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Comment by tylerscott | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of when I first discovered the Win32 API and used it to write some silly annoying apps in Borland C++ Builder. This was around 1998 and the worst I ever came up with was a persistent pop up that was difficult to remove due to some registry obfuscation. It had a single button that would open the CDROM tray. I put it on every computer in the lab. Good times. You’re right—it used to be playful to hack around. I miss those days.

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We played a lot of counter strike during my uni days and at one point I created a prank program that disguised itself as system.exe and listened for mouse movement. It would then inject random but smooth error into the mouse movement. I installed it on a friend's PC and it drove him to white hot rage. I think he destroyed a couple of mice before I owned up and bought him a new high end Logitech laser mouse (which was a novel thing at the time).

That's clever and awesome, in the true spirit of hacking.

I just wanted to write it was a crime still back then and take the example of the first worm in 1988 : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm TIL: a Harvard student named Paul Graham was quite close to Robert Morris. It is a small world.

you might be interested in seeing the founders of yc https://www.ycombinator.com/people/

Immediately searched for dang when I saw there were portraits there. He seems to be the only one who doesn't show his face!

The ghost in the shell

I never really looked at this page before. Wow, I still kind of think of YC as a small company but the reality is that they have more employees than I thought.

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