Hack value

A notion among hackers that something is worth doing or is interesting. This is something that hackers often feel intuitively about a problem or solution; the feeling approaches the mystical for some.

Doing something others think impossible, and doing it with finesse, cleverness, or brilliance implies the solution has hack value.

Picking a lock has hack value. Smashing a lock doesn't.

Proving Fermat's last theorem by linking together most of modern mathematics has hack value. Solving the four color map problem by exhaustively trying all possibilities doesn't. Writing a program to solve the four-color map problem exhaustively, however, does have hack value (as generating all the possibilities is itself potentially difficult).