hackish

adj — 3 senses

hackish

adj

Etymology From hack + -ish.

1

Characteristic of hacks, or inferior writers.

2

Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences Informal Using, or characterised by, hacks: poorly designed workarounds.

  • Our site, ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix, was recently subjected to incredibly high loads caused by the interaction of the various uucp software, two receiving sites, and news transmission. Fortunately we're out of that thicket for now, but only in a hackish sort of way. We trickle articles into inews and have terminated one of our neighbors. The other two possibilities (news batching and uucp sub-dirs) were considered and will probably be adopted at some point.1982 November 30, Stuart, “Re: New proposal for handling net traffi - (nf)”, in net.news (Usenet), retrieved 15 Dec 2016, message-ID <bnews.sri-unix.4523>:
  • A hackish solution is to use code switching, a technique of replacing a byte with a sequence of bytes headed by a special control character.2003, Erik T Ray, Learning XML:
1 more example
  • The first two hacks in this chapter provide, well, hackish solutions to that conundrum.2006, Bruce Perry, Ajax hacks:
3

Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences Informal Characteristic of hackers.

  • hackish slang; a hackish sense of humor
Synonyms
hacky
Derived terms
hackishness
Related terms
hackishly

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.