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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.]
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.
[+] [-] AYBABTME|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] easterncalculus|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] coldpie|1 year ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] derangedHorse|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] set5think|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] stong1|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] minusLik|1 year ago|reply
"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."
[+] [-] MetaWhirledPeas|1 year ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] windowshopping|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] set5think|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] spirobelv2|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Aleksdev|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xEF|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] beardedwizard|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dimator|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] biofox|1 year ago|reply
`` 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?
[+] [-] ilrwbwrkhv|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Elfener|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] winterrx|1 year ago|reply
This.
[+] [-] benreesman|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tux3|1 year ago|reply
'Tis not a contest. Curiosity is its own reward.
[+] [-] sanderjd|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] willguest|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] goodpoint|1 year ago|reply
Hacker culture is inherently antiauthoritarian. Wanting to become the big corporation is something you would expect only from "hacker" "news".
[+] [-] default-kramer|1 year ago|reply
> 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.]
[+] [-] kazcaptain|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yetihehe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sureglymop|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bratwurst3000|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] defrost|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rfl890|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 78987978k87|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shahzaibmushtaq|1 year ago|reply
> "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.
[+] [-] shahzaibmushtaq|1 year ago|reply
A must read for everyone.
[+] [-] boomskats|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vicken|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] neycoda|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] iwontberude|1 year ago|reply
This has been a pretty tried and true way for me to figure out who is schizophrenic and who is important.