Hack value
Hack value is a term from the hacker scene. It describes the appreciation of a thing, not according to its price or its usefulness, but according to its creativity and originality. Hack value is often used to refer to the motivation that induces a hacker to invest a lot of time in something without this necessarily making sense to an observer, but representing a hack to the hacker .
The Jargon File from 1995 under "Display Hack" offers a special definition of the hack value : The hack value of such a graphics hack is proportional to the beauty of the image divided by the size of the program code required. Since beauty is a subjective quantity, this law can of course not be used to calculate the hack value. It is precisely because of this irony that such pseudoscientific calculations are occasionally used to describe hacks.