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

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

#441

Post by hyperhopper »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #306
nouveaux wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why it used to be celebrated on HN, and why GP laments the change is that Woz hacked security. This is a great example of social engineering and it's in the vein of the old 80's hacker mentality. Besides for the fun story, it is a security breach that all these security personnel failed to pick up on. I agree with the GP that this kind of thing should be celebrated on HN and we should encourage the next ge…

It’s still celebrated. One of the articles with the most staying power on the HN front page I’ve seen in a while was the “owning an airline” one. While people did debate the ethics of it, the hacking was admired because it was someone not in a position of power hacking an entity that was. It also illuminated a massive security risk which could now be fixed.

And also it uncovered a bit of hidden authoritarian secret anti-citizen secret bits.

Something that drastically limits and can be used to oppress people like a nation-wide travel restriction should be public and require due cause. Not a mystical list where one day you realize "wow guess my life is fucked"

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

#442

Post by alephnerd »

fsloth wrote: post #388
alephnerd wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is a bit weird you got triggered by this out-of-context association when we were discussing the ethics of Woz's story, but you are correct, nordics are quite racist: https://harvardpolitics.com/nordic-racism/ - I would not say there is "some real racism" but call it a pretty entrenched position unfortunately.

Agreed that I got triggered and completely derailed this thread, and totally apologize about it btw. It just gets annoying sometimes when people from any community (America, Nordics, China, etc) get on a high horse sometimes.

Idk, for some reason the idealization of "Nordics" (itself a highly contentious term - is Estonia nordic? is Greenland?) on internet forums gets annoying, because I can just tell it's white people (in reality Western European+American, not like Romanians, Bosnians, Turks, or Albanians got it better in Malmö) talking to other white people and just completely ignoring the very real elephant in the room.

Once again sorry about that but I think that offhand comment the GP made was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

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

#443

Post by hyperhopper »

ramraj07 wrote: post #46
Asooka wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No less irresponsible than charging a man with a felony over an obvious joke.

How is using fake IDs to board airplanes a joke? Only because we are mostly sure this particular man is an innocent manchild, but how exactly does that generalize?

How is it not a joke? It's something funny.

There is no harm in it. You may argue, "what if he was a terrorist!" But he wasn't. He caused no harm here.

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

#444

Post by qwytw »

enedil wrote: post #395
ilyt wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly you haven't read or been in any post-soviet country, near perfect "ethnical cohesion", doesn't stop crime or increase trust in any way. Frankly that's arrogant and narrow-minded view; homogenous culture might cause less conflicts and problems when the culture itself is one promoting that in the first place

What do you mean? For instance, Poland escaped Soviet block, is almost unilaterally composed of Polish people, and yet look at the chart: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... The countries with lowest crime numbers in EU per capita are (ordered by crime rate increasing): Slovakia, Hungary, Estonia, Cyprus, Slovenia, Czechia, Poland, Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania, Romania. All of them are soc…

I think focusing exclusively on latest data is problematic. Many post soviet countries had huge amounts of crime in the 90s and early 2000s. Crime rates gradually decreased after they joined the EU until they reached their current levels.

The degree of ethnic homogeneity did not increase during that time, if anything it slightly decreased (or significantly in some major cities).

One possible explanation is that people willing to engage in low level crime simply moved to richer western countries because well they were (and still are) richer... e.g. in Norway Lithuanians are the second largest group of people who are imprisoned (after local Norwegians). The situation is similar in some other Western European countries. I'm not an expert but if I wanted to rob/steal from people and businesses I'd probably do that in Norway, Germany, or Switzerland rather than Romania or Lithuania. The risk versus reward ratio seems much better there. Also there prisons are way nicer (especially in Norway).

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

#445

Post by qwytw »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #423
ilyt wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly you haven't read or been in any post-soviet country, near perfect "ethnical cohesion", doesn't stop crime or increase trust in any way. Frankly that's arrogant and narrow-minded view; homogenous culture might cause less conflicts and problems when the culture itself is one promoting that in the first place

That's true for countries in which russia directly meddles. Countries that thrown off the yoke, like Czechia or Poland have one of the lowest crime rates in the world.

You might be correct now. They are probably correct about the 90s or early 2000s.

Then again crime rates in Belarus for instance don't seem to be much higher than in Poland or Lithuania.

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

#446

Post by TheFreim »

schwartzworld wrote: post #322
O__________O wrote: post #42

Related US Mint page for $2 bill sheets: https://catalog.usmint.gov/paper-currency/uncut-currency/?&p... Basically he tells story in a way that average person assume he’s printing fake bills, when in reality he’s just cutting and binding sets of uncut bills into a notepad. Lying to a federal investigator though is a federal crime and one that’s frequently resulted in prison sentences. Worth noting that Jobs & Woz fir…

What's the justification for them charging so much more than the cash value?

> wonderful gifts for the collector or “hard to buy for” person on your list

They seem to be primarily made as collectibles or silly gifts, I'd expect that most people who have them would not spend them.

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

#447

Post by 77pt77 »

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…

How the hell can you travel internationally with a fake US ID?

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

#448

Post by xavdid »

jsz0 wrote: post #319

One of the greatest flaws of modern society is how we systematically beat this natural childlike enthusiasm for bending the rules out of people. I'm just old enough to remember when 'it was just a joke' was a legitimate excuse that could get you out of trouble. If the joke was funny and didn't hurt anyone you might get a slap not he wrist but people of all ages appreciated your effort to make the world a less grim pl…

The problem you run into is that people can do legitimately harmful things, and claim it was "just a joke". It ruins it for everyone, unfortunately.

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

#449

Post by 3pac »

JasonFruit wrote: post #312
jsnell wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> normal people who are just trying to do their job… When it's the Secret Service, that's not "normal people", and their job is to figuratively or literally stomp anyone who doesn't sufficiently respect the immensely powerful people they insulate. Portraying them as regular Joe victim here is nonsense.

Counterpoint: Their job is to protect with the highest professionalism, indeed with their life, a democratically-elected person whose opinions and actions they may personally disagree with or even resent. It is a very honorable position if you ask me.

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

#450

Post by ss108 »

dereg wrote: post #169
dist1ll wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> anyone can look up threads of old in which we cheered such defiance toward authority.

Maybe it's good if the industry has ceased having such a teenagery view of things. The article won't load for me, but it seems there was no meaningful protest against some illicit government abuse of authority here. Dude was just printing and using fake IDs because he could.

As a millennial who used to be much more simpatico with your way of thinking, I would say I've become very against it because it is exactly the sort of attitude that I have seen lead people to Trumpsim, anti-vaxxing, etc. It's just irresponsible and arrogant to think that authority/government = bad and that any sort of finger to the man is intrinsically worth celebrating.

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