I'm afraid the title may scare people off the article. i assure you, "hacking" here is used in the canonical sense: "An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed."
For me, the origin of this was from "Smashing the stack for fun and profit (1996)"[1], which does actually refer to somewhat malicious purposes. Apparently it has existed in literature for a long time before that though[2].