Please don't accuse other users of astroturfing or shilling unless you have evidence. It degrades discussion, badly. In this case it even crosses into personal attack, which we ban people for, so please don't.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14925431 and marked it off-topic.

Not him. I made a throwaway because of the nature of the discussion and to eliminate the very small chance he or someone else could infer who I might be. No point giving them my main account's history to help them guess.

I'm not a fan of his at all. I do think he and his talents are interesting, and he's arguably one of the most notorious black hats of the past 5 years. I spoke nicely of him to counterbalance the listing of objectively very unethical crimes he committed against people and organizations. I did not mean "this guy stole credit cards" in an adulating way - I meant the opposite.

You're a moron.

If you really think so though, mailto:hn@ycombinator.com