meaning of hack value
1. hack value Often adduced as the reason or motivation for expending effort toward a seemingly useless goal, the point being that the accomplished goal is a hack. For example, MacLISP had features for reading and printing Roman numerals, which were installed purely for hack value. See display hack for one method of computing hack value, but this cannot really be explained, only experienced. As Louis Armstrong once said when asked to explain jazz: "Man, if you gotta ask youll never know. " Feminists please note Fats Wallers explanation of rhythm: "Lady, if you got to ask you aint got it. " ha ha only serious SF fandom, originally as mutation of HHOK, "Ha Ha Only Kidding" A phrase often seen abbreviated as HHOS that aptly captures the flavour of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or truths that are constructed on in-joke and self-parody. The Jargon File contains many examples of ha-ha-only-serious in both form and content. Indeed, the entirety of hacker culture is often perceived as ha-ha-only-serious by hackers themselves; to take it either too lightly or too seriously marks a person as an outsider, a wannabee, or in larval stage. For further enlightenment on this subject, consult any Zen master. See also AI koan. [Jargon File] hair [back-formation from hairy] The complications that make something hairy. "Decoding TECO commands requires a certain amount of hair. " Often seen in the phrase "infinite hair", which connotes extreme complexity. Also in "hairiferous" tending to promote hair growth: "GNUMACS elisp encourages lusers to write complex editing modes. " "Yeah, its pretty hairiferous all right. " Or just: "Hair squared!" hairy 1. Annoyingly complicated. "DWIM is incredibly hairy. " 2. Incomprehensible. "DWIM is incredibly hairy. " 3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context: "He knows this hairy lawyer who says theres nothing to worry about. " See also hirsute. The adjective "long-haired" is well-attested to have been in slang use among scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it was equivalent to modern "hairy" and was very likely ancestral to the hackish use. In fact the noun "long-hair" was at the time used to describe a hairy person. Both senses probably passed out of use when long hair was adopted as a signature trait by the 1960s counterculture, leaving hackish "hairy" as a sort of stunted mutant relic. 4.
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