<p>Ugh. This is a horrible article. Every MIT person I know (including quite a lot of hackers) who has read it has hated it.</p>
<p>“Hack” != “prank”. Some hacks are pranks, but not all hacks are pranks. Pranks are tricks, jokes. They are often (usually?) intended to one-up others. The point of hacks is that they are Awesome, not that they are a joke on anybody. Small ones are often about being cute and clever, large ones are about making the impossible, possible. A cool thing on the dome is a cool thing on the dome, not a prank.</p>
<p>The taking of the Caltech cannon was both a hack and a prank. Pretty much any MIT hack on Harvard is a prank. The firetruck on the dome was a hack, but not a prank, and the same is true for most dome hacks.</p>
<p>The DVD-unscrambling thing could possibly be considered a prank, but it was not a hack. The Star Simpson case was an unfortunate, nearly-disastrous misunderstanding…neither a prank nor a hack.</p>
<p>Caltech’s tradition is different from MIT’s. It is school-sanctioned, and much more prank-based.</p>
<p>And nobody that I know at MIT has any idea what the heck this “prank fund” is that Time alludes to. There is a humor fund, the Peter De Florez '38 humor fund, but it is not a hack fund. Hacks are funded by the people who create them.</p>