Over the Christmas break, it seemed that the world discovered that Kit Dotson and I have been covering the Kinect hacks pretty extensively here at SiliconANGLE. This was mostly due to some prominent placing on the Reddit front page, which led to Techmeme listing one of our Kinect posts as a headline late Friday night.

As I scrolled through the comments on Reddit, I had to jump in on one of the trolls’ comments in which he angrily railed against us and anyone else calling what happens with the open source Kinect movement “hacking.”

This is called programming. Everything being developed for the Kinect is a program that can read depth information. It is not hacking.

The Kinect is being used by design. The only "hacking" that happened with the Kinect was someone making a driver that would switch the camera on and off so the video output of rgb-d frames could be used by software designed to process rgb-d images and use them. And that is not really hacking, as reverse engineering a device driver is not hacking. The word hacking has changed meaning in this decade, software development is not hacking.

I won’t take you through our ultimately infuriating back and forth on Reddit, but it did spur a pretty good conversation on Quora. Rather than try to play in the group dynamics of Reddit as an insider, I posed my basic question there to either receive validation or refutation.

Instead, I got insightful comments. Ian Peters-Campbell, an engineer at Loopt said:

Software development is a superset of hacking. So people who are hacking may be developing software, but people doing software development are not necessarily hacking.

Hacking generally (but not always) refers to the more loose, fast-paced, process-light, individualistic style of programming preferred by a significant number of engineers and some software companies.

You’re completely within your rights to call your programming or someone else’s "hacking" and to mean it either positively, negatively, or both. If you’re not a software developer though then it may be hard to tell the right time to use the term, and while it may not be exactly "stupid and ignorant" it is also not universally applicable and you may come off as ignorant of the company/person you’re talking about,. It’s also possible that you will offend someone who thinks of herself as being on the more structured, "engineer" side of the coin.

Steven Hugg, Founder at Voxilate and a developer at HeyTell, spoke in similar themes:

Software development is making a product by harvesting the low hanging fruit. Hacking is climbing to the top of the tree and finding a way to ignite the sap so that it launches into orbit.

Gavan Woolery, a freelance developer, wanted to remind everyone that not all hacking is software hacking:

Hacking does not solely relate to developing software, so to pose a relationship either way can be misleading. To me, hacking is the process of building a solution to a problem using techniques that were not necessarily designed to solve the problem.

Hacking can apply to any field of engineering, and often can cross the blurry line into art. The hack may be elegant or ugly, but usually solves the problem with less effort than traditional solutions.

The term "hacking" is often misused to portray the process of breaking into something (or breaking something, i.e. with a virus). Hackers do not break things, they build them. "Cracking" is the term used to describe the process of breaking into something or breaching security.

All in all, it was a sanity check for me – after getting sucked into the black-hole of a well informed troll on Reddit, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t completely off base.

There definitely seems to be a lot of varied opinion, within the nuance of those interested in the topic. The consensus that seems to have emerged that software hacking is a subset of software development, but hacking itself isn’t necessarily limited to the software world.

How about you? What do you most commonly mean when you use the word “hacking” or “hacker?” Do you agree with the panel of experts Quora assembled?