What does it have to do with hacker culture? It's about two businesses - organized crime and documentary photography - in which successful people have similar qualities and strategies of those in hacking and in any entrepreneurial business
Yeah, there's a great article by 37 signals about how to break your competitors kneecaps so that they'll be crippled for the rest of their lives.
Now as a hacker/entrepreneur, you attempt to start a competitor against what seems like a backwards thinking, complacent established company. You think your product and strategy is so obviously going to win because you think you know why your established competitor succeeds, and you believe youve one-upped them.
And yet you fail. Do you sit around doubting your skill? Do you accuse the competitor of doing something outright illegal and evil? Or do you accept that there might be things under the surface that you hadn't considered (some of which may be illegal but not to the point where it would cause actual, game changing prosecution)?
To say that the abstracted takeaways from here don't apply to anything a hacker does, even a pure coder, is an extremely narrow mindset, and is probably the kind of mind that thinks Steve Woz would be a billionaire if he never met Steve Jobs (and even Woz knows that isn't the case).
Hacking is more about literal code and computers. If HN encompasses entrepernurial strategy, then not everything about being a successful hacker can be found on github.
"You have a nice family/business. I'll hurt or kill them if you don't pay me money."
It's pretty easy because parents, wives, children or businesses are fairly soft targets. You can't always be looking over your shoulder.
Organized crime is less than a zero-sum game, it's a negative sum game: the more prevalent it is, the more resources it sucks out of society, and the more resources society must dedicate to defending itself from parasites.
In my mind, creative hacks are the polar opposite of that: they make something from nothing, or are a clever way to eliminate a lot of dreary work.
I was going to respond, "Well, neither are most established businesses" but I think you misunderstood me. The disruptors, in this case, are not the Yakuza. They are the established entities. How much actual power they have is up for debate, but not terribly important to the point. The point is that they have a seemingly rooted place in Japanese society and the question should be: How can a presumably criminal enterprise still exist in a lawful society?
The answer, according to the OP, is relatively benign; it's not "because they utilize ninja stealth and James Bond-like technology". I think if you step back from the specific context of criminality and ask the question of why any established enterprise/institution still has power/recognition, the reasons are likely to be depressingly uninteresting than intriguing or complex. Exhibit A: Most political entities and regulations.