaning "to cut irregularly or inexpertly." That usage dates back to Old English haccian, and thence to the mists of antiquity. It's not hard to see how the other senses of hack, many of which carry connotations of poor quality or amateurishness, would have emerged out of this definition.
Hack job begins to appear in the literature in the 19th and 20th centuries. Most of the early uses are from the 1920s or later, although I find one fascinating example in a book review published in 1837:
There is a freshness and talent about this unpresuming production which has exceedingly captivated our fancy. There is not a hack line in it : what a treat for a reviewer ! and a reviewer in these days, when one hack job succeeds another with such unremitting activity, that it almost seems, at the end of the season, as if we had read only one huge hack work.
As with most of the other early uses of hack job that I have found, the sense of hack being used here is that of the hack writer, who produces large quantities of mediocre writing because of the money it brings in, rather than because of inspiration or talent. Interestingly, this sense of hack is apparently completely unrelated to the ancient cutting/chopping definition: the OED relates it to an obsolete use of hack to mean a horse that draws a hackney cab, another form of drudge work. (Hackneyed, meaning trite or clichéd, is also related.)
Throughout the 20th century, the use of hack job to mean mediocre written work predominates. It takes on an interesting sub-definition around the middle of the century, when I begin to see the hack job label applied specifically to works that (in the opinion of the writer) constitute severe and sustained attacks on a person, belief, etc.--what we might otherwise call a hit piece. This usage pretty clearly borrows from the older, unrelated use of hack as meaning clumsy, violent cutting: the hack writer is hacking away at his target.
It is not until the 1990s that I begin to see hack job used to refer generally to quick, shoddy work in contexts that have nothing to do with writing or the creative process at all:
The Chinese sometimes cut a chicken into chunks, bones and all, before cooking it. It's a true hack job, like Kentucky Fried Chicken, but remember that the bones add to the flavor.
The broadening of hack job in recent years has no doubt been influenced by the senses of hack popular in computing, meaning variously "to break into a computer system" and "to write computer code for pleasure, or to derive pleasure from writing computer code." This is supported by the appearance around the same time of the phrase hack together (roughly meaning "to create or assemble quickly or inexpertly"), which was initially used only as hacker jargon but is today, I'm sure we would all agree, understood by a wider audience.
That hack job came to exist as an idiom was probably inevitable: woodcutting is a job, being a hack writer is a job, so it's hardly surprising that the term would arise eventually, and in fact it has probably been coined multiple times independently. The evolving use of hack over the years has unsurprisingly contributed to an evolution in the way we use hack job as well.
Answer from phenry on Stack ExchangeVideos
Media and pretty much everyone else use the term "hacker" when talking about someone who breaks into private systems to steal things. What the person is doing is "hacking".
As far as I know, hacking is not the correct term for the action. Hacking is using something (could be a device, software or an everyday object) to do something the thing isn't meant for. Ever heard of "lifehacks"?
I think the correct term for someone who breaks into systems would be "cracker". No, not the cookie-like edible thing. The cracker cracks open the security by - here's why I think the term is misused - hacking it to do things it's not supposed to, like letting an outsider in. The term has been used to describe such person, but not nearly as much as hacker.
Hacking does sound better than cracking, and rolls off the tongue more easily. Hacking has also been used for so long, using the better term would be difficult to adapt to.
Hacking is a part of cracking, it isn't just cracking. What do you think?
Following the Jargon file,
[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe]
That's essentially the gist: you don't produce quality software, you don't develop, you don't project. You take an idea or someone else's piece of software and hack it roughly with a software equivalent of an axe, to form something that fits your own idea of "mostly working" — sometimes the idea being quite far from what general populace would find acceptable. Bypass limitations imposed for business or political (or even safety) reasons, bind different completely mismatching systems together for some weird results, and generally do to computers things that can't be named by any professional terminology, but are quite equivalent to hacking some item with an axe to make it function as something entirely different (say, turning an armchair into a swing).
So, this is not a morph of some word or direct use of some obscure meaning of 'to hack', it's a metaphorical use of the very basic meaning — to cut or chop with repeated and irregular blows.
It's not related to hashing.
The roots of hacker can be found from the Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT. In 1959, TMRC member Peter R. Samson complied a dictionary, which contained both the root work, hack, and its derivative, hacker. The italics are Samson comments from 2006:
HACK: 1) something done without constructive end; 2) a project under- taken on bad self-advice; 3) an entropy booster; 4) to produce, or attempt to produce, a hack.I saw this as a term for an unconventional or unorthodox application of technology, typically deprecated for engineering reasons. There was no specific suggestion of malicious intent (or of benevolence, either). Indeed, the era of this dictionary saw some "good hacks:" using a room-sized computer to play music, for instance; or, some would say, writing the dictionary itself.
HACKER: one who hacks, or makes them.A hacker avoids the standard solution. The hack is the basic concept; the hacker is defined in terms of it.
Perhaps the original meaning was similar to hacking through an immense jungle with a machete, it can go on forever.
In fact, the OED also defines hack as a tool for breaking or chopping up, dating from before 1300:
He lened him þan a-pon his hak, Wit seth his sun þus-gat he spak.
And hacker follows. From 1620:
One good hacker, being a lusty labourer, will at good ease hack or cut more than half an acre of ground in a day.
So the sense of mangling and bodging together software and/or hardware isn't too far off.