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Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

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Re: Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

#71

Post by dmix »

spindritf wrote: post #9
csl wrote: post #2

As an aside, do anyone here still use IRC regularly? It seems some open source projects have permanent channels, but I don't know how active these are. Haven't really used IRC since the mid-90s, but perhaps it's a good way to connect to other developers? Is there a representative YC channel?

Absolutely. All day, every day. There is no better way to coordinate. Clients for every platform are available. You can have new tickets, bugs, announcements piped into the channel. Discuss everything instantly and in real time, while leaving a log for those who are offline, highlighting them when necessary. Running your own server is perfectly feasible. And if you connect to a known ircd with SSL forced, it's reason…

Could you write (or reference) blog posts of that general set up? Sounds interesting.

Re: Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

#72

Post by keidian »

rdl wrote: post #61
clamprecht wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the only time I haven't been on IRC since I discovered it in 1991 is the 5 years I spent in prison :)

For an IRC-related crime?

I believe he's MinorThreat aka Chris Lamprecht, which means his sentence wasn't for his computer related crimes oddly enough.

Re: Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

#73

Post by davidu »

tptacek wrote: post #35
davidu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta disagree with you on this one. Lots of folks in w00w00 worked together. In that sense, they did invest in each other (with time and effort, if not cash). Also, back in the late 90s defcon days, w00w00, CdC, New Hack City, each had an entrepreneurial spirit. w00w00 perhaps more than most. I remember when CdC launched BackOriface, it was just as much a startup launch as anything. Note: I don't claim to be a membe…

I was there. I'm friends with several w00w00 people, and worked for 4 years with Dug. I wasn't in w00w00 because I was in a "rival" channel (by the way, it sounds weird to mix TESO and ADM up with IRC channels like #w00w00 and #!r00t and #guild). We were all of us entrepreneurial, but being in w00w00 didn't get any any support from, say, d0b. I'll do you one better: #!r00t'ers started a bunch of companies together. O…

Frankly, I don't think you're making your point, but swang made it below in another part of the discussion:

"And surprise surprise, people who used one of the more technical communications medium back in the 90s end up being technical people when they grew up."

I think that's your actual point: Smart technical young people became smart technical adults, and the hindsight of whats app could have been any number of channels, just as many of the members were parts of many "crews" or channels. Unlike most channels though, as you point out, they met up in real life, generally in august in vegas. :-)

Re: Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

#75

Post by firstOrder »

tptacek wrote: post #28

2000 words of post-hoc fallacy about an IRC channel. We're discussing here a group of people who started their careers dead smack in the middle of the dot-com bubble, practically all of them in software/network security, a field that has stayed valuable since its inception. Of course they've done well for themselves. This would be interesting if the denizens of #w00w00 had, say, invested in each other's companies. Bu…

> I'm just hoping to forestall another goofy HN conspiracy theory; the idea that w00w00 is, like, the Internet's "Skull & Bones".

That's true. The Internet's "Skull & Bones" of black hat, darkside hackers is l0ck.

Apparently their leader made a fortune preparing for the coming deflation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTTFuOEOhEE

Re: Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

#76

Post by tptacek »

firstOrder wrote: post #75
tptacek wrote: post #28

2000 words of post-hoc fallacy about an IRC channel. We're discussing here a group of people who started their careers dead smack in the middle of the dot-com bubble, practically all of them in software/network security, a field that has stayed valuable since its inception. Of course they've done well for themselves. This would be interesting if the denizens of #w00w00 had, say, invested in each other's companies. Bu…

> I'm just hoping to forestall another goofy HN conspiracy theory; the idea that w00w00 is, like, the Internet's "Skull & Bones". That's true. The Internet's "Skull & Bones" of black hat, darkside hackers is l0ck. Apparently their leader made a fortune preparing for the coming deflation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTTFuOEOhEE

Fuck L0ck. Seriously fuck those guys.

Re: Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

#78

Post by kamaal »

tptacek wrote: post #28

2000 words of post-hoc fallacy about an IRC channel. We're discussing here a group of people who started their careers dead smack in the middle of the dot-com bubble, practically all of them in software/network security, a field that has stayed valuable since its inception. Of course they've done well for themselves. This would be interesting if the denizens of #w00w00 had, say, invested in each other's companies. Bu…

>>We're discussing here a group of people who started their careers dead smack in the middle of the dot-com bubble

This reminds of the Indian IT scene. Where today's so called managers/execs/leaders were just lucky to be in the path of immense inertia in the 90's.

Most of them probably have no experience at all, some of them as little as working in testing projects for a few months. They just had to be promoted because companies were growing 100% year on year, and the only way to get new managers were to promote existing people. People with as little as an year of experience from college became senior managers.

Now we have these people come and repeatedly lecture us 'We are so awesome, they had to make us VP's without doing any work at all'.

Re: Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

#80

Post by s7ephen »

tptacek wrote: post #28

2000 words of post-hoc fallacy about an IRC channel. We're discussing here a group of people who started their careers dead smack in the middle of the dot-com bubble, practically all of them in software/network security, a field that has stayed valuable since its inception. Of course they've done well for themselves. This would be interesting if the denizens of #w00w00 had, say, invested in each other's companies. Bu…

Tom, you stuck your neck out here. Those who weren't there will never understand. Everyone who needs to know who's who, already does.. The rest of them can read about halfass explanations on techcrunch
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