EBarnacle: For Harvard in the '60s read MIT in the '50s. I was not there at the time, but I worked at Lincoln Lab in the early '60s and it was well established there at the time. There is some overlap between hacking in the sense of finding ingenious solutions to perceived problems & in the sense ofpranks that no one else would have thought of, and it is likely that the two senses developed together. Oddly, the latter sense was current in my high school (Putney, VT) in the early '50s, tho there was surely not much traffic between there & MIT.

I did not encounter the term "life hack" on the Web till a year or two ago, but I welcomed it precisely in the sense of a household hint, or more broadly a solution to a familiar problem in ordinary life. I have always enjoyed such things, and am glad to have a name for them.