I'm a professional hacker, and I love what I do, but this is one of the most cringe articles I have ever read. You shouldn't idolize the activities that you do and elevate them to a quasi-religious practice. Can you imagine a plumber or an airline pilot writing a manifesto like this? This happens with a lot of professions, but particularly in tech and ESPECIALLY in the offensive disciplines of cybersecurity. It makes for some of the most insufferable people you can ever interact with. They put all the eggs of their identity into one basket and it makes them overly self-important on that one topic, prideful, snobbish, and insecure. My advice to other hackers: pick up at least one or two other hobbies. Realize that it's not what you do that matters, but how you do all things, and most importantly how you engage with people.
The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
61–70 of 118 posts
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#62I feel like the irony of a post complaining about the death of hacker culture written entirely by ChatGPT pretty well summarizes where we're at.
Human effort has hit an all time low.
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#63This sounds like ChatGPT.
Uh, should have used Claude. Gpt is embarassing. You won’t get my point so I have to lay it bare: That doesn’t matter. Content counts and not the methods to create it.
when i say 'written by an llm' i am skipping a step. it assumes the reader knows that llm style and diction is bad. but of course there are many reasons why it is so bad.
for example, i would describe this article as grandiose, overdramatic and excessively ornate. ironically those styles show a lack of humanity.
it has vanishingly little substance. take "a poetic snapshot of a subculture forming in the shadows". this is meaningless!
it's generic, everything about the article is stating the mean belief. where is the controversy, where is the drama that would justify these massive sentences?
you can also notice that everything about an llm text has this repulsive corporate optimism, a desperation to deliver a redeeming conclusion.
so this article says, the hero meets the challenge in the journey, "We used opcode charts like musicians used sheet music. We owned the stack." oh no. we reached the bottom. but! watch out! because, we will be redeemed, "That spark is hard to find now, but it still lives in the rarest of places". how about this: no it fucking doesn't, the spark is dead, bled out and buried in a block of concrete. end of article.
i studied humanities but i hope that readers of any subject would react the same way.
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#64Man everyone says every article/blog post that is on HN is written by an LLM. Almost every single post.. I actually didn't get strong AI vibes from this one but maybe I just am bad at recognizing. Sure it's a bit cringy but I think that's kinda the point? idk...i like the idea of keeping the culture of exploration of technology just for the sake of it (not to monetize everything) alive.
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other thing is who really knows if it was human or LLM. I think I have been accused of writing like an LLM.
With em dashes in particular, a human would have to go to explicit effort to use a non-ascii character. I like a good em-dash myself, but I just use a hyphen because I'm not going to go to the effort of using a character that's not on my keyboard in a blog post or comment. Using em dashes, especially in an otherwise monospace retro-computing theme, is a sure sign of llm output.
That evidence is laughable.
I learned about em-dashes from one of clients who used them. She used Microsoft Word it took a chord key sequence but was in her skill set. I think it was shift-option hyphen.
I think using em-dashes to detect LLMs reveals the divide between computer science and liberal arts.
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#66Read the original instead of this AI slop:
Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"... Damn kids. They're all alike.
But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him? I am a hacker, enter my world... Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me... Damn underachiever. They're all alike.
I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..." Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me... Or thinks I'm a smart ass... Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here... Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found. "This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all... Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re right. The content sucks, because it was created with an LLM.
[flagged]
> Argue with the content
I am. It sounds like it was written by an LLM. That's synonymous with uninteresting and derivative.
BTW, likening not wanting to read LLM output to racism is possibly one of the funniest things I've ever seen on this website. Thank you.
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#68Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#69From the article > Then: Phrack was the Rosetta Stone. 2600 was gospel. IRC was sacred ground. Zines were copied, not monetized. We earned respect by contributing tools, ideas, or code, never by chasing clout. 2600: The Hacker Quarterly is definitely not quite what it was decades ago, but I was still so giddy when my first article got published there that I dereferenced a null pointer on purpose.
Nobody back then would have ever said IRC was “sacred ground.” What does that even mean?
And I read 2600 and also occasionally submitted, but it certainly wasn’t treated as gospel. Also of course there was clout chasing — most of the scene was teenagers trying to impress each other!
Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
#70I'm a professional hacker, and I love what I do, but this is one of the most cringe articles I have ever read. You shouldn't idolize the activities that you do and elevate them to a quasi-religious practice. Can you imagine a plumber or an airline pilot writing a manifesto like this? This happens with a lot of professions, but particularly in tech and ESPECIALLY in the offensive disciplines of cybersecurity. It makes…
Or buy a T-shirt that says.. WWND - and ask yourself.. What would Neo do? /s