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.
Feel basically the opposite, in fact I would go to say this takeawway is the wrong one - the article is titled "Calling All Hackers" but can't go three headings without talking about shitcoins and venture capital. There's the HN definition of hacker and the infosec one, and phrack is for the latter. "High tech, low life" hackers don't have obsessions with venture capital.
Well isn't that the thesis of the article? It's meant to be an explanation of the modern startup economy (HN) for the capital-H Hacker.
> 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.
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?
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.
>> 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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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?
Intrinsic value, like all value, is subjective. Always look for an audience that will value whatever it is you're making. When you use what you intrinsically value as a proxy for what a loosely-defined demographic values, it can lead you down a long road of building things that no one but you thinks is useful.
Thank you for the article! I found the "I understand computers and therefore the world" in the beginning a bit pretentious, but after reading the rest anyway, it doesn't anymore. I'd summarize the piece as:
"The hacker mindset comes with powerful tools: The urge to figure stuff out, the creativity to use it in unusual ways and the passion to share knowledge. Let's use it to make the world a better place. Start a company and gather allies. If enough of us do this, we'll have an impact on the world."
Yep. I know this is probably a bit revisionist (old-timey inventors wanted to get rich quick too) but it feels like companies used to more often be geared toward longevity, not ascendance, and I don't see how they could achieve longevity while constantly trying to make shareholders rich. Longevity really should be up there on the list of goals, with security and prosperity for all those involved.
I suppose a meat grinder growfast company could invent world-improving products that justify employee churn and abuse, but those would be unicorns with diamond encrusted horns.
What is the point of any of our actions if they don't benefit people?
The story of GE under Jack Welch and his underlings that spread out from there is horrifying. Boeing got caught up in it with the MD reverse acquisition. There was an audiobook I listened to recently that covered a bunch of this but I can't for the life of me find the title right now.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
Ha my friend. I asked this exact question to myself. I tried going down the VC route but realized it's all a big scam and the numbers don't add up if you are genuinely trying to build something better.
What I ended up doing is stacking cash at large tech companies and then using that to quit and I finally ended up with a large cash cow business with $4 million profits (pre tax).
With hacking, you can get double digit and even triple digit millionaire in about 10 years. Trick is to be really earnest, build at the frontier of tech, market efficiently and treat it like a math problem. You are trying to optimize for enterprise value.
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.
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)
> You can understand computers and science and math as much as you want, but
you will not be able to fix the bigger issues by yourself. The systems
that run the world are much bigger than what we can break on our laptops
and lab benches.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)?
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
I don't think there's especially compelling evidence out there that the world is dying.
People have been saying that forever. Especially during downswings like we've had lately (which is somewhat minor all told).
And then the world doesn't die but they spent a bunch of time dooming instead of staying ready for the inevitable opportunities that come from things turning around.
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
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.
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.
> 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.]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 |
I come from the later phone phreak era of the 90's and late 2000's. The phraase "hack the planet" from the movie hackers I love. You can control anything once you understand its behavior. 5 minutes is all you need to cause a little chaos.
life is all about systems. once you understand how to break down systems, you can hack all of them. it does not matter what your knowledge or skill level is on a particular system as long as you can break it all down to its fundamental parts and understand its behavior. most things you only need to observe before understanding.
I agree with others though, the article comes across as a little cocky. its also fine to be a hacker who only focuses on one particular area. it does not make you less of a hacker. you only need to understand systems.
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.
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.
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.
They are saying the exact opposite! The whole essay is about how financial markets are not some "mysterious unknown" and are instead predictable systems that are masked in a layer of bullshit that you can lean into and take advantage of. As a non-finance person, understanding "why" obviously terrible ideas get investment helps me understand how the world works. If we replaced the humans in the financial system with APIs, there would be inputs (pitch deck, founder persona, whatever) that can cleverly lead to an intended solution (raising capital, starting a company) in the same way that I could find a vulnerability on RuneScape or Eve Online, which I'm sure satisfies the traditional "hacker" definition. It's obviously not that cut-and-dry, but approaching the world in the "hacker mindset" is about observing and manipulating these systems.
> The whole essay is about how financial markets are not some "mysterious unknown" and are instead predictable systems that are masked in a layer of bullshit that you can lean into and take advantage of.
If someone goes out of their way to tell you about a thing in detail, emphasizing how it's not a mysterious unknown, the conceit is that they think that you thought it was a mysterious unknown, and they are removing the blinders from your poor ignorant eyes.
> As a non-finance person, understanding "why" obviously terrible ideas get investment helps me understand how the world works.
> If we replaced the humans in the financial system with APIs, there would be inputs (pitch deck, founder persona, whatever) that can cleverly lead to an intended solution (raising capital, starting a company) in the same way that I could find a vulnerability on RuneScape or Eve Online
I'm sorry, but you really don't understand how the world works.
> approaching the world in the "hacker mindset" is about observing and manipulating these systems
The hacker mindset is curiosity and discovery, not observing and manipulating. It's one thing to study a thing; it's another to become it.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
Binary Ninja is a solid competitor if you don't mind cleaning up the binaries before hand to clear up opaque jumps or have 256GB of ram.
I appreciate the spirit of this article - to use knowledge to bring about the change you want to see. However, while my friends are being helped by my knowledge, someone else is trying to help their friends. And I imagine this scenario has played out many times in modern society.
In this system, someone has to lose for someone to win. Felt like a strong reminder that capitalism subsumes all critique into itself.
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.
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.
I don’t care what influenced it, I might be more interested if I know the content is actually of interest but it presumably took several paragraphs to get there. I didn’t know it was about marketing, because I stopped reading.
A hacker should know how to captivate their audience, particularly when talking about marketing.
Sure, but if you spend 10m to read an article every time someone gave you an article, when you’re not even sure if you’re interested, then you’re wasting your life.
> “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.
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.
Feel basically the opposite, in fact I would go to say this takeawway is the wrong one - the article is titled "Calling All Hackers" but can't go three headings without talking about shitcoins and venture capital. There's the HN definition of hacker and the infosec one, and phrack is for the latter. "High tech, low life" hackers don't have obsessions with venture capital.
Well isn't that the thesis of the article? It's meant to be an explanation of the modern startup economy (HN) for the capital-H Hacker.
> 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.
Agreed. Remember when hacking was about meddling with systems of global finance rather than engaging with them earnestly? This guy doesn’t.
At one point you grow up and realize the fastest way to your goals is using money, and best bet to get lots of money fast is the VC game.
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That's the vibe I would have if I didn't read past the first third of the post.
> "High tech, low life" hackers don't have obsessions with venture capital.
This sounds like you're conflating aesthetics with what the article is actually discussing.
> 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?
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.
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>> 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.
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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.
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?
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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.
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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.
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?
Intrinsic value, like all value, is subjective. Always look for an audience that will value whatever it is you're making. When you use what you intrinsically value as a proxy for what a loosely-defined demographic values, it can lead you down a long road of building things that no one but you thinks is useful.
agreed, wholeheartedly.
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.
Thank you for the article! I found the "I understand computers and therefore the world" in the beginning a bit pretentious, but after reading the rest anyway, it doesn't anymore. I'd summarize the piece as:
"The hacker mindset comes with powerful tools: The urge to figure stuff out, the creativity to use it in unusual ways and the passion to share knowledge. Let's use it to make the world a better place. Start a company and gather allies. If enough of us do this, we'll have an impact on the world."
> Keep it private and closely held
Yep. I know this is probably a bit revisionist (old-timey inventors wanted to get rich quick too) but it feels like companies used to more often be geared toward longevity, not ascendance, and I don't see how they could achieve longevity while constantly trying to make shareholders rich. Longevity really should be up there on the list of goals, with security and prosperity for all those involved.
I suppose a meat grinder growfast company could invent world-improving products that justify employee churn and abuse, but those would be unicorns with diamond encrusted horns.
What is the point of any of our actions if they don't benefit people?
The story of GE under Jack Welch and his underlings that spread out from there is horrifying. Boeing got caught up in it with the MD reverse acquisition. There was an audiobook I listened to recently that covered a bunch of this but I can't for the life of me find the title right now.
What is A20? I guess I'm not a hacker...
Great job Luna!
can you give a tldr? whats the point? how are we going to get rich? what is your answer?
The answer is solely seeking to get rich isn’t the hacker spirit.
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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.
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 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.
> 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.
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!
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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.
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> Hacking, colloquially speaking, went mainstream
I disagree. What went mainstream is a pale imitation of what hacking originally was.
I petition a 1337 Laureate nomination if such nomination exist.
Are you Phrack by chance?
Different kinds of hackers then, I suppose.
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.
The people in those past articles weren't crypto startup CEOs, or startup CEOs at all most of the time.
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.
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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?
Ha my friend. I asked this exact question to myself. I tried going down the VC route but realized it's all a big scam and the numbers don't add up if you are genuinely trying to build something better.
What I ended up doing is stacking cash at large tech companies and then using that to quit and I finally ended up with a large cash cow business with $4 million profits (pre tax).
With hacking, you can get double digit and even triple digit millionaire in about 10 years. Trick is to be really earnest, build at the frontier of tech, market efficiently and treat it like a math problem. You are trying to optimize for enterprise value.
That is an impressive achievement. Kudos, my friend! There is still hope for me then? :)
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"It's about knowing what happens when you type "google.com" and press Enter" is possibly the best short explanation of hacker culture ever.
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.
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 :)
We used to know what would happen. Now with AI, it might recommend putting glue on pizza or making bioweapons for a potluck.
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)
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.
>"what is a hacker" junk
I didn't find the part about having a curiosity about computers cringe frankly.
> You can understand computers and science and math as much as you want, but you will not be able to fix the bigger issues by yourself. The systems that run the world are much bigger than what we can break on our laptops and lab benches.
This.
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.
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.
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.
Flash cards are not understanding, and it doesn't help that few if anyone explains finance without a lot of handwaving and magical thinking.
> "... 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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
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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)?
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
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a smart weirdo can rationalize the world and life, yes. They will probably be very, very wrong in interesting smart ways, tho.
I don't think the author is guilty of that.
I don't think there's especially compelling evidence out there that the world is dying.
People have been saying that forever. Especially during downswings like we've had lately (which is somewhat minor all told).
And then the world doesn't die but they spent a bunch of time dooming instead of staying ready for the inevitable opportunities that come from things turning around.
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.
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
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> 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?
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.
> given the insane proliferation of valueless derivatives and ejection of human values from these systems
might want to clarify a bit there
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.
> 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".
> 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.]
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.
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.
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.
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Interesting thought experiment you’ve shared. Thanks now my mind is running
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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.
> 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.
They're in a privileged position. Someone who's not already in a privileged position can't necessarily get there just by trying super hard.
i like this take a lot, what I get is hacker = infinitely curious individual
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.
I personally prefer "infinitely creative individual", with the non-artsy definition of creative: to create something
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That's always been my interpretation of it! I would use the term "insatiably curious" to describe it to people.
thats a good take . i would add “ a person that wants to understand how thinks work to manipulate them”
'hacking' is commonly defined as "using tools for something else than their initial purpose".
It's worse formatted than dang's stuff, but ya tried
Given the opportunity to offer up a better template ya copped out with a snide comment and didn't even try.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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What do you mean?
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=phrack.org
That article is worth reading. If you don't have the time, at least take a look at the "liquidity cycle" ASCII art: it is wonderful!
I come from the later phone phreak era of the 90's and late 2000's. The phraase "hack the planet" from the movie hackers I love. You can control anything once you understand its behavior. 5 minutes is all you need to cause a little chaos.
life is all about systems. once you understand how to break down systems, you can hack all of them. it does not matter what your knowledge or skill level is on a particular system as long as you can break it all down to its fundamental parts and understand its behavior. most things you only need to observe before understanding.
I agree with others though, the article comes across as a little cocky. its also fine to be a hacker who only focuses on one particular area. it does not make you less of a hacker. you only need to understand systems.
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.
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.
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.
FYI: https://davidgcohen.com/2011/08/28/the-mentor-manifesto/
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
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This isn't just a call to all hackers...this is a call to all entrepreneurs. It really highlights the artificial success of many companies today.
The author may know how the world works but they don't know how to make an easily-readable webpage.
> 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.
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.
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)
Good to see phrack finally supporting HTTPS.
Seriously, who cares, it is an essay in a text file.
because your ISP doesn't need to know what your read?
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Loved this. Thank you for putting it together, I could relate to it on a level you couldn’t possibly imagine.
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.
They are saying the exact opposite! The whole essay is about how financial markets are not some "mysterious unknown" and are instead predictable systems that are masked in a layer of bullshit that you can lean into and take advantage of. As a non-finance person, understanding "why" obviously terrible ideas get investment helps me understand how the world works. If we replaced the humans in the financial system with APIs, there would be inputs (pitch deck, founder persona, whatever) that can cleverly lead to an intended solution (raising capital, starting a company) in the same way that I could find a vulnerability on RuneScape or Eve Online, which I'm sure satisfies the traditional "hacker" definition. It's obviously not that cut-and-dry, but approaching the world in the "hacker mindset" is about observing and manipulating these systems.
> The whole essay is about how financial markets are not some "mysterious unknown" and are instead predictable systems that are masked in a layer of bullshit that you can lean into and take advantage of.
If someone goes out of their way to tell you about a thing in detail, emphasizing how it's not a mysterious unknown, the conceit is that they think that you thought it was a mysterious unknown, and they are removing the blinders from your poor ignorant eyes.
> As a non-finance person, understanding "why" obviously terrible ideas get investment helps me understand how the world works.
> If we replaced the humans in the financial system with APIs, there would be inputs (pitch deck, founder persona, whatever) that can cleverly lead to an intended solution (raising capital, starting a company) in the same way that I could find a vulnerability on RuneScape or Eve Online
I'm sorry, but you really don't understand how the world works.
> approaching the world in the "hacker mindset" is about observing and manipulating these systems
The hacker mindset is curiosity and discovery, not observing and manipulating. It's one thing to study a thing; it's another to become it.
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.
Looking up new terms on investopedia and going down rabbit holes from there is not a bad start, I think.
Looking at the article I was expecting some dude popping out of nowhere on a skateboard.
Hahah I just realized the reference to the movie! Bravo.
Great narration! Thanks for the article.
Loved this line: "Nowadays, to me it's about creating good jobs for my friends, helping our customers, and taking care of the community".
Good luck!
> 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."
I humbly suggest that you read beyond the first few paragraphs. The author goes on to significantly expand the definition.
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.
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?
I feel miserable as I only check 4 or 5 criterions over 8000.
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.
Do group buys for IDA Pro even still exist?
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.
Binary Ninja is a solid competitor if you don't mind cleaning up the binaries before hand to clear up opaque jumps or have 256GB of ram.
I thought the move was just using a cracked version until you make it and can afford a real license to flex.
I really enjoyed reading that. Thank you.
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...
This is such a beautifully written story with it's own kind of elegance. Love it!
I appreciate the spirit of this article - to use knowledge to bring about the change you want to see. However, while my friends are being helped by my knowledge, someone else is trying to help their friends. And I imagine this scenario has played out many times in modern society.
In this system, someone has to lose for someone to win. Felt like a strong reminder that capitalism subsumes all critique into itself.
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
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.
For real. A hacker knows this, a hacker knows that. Does a hacker know how to get to the fucking point?
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.
I don’t care what influenced it, I might be more interested if I know the content is actually of interest but it presumably took several paragraphs to get there. I didn’t know it was about marketing, because I stopped reading.
A hacker should know how to captivate their audience, particularly when talking about marketing.
This article took less than 10m for me to read. That is really not much time.
Sure, but if you spend 10m to read an article every time someone gave you an article, when you’re not even sure if you’re interested, then you’re wasting your life.
> 3 - How Money Works
Bold
Lmao I read the title as Optimus Prime as he says "Calling all autobots"
gz nspky ggwp
Conway's law
Gonna need more context for what part you're replying to.
If your company is successful, won’t the VCs just spin up some clones?
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"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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> “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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I don't get the point of this comment. Was it ChatGPT-generated?
should've been a post. you're right. who knows? maybe it could've topped HN .. or should I say RN (runnersnews?)
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Cool.
Really pointless article
Really pointless comment :P
Web Page Blocked!
:-(
Sounds like someone (your parents? the company you work at? your school?) have installed a firewall of some sorts.
That seems like a problem on your end.
Aha, caught browsing in the job. Head to HR for your daily beating.
Hahah