I assume that the PG et al. mean "hack" in the positive sense -- as much as news.yc occasionally sounds cultish, I don't think they're following the usual cult scheme of having prospective members confess their crimes in order to ensure that the cult has blackmail material on everybody. :-)
That said, I'm having trouble coming up with a good example of what would qualify here -- the best I have so far is when I was a new graduate student at Oxford and dug through the Exam Decrees And Regulations (also known as the "big grey book") to discover what nobody else in the Computing Lab was aware of: That instead of writing a 50 page dissertation at the end of my first year and being examined on it, I could count the fact that I had a paper published in a major journal as equivalent to holding a Master's degree, and thereby transfer from Probationary Research Student status to D.Phil. Student status six months early and with hundreds of hours less work.
I would personally call this "reading the rules and understanding how they work" rather than "hacking the system", but maybe that's what they mean.
That said, I'm having trouble coming up with a good example of what would qualify here -- the best I have so far is when I was a new graduate student at Oxford and dug through the Exam Decrees And Regulations (also known as the "big grey book") to discover what nobody else in the Computing Lab was aware of: That instead of writing a 50 page dissertation at the end of my first year and being examined on it, I could count the fact that I had a paper published in a major journal as equivalent to holding a Master's degree, and thereby transfer from Probationary Research Student status to D.Phil. Student status six months early and with hundreds of hours less work.
I would personally call this "reading the rules and understanding how they work" rather than "hacking the system", but maybe that's what they mean.