27 replies
11h35m
This whole thing comes off as very “edgy”. We just like to tinker with things. It’s really not that deep for most of us.
21 replies
6h1m
I thought this would be bad. The start with security stuff isn't my vibe. But then I kept reading it and the storytelling kept me. The econ stuff, parallels, etc.
It ended up capturing perfectly a bunch of ideas I've been having for a few months now. ZIRP was toxic. It made us bad and lazy. Identifying the phenomenons and explaining their mechanisms has been a useful exercise.
I think this post will stay in my brain for a long while. I'm at this point in life and this resonates a lot. I want to build useful stuff with intrinsic value and I'm sick of the BS that exulted in the last decade. In my own way I'm trying to start ventures, so it's a good motivating call.
Slow start but damn solid article.
19 replies
5h17m
ZIRP was toxic. It made us bad and lazy.
Yes. It makes me really nervous to see people celebrating the fed talking about lowering rates. Maybe rates should be lowered a bit, sure, I don't know. But please, please don't ever let us go back to zero-interest. As a person who works with technology, that era was so incredibly depressing. So much waste. I'm on the verge of leaving the tech industry because of what happened over the past 10 years. City bus drivers don't have to share an industry with SBF and Juicero and Elon Musk, you know?
8 replies
4h23m
Lowering rates is fine. Lowering them to zero is bad.
Economists generally believe the baseline, target rate should be around 2-3%.
Zero interest rate is like steroids. You can take them for a while to pick you up and help fight a bug (like the 2008 crash), but if you don't stop taking them, you'll need a long, painful, 5.5% interest rate rehab.
1 replies
3h39m
And, if you were to balance the Federal budget, you would inflate away 75% of the national debt in 50 years at 3% inflation. But, only a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution could accomplish that.
0 replies
1h22m
How are you calculating that? The national debt itself currently has an average interest rate higher than 3%.
1 replies
2h45m
Zero interest rate is like steroids.
The problem with your analogy is that paying interest is an active measure. It takes effort. The higher the rate*(outstanding debt), the more effort. This isn't a choice between injecting nothing vs injecting steroids, it's a choice between injecting sedatives vs injecting nothing. Raising the interest rate is like injecting a sedative. How much sedative should we inject? How much sedative can we inject?
0 replies
46m
I disagree, as this implies that an interest of zero is the normal default. Why would it be? Why would someone lend someone else money, when they get nothing for it?
1 replies
2h8m
Economists generally believe the baseline, target rate should be around 2-3%.
The problem with that is (as we found out) that does not leave you much room to cut without going to near zero rates.
0 replies
1h1m
That's a feature, not a bug.
The government reaction to the 2021 economic circumstances was to counter the hot job market, not inflation. It is explicitly and legally the mandate of the federal reserve to target maximum employment first, and 3% inflation if possible.
Inflation has been normal for a while now by most metrics, but rates are still sky-high to crush worker power. This may not be the stated goal, but it is the actual outcome we can see.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Super-low inflation targets hurt worker negotiating power.
1 replies
49m
Zero interest rate is like steroids
More like adding fat and never burn it. Zero interest means everything stays around, no pressure to produce since there is no expectation of ROI, and then when you suddenly add that pressure a lot of stuff collapses under their own weight since they don't have anything to keep it up.
0 replies
1m
I'll be the devil's advocate. Zero interest rates means it's easier for startups to raise money. High interest rates locks in the status quo - because of their massive war chests big companies don't struggle because of high interests, but small companies do.
For individuals in the middle class and lower, high interest rates (and the associated inflation) directly lower the quality of life by eroding their purchasing power.
2 replies
4h47m
> It makes me really nervous to see people celebrating the fed talking about lowering rates.
One thing I've often thought true but not confirmed is that lowering interest rates has it's own effect on top of the lower rate itself. Lowering rates leads to refinancing for example which is not a thing in a steady state. I'm inclined to think most of the benefit of a rate lowering is in fact transient, while the effects of having low rates are permanent and there are similarly transient costs with raising rates. It's a trap.
1 replies
3h35m
You talk about low rates like they are a choice. That's mostly not true. A better way to think about it is that low rates are a consequence of "lots of savings chasing few investment opportunities."
Sure, the fed can buy and sell treasuries and use its magical balance sheet to push/pull on treasury yields, and these in turn are the lowest risk and most liquid mechanism for duration transformation so they tend to serve as a baseline / comparison point for every other kind of investment, transmitting monetary policy into the real economy. However, the fed's magical balance sheet has limits: if they push or pull on treasury yields too hard for too long, people will stop using them as a default point of comparison and put their money somewhere else. See: Bank of Japan and the JPY Carry Trade that everyone became an expert in about 3 weeks ago. Point is: the fed can push and pull, but it can't fight the market-determined macro and win. Not for long, anyway.
Low rates are inevitable between growth sigmoids. Unless you think we can exponentially grow forever, we need to figure out how to cope. What would that look like? How could we possibly cool off the economy without paying people to not invest? Well, I mean, we could raise taxes and spend that on the people who got left behind on the last growth sigmoid, but I can hear the "boos" and "hisses" already. Hey! Tomatoes are for eating, not throwing! Guys, come on! You know it's true.
0 replies
42m
Well, I mean, we could raise taxes and spend that on the people who got left behind on the last growth sigmoid, but I can hear the "boos" and "hisses" already.
I mostly agree. The issue comes from how the money gets spent. It costs money to collect money, it costs money to spend money. Most of the spent money is used to "buy solutions" from private industry, so the rich still get richer, and nothing really changes.
Baltimore, MD, USA, spends more per student [1] than almost any other city in the country, and nothing changes. Oh well actually, there is a lot of corruption in the city council and I think over half of the past few mayors have been arrested on criminal charges.
[1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/in-baltimore...
2 replies
5h9m
I'm only starting to learn about these things.
From the data I've seen and read it seems like low interest rates are (politically) alluring, because of short term metrics, but will bite back via inflation and bubbles bursting very consistently.
Is there any wisdom and data that challenges or expands on this that a layman can understand?
0 replies
3h20m
So, bubbles are hard, especially when the underlying fundamental thing does not respond well to price increases (NIMBYism, zoning, weaponized environmental legislation, etc.)
https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/the-2000s-housing-bubbl...
Tech bubbles are doubly so, because now that "total addressable market" has exploded thanks to the internet everything is a bubble. (Starting with the good old dot-com one, and crypto, and AR/VR/Metaverse, and now AI. Folks are comparing Nvidia stock graphs to Cisco around 2000.)
....
Likely the HN crowd overestimates the effect of ZIRP on tech, because how crazy the last 10-15 years have been. (But we see that the economy in general performed extremely well, real wages increased, etc.)
Yes, of course there were (and are) a lot of scummy ventures, but there will be more.
...
Regarding rates, the picture is a bit more complex. So coming out of the 2008 crash the Obama/ARRA fiscal stimulus was too small. (And of course it got hyper-over-politicized on "both sides".) And the monetary response was also lackluster.
But we also know now (benefit of hindsight!) that the rates before 2008 were too low.
https://www.caixabankresearch.com/en/economics-markets/monet...
One important take-away is that of course everyone wants growth, more growth would help lower taxes, inflate away deficits, yey! Prosperity is good!
But ... we can't simply buy growth with endless loans from our future selves. Real economic growth requires increasing productivity, which requires applying new (better, more suited to the situation, more profitable) technologies, which requires changes (duh), but an aging population is very change-averse. The US with the political gridlock tends to go on wild goose chases, spending enormous amounts of money on bullshitting instead of picking better technology.
(And here technology includes social technology too. From the things like "lack of funding reform for fire departments leads to them going with too large firetrucks everywhere to be able to bill a lot, which leads them to not sign-off on thinner roads, which leads to too wide roads where motorists drive too fast, which leads to too many injuries and fatalities" to all the usual like lack of gun control and bribery rules for the courts.)
0 replies
3h36m
0 replies
4h57m
Not a fan of the terminology that corporations are people, but stacks of free money will mess up a company much like it will a person.
0 replies
4h47m
The long term trend for the Fed is that it raises rates somewhat, and then lowers them even more. There is no reason to think this won't happen again this time, landing squarely in negative rates. It only stops when US dollars are worthless because any Tom, Dick and Harry can get a billion of them for free and even get paid for doing so.
So far, the Fed does a good job of gatekeeping normal people out of the negative rate market even when rates are negative - only rich people are allowed to benefit.
0 replies
26m
I have a slightly different view on this. ZIRP allowed companies to do crazy things when it came to tech investment. For instance, would Kafka (and by extension, Confluent, and much of the distributed-systems landscape) exist if LinkedIn hadn't decided: "you know, let's not think too hard about whether building a custom queue system is fully economically rational, let's just let our engineers do it, and we'll be able to spin it to investors/shareholders as a good use of capital." It's no coincidence that this happened in 2010, the first year that the interest rate dropped below 1% (and substantially so).
https://www.rtinsights.com/the-technical-evolution-of-apache...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS
Were the people who worked on that project value-optimal for LinkedIn? Maybe, maybe not. Were they "lazy" and a "waste" in the value they brought to society overall, especially including the spin-offs and startups that members of these teams would go on to build? I don't think that's an accurate characterization.
Zero-interest was an effective way to incentivize public companies, VC-backed companies, and their LPs to spend large amounts of money on speculative engineering work - speculative enough that one might even call it research, but the fact that we could call it something other than research is the entire point.
It's far from the only such incentive, and it came with many, many downsides, including the creation of many over-funded startups that over-promised and caused harm in their under-delivery.
To be sure, startups aren't going anywhere. There are surprisingly fun challenges when profitability and sustainable growth are core requirements for every project, both macro and micro, and it's just an evolution of our hacker mentality to have to deal with these new constraints.
But I fear that we've lost the incentive to have companies invest speculatively in crazy projects without having a sufficient replacement for ZIRP, and it may take a generation before we understand how that will have affected the rate of innovative output for the entire world.
0 replies
1h0m
Elon Musk is very wasteful selling waste due to low interest rates? Please explain or make your point? I don't get how he relates to the rest of your post?
0 replies
5h40m
agreed, wholeheartedly.
17 replies
10h20m
"... how the world works"
This is the most generic trap of all. Get good at something and then extrapolate to claim that you know how everything works. I suggest that, given the insane proliferation of valueless derivatives and ejection of human values from these systems, a more suitable conclusion might be that this is how the world dies.
3 replies
8h25m
An effective hacker has to be competent at social engineering as well as having a very deep understanding of software/hardware.
By the time you have accrued detailed experience of how both these technical systems and social systems work, you may be well on your way to understanding how the world works (in abstract, at any rate)?
1 replies
7h55m
I think the term 'social engineering' gets right to the point. We aren't machines but we have found very effective way of hacking our rewards systems so that we can manufacture demand, modify behaviour etc.
The author describes the phenomenon, but doesn't seem to see the broader picture. This is where a meta-systematic, or paradigmatic (if you're allergic to the word 'meta') perspective is needed, which transcends both social and technical systems, but appreciated how they fit into a larger scheme.
Through this lens the world is decidedly pluralistic and cannot be condensed to 'it's like X, we gotta do Y'. That can work for a personal strategy, and the author is kind enough to make some suggestions, but it's intellectual overreach to try and label the world
0 replies
33m
I think the term 'social engineering' gets right to the point.
"Social engineering" is just dystopian newspeak for "deception, manipulation, lying, and bullshitting to get what you want". If honest language were used, maybe it wouldn't look so sexy.
Anything else that avoids immoral means is just a matter of rhetorical skill and ability to negotiate.
0 replies
7h52m
a smart weirdo can rationalize the world and life, yes. They will probably be very, very wrong in interesting smart ways, tho.
2 replies
5h36m
How the world dies vs how the world works doesn’t sound all that different, and there’s still plenty of great wisdom in the article.
1 replies
3h56m
This is super depressing, but probably on point. I agree that the article has good points.
I think the spirit that the author is trying to capture is that there is a better way. I just think that they don't go far enough. There is a tendency to arrive at a idea and believe it to be a good global model - my intention with these comments is to try and provoke a more holistic assessment of the issue, despite the fact that I think their criticism of startup culture is valid
0 replies
3h50m
It sounds like you should take it from where they left off and publish your own post about your perspective, and fulfill the prophecy!
2 replies
5h32m
This is exactly how most on this website sound to be honest--people who got good enough in their field to convince themselves that they can speak authoritatively on some unrelated complex topic.
1 replies
2h19m
Which is strange, because one might expect that as someone gains expert knowledge in a particular field, they would recognize that most fields are similarly complex, require just as much nuanced knowledge as their own, and would not try to speak authoritatively on it.
0 replies
30m
And yet, this turns out to be not really how the human psyche works! It is useful to keep this in mind, and to be reminded of it.
1 replies
7h58m
Agree with the sentiment of your comment in isolation but when I went to the article to see the quoted line in context, the author isn't saying anything of the sort.
They're not taking a narrow definition of knowledge & extrapolating that once one has that specific knowledge it explains everything. Instead they're broadening the definition of "hacker" (& also invoking the idea of continuous interrogation) to describe an approach to always seeking & finding "how the world works" in any given context.
0 replies
7h35m
It's there three times, which is partly what triggered the comment, as it came across as something of a theme.
Certainly this article is less dogmatic that many, but I still got the sense that author was using effects like causes.
The less lazy version is to do with treating the metric as the measure. Sure, the quant revolution is in full swing, but it's a terrible way to gauge the success (or failure) of society, and is perhaps a better metric for describing detrimental human activity.
That said, I fully appreciate the author's efforts to break with convention, but I felt that the points made actually give creedence to the system that, in my view, is actively corrupting the values that might get us out of this mess
1 replies
6h52m
I suggest that, given the insane proliferation of valueless derivatives and ejection of human values from these systems
What do you mean by "these systems" ? Blockchain based money?
0 replies
6h15m
I suppose memecoins represent a form of this, but I was really referring to financial instruments, in particular those that exist based on a derived sense of value, rather than an actual quantification of it, such as:
Stock and, to a lesser degree, commodities futures, stock index futures, currency futures, interest rate futures, index options, currency options, interest rate options, credit default swaps, total return swaps, currency forwards, interest rate forwards.
The more exotic of these, which are usually more lucractive and less well regulated, include:
derivative-based exchange-traded funds, leveraged ETFs, inverse ETFs, equity-linked notes, credit-linked notes, principal-protected notes, collateralized debt obligations, weather derivatives (yes, you read that right), catastrophe bonds (eesh) barrier options and lookback options, to name a few.
They are all mechanisms to leverage expectation and uncertainty and most rely on the quantification of risk at some level. Risk, however, is defined in terms of expected return and subject to an assessment of externalities that is, at its core, resource-blind.
0 replies
6h46m
given the insane proliferation of valueless derivatives and ejection of human values from these systems
might want to clarify a bit there
0 replies
8h23m
I don't think the author is guilty of that.
0 replies
3h37m
My point is, it is not just about computers. It's about understanding how the world works. The world is made up of people. As much as machines keep society running, those machines are programmed by people--people with managers, spouses, and children; with wants, needs, and dreams. And it is about using that knowledge to bring about the change you want to see.
9 replies
11h55m
The market is incentivized to deliver a product that meets the minimum bar to meet that checkbox, while being useless. I invite you to think of your favorite middleware or EDR vendors here. For passionate security founders considering raising venture, remember that this is what your "success" is being benchmarked against.
Do not swallow blackpills. It's easy to get really cynical and think things are doomed
Creating leverage for yourself. Hackers should not think of themselves as "oh I am this little guy fighting Big Corporation" or whatever. This is low agency behavior. Instead become the corporation and RUN IT THE WAY YOU THINK IT SHOULD BE RUN.
Should I do it? Does this mean me? Obviously not, because I don't know shit about EDR. But obviously neither does Crowdstrike. I mean really, I couldn't possibly do any worse... right? Right? On the internet, it's easy to feel outclassed. But IRL, a large majority of people suck at their job. So in theory this should work.
In practice, I guess I'm just blackpilled. For much less effort I can get paid 6 figures for 2 hours of work per week. [Also, I realize that winning at business is more difficult than I'm implying. But if my former bosses, who didn't do much other than yell at people and also drugs, could build a 25M/year business then you probably can too.]
6 replies
9h54m
If your debt grows faster than your income you are blackpilled. If you run a derivatives market in your head and nothing you imagine can be boostrapped, you are blackpilled.
Crypto gets a lot of shit but social contracts made analyzable as smart contracts is promising for ethical financial markets. e.g. you could detect a debt spiral as a flow/loop/void structure with renormalization groups and persistent homology. When you can spot entities trying to create wage slaves from 100 miles away you can focus your energy on being creative.
3 replies
6h42m
Do you mind expanding on the meaning of blackpilled. I am struggling to make sense of your comment without that context. Google brings up stuff to do with misogyny.
1 replies
6h25m
In the Matrix movie Neo took the blue pill or the red pill. Taking the red pill meant Neo woke up and saw the Matrix for what it was. IRL being "redpilled" then started to mean you constructed a new world model which was critical of power structures, which then turned into both misogyny and misandry and pretty soon people realized this world model they created had made them mentally ill. Then the realization that they had constructed a new Matrix, worse than the old, became the 'black pill'. IMO it's different from nihilism because of the self-awareness and inability to stop it from happening.
0 replies
1h43m
I usually think of "red pill" as "You learn some piece of information, the implications of which lead to you your perception of the world expanding in a large and meaningful way that belies your earlier perception of the world and forces a reassessment of prior experiences".
I think of "black pill" as a GMO'd red pill designed to nudge the "learner" into a position of learned-helplessness.
Take a common aphorism around here: "99% of startups fail, so you shouldn't bother trying". The red pill is "failure is the most common modality for new ventures", but the attached advice makes it a black pill.
In a meta way, the linking of the term "red pill" to misogyny/misandry turned the red pill concept itself into a black pill (why bother seeking "red pills" if the "community" most identified with them is so disturbing?).
0 replies
2h1m
The way its used in the article at least, to me means having a view of the world that feels true and important but is bleak and disempowering.
Like the sibling comment said, 'red pill' is seeing the truth of the world (or, what the community that uses the term red pill thinks is the truth at least. often this refers to the truth as decided by internet mysoginiats). Black pill is this truth + its unchangeable and hopeless and pointless and why do anything and oh god I wish I could go back to not knowing.
If its used by somebody reasonable, blackpill is a pejorative with the implication that the ideology is more cynical and hopeless than it really should be and has the connotation that their ideology is a little too internety.
1 replies
7h50m
Interesting thought experiment you’ve shared. Thanks now my mind is running
0 replies
6h13m
If you get results I'd be curious to know. Peace.
0 replies
4h42m
EDR vendors don't seem to know shit about EDR, either. You could be one even if you don't know about EDR. It's all about how you make your customers see you. That's what the article is saying.
0 replies
44m
It depends on what you value.
The catch22 is that if you are good at technology, you tend to align your personal morals and character to actual true value, not fake value, which makes you a pretty good anti-bullshit filter. However people who align themselves to the concept of making money are more aligned to working with the bullshit, not seeing it as negative but as a part of life. Thats why your ex bosses could build 25M business, and why you are blackpilled.
In the past, when there was room for innovation because things haven't been invented yet, you could do both. Now, you basically have to pick one or the other.
7 replies
12h2m
i like this take a lot, what I get is hacker = infinitely curious individual
3 replies
10h30m
Just "infinitely curious individual" is a bookworm. Hacker would also like to tinker with the rules underlying the systems to see how things might break. So bookworm + tinkering + wants to understand complex systems (hackers call it "to grok"). Systems - not only computer systems, also biological, physical and any kind of complex assemblages of rules.
2 replies
9h44m
I personally prefer "infinitely creative individual", with the non-artsy definition of creative: to create something
1 replies
8h5m
Still not specific enough and doesn't evoke hackers. I consider myself a hacker but I don't consider myself "infinitely" creative, just creative in technical areas. So maybe technically creative individual? But those are more like Makers.
0 replies
2h16m
No matter how you define "hacker", "argues about the definition of 'hacker'" certainly should be included :)
1 replies
10h19m
thats a good take . i would add “ a person that wants to understand how thinks work to manipulate them”
0 replies
7h27m
'hacking' is commonly defined as "using tools for something else than their initial purpose".
0 replies
11h36m
That's always been my interpretation of it! I would use the term "insatiably curious" to describe it to people.
4 replies
5h20m
Web Page Blocked!
You have tried to access a web page which belongs to a category that is blocked.
1 replies
5h10m
Aha, caught browsing in the job. Head to HR for your daily beating.
0 replies
5h0m
Hahah
0 replies
5h15m
Sounds like someone (your parents? the company you work at? your school?) have installed a firewall of some sorts.
0 replies
5h18m
That seems like a problem on your end.
4 replies
13h24m
Calling All Hackers | 2 points 15 hours ago |
Phrack 71 | 194 points 1 day ago | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41296949
Calling All Hackers | 7 points 1 day ago |
Phrack Issue #71 | 12 points 1 day ago |1 replies
11h28m
It's worse formatted than dang's stuff, but ya tried
0 replies
8h35m
Given the opportunity to offer up a better template ya copped out with a snide comment and didn't even try.
1 replies
6h54m
What do you mean?
0 replies
5h38m
3 replies
40m
A hacker is someone who understands how the world works. It's about knowing what happens when you type "google.com" and press Enter. It's about knowing how your computer turns on, about memory training, A20, all of that. It's about modern processors, their caches, and their side channels. It's about DSi bootloaders and how the right electromagnetic faults can be used to jailbreak them. And it's about how Spotify and Widevine and AES and SGX work so you can free your music from the shackles of DRM.
This is a very... interesting definition of "the world."
1 replies
26m
I humbly suggest that you read beyond the first few paragraphs. The author goes on to significantly expand the definition.
0 replies
10m
I did read the whole article, and I liked it. As an intro, it was a bit discombobulating to see this as the first paragraph.
0 replies
18m
To know how the "world works", to know the causes of things, either includes hackers, or is identical with being a hacker. Is Aristotle a hacker? Human beings desire, by nature, to know. If you live in a technological society, it is important to understand the thicket of technology we find ourselves in, and how to navigate it. That's just prudence, and just a particular determination of the truth, that it was always good to understand oneself and one's predicament.
I guess you can call that a hacker, or count hackers among such people. But then, if the latter, you must offer a distinguishing characteristic that distinguishes hackers among others in this genus.
And what are the author's presuppositions?
3 replies
11h55m
I’ll cut the author some slack because the alternative is worse: knowing things is better than an active posture of ignorance.
But let’s take it easy on the gatekeeping that any of that is even a little complicated.
Quantum chromodynamics is complicated: price-time precedence in financial markets is flash cards.
0 replies
56m
I don't think the author is gatekeeping here. The way I read your comment, you seem to be gatekeeping what is complicated enough
'Tis not a contest. Curiosity is its own reward.
0 replies
32m
The existence of more complicated things does not mean that other things are not also complicated.
Financial markets that are open to the participation of billions of people, amalgamating all the behavior of all those participants, are complicated. Perhaps not nearly as complicated as quantum chromodynamics, I dunno, but complicated nonetheless.
0 replies
7h41m
Flash cards are not understanding, and it doesn't help that few if anyone explains finance without a lot of handwaving and magical thinking.
2 replies
9h19m
If I’ve ever seen an article that needs a tldr, this is it.
Just because we’re both hackers, doesn’t mean you can call on me. I don’t care about all your handles or what you think hacking should be, get to the point and stop wasting my time.
0 replies
2h39m
I appreciate what it is trying to say, it's pretty basic knowledge for anyone that has broken out of "the market is God" mentality though through reading about the basics of finance.
I think the writing style is influenced by WallStreetBets infodumps, which are influenced by Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, and kinda remind me of Hunter S. Thompson a little bit. Personally I find it annoying but I understand the culture that this kind of writing is emerging from.
0 replies
5h14m
For real. A hacker knows this, a hacker knows that. Does a hacker know how to get to the fucking point?
2 replies
6h16m
Entertaining read. To me it feels like a modern version of The Mentor's original manifesto, but having resigned itself to middle age. My inner 12 year old wants to frame this one too.
1 replies
2h29m
0 replies
14m
lol no, that's a sterile self-help blogpost written by some VC.
This is The Mentor's original manifesto: https://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html
2 replies
6h34m
Do group buys for IDA Pro even still exist?
0 replies
3h32m
I thought the move was just using a cracked version until you make it and can afford a real license to flex.
0 replies
2m
IDA has gone full corporations since 8.0, but before that china always used to leak the latest version.
Ironically this time IDA 9.0 was leaked by... hexrays themselves, including lumina, hexvault, etc. Pretty sure it was meant to be a demo page in defcon, but someone leaked the URL.
2 replies
5h27m
"It's about knowing what happens when you type "google.com" and press Enter" is possibly the best short explanation of hacker culture ever.
0 replies
34m
Yep, I still remember the feeling when I first developed at least some mental model for all the steps along the way from "enter" to seeing the results, and realized that it was even more shockingly complex than I imagined it to be when it was just magic, and that despite that complexity, it all actually works many billions of times every moment of every day.
Then what happened is that pretty much every year (maybe closer to every day) since then I have learned about some piece of the puzzle where my mental model was actually nowhere near the truth, and that each individual puzzle piece is even more complex than I thought! Truly wild stuff.
0 replies
5h12m
It literally goes on to say "But being a hacker is so much more than these things." after that, so it's not just about things like those :)
1 replies
4h48m
Good to see phrack finally supporting HTTPS.
0 replies
2h39m
Seriously, who cares, it is an essay in a text file.
1 replies
5h29m
The author is telling us that "Hackers" are people who know enough ins and outs about the things they interact with on a daily basis.
"My point is, it is not just about computers. It's about understanding how the world works. The world is made up of people. As much as machines keep society running, those machines are programmed by people--people with managers, spouses, and children; with wants, needs, and dreams. And it is about using that knowledge to bring about the change you want to see.
That is what being a hacker is all about."
I usually read/listen to people's experiences and whether or not their stories truly make sense depends on how they present them to the world.
0 replies
2h0m
As I said above "for stories to make sense, you must be a good storyteller", and this author is definitely one of them.
A must read for everyone.
1 replies
13h45m
Conway's law
0 replies
11h52m
Gonna need more context for what part you're replying to.
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9h4m
This did not seem as bad as it’s played in the comments - it’s somewhat akin to pg’s breakout essay (pg is much much easier to read) but it’s the same thing - set up a company, make the world better. I like the attitude (even if the text formatting could be improved but house style is house style)
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4h39m
Yeah I think everyone got hung up on the kind of cringy first section. Past the "what is a hacker" junk, it's quite a good article.
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5h5m
Really pointless article
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5h2m
Really pointless comment :P
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6h31m
Looking at the article I was expecting some dude popping out of nowhere on a skateboard.
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3h41m
Hahah I just realized the reference to the movie! Bravo.
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35m
This is my article. Thank you for your kind words, I'm glad you all enjoyed it! I was very surprised to wake up this morning to see it on HN, haha.
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9h21m
I feel miserable as I only check 4 or 5 criterions over 8000.
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5m
As someone who doesn't have a formal understanding of finances/economics, I really enjoyed the first half of this post.
Are there any good resources to understand the world's financial systems as a layman? I'm not looking to be an expert.
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5h58m
Thank you for finding a great way to say what I have been trying to say all my life. I will keep this with me for the rest of my life
-Hassan
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9h43m
3 - How Money Works
Bold
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1h46m
I really enjoyed reading that. Thank you.
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7h49m
“The point is, all of this made me feel very small and powerless after I realized the sheer size of the problems I was staring at. Nowadays, to me it's about creating good jobs for my friends, helping our customers, and taking care of the community. Importantly, I realized that this is still making a bigger positive impact than what I could have done alone just as an individual hacker or engineer.”
I couldn’t have said it better. This is why I’m an entrepreneur and still take the pains to do it.
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11h8m
I'm saying this on the wrong forum...
all this shit I hear about working in early stage startups and I'm honestly surprised why anyone would bother (unless they're a founder)
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3h9m
I'm going to eat meat and I'm not going to change my gender, sorry.
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1h55m
gz nspky ggwp
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3h0m
I agree with the premise and conclusions, but what struck me, particularly, about this was how well it was written. Thanks to the author for a super piece.
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1h31m
Knowing that you're not worth burning a 0day on
This has been a pretty tried and true way for me to figure out who is schizophrenic and who is important.
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5h4m
Hackers should not think of themselves as "oh I am this little guy fighting Big Corporation" or whatever. [...] Instead become the corporation
Hacker culture is inherently antiauthoritarian. Wanting to become the big corporation is something you would expect only from "hacker" "news".
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7h10m
Absolutely great read. My thesis is you have to understand how the world works and one aspect of it is quickly identifying mainstream lies: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/the-secret-o...
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1h10m
Good news....you know that worry about zero interest?
TARP was closed in fall of 2023 as all assets were sold off, see https://home.treasury.gov/data/troubled-asset-relief-program
That means assuming we do not screw up again, no more zero or negative interest situations.
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2h55m
"It's about knowing more about the web than most, but still choosing to make your site as mobile-unfriendly as possible." /s
EDIT: I actually love that it's text based, even to the point of creating sigma notation out of plain text.
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28m
As a ex-hacker who left the scene to wear a suit and become a "grown-up", this is refreshing and much more palatable vision of the community that I wish I had seen more of when I was younger:
`` Hackers should not think of themselves as "oh I am this little guy fighting Big Corporation" or whatever. This is low agency behavior. Instead become the corporation and RUN IT THE WAY YOU THINK IT SHOULD BE RUN." ''
One question though, to the suggestion that hackers should focus on raising capital in a way that gives them breathing room... how the hell am I supposed to do that?
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1h14m
If your company is successful, won’t the VCs just spin up some clones?
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2h15m
So a young hacker turned tech bro learned about the financial markets and told himself he was still a hacker working in tech and financial markets. But I see nothing of hacking here. I see pontificating about an "ethos" and how great hackers are, and making it seem like financial markets, bitcoin and startups is some mysterious unknown to "hack". Really it's just a job. Hey, you wanna nerd out on this stuff, that's great. But just doing a job in financial markets or silicon valley doesn't make you a hacker, or what you do hacking.
phrack has always had this kind of article. i'm sure if you grep for "A hacker is" or "the hacker ethos" you'll get a hit for every phrack issue going back to the 80s.
Only thing I fail to understand is why a hacker needs to know where to buy estrogen… I can more easily take the idea of hacker knowing how to cook Molotov cocktails.
There have been hypotheses that a significant number of trans women (i.e. biological men who identify as women) are actually on the autism spectrum. Considering natural tendency of autistic people to prefer isolated activities and puzzles, there may be a correlation between hackers and trans women.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27872002/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26753812/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38803560/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38831234/
As with any novel phenomena, especially in sociology, it is very hard to provide tangible evidence for anything. If you demand nobody speaks of anything of sort without hard evidence, rarely anything would ever be said.
Eh, that is some bullshit, but there is evidence though. I edited my comment to provide it, instead of asking you to do so.
Nice of you to do that. Thank you.
Even if this is true, it need not be either-or. Saying that they are 'actually' autistic seems to imply that you do not believe that they are 'actually' trans.
Might also depend on how you define "hacker". Most people don't know the true meaning of the word, and should be using "cracker" instead.
This is only an example of the type of thing a hacker would do- a hacker is willing to solve problems on their own on their own even if it requires methods that are illegal, dangerous, or complex.
A lot of people throw their hands up and give up when they need an expensive medication they can't get prescribed but in general you can often buy them overseas, grey market, make them yourself, etc.
Replying to awooooo who was flagged dead:
What a person "needs" is complex and individual. Unless you are their doctor or are paying for it, your opinion of what medications a person needs is irrelevant- it is absolutely none of your business.
This nit-picking is in no way central to my point as it was a general statement about hacker culture ethos not any particular person or medication, so why did you post it? With only two comments so far - It appears you joined HN just to share anti-trans bigotry? That isn't okay. This is not a "hate forum" - accepting people that are different is a fundamental aspect of hacker and HN culture.
@awooooo - nonsense, you have people minding their own business and being themselves, and you don't approve so you are insulting them, and trying to say they need to hide who they are or be different. That is just plain old bigotry. Being trans doesn't hurt of affect other women in any way.
I'm willing to bet you are different in some way that isn't acceptable to others, so you feel the need to hide it out of fear, or hoping for acceptance. It's true of most people, and the fact that people need to hide themselves is awful.. and what you are contributing to here.
I'm not trans but I am neurodivergent in a way that I can't hide, and was bullied and attacked for being different a lot of my life. Bigots that only know of one way people can be different would call me "queer" when they cornered me in the school hallway in groups to try to hurt me. Luckily for me, I'm a strong guy, and even being in groups they usually had a worse time of it than I did. I understand what that is like, and don't wish it on anyone. I want a world where people can mind their own business as themselves without hiding and without awful people trying to shame or attack them.
A few years ago I freaked out the Reddit moderators on a sub called /r/bodymods , which was, ostensibly, about modifying your body, when I asked about the feasibility of doing ones own liposuction.
I'm not saying that's a good or bad idea from a medical perspective, but I certainly was off-put by their hypocrisy at shutting me down and their myopic definition of "body mods" which apparently to them was just poking holes in their face.
Unless you think/say/repeat the same things as everyone else on a subreddit you get downvoted and shadowbanned. It has the most aggressive and militant groupthink culture I've seen anywhere, which makes it pretty useless for trying to learn new things or share new ideas.
If you have any type of niche hobby for example, and someone finds a new and better way of doing something, they will pretty much universally be attacked and censored.
I see you have only met a narrow subset of hackers.
They may be hacking their own body to a binary that's different from their source code
why not both?
That part is definitely not aimed at every reader, but it is appropriately used to highlight how some might circumvent the lengthy legal processes involved in getting estrogen. Moreover, it points to the possible need for them to compound it themselves which in turn makes them a hacker.
Estradiol valerate (which is what the article actually names) seems to be used for a wide variety of female reproductive health issues, especially when (as the article suggests) it's compounded with other drugs. It's also used by transgender people as a hormone therapy. A hacker might live in a place where gender-affirming healthcare is illegal or unavailable, or where female reproductive healthcare in general is difficult or expensive to obtain.
Reproductive healthcare is much more broadly useful than Molotov cocktails.
Phrack's tendency toward the edgy sentiment aside, I sort of understand it. Sort of.
I grew up in the era of BBSs, microcomputers giving way to full desktops in the US and payphones we're still slightly interesting. though phreaking was sadly in its final days. I also had (and have) severe social anxiety, but had no idea what that was at the time. I just knew I did not understand the world or people much at all, seeing them as sloppy systems that seemed to operate without any predictable set of rules aside from maybe self-preservation and immediate gratification.
So when I started taking apart computers, futzing with software and seeing what made the beige boxes tick, I found I could understand those with far more clarity. I also found other people like me in the message boards and a local library. Naturally, this became my world, because I knew how to navigate it better than people who had little interest in using a computer for anything beyond homework or accounting.
It really felt like there was this whole reality that sat on top of the "common" reality and I had ascended to it with some silly notion of secret knowledge. You can image how addicting that would feel to someone who does not do well social and felt very, very outcast as a kid.
I guess the difference between myself and a lot of Phrack authors, whom I still very much respect for laying the paving stones that I got to walk on, is that as I got older, I dealt with my anxiety and found that my genuine curiosity was more of an asset to enriching myself than a key to the door of some secret counter-culture. Hacking, colloquially speaking, went mainstream and sort of left me in the dust, having become impossible for any one person to keep up with the flood of new methods, exploits, etc as the Internet exploded and suddenly everyone had computers in some form or another.
I moved on, more or less. Yes, I still tinker, as a hobby and a form of therapy, but mostly with old computers and industrial machines, since that's part of my adult career, but I miss that feeling of being part of some counter-culture-like group, whether it was real or not.
I can totally see where it would be hard to let go of that. Heck, I'd post that some of the Phrack authors have no business letting go of it since they helped define that whole world and need to keep it alive. I say let them be edgy. I have trouble with that, myself, but I respect it.
Sorry, this turned into a "Hacker Perspective" 2600 article, I guess.
I petition a 1337 Laureate nomination if such nomination exist.
I really liked reading your comment.
Somewhat related. I used to think, if I get really good at some thing, people will respect or admire me more. So I do my utmost best to be excellent at what I do.
I found out that getting respect or admiration works differently. When you are very good in one area, you come across as geeky/nerdy. That fills nicely a respected stereotype in film, where the geek finds the missing piece for saving the world. But in the real world, most people don't care.
Also I more recently found out that if you show you are trying really hard, that comes across as feeling very unsure about yourself.
So about the article, understanding how the world works. The author clearly has understanding about financial markets. He knows a lot about security weaknesses and how to exploit them. It is all knowledge available on the web after all, if you spend a lot of nights studying it, it starts to click.
The world is so much more than that though. For me, it is mostly how you interact with it, and the best interactions are with people. At work, at home, on HN.
Why do I work? I make something, I fix a problem, I discuss what is important, it makes somebody happy because it aligns with their goal. Be it a colleague who wants their design reviewed, a customer who has a problem with your product, or a manager who wants a new feature.
That's a fascinating view.
In fact, I'd say most FOSS GUIs from the 90s and early 00s make a lot more sense if you see them as having the hidden/bonus goal of repelling this "world of people." I just remember using something like Dynebolic for the first time, (or, much later, Popcorn Time) and having the feeling I'd just found a sparkling piece of amethyst among so many clods of dirt. Hackers always seemed to me way too curious and lazy to shovel dirt in their spare time; basic resentment/elitism toward society so cleanly explain so many parts of FOSS, everything from the amount of time it's taken to get a decent multi-screen configuration GUI to that old error message, "You don't exist. Go away!"
Digression-- I remember reading an interview of someone who wrote one of the APIs to get multi-screen video working in Linux. They'd written about how they realized that what they'd wrote would be generally useful and therefore needed a GUI. But they didn't have expertise in GUI design nor any interest in maintaining one. So they set down and explicitly wrote a terrible GUI with the goal of making it so bad it'd be less helpful than just using the command line, thus forcing someone else to take on the task of replacing the awful GUI.
Does anyone remember what that was? The visual metaphor was something to do with playing cards. Anyhow, I'd love to see that GUI!
Thoughtful and insightful reflection, thanks for sharing. I think that interplay between personal sense-making, personal strengths and the addictive/rewarding aspects of belonging to a specialized/esoteric community are a very common combination driving the creation of new narratives, new factions/interest and, ultimately, all kinds of change in general… for better or for worse, usually only time and intervening chance can tell. It’s cool how meaningful it is to the participants, and also cool when you can zoom out and connect it to the experiences of others across space and time.
I disagree. What went mainstream is a pale imitation of what hacking originally was.
Are you Phrack by chance?
Different kinds of hackers then, I suppose.