There was a time when the hacker mindset was about something nice.
They’ve adopted a hacking mindset. They translate this clever, ethical, enjoyable, excellence-seeking behaviour to their everyday lives. See? Hacking is a mindset, not a skillset. When you seek, in your everyday life, to deliberately find opportunities to be clever, ethical, to enjoy what you are doing, to seek excellence, then you’re hacking.
Not enriching a few people. Not replacing everyone else's bad things with differently-bad treadmills. Not crushing 20-hour days, the latest programming hype, or whatever Paul Graham/Peter Thiel are saying. The orange website ethos, as one might say.
Enjoyable. Ethical. Seeking excellence to reshape the world into something better for everyone's everyday life.