Now that's what I call an hacker | Hacker News Reader

Now that's what I call an hacker

jitbit.com

36 pointsdebdut10 comments

If this person worked for me and I found out about this, I wouldn't call them a hacker. I'd call them unemployed without a reference.

I didn't find anything particularly egregious from an employer perspective. The automation is not any different or lazy than say setting SQL queries. Many say a lot worse about customers in slack etc. I do think less of this person for calling his wife his bitch. Kinda gross. But I am not interested in imposing my civil or moral standard on anyone. I just know I wouldn't enjoy interacting with them. Ethics are a different question because social contracts necessarily require some overlap in ethical frameworks each party is operating under, and I didn't find anything unethical. I guess I could be wrong?

Notwithstanding that this story has a 2% chance of being real, why, exactly?

1. Employee works late. Now usually this is a bad thing for everyone involved, but I assume that someone who is trigger-happy with firing would think that long hours is a good thing.

2. Given that it's a staging DB, nothing a "stop doing this" can't fix. And a talking to with the client about the problems that Kumar is causing.

3. See (1).

4. Optimizes their time away from their work.

Agreed. No bad boys allowed in the Good Boys club!

Actually toxic employees are so much worse than this and seem to have jobs at companies all over.

Name of coffee machine, please.

This is the script used to talk to the coffee machine:

https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts/blob/master/fucking...

I wonder how many other devices talk telnet and have a weak password. Would be cool to have a database of such models.

Not the real script, if it exists at all. For one thing it's not in Russian (nor are any of the other scripts that send text messages to his boss/wife), and the password and commands are much too simplistic - in the story it says it's sending binary gibberish.

The 17 second delay before sending the command also makes no sense if this were run automatically every hour.

edit: also there's a bunch of versions in different languages :)

I think that script is run manually - so its 17 seconds plus whatever time it takes to grind and tamp the coffee before brewing - thats the time it takes for him to walk from his desk to the coffee machine.

Yes, that's how I understood it to work. But the readme in that Github repo shows a crontab entry to run it every hour, and the script checks if the user is currently logged in.

If it actually worked like this, you would have to get up from your desk exactly on the hour, which certainly seems more annoying than useful!

The whole repo is supposed to be a joke of course, just a badly thought out one that I find confusing rather than funny.

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