I think you missed the point of the article. They were mockingly critiquing it, as the people behind the movie went above-and-beyond typical Hollywood technical gobbley-gook. The point is that it was accurate enough that they could critique it.
Hackers are not optimizing for performance or readability.
I've watched a few penetration testers at work - they have to have a very broad knowledge base and work at speed. They're not sitting around wondering if their query is going to work in 1s or 0.1s - it just doesn't matter.
(The set of all hackers are not a strict subset of the set of all developers, but it's also true that some hackers - yes, in the breaking-in-to-something sense - are developers.)
FYI I'm referring to 'trying to break into a system, possibility illegally, with time pressure, hackers', rather than HackerNews hackers. Which I thought was reasonably obvious from the context.
If you're actually trying to crack a system, you're generally trying a lot of different things very rapidly. Tweaking performance and nicely formatting code you're going to immediately discard is... a misappropriation of resources.
I prefer to think of 'hack' and its variants as neutral terms that can, in context be either good ('Look what I hacked together!') or bad ('They hacked into the servers').
(Actually, the way usually explain it to non-techies: duct tape. Everyone understands what duct tape is meant for: it won't necessarily win any awards for style[1], but it's powerful, and it sure as heck gets the job done in a pinch, and quickly too! I find that analogy generally holds well enough, whether we're talking about black-hat hacking or 'real' hacking.)
