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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

This isn't "whistleblowing" and I hope whomever did this spends a long time in prison.

Regardless of what your feelings on ICE enforcement are...

I kind of agree with you - up until the point that ICE started just shooting people in the face with zero consequences (and please don’t trot out the self-defence BS).

Let’s try your comment in 1938 Germany. Replace the word ICE with Gestapo.

also, what on earth does this DHS slogan mean?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/13/trump-admini...

from a federal government agency heavily armed against unarmed non-violent protestors

absolutely terrifying but that's the point I guess?

I hate the Gestapo comparisons because they are disrespectful to the Gestapo. Say what you will about them, at least they showed their faces.

ICE is behaving like slave chasers, which inspired the Gestapo. The state of your country is homegrown yanqui fuckery. Should've finished the job you started in the civil war.

Did you know the early nazis where actually impressed by america's segregation and racism and lamented they couldn't easily do the same? Well, they kinda did in the end.

On the contrary, this is exactly the sort of thing a prototypical hacker would do: give a massive finger to the authorities through the use of technology.

That's not what a prototypical hacker is at all. I have the benefit of being able to talk to most of the "prototypical hackers", the TMRC crowd, decades ago and being a hacker had nothing to do with sticking it to authorities. It was all about personal ingenuity and generally lacking self-discipline (from an outsider's perspective -- as people didn't refer to themselves as hackers for decades, it started as a derisive term from more "respectable" researchers).

The whole freedom-fighting hacker thing came about later, mostly from the 2600 and BBS crowd as a self-aggrandizement despite all of the laws that they were breaking: mainly related to use of telephone lines, wire & mail fraud, drug use/trafficing and age of consent violations.

You're literally trying to tell me about my own tribe and you don't have the slightest clue.

Dunno about your friends, but I imagine the original, old school MIT hackers -- the ones who lockpicked doors for fun and fought tooth and nail against any restrictions on access to computer systems -- would chuckle at an infodump like this, not clutch their pearls.

it seems as though you’re reaching extraordinarily far back in time to apply a definition that simply doesn’t exist anymore. hell, the time period you’re referencing (…80 years ago!) is when “gay” still meant “happy”.

obviously, you’re free to use whatever words you like, but your clinging to outdated terminology and being perpetually misunderstood is not a failure of other people.

It was the parent poster that reached for the idea of "prototypical hacker", but then missed the mark by several decades.

Words have meaning.

Also my usage very much matches early "computer hackers" in a cultural sense. If I was just going off of the word origin itself we'd be talking about horse and carriage drivers...

Words also have multiple meanings, and change over time.

And saying "prototypical" is reaching for a specific point in time.

If I said "prototypical automobile", I can only really be talking about a Ford Model T. I couldn't be talking about a 60s Mustang, no matter their popularity/familiarity.

My friend, no. Again, words can have multiple meanings. Right now, when I highlight and define prototypical, I get the following:

"denoting the first, original, or typical form of something".

An example: "the phone emerged as the prototypical example of point-to-point communication".

The usage of "prototypical hacker" by tastyface above fits neatly in the "typical form", while you're using the "original form".

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