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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

2000 words of post-hoc fallacy about an IRC channel.

We're discussing here a group of people who started their careers dead smack in the middle of the dot-com bubble, practically all of them in software/network security, a field that has stayed valuable since its inception. Of course they've done well for themselves.

This would be interesting if the denizens of #w00w00 had, say, invested in each other's companies. But as I understand it (I was a #!r00t person; our biggest win was ISSX) that's not at all what happened.

Sorry to sound pissy. I'm just hoping to forestall another goofy HN conspiracy theory; the idea that w00w00 is, like, the Internet's "Skull & Bones". No.

Also, I suspect the stories about w00w00 as a "hacking group" that broke into people's machines: total BS.

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Gotta disagree with you on this one. Lots of folks in w00w00 worked together. In that sense, they did invest in each other (with time and effort, if not cash).

Also, back in the late 90s defcon days, w00w00, CdC, New Hack City, each had an entrepreneurial spirit. w00w00 perhaps more than most. I remember when CdC launched BackOriface, it was just as much a startup launch as anything.

Note: I don't claim to be a member of any.

I was there. I'm friends with several w00w00 people, and worked for 4 years with Dug. I wasn't in w00w00 because I was in a "rival" channel (by the way, it sounds weird to mix TESO and ADM up with IRC channels like #w00w00 and #!r00t and #guild).

We were all of us entrepreneurial, but being in w00w00 didn't get any any support from, say, d0b.

I'll do you one better: #!r00t'ers started a bunch of companies together. Other than WhatsApp (WHICH I ADMIT BLOWS THE CURVE), were there a lot of multiple-w00-person companies?

I wrote the article and, yes, I probably conflated TESO and ADM with w00w00 on one level, though I did a ton of research and those other hacker groups were routinely mentioned in comparison.

"Gotta disagree with you on this one. Lots of folks in w00w00 worked together. In that sense, they did invest in each other (with time and effort, if not cash)." -- that's correct and a good way of putting it.

Well, two of those are vulnerability research teams, and one of them is a social club, but sure, I guess you can use them all in the same sentence. ;)

"We were all of us entrepreneurial"

All is a strong word. I was more #hack, but also spent time in #!r00t and the two communities overlapped a bit (tim(al), etc). I was terribly non-entrepreneurial back then. I ported the original iss.c to SunOS and Solaris but distinctly remember telling kewpie that a business around this would never fly. This is one example (of a few quite notable ones) of why people should not take business advice from me.

All that aside, yeah, this smacks of mostly post-hoc fallacy to me as well.

Napster? IIRC, Plaxo. FB. Zivity had at least 2 #w00w00. Some various FF-affiliated stuff.

Frankly, I don't think you're making your point, but swang made it below in another part of the discussion:

"And surprise surprise, people who used one of the more technical communications medium back in the 90s end up being technical people when they grew up."

I think that's your actual point: Smart technical young people became smart technical adults, and the hindsight of whats app could have been any number of channels, just as many of the members were parts of many "crews" or channels. Unlike most channels though, as you point out, they met up in real life, generally in august in vegas. :-)

Really I think it's just safe to say that anyone who was on irc in the late 90s probably had their career benefit from it. #winprog got me my first job at the tail of the boom (and I did terribly at it) and that definitely wasn't a 'scene' kind of channel (ridiculous Wired article aside), but I definitely still have a certain kind of fraternity with the other people I occupied that space with (in a different channel, as well as semi-regular real life meetings, now) and a lot of those people have gone on to do great stuff.

Can a similar argument be made about the PayPal Mafia? Is there a lot of investment cross-pollination within the members, or is it more just a general sense of "lots of clearly forward-thinking people made lots of money and continue to be forward-thinking/making lots of money", a sort of reverse Seinfeld curse?

If you work backwards, starting with people who have successful exits, you will find occasional intersections on mailing lists or IRC channels or meetups or model railroad clubs.

This doesn't mean that list or whatever caused the success. This is the same problem epidemiologists face when trying to explain cancer clusters.

>>We're discussing here a group of people who started their careers dead smack in the middle of the dot-com bubble

This reminds of the Indian IT scene. Where today's so called managers/execs/leaders were just lucky to be in the path of immense inertia in the 90's.

Most of them probably have no experience at all, some of them as little as working in testing projects for a few months. They just had to be promoted because companies were growing 100% year on year, and the only way to get new managers were to promote existing people. People with as little as an year of experience from college became senior managers.

Now we have these people come and repeatedly lecture us 'We are so awesome, they had to make us VP's without doing any work at all'.

Tom, you stuck your neck out here. Those who weren't there will never understand. Everyone who needs to know who's who, already does.. The rest of them can read about halfass explanations on techcrunch

A bad habit of mine.

> I'm just hoping to forestall another goofy HN conspiracy theory; the idea that w00w00 is, like, the Internet's "Skull & Bones".

That's true. The Internet's "Skull & Bones" of black hat, darkside hackers is l0ck.

Apparently their leader made a fortune preparing for the coming deflation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTTFuOEOhEE

Fuck L0ck. Seriously fuck those guys.

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