hand-hacking n.
1. [rare] The practice of translating hot spots from an HLL into hand-tuned assembler, as opposed to
trying to coerce the compiler into generating better code. Both
the term and the practice are becoming uncommon. See tune, bum, by hand; syn. with v. cruft. 2. [common] More generally, manual
construction or patching of data sets that would normally be
generated by a translation utility and interpreted by another
program, and aren't really designed to be read or modified by
humans.