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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

I am particularly sad about current state of Meta. Regardless of what people think of Facebook and Zuck, he was unapologetically a hacker. I visited FB campus few times and emphasis on hacker culture everywhere was just immensely delightful. He knew the value of good hacker and raised bar for the compensation across the entire industry. Ship your code today was absolutely refreshing. Number of open source projects that has came out of Meta is unparalleled for number of employees. MetaAI had been well protected and is one of the strongest engine for progress in AI. I always viewed it as a company run by a hacker for hackers.

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I do not think he is evil, just really disconnected from reality, which in all honesty most C-Levels are.

From his statement it sounds like he really believed people would accept the pandemic’s restrictions as a “new normal” and this would leap-frog humanity into the virtual world for good.

I am a highly cynical and pessimistic person and even I knew this wasn’t happening. People around the World were literally risking their lives and their loved ones for a little physical connection. Our generation, it turns out, is still very human centric and we are still ultimately social beings, not just social minds. Maybe kids born into YouTube, who are now coming of age, will be different, yet I still would not bet 11 thousand lives on it.

> People around the World were literally risking their lives and their loved ones for a little physical connection.

Other people kept working their blue collar jobs at mines and oil pads as if nothing had happened. Once I was on the mine sites, there was no indication of anything different. No masks or any other BS.

My 'rona experience was totally different than the wfh keyboard careers.

upvotes are unfortunately not visible. while my comment adds minimal, I want to amplify this comment.

It's the "caveman principle" [0] at work. We are still biologically pretty much the same. Hopefully, it means that something like Metaverse will never materialize or that it will take the emergence of a Matrix-like VR first.

[0] https://associationsnow.com/2013/04/how-the-future-of-associ...

NSA is also probably a great place for hackers, but their mission is trash. Someone once drew a 2x2 grid for me. One dimension was competence, and the other was right mission. I was then asked what is the most dangerous square on the grid. The answer is competent with the wrong mission.

What's wrong with the NSA's mission?

Analysts stealing nudes isn't the mission.

You don't agree with the tiny sliver of the NSA mission that you know about.

90% of the work they do is purely defensive. The offensive work targets bad actors and foreign governments/militaries, compared to other countries intelligence services that also engage in economic espionage.

In a perfect world they wouldn't need to exist at all. But we don't live in that world.

How do you square this with the constitution? Need to capture all the data on the internet and sift through it for the greater good?

Clearly not, and if we look at who enacted the NSA and current events of stifling speech we have a clear answer.

Given the natural opaqueness of the organization I would likely fundamentally disagree with a great deal more of what the NSA mission is if I had any knowledge of it.

They also basically have zero real congressional oversight.

And just because 90% of what they do is purely defensive doesn't make the 10% any more acceptable (x key score, data mining, hooking into Google, etc.)

You contradict yourself. If you don't know what they are doing behind the curtain, how can you be so confident that 90% of what they do is defensive?

They don't work within the bounds of the law and constitution, and thus their mission is bad by my simple definition. I don't need to know what they do in secret.

"They don't work within the bounds of the law and constitution"

So what has your research on this uncovered?

The first thing that comes to my mind is the whole Snowden series of events. Spying every citizen, is wrong. Also, I'm seeing the effects of something similar in my country, where this sort of spying is used to curb free speech, dissent, and completely kill the very essence of democracy.

It is wrong, and there has to be better ways. I don't remember the exact procedure, but NSA didn't need much clearance to spy on any American citizen.

Are you really unaware of this? It was the top story in the country for months. A documentary about it even won an Oscar. As someone else has already replied, we are talking about the vast domestic spying apparatus that Snowden revealed, including the PRISM and xkeyscore programs. They are unquestionably unconstitutional and illegal. Anyone that suggested they existed before the reveal was an insane paranoid nutjob. Furthermore, the fact that there was virtually nothing done about this severe crime by the rest of the government indicates that the entire system is a farce. The NSA is still doing the same thing as before, and probably more.

Another angle is how do you prosecute the head of intelligence when everything is supposed to be secret.

That is what Denmark is trying to find out:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/denmark-charges-spy-chi...

Sometimes people have clearances and they speak vaguely to avoid literal jail. Consequences are high here.

Ok and sometimes people just say unsubstantiated shit on the internet. Which one is it? Do you have some inside knowledge on the commenter?

I can’t comment on the specific poster, but I once held a clearance and can relate.

People with clearances also have huge incentives to lie to themselves about the decency of what they're doing. One of the main thing secrecy protects, is such people's morale.

You know what they say, "if they cheat with you, they cheat on you too". A liar is a liar. If your job involves seeking people's trust in order to betray it, you're not very smart if you think your boss wouldn't betray you.

> 90% of the work they do is purely defensive.

You have literally no idea whether that’s true. Even if you somehow did, you couldn’t prove it here.

You could be right—but your assertion has zero credibility.

> You don't agree with the tiny sliver of the NSA mission that you know about.

Strong "trust me bro" vibes.

Hand-waving and baseless assertions don't contradict the fact that it conducts activities against it's country's most basic founding principles and laws.

This regrettable line of argument is in line with blindly defending the police in spite of all the police murders, abuse, and outright corruption.

I never had much complaint about Facebook's engineering culture, it seems like they get more right than the other giant tech companies.

Facebook's failures were always with business morals and product direction, and it's the latter that they really really screwed up on this time with the attempt to turn their cash cow into TikTok and the investment into the metaverse.

"Number of open source projects that has came out of Meta is unparalleled for number of employees." Minor nit, the unparalleled part doesn't hold true here. Meta has about 600 open source projects which is nice, but Google has had over 8,000 open source projects. Meta is nowhere near Google's level of open source community support for the number of employees proportionally. Google has about twice as many employees but over 13 times the amount of open source projects.

Considering that most of Google's open source projects are of the "throw over the wall" kind, where they don't really care about the wider community, when most of Meta's projects (that I've seen) are interacting with and creating communities, it's not really comparable.

TLDR: by KLOC Google might have more, but arguably Meta's have more impact.

Maybe it got to his head, like child movie stars that never enjoyed a normal childhood? Being a hacker is no guarantee of being a well adapted adult, specially if your hobby transforms into an international behemoth in just 15 years.

That is how cabals work.

I get your point, but is that really such a great thing when it comes to business ethics? e.g., spying on people and hacking their private communications just to get ahead: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-i...

He was 19 there right? Thankfully I've seen people who were writing keyloggers at that age be very decent, good people, so that article isn't an indictment of who he is now - plenty of things to look at more recent than that. It would be really nice to hear him candidly express how he fucked up with the rohingya, and content promotion/moderation.

> he was unapologetically a hacker

Huh? Like Gates and Musk, he's not even a highly skilled developer, even less a hacker.

Seriously I was never aware how badly the word's meaning has been butchered by the SV techbros until I joined the site.

I first heard it used to traditionally describe computer security whizzes like Kevin Mitnick, Diffie & Hellman, Robert Morris (Morris worm) etc. But apparently the last ~15 years it's just a compliment for the next random corporate grifter who has 0 technical experience and is just in for the $$$.

However Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years before or right after dropping out of Harvard by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=922367...

> Seriously I was never aware how badly the word's meaning has been butchered by the SV techbros until I joined the site.

Spot on.

> However Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years back by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field.

Wait, what?

> Wait, what?

Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years back by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field.

It might be Gates and Papadimitriou (1979): Bounds for Sorting by Prefix Reversal.

https://dodona.ugent.be/exercises/189028897/media/gates1979....

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012365X79...

> ...he had helped make some significant contributions a few years back...

Article says his paper on it was published in 1979, which was 43 years ago. I wouldn't call that 'a few years back'. I interpreted your comment as he took a break from his philanthropy to come up to an efficient solution to the problem like 3-5 years ago.

Holy shit that's a very misleading typo. Thanks for pointing it out.

No problem. It's still cool, still makes him a hacker, just slightly less impressive than if he had done it while juggling the needs of his Foundation.

> computer security whizzes like Kevin Mitnick

Strange because Mitnick puts most of his exploits down to social engineering, not technical prowess.

But then taking anything a self-confessed social engineer says about themselves at face value is obviously problematic.

I know but it certainly was one of the most prominent names when I was googling for best hackers ( :-) ) back in 2005.

Still, I prefer having someone like Kevin in mind when saying the word instead of any other desperate "growth hacker" that is trying to mislead VCs with their trite ideas that will forever change tech the way we know it.

Your claim is that solving a hard math problem (which takes smarts for sure!) is more "hacker" than bulding a web app (Zck) or an operating system (Gates)?

I understand why you would think that's what I meant to say, but no.

If we aren't talking about computer security, hacker imo would be someone with remarkable technical/scientific contributions. Indeed, there may be some personal bias for math hackers (cryptographers, theorists) but then their skillsets with the respective programmer ones converge.

I don't think this is a "SV techbro" thing. In the 80s (when I was in college), "hacker" had a connotation of someone who built cool things in software, usually outside the "normal" approach. It was sort of the opposite of what eventually became software engineering - quick and dirty "tricks" that explored the edges of operating system. We looked up to hackers as repositories of esoteric knowledge. Long hair and hiking boots were common.

Certainly, some of what they hacked on might be related to security. Or maybe they wrote little games. Or threw together a curses-based interface to the Unix shell. Or some other cool utility.

As I recall, there was a concerted attempt to distinguish between people who exploited security vulnerabilities (aka "crackers") from people who could quickly build these useful things ("hackers").

I feel like the modern use of hacker (ala "hackathon") is actually pretty well in line with the usage I grew up with.

We have Eric S Raymond to thank for corrupting the meaning of "Hacker" to include himself.

Plate of Shrimp:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537629

https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

>I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of schlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the "what is a hacker?" essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond. Dave Winer has recently and mercifully moved his essays off to audio, but you can still hear him snorfling cashew nuts and talking at length about what it means to be a blogger[7] . These essays and this writing style are tempting to people outside the subculture at hand because of their engaging personal tone and idiosyncratic, insider's view. But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.

As far as I know you have it reversed: Mitnick & co. should be called "crackers", while "hackers" is the wrong term.

I found this article (I only skimmed it and didn't look for counter evidence, sorry) https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/a-short-...

Musk was writing games at 12 years old and Zuck still does stuff like this.

https://m.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-jarvis...

And that does not make someone a highly skilled developer and even less a world-class genius.

The point being discussed is "he was unapologetically a hacker." Making your own home automation definitely makes you a hacker.

I’m curious what you’ve done.

LOL, nice logic there.

I’ll take that as not a lot.

Gates personally wrote the embedded BASIC interpreter for the TRS-80 Model 100, among other things. It isn't valid to question his technical "hacker cred."

Pick a different line of attack if you want to slag Gates; there are several others to choose from.

HAH, downvoted to -4 for writing this on "hacker" news.

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