Hacker News Quotes

Dear 2600: Tell me how much one of your hackers would charge me to delete my criminal record from the Texas police database. [NAME DELETED] Well, we would start with erasing your latest crime, that of soliciting a minor to commit another crime. (Your request was read by a small child here in the office.) After you’re all paid up on that, we will send out the bill for hiding your identity by not printing your real name, which you sent us like the meathead you apparently are. After that’s all sorted, we can assemble our team of hackers, who sit around the office waiting for such lucrative opportunities as this to come along, and figure out even more ways to shake you down. It’s what we do, after all. Just ask Fox News.

Fredkin believes that the universe is very literally a computer and that it is being used by someone, or something, to solve a problem. It sounds like a good-news/bad-news joke: the good news is that our lives have purpose; the bad news is that their purpose is to help some remote hacker estimate pi to nine jillion decimal places.

The hecklers weren’t hacking people’s computers; they were hacking their minds, in two ways. In one sense, they sought to change a target audience’s perception on issues, nudging audiences toward preferred foreign policy positions and influencing experts, politicians, and media personalities toward a pro-Assad or pro-Russia stance. When not shaping audience conversations through a barrage of slanted content and supporting banter, hecklers sought to batter adversaries off social media platforms through either endless harassment or compromise.

TechCrunch, Fast Company, Mashable, Inc., Entrepreneur, and countless other publications. LinkedIn and Hacker News abound with job postings: Growth Hacker Needed. Their job isn’t to “do” marketing as I had always known it; it’s to grow companies really fast—to take something from nothing and make it something enormous within an incredibly tight window. And it says something about what marketing has become that these are no longer considered synonymous tasks. The term “growth hacker” has many different meanings for different people, but I’ll define it as I have come to understand it: A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like “branding” and “mind share,” growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth—and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a start-up from nothing to something.

It was a wake-up call to me to learn that Airbnb was by no means unique: Instagram started as a location-based social network called Burbn (which had an optional photo feature). It attracted a core group of users and more than $500,000 in funding. And yet the founders realized that its users were flocking to only one part of the app—the photos and filters. They had a meeting, which one of the founders recounts like this: “We sat down and said, ‘What are we going to work on next? How are we going to evolve this product into something millions of people will want to use? What is the one thing that makes this product unique and interesting?’”7 The service soon retooled to become Instagram as we know it: a mobile app for posting photos with filters. The result? One hundred thousand users within a week of relaunching. Within eighteen months, the founders sold Instagram to Facebook for $1 billion. I know that seems simple, that the marketing lesson from Instragram is that they made a product that was just awesome. But that’s good news for you—it means there’s no secret sauce, and the second your product gets to be that awesome, you can see similar results. Just look at Snapchat, which essentially followed the same playbook by innovating in the mobile photo app space, blew up with young people, and skyrocketed to a $3.5-billion-dollar valuation with next-to-no marketing.

America sucks at information warfare, absolutely sucks. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Democracies are marketplaces of ideas. We stand for freedom, liberty, human rights, and peaceful protest, so stopping one thing, like the violent views of terrorists or nefarious Russian influence of homegrown Americans, gets quite tricky. American values and those of other Western democracies are their greatest strength when shared and promoted—and a major vulnerability in the eyes of those who seek to exploit them. Suppressing ideas undermines American values. And so countering bad ideas, like those that fuel terrorism or authoritarianism, proves vexing, as we tend to believe that the remedy to be applied is more speech, even though we are not entirely sure what to say, how to say it, or who should say it.

Eventually, we may reach a point when it will be impossible to disconnect from this all-knowing network even for a moment. Disconnection will mean death. If medical hopes are realised, future people will incorporate into their bodies a host of biometric devices, bionic organs and nano-robots, which will monitor our health and defend us from infections, illnesses and damage. Yet these devices will have to be online 24/7, both in order to be updated with the latest medical news, and in order to protect them from the new plagues of cyberspace. Just as my home computer is constantly attacked by viruses, worms and Trojan horses, so will be my pacemaker, my hearing aid and my nanotech immune system. If I don’t update my body’s anti-virus program regularly, I will wake up one day to discover that the millions of nano-robots coursing through my veins are now controlled by a North Korean hacker.

The most insidious part of the traditional marketing model is that “big blowout launch” mythology. Of course, equally seductive is the “build it and they will come” assumption that too many people associate with the Web. Both are too simple and rarely effective. Remember what Aaron Swartz realized. Users have to be pulled in. A good idea is not enough. Your customers, in fact, have to be “acquired.” But the way to do that isn’t with a bombardment. It’s with a targeted offensive in the right places aimed at the right people. Your start-up is designed to be a growth engine—and at some point early on, that engine has to be kick-started. The good news is that we have to do that only once. Because the next step isn’t about getting more attention or publicity. The endless promotional cycle of traditional marketing is not our destiny. Because once we bring our first customers in, our next move is to set about turning them into an army.

WE LIVE IN AN age of nontraditional ladder climbing. Not just in politics, but in business and personal development and education and entertainment and innovation. Traditional paths are not just slow; they’re no longer viable if we want to compete and innovate. That’s great news, because throwing out the dues paradigm leads us toward meritocracy. But to be successful, we need to start thinking more like hackers, acting more like entrepreneurs. We have to work smarter, not just harder. We’ll see throughout the following chapters how Sinatra-style credibility and ladder switching—always parlaying for something more—are the foundation for how the most interesting people and companies in the world succeed. It’s not just how presidents get to the top. It’s how CEOs and comedians and racecar drivers hone their skills and make it in the big leagues. It’s how new businesses grow fast, and old businesses grow faster. It’s how entrepreneurs create life-changing products in record time and inventors parlay dreams for bigger dreams. Hacking the ladder is the mind-set they use to get places. The rest of this book is about becoming good enough to deserve it.

the device had the property of transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor, Pierce proposed transistor. Exclaimed Brattain, “That’s it!” The naming process still had to go through a formal poll of all the other engineers, but transistor easily won the election over five other options.35 On June 30, 1948, the press gathered in the auditorium of Bell Labs’ old building on West Street in Manhattan. The event featured Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain as a group, and it was moderated by the director of research, Ralph Bown, dressed in a somber suit and colorful bow tie. He emphasized that the invention sprang from a combination of collaborative teamwork and individual brilliance: “Scientific research is coming more and more to be recognized as a group or teamwork job. . . . What we have for you today represents a fine example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research in an industrial framework.”36 That precisely described the mix that had become the formula for innovation in the digital age. The New York Times buried the story on page 46 as the last item in its “News of Radio” column, after a note about an upcoming broadcast of an organ concert. But Time made it the lead story of its science section, with the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs enforced the rule that Shockley be in every publicity photo along with Bardeen and Brattain. The most famous one shows the three of them in Brattain’s lab. Just as it was about to be taken, Shockley sat down in Brattain’s chair, as if it were his desk and microscope, and became the focal point of the photo. Years later Bardeen would describe Brattain’s lingering dismay and his resentment of Shockley: “Boy, Walter hates this picture. . . . That’s Walter’s equipment and our experiment,

My reply to Paul Graham’s comment on Hacker News seems like a summary worth repeating: There’s a difference between: Passing neutral judgment; Declining to invest marginal resources; Pretending that either of the above is a mark of deep wisdom, maturity, and a superior vantage point; with the corresponding implication that the original sides occupy lower vantage points that are not importantly different from up there.

Of course, to hear weev tell the story, it was clear that he also did it for the lulz. He would giggle whenever Goatse Security was mentioned in news reports about the incident. He imagined millions of people Googling the strange name of the security group, and then recoiling in horror at the sight of a vile “anal supernova” beaming off their screen.4 Goatse is a notoriously grotesque Internet image of a man hunched over and pulling apart his butt cheeks wider than you might think is humanly possible. Those who view it are forever unable to unsee what they have just seen—unable to forget even the smallest detail, their minds seared by the image as if the gaping maw, adorned with a ring, were a red-hot cattle brand. The

Even before today she felt the daily deluge of alarming news related to Russian hackers, nuclear-armed North Koreans, police officers shooting innocent Black children, deranged gunmen popping up like whack-a-moles ambushing schools and holiday parties and church gatherings, people being violently hauled off airplanes, terrorists in Barcelona, melting ice caps, and dying polar bears, and she is on alert, and terrified, about absolutely everything.

News that affects your prospects directly... (“How To Use The New Laws To Lower Your Property Taxes By Half.”)... 2. A spectacular benefit that jars them out of their stupor... (“New Herbal Pill Instantly Makes You Look 10 Years Younger!”)... or... 3. Arouse such burning curiosity that they cannot continue with their lives until they've read your message. (“Why Does This Hacker Smile Every Time You Do Business On-Line?”)

She flipped on the radio to get her own voice out of her head and replace it with whatever inanity was on the morning drive. People who host morning radio programs cannot believe how funny they are. She moved it to AM—did anyone listen to AM anymore?—and put on the all-news channel. There was comfort to the almost military precision and predictability. Sports on the quarter hour. Traffic every ten minutes. She was distracted, half listening at best, when a story caught her attention: “Notorious hacker Corey the Whistle has promised a treasure chest of new leaks this week that he claims will not only embarrass a leading official in the current administration but also will definitely lead to resignation and, most likely, prosecution . . .” Despite

Engineers have a peculiar relationship with doctors. When they have need of one, and the doctor decides on a treatment plan for them, they think about the complexity of the problem space the doctor had to navigate to reach that decision. They wish the doctor would chart the parameter space for them, so they can agree or disagree with the choice in an informed manner, and have more of a clue about the competence of the doctor. This is usually not what happens, not to their satisfaction anyway, and it's deeply unsettling having to trust rather than know when it comes to something that appears so much like engineering on the surface.

This means that our outward-facing marketing and PR efforts are needed simply to reach out to and capture, at the beginning, a group of highly interested, loyal, and fanatical users. Then we grow with and because of them. If they are geeks, they are at TechCrunch or Hacker News or reddit or attending a handful of conferences every year. If they are fashionistas, they are regularly checking a handful of fashion blogs like Lookbook.nu or Hypebeast.

Content Marketing. Although it is often coupled with SEO, content marketing relies solely on virality or on building an audience slowly over time, without the long-term benefit of organic search. This includes writing blog posts you hope will make it to the top of social news sites like Hacker News and Reddit and building a media brand alongside your product (something I recommend only for very well-funded companies). It also includes producing content to educate people at different steps in their funnel whom you already have permission to contact. Most people think of blog posts when you mention content marketing. However, content can include books, ebooks, audio (think podcasts), video (think YouTube), or even in-person courses that are given away to bring links, traffic, and leads and build credibility. Most founders start by producing the content themselves, then hire people to help with production later.

The Columbia Journalism Review analyzed the news outlets most frequently shared by supporters of Trump and Clinton. Fans of both candidates demonstrated a proclivity for outlets supporting their political biases, but the differences between the two camps were stark. On social media, Clinton supporters shared the Washington Post, Huffington Post, and New York Times the most. Trump supporters far and away preferred Breitbart, the Hill, and Fox News. Further down the list, Clinton supporters gravitated to a wide range of liberal outlets, most fairly well known. Trump’s camp, though, included a long list of lesser-known outlets, including the controversial Infowars, a media organization known for denying the occurrence of the Sandy Hook shootings and one I’d witnessed routinely regurgitating Russian propaganda.

cursory look at the Columbia Journalism Review’s media map demonstrates how social media encourages information bubbles for each political leaning. Conservatives strongly centered their consumption around Breitbart and Fox News, while liberals relied on a more diverse spread of left-leaning outlets. For a foreign influence operation like the one the Russians ran against the United States, the highly concentrated right-wing social media landscape is an immediate, ripe target for injecting themes and messages. The American left shows to be multipolar, littered with fringe outlets and causes, making concentrated foreign influence more challenging; spreading the Kremlin message thus requires influencing many outlets rather than one or two.

year after Trump’s election, the Associated Press analyzed his forty-three nominees in science-related positions and found that 60 percent held neither a master’s degree nor a doctorate in a science or health field.5

The good news is you don't have to do any of this manually! The best tool that is currently available for testing the randomness of web application tokens is Burp Sequencer. This tool applies several standard tests in a flexible way and gives you clear results that are easy to interpret.

In a research study called “How today’s fastest growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers,” startup veteran Lenny Rachitsky interviewed early members of teams from Slack, Stripe, Figma, and Asana. In studying how these earliest companies found their first customers, it was concluded that a significant number came from the founders tapping their personal networks: Only three sourcing strategies account for every B2B company’s very early growth. [These are: Personal network, Seek out customers where they are, Get press.] Thus, your choices are easy, yet limited. Almost every B2B business both hits up their personal network and heads to the places their potential customers were spending time. The question isn’t which of these two routes to pursue, but instead how far your own network will take you before you move on. It’s a huge advantage to have a strong personal network in B2B, which you can also build by bringing a connector investor or joining an incubator such as YC. Getting press is rarely the way to get started.44 Just as Uber’s ops hustle worked for solving the city-by-city Cold Start Problem, B2B startups have an equivalent card to play: they can manually reach out and onboard teams from their friends’ startups, building atomic networks quickly, as Slack did in their early launch. Or, many productivity products begin by launching within online communities—like Twitter, Hacker News, and Product Hunt—where dense pockets of early adopters are willing to try new products. In recent years, B2B products have started to emphasize memes, funny videos, invite-only mechanics, and other tactics traditionally associated with consumer startups. I expect that this will only continue, as the consumerization of enterprise products fully embraces meme-based go-to-market early on, instead of leading with direct sales.

If a male CEO had an affair, it would hardly be news,” Alison said. “It would be glossed over and business would go on as usual. Why should I be different?

Ghazal !يا لطيف (Ya Lateef!) - 1942- A lot more malaise and a little more grief every day, aware that all seasons, the stormy, the sunlit, are brief every day. I don’t know the name of the hundredth drowned child, just the names of the oligarchs trampling the green, eating beef every day, while luminous creatures flick, stymied, above and around the plastic detritus that’s piling up over the reef every day. A tiny white cup of black coffee in afternoon shade, while an oud or a sax plays brings breath and relief every day. Another beginning, no useful conclusion in sight‚— another first draft that I tear out and add to the sheaf every day. One name, three-in-one, ninety-nine, or a matrix of tales that are one story only, well-springs of belief every day. But I wake before dawn to read news that arrived overnight on a minuscule screen , and exclaim يا لطيف every day.

Social media nationalism and clickbait populism have led to a third phenomenon that undermines the intelligence of crowds, threatening the advancement of humanity and the unity of democracies: the death of expertise. As the barriers to internet access got lower and lower, anyone, regardless of education, training, or status, could explore information and voice their opinion in debate. This would seem, on the surface, to be good for democracies, as increased information, awareness, and voice would seem to encourage more civic engagement and debate and better collective outcomes. Instead, social media users, in their relentless pursuit of preferences, have selectively chosen information and expertise they like over that which is true or even real. Social media users participating in the crowd have chosen to be happier and dumber by not just challenging McAfee and Brynjolfsson’s core but also by seeking to destroy it.

RT has something for every American if it means weakening support for the U.S. government and its institutions. RT’s tagline is “Question More.” Of course, it seeks to provide not answers, but doubt. How do you know? Could it be this instead? Can you really trust the government? Isn’t the U.S. government hypocritical? The net takeaway of RT coverage is that nothing can be trusted, and if you can’t trust anyone, then you’ll believe anything.

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