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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

For all I love to dunk on Musk and the 47th... there is a lot of truth in the words that most talented nerds start out as hackers in the negative interpretation of the word or get other kinds of run-ins with the law. Hell, many years ago one of the three letter agencies complained that they have to reject too many people for weed convictions.

At the core of it, companies (and the three-letter agencies) want highly experienced people, and the most experience, creativity and wisdom can be had by, well, breaking rules. When you're up against other nation states, you need people with the mindset to question things.

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A lot of people like to tell themselves that breaking into other people's computers is about curiosity or activism or some other such virtue.

I don't see it. What I see is post-hoc rationalisation to justify lust for a feeling of power and control over others.

Practically any virtue you ascribe to "hackers" you can give to those kids that break into people's cars and take them on joyrides.

To me its more about the intent and actions. If you figured out how to hack something, and possibly leave a note for the admin to fix their systems, thats one thing.

If you figure out how to hack something, and your first thought is to trash / destroy the system, thats the crime.

So personally: > "where Stanley, at 15, bragged about fucking up servers" is more damning to me then the actual hacking part.

> I don't see it. What I see is post-hoc rationalisation to justify lust for a feeling of power and control over others.

There's always two sides to a medal. I think that the executive branches of government - across the Western world - suffer from lethargy caused because barely anyone in public service is willing to question, much less stretch or even bend, the rules in power.

A government obviously cannot be purely made out of rulebreakers and, frankly, toddlers and imbeciles. We see this in the current US administration. But it cannot be made out of "we always did it this way" people either, because that's how you end up with systems and processes that are so hopelessly fossilized that no one even understands why these systems are the way they are.

I'm talking about the virtues that you've just tried to paint on people that practice breaking into other peoples computers for fun.

It seems like what you are looking for is a discussion about whether or not it it is ethical for bureaucrats and elected officials ought to circumvent or ignore their countries democratic processes and laws.

I'm sure there are some ethical justifications for doing this in some hypothetical situations, but really I'm not sure it's as useful to be discussing hypotheticals rather than specifics in this space.

> It seems like what you are looking for is a discussion about whether or not it it is ethical for bureaucrats and elected officials ought to circumvent or ignore their countries democratic processes and laws.

What was the saying, three felonies a day? Society doesn't work out when people behave like role models all day long, the economy would grind to a standstill. That's why you get stuff like "shadow IT" and whatnot. Processes tend to grow ("scope creep") and no one is interested in cutting the crap.

I disagree. I definitely have the curiosity to break into things all the time. There's a difference between unlocking a car, leaving a note saying "I unlocked your car" and locking it again, and unlocking it to crash it.

I think both of those things do give people that rush of power and control over others. Certainly one is harmless and the other... not so much.

It doesn't give me a rush of power or control, I just like solving puzzles, and locks are puzzles.

I don't know how to explain that the feeling of solving a puzzle is a "rush of power". If it weren't, you'd be equally happy fiddling with a pile of puzzle pieces and making no attempt to solve it as you were to searching for a solution.

There isn't anything inherently unethical about enjoying power, but neither is it in any way virtuous.

I still disagree. You're making a false dichotomy that there can be either "rush of power" or "nothing". Instead, I feel a sense of achievement at a job well done. To say that that's "power" requires stretching some definitions.

You can take the position of "achievement isn't a feeling of power" if you'd really like to, in which case I simply say find and replace all prior uses of "feelings of power" with "feelings of achievement" and the argument still stands. I'm happy to use whatever definitions you want. Taking joy from your success in doing things (whether you refer to it as achievement or power) is simply not an valid ethical justification when it is at the expense of violating other peoples right to control of their possessions.

I don't know that the argument stands with "feelings of achievement". I agree that you can't justify a moral infringement by taking pleasure in it, but upthread you were trying to distance the motivation from virtuous ones like curiousity and activism. Being driven by achievement is absolutely a virtue. I'd argue it's the same virtue that drives curiousity, and you've essentially just said exactly that ("the feeling of solving a puzzle is a 'rush of power'" s/power/achievement).

solving puzzle pieces is trivial. you just keep looking for the right parts till it fits. it is designed to be solved. unlike a car door.

This comment redefines the "power" as it's defined above, in particular by forgetting that it's "over others":

> I think both of those things do give people that rush of power and control over others.

That was presumably unintentional; I just wanted to point out that it's a different philosophical topic.

I don't strictly disagree with the idea but it's not the same as saying that someone solving a sudoku is doing it for the sake of having power over the puzzle's creator and/or the curator of the book/app that included the puzzle. It seems more likely that they're doing it instead because when they would solve puzzles in the past they would get a hit of dopamine, which taught them that solving puzzles is rewarding. I think this seems to fall under "rush of power" per this meaning but it's not "rush of power and control over others" per the initial one.

Security systems also give you power and control over others. Whether or not it's harmless to break them is a case-by-case question.

That's not as innocuous as you put it. From Godfather's horse head to the Bibilical story of Saul's robe, that can have a very different meaning and feeling.

And what qualifies a nerd and hacker to audit systems whose full impact they don’t know and whose programming language they aren’t experienced in?

Would you ask a rocket scientist to do a brain surgery?

They'd get training presumably. I wasn't qualified for my current job. Luckily they have training! And people to help.

They got trained in all the department activities and laws they now work in?

How many years of training were that?

You seem to think that every government agency does highly specialized incredibly specific work that you couldn't possibly have any idea how to manage. That's absolutely not the case. Sure there are absolutely certain jobs etc. where that may be the case - certain engineering departments in perhaps DOE come to mind, that sort of thing.

99% of the government is not that. It's paperwork, databases, forms. Not saying it's not important work, I'm saying it doesn't take a genius to look at the workflow for the vast majority of the government and understand it, and see opportunities for better efficiency.

> It's paperwork

Paperwork, with a mind-numbing set of rules you need to pay attention to, that can affect people's lives in very serious ways. Just a couple days back a guy with protected status was deported to a gulag in El Salvador by a "clerical error".

Can you explain how DOGE and deportations are related?

Deportations of people with protected status happen when someone doesn’t pay the attention needed while doing paperwork.

The point being DOGE people are incompetent to assess the work of a government they have zero knowledge about.

I lost the thread a bit. Are we talking about Doge? Yes that is a abysmal. No defence for that.

But in general people need to learn some stuff on the job. E.g. hire an 18 year old hacker and by 20 they are leading projects, debugging code, preparing for SOC compliance etc. Is possible.

Managing the government isn't brain surgery. It's not that specialized.

Most of the rocket scientists I know would refuse to perform brain surgery on the basis of qualifications. The maturity and professionalism shows itself in the discretion.

Hire a burglar to give home security advice.

This absolutely happens a lot, not at the individual level but security companies absolutely hire former criminals without violent convictions who know what they're talking about and have turned their life around.

You basically just described rebellious youth, which we have all been at some point in our lives. And this statement is complete and utter bs. The problem is that comrade muskov is not a technical person, he is just a "marketing strategist" (quotation marks since I don't want to offend people who actually know what they are doing). Here's the painful truth: most governments have appalling security practices and it's a miracle that the world still exists. Finding vulnerabilities or leaks is not a hard task and it only requires patience - there are dozens of such examples in my own country alone and the only reason no one has sounded the alarm is because two things are going to happen: media scandal for 2 days, then everyone will forget about it and the second thing that will happen is that whoever rings the alarm will be dragged in by security agencies for years to get questioned about what they were looking for and they will not accept "I know you are morons and I don't trust you with handling my data in a service that is completely open to the general public". "Run-ins with the law" has nothing to do with talent and if anything, it's the absence of a talent if that resulted in "run-ins with the law". That is a clear indication that the people involved have no idea what they are doing and just managed to connect two simple dots after a "complete 2 hour hacking crash course - FREE, pls subscribe for more". The simple fact is that musk has no goddamn clue about what he is doing or talking about: "the government does not run relational databases". Right comrade, cause precisely the usa spending service which you are referring to is not a django app using psql: https://github.com/fedspendingtransparency/usaspending-api/b...

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