It ended up capturing perfectly a bunch of ideas I’ve been having for a few months now. ZIRP was toxic. It made us bad and lazy. Identifying the phenomenons and explaining their mechanisms has been a useful exercise.

I think this post will stay in my brain for a long while. I’m at this point in life and this resonates a lot. I want to build useful stuff with intrinsic value and I’m sick of the BS that exulted in the last decade. In my own way I’m trying to start ventures, so it’s a good motivating call.

Slow start but damn solid article.

> My point is, it is not just about computers. It’s about understanding how
the world works. The world is made up of people. As much as machines keep
society running, those machines are programmed by people–people with
managers, spouses, and children; with wants, needs, and dreams. And it is
about using that knowledge to bring about the change you want to see.

> That is what being a hacker is all about.

There are plenty of counter-examples to this (writing OSS software, farming your own land with a commune, etc), but in general it’s easier to get stuff done when you can throw cash at it, at least in late stage capitalism. It’d be hard to build a company like SpaceX without a boatload of cash!

Yes. It makes me really nervous to see people celebrating the fed talking about lowering rates. Maybe rates should be lowered a bit, sure, I don’t know. But please, please don’t ever let us go back to zero-interest. As a person who works with technology, that era was so incredibly depressing. So much waste. I’m on the verge of leaving the tech industry because of what happened over the past 10 years. City bus drivers don’t have to share an industry with SBF and Juicero and Elon Musk, you know?

Economists generally believe the baseline, target rate should be around 2-3%.

Zero interest rate is like steroids. You can take them for a while to pick you up and help fight a bug (like the 2008 crash), but if you don’t stop taking them, you’ll need a long, painful, 5.5% interest rate rehab.

That was not a “bug.” That was a parasite. If you take steroids with a parasite you might just make the parasite stronger.

The problem with that is (as we found out) that does not leave you much room to cut without going to near zero rates.

The government reaction to the 2021 economic circumstances was to counter the hot job market, not inflation. It is explicitly and legally the mandate of the federal reserve to target maximum employment first, and 3% inflation if possible.

Inflation has been normal for a while now by most metrics, but rates are still sky-high to crush worker power. This may not be the stated goal, but it is the actual outcome we can see.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

Super-low inflation targets hurt worker negotiating power.

    "The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates."

The reason rates are staying high is because of the expectations game. The US had unfathomable price stability for decades. The fed realizes that the inflation genie is out of the bottle. The only way to get it back in is to overcompensate by raising rates and leaving them high until people forget about 10% inflation.

A rate of inflation + 0.5% is double of a rate of inflation + 0.25, that is double of a rate of inflation + 0.125%, that is double of…

You can have as many steps as you want.

The problem with your analogy is that paying interest is an active measure. It takes effort. The higher the rate*(outstanding debt), the more effort. This isn’t a choice between injecting nothing vs injecting steroids, it’s a choice between injecting sedatives vs injecting nothing. Raising the interest rate is like injecting a sedative. How much sedative should we inject? How much sedative can we inject?

More like adding fat and never burn it. Zero interest means everything stays around, no pressure to produce since there is no expectation of ROI, and then when you suddenly add that pressure a lot of stuff collapses under their own weight since they don’t have anything to keep it up.

For individuals in the middle class and lower, high interest rates (and the associated inflation) directly lower the quality of life by eroding their purchasing power.

This confuses me. Rates were raised to reduce inflation. How should inflation have been reduced, if not (at least in part) by raising rates?

Raising rates didn’t lower housing prices, it just empowered cash buyers to become landlords.

If it’s lower than inflation, the government is just giving free money to the corporations with access to interbank settlement loans.

One thing I’ve often thought true but not confirmed is that lowering interest rates has it’s own effect on top of the lower rate itself. Lowering rates leads to refinancing for example which is not a thing in a steady state. I’m inclined to think most of the benefit of a rate lowering is in fact transient, while the effects of having low rates are permanent and there are similarly transient costs with raising rates. It’s a trap.

Sure, the fed can buy and sell treasuries and use its magical balance sheet to push/pull on treasury yields, and these in turn are the lowest risk and most liquid mechanism for duration transformation so they tend to serve as a baseline / comparison point for every other kind of investment, transmitting monetary policy into the real economy. However, the fed’s magical balance sheet has limits: if they push or pull on treasury yields too hard for too long, people will stop using them as a default point of comparison and put their money somewhere else. See: Bank of Japan and the JPY Carry Trade that everyone became an expert in about 3 weeks ago. Point is: the fed can push and pull, but it can’t fight the market-determined macro and win. Not for long, anyway.

Low rates are inevitable between growth sigmoids. Unless you think we can exponentially grow forever, we need to figure out how to cope. What would that look like? How could we possibly cool off the economy without paying people to not invest? Well, I mean, we could raise taxes and spend that on the people who got left behind on the last growth sigmoid, but I can hear the “boos” and “hisses” already. Hey! Tomatoes are for eating, not throwing! Guys, come on! You know it’s true.

I mostly agree. The issue comes from how the money gets spent. It costs money to collect money, it costs money to spend money. Most of the spent money is used to “buy solutions” from private industry, so the rich still get richer, and nothing really changes.

Baltimore, MD, USA, spends more per student (1) than almost any other city in the country, and nothing changes. Oh well actually, there is a lot of corruption in the city council and I think over half of the past few mayors have been arrested on criminal charges.

(1) https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/in-baltimore…

I’m not connected to Maryland, but is there a reason, other than history that the school board is appointed by the mayor and not elected? Everywhere I’ve lived, school districts have been independent from the cities they operate in, and supervised by a state education organization and perhaps mildly supervised by the county board of supervisors in the counties they operate in (or city councils when operating in cities that are counties). Then you could have corrupt city governance without necessarily having corrupt school governance; although you could still have both if that’s what your local electorate chooses.

It is a horribly fucked up city, corrupt from top to bottom, rampant crime, murder, fraud, etc.

But no worries, residents of the city pay an ADDITIONAL tax beoyo9nd federal and state taxes to ensure things stay exactly the way they are. Baltimore city could triple their tax rates and nothing would change.

This is a microchasm of the entire US. One of if not the wealthiest country in the world cannot figure out that throwing money at problems DOESN’T FIX THEM. It is a rich-person way of thinking: “something broke, I’ll pay someone to fix it” but thr “someone” lines their pockets, pays lip service, does the least costly “fix” possible, and laughs all the way to the corvette store.

1950-1975 San Francisco was in a similar situation, losing population. In 1978 prop. 13 passed and placed a cap of 1% on the property tax. Reducing it by 2/3’s. A huge boom started. The overall revenue increased by 80% after a few years as the property values increased.

Two Baltimore residents talk about it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrNjUCmTURg

So tell me, who won? I have a guess.

So far, the Fed does a good job of gatekeeping normal people out of the negative rate market even when rates are negative – only rich people are allowed to benefit.

From the data I’ve seen and read it seems like low interest rates are (politically) alluring, because of short term metrics, but will bite back via inflation and bubbles bursting very consistently.

Is there any wisdom and data that challenges or expands on this that a layman can understand?

https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/the-2000s-housing-bubbl…

https://www.rtinsights.com/the-technical-evolution-of-apache…

“The hacker mindset comes with powerful tools: The urge to figure stuff out, the creativity to use it in unusual ways and the passion to share knowledge. Let’s use it to make the world a better place. Start a company and gather allies. If enough of us do this, we’ll have an impact on the world.”

Yep. I know this is probably a bit revisionist (old-timey inventors wanted to get rich quick too) but it feels like companies used to more often be geared toward longevity, not ascendance, and I don’t see how they could achieve longevity while constantly trying to make shareholders rich. Longevity really should be up there on the list of goals, with security and prosperity for all those involved.

I suppose a meat grinder growfast company could invent world-improving products that justify employee churn and abuse, but those would be unicorns with diamond encrusted horns.

What is the point of any of our actions if they don’t benefit people?

maybe I overlooked something that is why I asked this question.

article seemed reductive and of unclear value. enlighten me if you found it.

I grew up in the era of BBSs, microcomputers giving way to full desktops in the US and payphones we’re still slightly interesting. though phreaking was sadly in its final days. I also had (and have) severe social anxiety, but had no idea what that was at the time. I just knew I did not understand the world or people much at all, seeing them as sloppy systems that seemed to operate without any predictable set of rules aside from maybe self-preservation and immediate gratification.

So when I started taking apart computers, futzing with software and seeing what made the beige boxes tick, I found I could understand those with far more clarity. I also found other people like me in the message boards and a local library. Naturally, this became my world, because I knew how to navigate it better than people who had little interest in using a computer for anything beyond homework or accounting.

It really felt like there was this whole reality that sat on top of the “common” reality and I had ascended to it with some silly notion of secret knowledge. You can image how addicting that would feel to someone who does not do well social and felt very, very outcast as a kid.

I guess the difference between myself and a lot of Phrack authors, whom I still very much respect for laying the paving stones that I got to walk on, is that as I got older, I dealt with my anxiety and found that my genuine curiosity was more of an asset to enriching myself than a key to the door of some secret counter-culture. Hacking, colloquially speaking, went mainstream and sort of left me in the dust, having become impossible for any one person to keep up with the flood of new methods, exploits, etc as the Internet exploded and suddenly everyone had computers in some form or another.

I moved on, more or less. Yes, I still tinker, as a hobby and a form of therapy, but mostly with old computers and industrial machines, since that’s part of my adult career, but I miss that feeling of being part of some counter-culture-like group, whether it was real or not.

I can totally see where it would be hard to let go of that. Heck, I’d post that some of the Phrack authors have no business letting go of it since they helped define that whole world and need to keep it alive. I say let them be edgy. I have trouble with that, myself, but I respect it.

Sorry, this turned into a “Hacker Perspective” 2600 article, I guess.

Somewhat related. I used to think, if I get really good at some thing, people will respect or admire me more. So I do my utmost best to be excellent at what I do.

I found out that getting respect or admiration works differently. When you are very good in one area, you come across as geeky/nerdy. That fills nicely a respected stereotype in film, where the geek finds the missing piece for saving the world. But in the real world, most people don’t care.

Also I more recently found out that if you show you are trying really hard, that comes across as feeling very unsure about yourself.

So about the article, understanding how the world works. The author clearly has understanding about financial markets. He knows a lot about security weaknesses and how to exploit them. It is all knowledge available on the web after all, if you spend a lot of nights studying it, it starts to click.

The world is so much more than that though. For me, it is mostly how you interact with it, and the best interactions are with people. At work, at home, on HN.

Why do I work? I make something, I fix a problem, I discuss what is important, it makes somebody happy because it aligns with their goal. Be it a colleague who wants their design reviewed, a customer who has a problem with your product, or a manager who wants a new feature.

That’s a fascinating view.

In fact, I’d say most FOSS GUIs from the 90s and early 00s make a lot more sense if you see them as having the hidden/bonus goal of repelling this “world of people.” I just remember using something like Dynebolic for the first time, (or, much later, Popcorn Time) and having the feeling I’d just found a sparkling piece of amethyst among so many clods of dirt. Hackers always seemed to me way too curious and lazy to shovel dirt in their spare time; basic resentment/elitism toward society so cleanly explain so many parts of FOSS, everything from the amount of time it’s taken to get a decent multi-screen configuration GUI to that old error message, “You don’t exist. Go away!”

Digression– I remember reading an interview of someone who wrote one of the APIs to get multi-screen video working in Linux. They’d written about how they realized that what they’d wrote would be generally useful and therefore needed a GUI. But they didn’t have expertise in GUI design nor any interest in maintaining one. So they set down and explicitly wrote a terrible GUI with the goal of making it so bad it’d be less helpful than just using the command line, thus forcing someone else to take on the task of replacing the awful GUI.

Does anyone remember what that was? The visual metaphor was something to do with playing cards. Anyhow, I’d love to see that GUI!

A lot of people throw their hands up and give up when they need an expensive medication they can’t get prescribed but in general you can often buy them overseas, grey market, make them yourself, etc.

> They want it, but it’s not a necessity.

What a person “needs” is complex and individual. Unless you are their doctor or are paying for it, your opinion of what medications a person needs is irrelevant- it is absolutely none of your business.

This nit-picking is in no way central to my point as it was a general statement about hacker culture ethos not any particular person or medication, so why did you post it? With only two comments so far – It appears you joined HN just to share anti-trans bigotry? That isn’t okay. This is not a “hate forum” – accepting people that are different is a fundamental aspect of hacker and HN culture.

I’m willing to bet you are different in some way that isn’t acceptable to others, so you feel the need to hide it out of fear, or hoping for acceptance. It’s true of most people, and the fact that people need to hide themselves is awful.. and what you are contributing to here.

I’m not trans but I am neurodivergent in a way that I can’t hide, and was bullied and attacked for being different a lot of my life. Bigots that only know of one way people can be different would call me “queer” when they cornered me in the school hallway in groups to try to hurt me. Luckily for me, I’m a strong guy, and even being in groups they usually had a worse time of it than I did. I understand what that is like, and don’t wish it on anyone. I want a world where people can mind their own business as themselves without hiding and without awful people trying to shame or attack them.

Reproductive healthcare is much more broadly useful than Molotov cocktails.

this mentioning of potential trans-paraphernalia in an article calling to all hackers is a little misleading (imho), biased perhaps, or even influential. it is a statement i guess.

back in our teen hacker days we heard stories of ppl building molotovs, credit card scammers, eavesdropping equipment, lock-pick etc. but biohacking and female hormonal medicine in particular has definitely not been on the list (that much) if memory serves right… and my bet is that Phrack back-archive can confirm it.

perhaps it is a logical to see a change in popular understanding what hackers can find, or do, or are defined by. curiosity and daring courage to intrude is one thing, we can all agree.

perhaps also we may agree that hacking one’s body is still hacking, as social engineering IS considered hacking.

English is not my native language, I sometimes miss the subtleties.

I’m not saying that’s a good or bad idea from a medical perspective, but I certainly was off-put by their hypocrisy at shutting me down and their myopic definition of “body mods” which apparently to them was just poking holes in their face.

If you have any type of niche hobby for example, and someone finds a new and better way of doing something, they will pretty much universally be attacked and censored.

That would imply that non-trans people are somehow outsiders, which is contrary to the hacker philosophy, which respects merit and skill, regardless of the person’s identity.

As more and more queer and trans people have gotten involved with hacker culture, they’ve brought queer and trans political and philosophical thinking with them and with it, a new orientation. They’re sort of terraforming the hacker space to make it more comfortable and welcoming to people like them. I mean Mara Bos, a leading developer in the Rust ecosystem, states that her goal is to “make the Rust standard library more gay”. Cishets are still welcome, of course, inasmuch as they give due respect to queer and other marginalized people in the community and do not express regressive opinions about the same.

The Q in LGBTQ can stand for Queer, or it can stand for Questioning; and maybe that’s the basic mindset of queer theory that’s applicable here: to question everything, especially your assumptions, and examine critically the social constructs that are intrinsic to the environment in which you live and work. Especially give thought to who is centered and who is marginalized by your efforts.

Allison Parrish does a great job of explaining this attitude in her talk “Programming is Forgetting: Towards a New Hacker Ethic”:

http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting…

I don’t feel like the neo-queer-hacker culture you’re discribing is particularly welcome to anyone who disagrees with them. I’ve heard of multiple instances of people calling for bans of people who said something they disagree with (2). That is completely opposite of “inclusive”. Inclusivity only matters when it includes people you disagree with.

> Coraline Ada Ehmke slew the meritocracy buddha in 2018

It doesn’t surprise me that a person who hasn’t shown much skill or merit is arguing against meritocracy. It is in her own interest to do so.

(0) https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814

I’d say hacker culture tends to be accepting of individualism and diversity, but the vast majority of people in hacker culture have no affiliation with, or knowledge of queer/trans subcultures.

Would like to see that explored more. I think I get where you’re going, but which statement is more true: “hacker culture is inherently queer” or “hacker culture is inherently anti-authoritarian”?

Because I’m thinking it’s maybe more like “Both queer culture and hacker culture are inherently anti-authoritarian, so they have many points of concordance”.

But then I start thinking around the problem, and I think about the amount of privilege inherent in that white-boy-from-the-suburbs 80s/90s hacker thing (“fifty thou a year’ll buy a lot of beer”) and I start to wonder if the gulf is maybe a bit deeper than it first appears.

Where does the cyberpunk/libertarian stuff fit in with queer culture, which IME is a lot more communal?

I don’t know. I think it’s a really interesting line of inquiry.

(Edit: you’ve been flagged. What the actual fuck?)

If anything, I’d consider modern (post-Obergefell) queer culture to be pretty hostile to hacker culture since hackerdom is partially about understanding systems and working them to whatever purposes you decide, whereas modern queer culture seems to be about finding a system that works for you and pledging allegiance to it.

A lot of my distaste/lack of fitting with queer culture right now stems from the conflicts between the values instilled in me as the child of hackers and the values of queer environments.

They were flagged because the comment was deliberately inflammatory and lacked any nuance – there is no way to spring-board from that comment into any kind of continued discussion. It was a comment that was only meant to virtue signal/push an agenda, not to promote discussion. HN tends to frown on that outside of specific aspects of techno-politics.

In a postmodern viewpoint (which has heavily influenced the development of queer theory and culture), most concepts are considered to be deeply intertwined with/defined by their social construction. Queerness, meaning same-sex/gender attraction and non-cisness, are defined as ‘problems’ in society because they subvert social norms. A postmodern/conceptual reading of queerness could state that the subversion is more integral to the concept of queerness than the actual details: For example, male crossdressing is seen as ‘queerer’ than female crossdressing because it’s against the norm for men to wear women’s clothing but not for women to wear men’s clothing. What is considered queer enough to be ‘queer’ depends on social constructions. If queerness is defined by ‘a lifestyle/way of being that is inherently transgressive of social norms, which are defined ipso facto by authorities (whomever they may be in a given culture)’, then hackers’ general stubbornness when it comes to doing things their way and refusing to bend to the easy/official way of doing things could be seen as ‘queer’. Like a gay person who refuses a lavender marriage despite the social benefits it brings, a hacker may refuse conventional/well paying employment because they believe it violates who they are.

It’s just, in my opinion, a stupid argument. I disagree on two key points:

1.) Not everything that is anti-authoritarian and contrary to the norm (and side-eyed for that reason) is ‘queer’. All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. The libertarians who want to abolish the age of consent are not ‘queer’. The fundies who want there to be no educational oversight so they can break the ‘norm’ of having their kids learn history/science are not ‘queer’ even though they’re both anti-authoritarian groups working against social norms. (Even most Christians send their children to school, and even most libertarians agree that having sex with 10 year olds is bad and should be illegal.) Hell, by that definition, TERFs would be queer inherently and I’m pretty sure OP wouldn’t agree with that.

2.) Being homosexual/non-cis is not inherently against social norms and, in fact, the argument ignores that as the digital age allows for geographically distributed cultures, that the queer community itself propagates social norms for its members. (Many of which I disagree with, hence why I am so aware of them.) This is acknowledged with the term ‘homonormativity’ (e.g. to be a good gay, you have to be monogamous and married and act just like straight people, etc.). Breaking queer social norms carries the same penalties within the community as breaking greater society’s social norms does – detransitioners are an interesting study group here.

Honestly, in my experience, the transgressive nature of queerness depends very much on a.) what type of queer you are (I’m picking up on the OP being trans-femme and they are generally seen as one of the more inherently transgressive types of queer, which likely influences their POV) and b.) what part of society you’re in. I would actually consider my homosexuality to be one of the least transgressive aspects of my identity/behavior. My refusal to center romantic relationships/opting to operate in a long term household with a sibling is far more transgressive. My refusal to hide my disability and refusal to participate fully in/invest in my career because of it is far more transgressive. My refusal to care about my gender much and my choice to not pursue any kind of action to change my appearance to match my inner self (because I already have medical conditions and adding hormones/surgeries on top of that is a very unstable system + because as a visually impaired person I don’t see why I should have to change how I look so the rest of you can feel more comfy with my gender presentation) is immensely transgressive in queer spaces because it suggests that gender/self validation is not exceptionally important to me/doesn’t override other concerns. Etc.

I consider the main point of differentiation between queer culture and hacker culture to be about validation and interaction with broader society. Queer culture cares what society thinks: people in it want validation and acceptance and in fact, a lot of queer spaces now primarily function as validation/hugbox chambers, and I see a distressing lack of self-actualization and agency. Hackers overcorrect in the other direction: they’re actively hostile to (at worst) or indifferent to (at best) the concerns of greater society. A hacker is generally expected to have a decent sense of self-worth/self-esteem, and going into hacking spaces and being asked to validate someone wouldn’t be taken well. (It’s really common to see ‘am I really queer/trans enough? Am I really a lesbian? Please call me girl/boy things to help me experience gender euphoria’ etc. in queer spaces, whereas ‘I ran a script on someone’s computer, please tell me I’m a 1337 haxxor so I don’t get depressed’ in hacker spaces would go over like a lead balloon). I’m not really claiming one is better than the other: I prefer hacker spaces ironically because I’m a fairly masculine woman and I despise being used as a validation/vent/therapy machine, but it also has its issues. Like since you’re expected to have a rock solid sense of self, people slinging gross insults at you based on parts of your identity is something you’re supposed to shake off or you’re the sensitive one. I’m totally chill at being called a moron/flamed for stupid questions and suggestions, but as someone who was once a teenaged lesbian, things like the corrective rape threats were over the line.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely we’ll know exactly what they meant. The comment was constructed like a Tweet or Tumblr post meant to rally the troops/get ‘yaaas queen slay’ type responses. An actual desire to discuss would have included things like their reasoning, where they got their information, and/or indications of how sure they were about different parts. And they would have tailored their response to their audience. (I certainly write differently here than I do elsewhere – I would not call myself a ‘homosexual female’ elsewhere, but HN has a strong preference for technically descriptive terms and doesn’t generally ascribe as many inferences to them, so I used those words here.) Instead, it was just blanket ‘X is true and I will not elaborate I’m so smrt’ type posting.

*edited ‘associate’ to ‘ascribe’ because MS aphasia is a bitch and I mix up words now

That was chewy. I can’t give it the reply it deserves (not least because I haven’t walked in those shoes), but I think “transgressive” is absolutely the key word here. Thank you for surfacing it. I, personally, do not believe hacking is transgressive. For evidence I point to how easily “hackers” slip into corporate roles.

> A postmodern/conceptual reading of queerness could state that the subversion is more integral to the concept of queerness than the actual details

I think I instinctively lean towards this definition. It reminds me of maximalist vs minimalist definitions of religion. Choose a maximalist definition and you end up including things like philosophies and political ideologies. Choose a minimalist defintion, and you end up missing out some things that are self-evidently religions. Truth is, religion is one of those “you know it when you see it” things, and maybe Queerness is too?

I can’t agree with transgression being a key component of queerness, but there’s an asterisk to my disagreement: I think that could be a plausible reading if we split the gay community from the queer community, but I also think that’s both unlikely to happen and a terrible idea.

The reason that I disagree is because it leads to situations where a bisexual woman who’s only had relationships with men is ‘queerer’ than a lesbian if the lesbian lives somewhere that isn’t homophobic or the bisexual woman has the ‘right’ politics. There are also logistical problems/concerns with defining the queer community based on transgression that would prohibit the community from performing what I see as key functions of the queer community:

* Support for young queer people and queer elders, as well as disabled queer people. There are many, many issues with queer elders, for example. Transgression is often limited to people with time and independence to transgress (or for whom the trade offs aren’t as severe). A community defined on transgression is necessarily one that won’t support its members throughout their entire lives and will be overly weighed with the concerns of adolescents and young adults. Adolescents and young adults definitely have a place: As a group, they’re the best at raising hell about things we’ve all accepted that actually aren’t okay, and the best at reminding us that change is possible. However, they aren’t the only people who have a place. I knew I was gay when I was 6 and started hanging out in queer spaces online at about that age. How transgressive could I be at six? On the flipside, how transgressive can an 84 year old man who was put in a nursing home by his homophobic kids and now can’t see his lover of 30 years be if he lacks the independence to leave? Likewise, many disabled people can’t work and can only collect SSI, which usually means they have to live with relatives. Sometimes those relatives are homophobic/transphobic and they can’t be transgressive without risking literal death (homelessness and severe disability are not a good combination).

* The queer community has a practical role for homosexuals and trans people: Facilitating places where we can meet prospective partners is one example. As a gay woman, it’s really hard to find partners out and about because…well, most people are straight. Do boring lesbians or gay men not deserve places to meet partners? Likewise, trans people deserve places they can go where they know people won’t be transphobic dicks and can meet potential dates that both aren’t chasers and that are respectful of their gender identity. A passing trans man with a good, boring job still needs to find a partner that won’t flip at the fact that he’s not cis, and disclosure in non-queer specific settings is dicey at best and dangerous at worst.

* Personally, I’ve noticed that communities based on transgression often turn into cults of personality, because whomever is the coolest/most outspoken/most brash sets the temperature, and anyone who objects isn’t cool/punk/transgressive enough. This makes it REALLY easy for bad people to get away with things because there’s no principle behind the transgression, and that means that a lot of Chesterton’s fences are torn down. I’m extremely anti-authoritarian and I still agree there are certain social mores that exist for a reason: for example, the more that you shouldn’t involve unconsenting people in your kinks/sex life. Have all the kinks you want, but forcing them into spaces in the name of ‘transgression’ without consent is bad. Or that erotic conversations shouldn’t happen between minors and adults several years older than them. (I phrase it that way because obviously it’s fine if a 17 year old and an 18 year old cyber, and I also, because of my 0th law, believe it’s fine to provide dry, factual sexual information to minors. I specify erotic for a reason.)

Splitting the communities would solve those problems but introduce new ones:

* Splitting the gay and queer communities would put trans people who value passing and blending in into a very difficult spot. It would suck for them and I don’t want things to suck for them.

* It’d create a huge logistical hurdle for trans/queer rights, since a lot of the activist infrastructure was built for the LGB and if you take out the ‘let people marry who they love/have families with who they love/live with who they love’ aspect of queer activism, straight cis people will relate way less and be less supportive. Most straight people can understand ‘I love this person and can’t be with them and that makes me sad’ more than they can ‘I feel a deep seated need to have a vagina/penis’. Unfortunately, relatability is a key aspect in gathering support, tactically speaking. It would be tactical/strategic suicide for the trans and queer community to decouple from the gay community.

I fully agree that hacking isn’t ipso facto transgressive. It’s people exploiting systems for their own purposes. Those purposes vary widely. I’m sure there are plenty of hacker types in the three letter agencies, which is about as non transgressive as you can get in that they’re literally a secret authoritarian arm of the state.

I think I’m about to present as the traditional logical-to-the-point-of absurdity HN nerd here, but:

> I think that could be a plausible reading if we split the gay community from the queer community, but I also think that’s both unlikely to happen and a terrible idea.

If “Queer community” and “Gay community” are different, it is possible to separate them. Or rather belong to just one, the other, or both.

Is the difference between Q and G not, essentially, one of politics?

(Not my communities, not my country, looking in from the outside, “politics” in a very broad sense, all those caveats. I’m picking up on that one sentence because I don’t think there’s anything else I can disagree with – I either agree, or I don’t know enough to disagree).

BTW, have you ever run across the concept of a purity spiral? I’m not a fan of the source, but I think the concept is a good spanner to add to the mental toolkit. I think it would appeal to you: https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a…

> I think I’m about to present as the traditional logical-to-the-point-of absurdity HN nerd here…

An overreliance on logic in my HN? It’s more likely than you think! 😉

Logically, you would be correct, but there’s specific social history and context that makes the break a very bad idea. I’d compare it to the feasibility of a nationally competitive third party in the US: It’s possible in theory but in practice, extremely unlikely. (I apologize that most of my analogies rely on US specific cases; there are a few other countries I could use instead but I don’t know which one you’re from so I’m not sure how to adapt my content to your situation.)

In this case, the problem is that the people who are currently agitating for a separation of the two are mostly homosexuals (and a smattering of bisexuals) who are actively hostile to trans peoples’ issues. This results in a situation where there can be no neutral discussion of the separation. In addition, since the queer community runs on vibes, that means that the leaders of each ‘side’ tend to be the loudest and most extreme, because they care the most and have the most time to devote to these feuds. Plus, pretty much all decisions/opinions in left-leaning American spaces tend to be viewed from solely a moral lens: Discussion of action from a strategic lens is almost seen as immoral. (For instance, my objection to bisexual women who are mostly attracted to women claiming the lesbian label + my objection to neopronouns are seen as moral judgements rather than a reflection of my Linguistics background meaning I prefer us to adapt our terms to what we know of how language works. This is from people who both agree and disagree with me.) Interestingly, I do see this changing slowly and I feel hopeful about that – the moral shaming and self righteousness is very online-Millennial coded and we’re (I’m 36) aging out of youth culture, which means the kids are starting to push back on our stupid ideas. We seem more like busybodies than people speaking truth to power. Good.

Because of the social context behind who is leading both the ‘LGB drop the T’ movement as well as their enemies, instead of a clean break, we’d get a messy circular firing squad that likely would greatly damage both sides in the eyes of larger society. It would also result in both sides being used as proxies in political disputes, whereas together we’re a strong enough band to stand on our own merit/advocate for our own interests. It’s kind of similar to how Black Americans will never break away from the Democrats despite having a substantial religious, socially conservative contingent: There’s too much benefit in getting to exercise power as a voting bloc and it’s more advantageous to play along in public while socially policing/arguing among themselves in more private arenas.

tl;dr: Separating would be a Pyrrhic victory for everyone involved. So nobody will do it.

> BTW, have you ever run across the concept of a purity spiral? I’m not a fan of the source, but I think the concept is a good spanner to add to the mental toolkit. I think it would appeal to you: https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a…

IMO the kids are shaping up to be more like GenX than anything. (The kids are alright).

America’s the navel of the world, culturally, militarily, financially. The rest of us just kinda have to roll downhill. It’s not good or bad, it just is. And I’ll take The Mouse over Pooh Jinping any day. (UK BTW). What does annoy me is that because we share a language, we get the overspill from US-targeted propaganda. We’ve even developed our own Sovereign Citizen movement.

> In this case, the problem is that the people who are currently agitating for a separation of the two are mostly homosexuals (and a smattering of bisexuals) who are actively hostile to trans peoples’ issues.

Reminds me of the Mens’ Rights, movement. Ok, yeah, in theory it’s a great idea. But who wants to hang out with the kind of guys Mens Rights attracts?

> What does annoy me is that because we share a language, we get the overspill from US-targeted propaganda. We’ve even developed our own Sovereign Citizen movement.

Yeah, the Canadians are dealing with this shit too.

One thing I’m hopeful for is that as more and more politics becomes entwined with the digital world is that things might be able to balance out a bit on that front. Prior to instant communication, geography was a hurdle, but now we can have more cooperation between all the areas of the world that are overshadowed by America/neglected in online discussions. As more and more Africans, South Americans, Central Asians, etc. join the party, they can start calling us out on our self-centeredness more. Hopefully.

> Reminds me of the Mens’ Rights, movement. Ok, yeah, in theory it’s a great idea. But who wants to hang out with the kind of guys Mens Rights attracts?

Basically. And, like with the Men’s Rights guys, both ‘sides’ attract people who like righteous anger and complaining more than anything tedious like ‘work’ or ‘learning’.

I appreciate the compliment and glad it was helpful!

“ Hackers should not think of themselves as “oh I am this little guy fighting Big Corporation” or whatever. This is low agency behavior. Instead become the corporation and RUN IT THE WAY YOU THINK IT SHOULD BE RUN.” ”

One question though, to the suggestion that hackers should focus on raising capital in a way that gives them breathing room… how the hell am I supposed to do that?

What I ended up doing is stacking cash at large tech companies and then using that to quit and I finally ended up with a large cash cow business with $4 million profits (pre tax).

With hacking, you can get double digit and even triple digit millionaire in about 10 years. Trick is to be really earnest, build at the frontier of tech, market efficiently and treat it like a math problem. You are trying to optimize for enterprise value.

Then what happened is that pretty much every year (maybe closer to every day) since then I have learned about some piece of the puzzle where my mental model was actually nowhere near the truth, and that each individual puzzle piece is even more complex than I thought! Truly wild stuff.

This.

But let’s take it easy on the gatekeeping that any of that is even a little complicated.

Quantum chromodynamics is complicated: price-time precedence in financial markets is flash cards.

‘Tis not a contest. Curiosity is its own reward.

Financial markets that are open to the participation of billions of people, amalgamating all the behavior of all those participants, are complicated. Perhaps not nearly as complicated as quantum chromodynamics, I dunno, but complicated nonetheless.

Hacker culture is inherently antiauthoritarian. Wanting to become the big corporation is something you would expect only from “hacker” “news”.

This is the most generic trap of all. Get good at something and then extrapolate to claim that you know how everything works. I suggest that, given the insane proliferation of valueless derivatives and ejection of human values from these systems, a more suitable conclusion might be that this is how the world dies.

They’re not taking a narrow definition of knowledge & extrapolating that once one has that specific knowledge it explains everything. Instead they’re broadening the definition of “hacker” (& also invoking the idea of continuous interrogation) to describe an approach to always seeking & finding “how the world works” in any given context.

Certainly this article is less dogmatic that many, but I still got the sense that author was using effects like causes.

The less lazy version is to do with treating the metric as the measure. Sure, the quant revolution is in full swing, but it’s a terrible way to gauge the success (or failure) of society, and is perhaps a better metric for describing detrimental human activity.

That said, I fully appreciate the author’s efforts to break with convention, but I felt that the points made actually give creedence to the system that, in my view, is actively corrupting the values that might get us out of this mess

By the time you have accrued detailed experience of how both these technical systems and social systems work, you may be well on your way to understanding how the world works (in abstract, at any rate)?

The author describes the phenomenon, but doesn’t seem to see the broader picture. This is where a meta-systematic, or paradigmatic (if you’re allergic to the word ‘meta’) perspective is needed, which transcends both social and technical systems, but appreciated how they fit into a larger scheme.

Through this lens the world is decidedly pluralistic and cannot be condensed to ‘it’s like X, we gotta do Y’. That can work for a personal strategy, and the author is kind enough to make some suggestions, but it’s intellectual overreach to try and label the world

People have been saying that forever. Especially during downswings like we’ve had lately (which is somewhat minor all told).

And then the world doesn’t die but they spent a bunch of time dooming instead of staying ready for the inevitable opportunities that come from things turning around.

I think the spirit that the author is trying to capture is that there is a better way. I just think that they don’t go far enough. There is a tendency to arrive at a idea and believe it to be a good global model – my intention with these comments is to try and provoke a more holistic assessment of the issue, despite the fact that I think their criticism of startup culture is valid

What do you mean by “these systems” ? Blockchain based money?

Stock and, to a lesser degree, commodities futures, stock index futures, currency futures, interest rate futures, index options, currency options, interest rate options, credit default swaps, total return swaps, currency forwards, interest rate forwards.

The more exotic of these, which are usually more lucractive and less well regulated, include:

derivative-based exchange-traded funds, leveraged ETFs, inverse ETFs, equity-linked notes, credit-linked notes, principal-protected notes, collateralized debt obligations, weather derivatives (yes, you read that right), catastrophe bonds (eesh) barrier options and lookback options, to name a few.

They are all mechanisms to leverage expectation and uncertainty and most rely on the quantification of risk at some level. Risk, however, is defined in terms of expected return and subject to an assessment of externalities that is, at its core, resource-blind.

> Do not swallow blackpills. It’s easy to get really cynical and think
things are doomed

> Creating leverage for yourself. Hackers should not think of themselves as
“oh I am this little guy fighting Big Corporation” or whatever. This is
low agency behavior. Instead become the corporation and RUN IT THE WAY YOU
THINK IT SHOULD BE RUN.

Should I do it? Does this mean me? Obviously not, because I don’t know shit about EDR. But obviously neither does Crowdstrike. I mean really, I couldn’t possibly do any worse… right? Right? On the internet, it’s easy to feel outclassed. But IRL, a large majority of people suck at their job. So in theory this should work.

In practice, I guess I’m just blackpilled. For much less effort I can get paid 6 figures for 2 hours of work per week. (Also, I realize that winning at business is more difficult than I’m implying. But if my former bosses, who didn’t do much other than yell at people and also drugs, could build a 25M/year business then you probably can too.)

The catch22 is that if you are good at technology, you tend to align your personal morals and character to actual true value, not fake value, which makes you a pretty good anti-bullshit filter. However people who align themselves to the concept of making money are more aligned to working with the bullshit, not seeing it as negative but as a part of life. Thats why your ex bosses could build 25M business, and why you are blackpilled.

In the past, when there was room for innovation because things haven’t been invented yet, you could do both. Now, you basically have to pick one or the other.

Crypto gets a lot of shit but social contracts made analyzable as smart contracts is promising for ethical financial markets. e.g. you could detect a debt spiral as a flow/loop/void structure with renormalization groups and persistent homology. When you can spot entities trying to create wage slaves from 100 miles away you can focus your energy on being creative.

Like the sibling comment said, ‘red pill’ is seeing the truth of the world (or, what the community that uses the term red pill thinks is the truth at least. often this refers to the truth as decided by internet mysoginiats). Black pill is this truth + its unchangeable and hopeless and pointless and why do anything and oh god I wish I could go back to not knowing.

If its used by somebody reasonable, blackpill is a pejorative with the implication that the ideology is more cynical and hopeless than it really should be and has the connotation that their ideology is a little too internety.

I think of “black pill” as a GMO’d red pill designed to nudge the “learner” into a position of learned-helplessness.

Take a common aphorism around here: “99% of startups fail, so you shouldn’t bother trying”. The red pill is “failure is the most common modality for new ventures”, but the attached advice makes it a black pill.

In a meta way, the linking of the term “red pill” to misogyny/misandry turned the red pill concept itself into a black pill (why bother seeking “red pills” if the “community” most identified with them is so disturbing?).

They’re in a privileged position. Someone who’s not already in a privileged position can’t necessarily get there just by trying super hard.

    Calling All Hackers | 2 points 15 hours ago | 
    Phrack 71 | 194 points 1 day ago | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41296949
    Calling All Hackers | 7 points 1 day ago | 
    Phrack Issue #71 | 12 points 1 day ago |

life is all about systems. once you understand how to break down systems, you can hack all of them. it does not matter what your knowledge or skill level is on a particular system as long as you can break it all down to its fundamental parts and understand its behavior. most things you only need to observe before understanding.

I agree with others though, the article comes across as a little cocky. its also fine to be a hacker who only focuses on one particular area. it does not make you less of a hacker. you only need to understand systems.

> “My point is, it is not just about computers. It’s about understanding how
the world works. The world is made up of people. As much as machines keep
society running, those machines are programmed by people–people with
managers, spouses, and children; with wants, needs, and dreams. And it is
about using that knowledge to bring about the change you want to see.

That is what being a hacker is all about.”

I usually read/listen to people’s experiences and whether or not their stories truly make sense depends on how they present them to the world.

The one you referenced I pushed I front of my teenager daughters nose and said “read this it’s important it’s about you”

Thank you

This has been a pretty tried and true way for me to figure out who is schizophrenic and who is important.

all this shit I hear about working in early stage startups and I’m honestly surprised why anyone would bother (unless they’re a founder)

Are there any good resources to understand the world’s financial systems as a layman? I’m not looking to be an expert.

Loved this line:
“Nowadays, to
me it’s about creating good jobs for my friends, helping our customers,
and taking care of the community”.

Good luck!

I guess you can call that a hacker, or count hackers among such people. But then, if the latter, you must offer a distinguishing characteristic that distinguishes hackers among others in this genus.

And what are the author’s presuppositions?

Ironically this time IDA 9.0 was leaked by… hexrays themselves, including lumina, hexvault, etc. Pretty sure it was meant to be a demo page in defcon, but someone leaked the URL.

Binary Ninja is a solid competitor if you don’t mind cleaning up the binaries before hand to clear up opaque jumps or have 256GB of ram.

If someone goes out of their way to tell you about a thing in detail, emphasizing how it’s not a mysterious unknown, the conceit is that they think that you thought it was a mysterious unknown, and they are removing the blinders from your poor ignorant eyes.

> As a non-finance person, understanding “why” obviously terrible ideas get investment helps me understand how the world works.

> If we replaced the humans in the financial system with APIs, there would be inputs (pitch deck, founder persona, whatever) that can cleverly lead to an intended solution (raising capital, starting a company) in the same way that I could find a vulnerability on RuneScape or Eve Online

I’m sorry, but you really don’t understand how the world works.

> approaching the world in the “hacker mindset” is about observing and manipulating these systems

The hacker mindset is curiosity and discovery, not observing and manipulating. It’s one thing to study a thing; it’s another to become it.

In this system, someone has to lose for someone to win. Felt like a strong reminder that capitalism subsumes all critique into itself.

Just because we’re both hackers, doesn’t mean you can call on me. I don’t care about all your handles or what you think hacking should be, get to the point and stop wasting my time.

I think the writing style is influenced by WallStreetBets infodumps, which are influenced by Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, and kinda remind me of Hunter S. Thompson a little bit. Personally I find it annoying but I understand the culture that this kind of writing is emerging from.

A hacker should know how to captivate their audience, particularly when talking about marketing.

EDIT: I actually love that it’s text based, even to the point of creating sigma notation out of plain text.

I couldn’t have said it better. This is why I’m an entrepreneur and still take the pains to do it.