Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Steve Wozniak used to tip from printed sheets of $2 bills

web.archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 553 posts

Re: Steve Wozniak used to tip from printed sheets of $2 bills

#371

Post by scarface74 »

dbingham wrote: post #367
scarface74 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew I read something somewhere and this is the closest I could find. But I think it’s related. So when I asked ChatGPT > Are countries with less racial diversity more likely to have a larger safety net” because my GoogleFu was failing me, of course it gave me a non controversial generic answer. But when I asked it for citations it gave me this > A 2018 study published in the journal Social Science Research, which…

That's very circumstantial evidence that requires more examination. Is that a direct result of the diversity - or of the history that generated that diversity in the first place? In most countries that are ethnically diverse, that diversity was created through various forms of colonialism. Often with racial imperialism deeply ingrained in it. Which means those countries have long running strains of racist ideas and i…

That last paragraph sound like the same non committal answer I got from ChatGPT at first. That’s not meant to be a criticism, just a random aside.

You do raise a fair point

Re: Steve Wozniak used to tip from printed sheets of $2 bills

#372

Post by mxtihvb »

From Walter Isaacson's biography:

Woz and Jobs got their first big break from selling physical copies of the 'Blue Box', a device which allowed you to place long-distance phone calls through intelligently breaking AT&T's phone routing network. In today's 'wire fraud' day and age, this 100% would have been illegal -- so note that these two people made today's most valuable company!

Relatively speaking, printing a photo ID or $2 bills is nothing. It is the hacker spirit (notice we are on a site called hacker news!).

Re: Steve Wozniak used to tip from printed sheets of $2 bills

#373

Post by alephnerd »

fsloth wrote: post #299
alephnerd wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys only value independence for Western Europeans. Alligevel vedtager I en "Ghettopakke", der lovligt legaliserede at splitte migrantfamilier fra hinanden. I er lige så dårlige som resten af andre hvide mennesker, jeg har mødt. [0] - https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/4895/Denmark:-Ghetto-P... [1] - https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/10/un-human-rig...

I'm not sure why you are venting, but if you are having a hard time in your life I'm sorry you are going through that. Now, our discussion was about Woz's zany antics, but I still have to clarify some geographical things: 1. Western Europe[0] and nordics[1] are two disjoint sets of countries 2. Of 28M nordic people only roughly 1/5 is Danish. And, there is very little political cohesion between the countries, except…

Yea. It was moment of venting tbh. I just get pissed off when a handful of commentators from Scandinavia act "holier than thou" when there is still some real racism and toxic commentary around migrants. With a mom who's "Mirpuri" (the actual term is Pahari or Dogra. Mirpuri means from Mirpur Tehsil in AJK) background. I've heard down the grapevine how much it sucks for the community in DK and NO.

Re: Steve Wozniak used to tip from printed sheets of $2 bills

#374

Post by drdec »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #369
drdec wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lawyer can help you decide which facts to reveal and which to withhold. A good lawyer will prevent you from making the state's case for them.

Facts in my comment refer to the information the prosecutor has at their disposal.

I thought the context of this discussion was concerning an interview with law enforcement, in this case the Secret Service.

Re: Steve Wozniak used to tip from printed sheets of $2 bills

#375

Post by retrac »

b3orn wrote: post #140
yreg wrote: post #3

> [The Secret Service agent] asked my for some picture ID. I have some fake photo ID's that a friend made for me years before, when we could make realistic photo ID's from our computers. Almost nobody else could do this because printers weren't good enough. But I had an expensive early generation dye sublimation printer and made some fake ID's for fun. I had one favorite fake ID that I'd used for almost every airplan…

> It probably amounted to a real crime. I'm not a lawyer, I have no idea how criminal law in the USA works, but why would this be a crime? He didn't fake a Department of Defence ID, he created an ID for a fictional Department of Defiance, it may look similar, it may appear as a "real" ID because it's not just a piece of paper, but it's about as real an ID as a gym membership card.

Not a lawyer either, but in Canada the core issue would be intent to decieve or mislead, as with fraud in general. It's not illegal to use a fake name or alias, nor print your own IDs (as long as you're not forging government IDs). But doing either to manipulate through deception, or mislead investigators, is a crime - fraud or public mischief. I believe it's broadly similar in the USA? Now, he may have lacked the intent to actually make it a crime, but I wouldn't want to have to argue that in front of a judge.

Re: Steve Wozniak used to tip from printed sheets of $2 bills

#376

Post by joshmanders »

jsnell wrote: post #244
dereg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t help but shake my head at most of these comments. There was a time when we celebrated anecdotes like this here on Hacker News. I’ve seen this story circulated many times but this is the first time I’ve seen this sort of reaction. These aren’t rose colored glasses, anyone can look up threads of old in which we cheered such defiance toward authority. People are frothing to frame this story with 2023 glasses and…

Nothing says "challenging the status quo" like a multi-millionaire messing with normal people who are just trying to do their job... I'm sure I when I first read this story, I thought it was hilarious. But since then, I've gained at least little bit of empathy. Think of this story from the perspective of the other people. Woz is being a total piece of shit, wasting their time being intentionally as suspicious as poss…

> Woz is being a total piece of shit, wasting their time being intentionally as suspicious as possible, just to waste their time and then pull off a "a-ha

You know who's really wasting peoples time? Secret Service and a casino security guard because he tipped with legal tender that they haven't seen before, so they think he's some counterfeiter or something.

I'd fuck with authority who was too stupid to realize that $2 bills are very much legal tender.

Re: Steve Wozniak used to tip from printed sheets of $2 bills

#377

Post by quesera »

hueyluey wrote: post #218
sandworm101 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving a false ID to law enfordement? That is a crime. Giving a forged ID to the secret service, the people in charge of detecting counterfeiting? That's just idiocy. Misspelling department of defense doesnt make the ID ok any more than printing a tiny lol in the corner of your fake dollar bills. (Also, falsely claiming a relationship with the military is downright dishonerable.)

What do you mean by "dishonerable" here? Is this an instance of how Americans love the military so much that it's difficult to understand for people from other countries (where being a military isn't different from being a shop owner, or carpenter or doctor or whatever)?

Americans want to believe. Call it "optimism", if you're feeling generous.

American exceptionalism is a thing to believe in which satisfies all of the needs of a believer. It's part of the belief triad "god-family-country".

The military is an extension of the country. There is very little visible military presence in the US, and the military has no role in civilian affairs except in cases of temporary callup for natural disasters etc.

And yet it's a very big military, so everyone has some adjacency to present or historical members of the military.

In short, it's the perfect object of optimistic belief. The military is consistently the "most trusted" part of American society -- perhaps because all the things it does, it does elsewhere.

And for the most part, American foreign policy is pretty similar across political lines, so there's no inherent partisan rift, making it an easy and safe thing for everyone to agree on.

A foreigner might argue that that is a flimsy basis for belief. They might point to some tragic events visited upon the world by the US military. They might say that Normandy was a long time ago and it doesn't justify everything that's happened since then.

Many Americans would agree with that. But that's the outsider's view. First and foremost, internally, the military is a jobs program. And it's very very good at that! Tons of training and education, incredible amounts of commerce and technology, genuine personal development, and on the whole very little international malfeasance.

Americans are optimistic people.

Re: Steve Wozniak used to tip from printed sheets of $2 bills

#378

Post by slackfan »

scarface74 wrote: post #350
slackfan wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As proud trailer trash -- fucking with the feds is a time honoured tradition, and we have done similar and gotten away with more. Please stop being so condescending.

So why is it that “rural America” seem to hold the local police in such high regard. But think the Federal police are so bad?

Because we get a statement showing what the PD used our tax money for, every single year, vs the endless black hole of the IRS. Also we can fire and disband them if we so wish. For us "Defund the police" is not a toothless meme, it's a reality that we can implement if the police become a nuisance. For instance my town fired the entirety of its' PD a good decade ago.

Counterpoint; why do city folk hold their police deparments in such low regard and scream for their defunding yet somehow hold the federal enforcement agencies in some do-no-wrong-holier-than-thou limelight?

Re: Steve Wozniak used to tip from printed sheets of $2 bills

#379

Post by koonsolo »

_yb2s wrote: post #273
koonsolo wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, business ppl are the ones who like to break the rules more than others. I would argue most people here are employed engineers, and they mostly love following rules.

I disagree, a key social purpose of complex legal rules is regulatory capture that allows powerful people to stay powerful. Smart powerful people don’t have to break the rules, they follow them in practice but not in spirit, whereas people without access to lawyers and legal sophistication break rules unknowingly, even when following them in spirit.

I'm talking in the practical kind of way: speeding, parking where you're not supposed to, "better to ask forgiveness than permission" kind of things, creative bookkeeping (I'm from Belgium :D), ... .

No idea what kind of high profile business owners you know, but in my circle in Belgium, most are small business owners. In my experience, employees like to follow rules, business owners like to push their boundaries.

Re: Steve Wozniak used to tip from printed sheets of $2 bills

#380

Post by erosenbe0 »

dist1ll wrote: post #36
yreg wrote: post #3

> [The Secret Service agent] asked my for some picture ID. I have some fake photo ID's that a friend made for me years before, when we could make realistic photo ID's from our computers. Almost nobody else could do this because printers weren't good enough. But I had an expensive early generation dye sublimation printer and made some fake ID's for fun. I had one favorite fake ID that I'd used for almost every airplan…

Isn't it pretty irresponsible to commit a felony while you have a daughter and wife to take care of? I find his nonchalant delivery quite jarring. I don't understand what's going through his head here.

Woz is embellishing for dramatic effect. Decades ago, picture ID meant anything. You could get on a plane sometimes with a school ID. Before holograms and bar codes on driver's licenses, all IDs were presumed to be garbage and just a way to get the spelling of a person's name if in fact the ID was real.

Woz was not in custody and is therefore exaggerating about being Mirandized. He played a prank by giving his clown employee ID. It was in Casinoland where people had goofy job titles and this wouldn't have been so crazy. Nothing to see here.

That said, if he had been in actual trouble or has been committing forgery, the clown ID would have been a bad move.

Post reply on HN