Investors: but surely they won't cheat me!
Why should they put their own life on the line when there are so many others whose lives could be used instead?
My answer that got me accepted was that there was a lip syncing competition at my college that was dwindling because everyone had to submit a CD and sign up in advance. It also was held in an auditorium.
When I took over, I moved it to Spotify and moved the venue to the lawn, and we went from ~20 people the previous year to 1.2k the year I ran it.
Here's pg's definition of a hacker: https://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html
I left out that the rule at the time was all songs had to be reviewed by the administration, which I didn't comply with. I'm not saying my story is the greatest; quite the opposite. I was trying to show that "hacking" isn't inherently unethical or even particularly interesting.
Hacking is looking at the rules and finding smart ways of following them. A lawyer or accountant finding legal loopholes is hacking.
The clearest place to see hacking is within games where one follows the rules and does not cheat.
Avoid thinking that hacking is unethical behaviour. A common mistake of people that don't understand the culture.
Like many great words, the meaning does depend on who uses the word. But the people who created the usage didn't use it for cheating.
"I don't get it, why are they confessing? They are not confessing. They are bragging"
being largely ethical and being ruled is so baked into the identity of a citizen that we do not see mass defection. someone who does defect by being unethical gains and maybe rules others.
there is no requirement for a cooperative agreement or social contract signed by the leader or plutocrats of a society. they can and do defect by being corrupt.
more people are realising in the middle class that they too can defect and gain personally at others' expense. for example, realising that not recycling saves time and harms only others, or starting these companies listed in the article.
the more people that do defect, the less cooperation, which is a social breakdown. under mass defection you have the law of the jungle, which is the existing paradigm of marc andreessen and peers, they are sociopathic.
this is all to say that A16Z can cheat in the knowledge that only comparable competitors will cheat, the people as a whole who are harmed will not.
How can you honestly tell this young man not to cheat and get ahead when the president does it regularly? We’re a spiritually dead country and the youth is reflecting it. Don’t use Lee as the scapegoat.
You have agency over your own actions. Don't blame others for your self inflicted "spiritual death."
In fact, beyond criticizing them, they should be denigrated and made fun of incessantly. Ostracized and reaffirmed as low-status individuals, no matter how much wealth they can acquire through low-status bullshit, they'll never be worthy of respect.
We got here by putting two of the most hated people in the country on the ballot against him, twice.
One was actively hated for decades by the ultra-powerful evangelical voting bloc and hardly loved even by her own party, then another who couldn't be more closely affiliated with the incumbent during a period of high inflation (globally) that ousted incumbents in virtually every election (globally) that year.
These are especially doomed against a completely amoral propaganda machine that's willing to say, in private, that the candidate is "a demonic force", while in public doing everything they can to get him to power (see: Tucker Carlson). Earning legitimate democratic victory against people who are quite literally and explicitly bad-faith actors is very hard.
And lastly, Roy Lee, Marc Andreessen and their ilk are nothing like the people who you're referring to. Being a low-status, cheating, amoral loser like Roy Lee is completely distinct from being a lower- or middle-income American worker.
I hate this victim-blaming. Democrats deserve heaps of criticism for how they handled the last few elections, but Clinton was the most qualified presidential candidate we've had since maybe McCain in 2008? (I didn't vote for McCain, but it would be hard to argue he wasn't qualified).
You said yourself where the blame should lie:
> These are especially doomed against a completely amoral propaganda machine... Earning legitimate democratic victory against people who are quite literally and explicitly bad-faith actors is very hard.
Blame can be shared among many actors, and generally should be.
There's also special value in finding blame in yourself and your own actions where possible, not as a self-flagellation exercise, but because it will reveal if you had levers available you failed to pull for some reason.
But why tho? And what does that say about voters who apparently "loved" Trump, a guy who mocked a disabled reporter at a campaign rally, more than her?
Yeah, Trump's election says very awful things about all of us, and especially his voters.
The narrative of "oh if normal people weren't so mean calling out the awful things these voters say and do, they would have behaved otherwise" is simply not true. For them it's a matter of "winning" and "losing" and damn the consequences. Treating them nice doesn't change anything.
You mean like how Trump mocked a disabled reporter at one of his early campaign rallies?
Americans actually agree on this, by and large.
Has it ever occurred to these low status people that their low status is due to their bad choices in life? No, it's all the fault of others: the black people, the brown people, the weird people...
If one abandons their principles as soon as a sufficient reward is offered, then they have no integrity.
So let your children see and learn what society rewards AND teach them integrity.
It is incredible that you think that Trump being president is normal. I didn't say he was responsible for this behavior; I am saying that him and his supporters are responsible for normalizing immoral, unethical, unacceptable behavior.
I think what you're really saying here is that you don't like tech interviews, which is understandable, but ultimately doesn't amount to either a moral or a technical argument against them.
So you're suggesting that an enterprise that would ever have even considered routinely using any stupid bullshit question along those lines is somehow engaged in a finely-honed and effective process for creating an optimal screening system? It doesn't matter how often you "change course" if you obviously have no idea how to steer in the first place.