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What does this have to do with hacker culture? Another repost from reddit. Great piece though.

danso 14y ago
FWIW, I stumbled upon this link because it was in the sidebar of another story I was reading. I submtted it to r/photography but saw that someone had posted it a few days before to a smaller sub reddit... What does it have to do with hacker culture? It's about two businesses - organized crime and documentary photography - in which successful people have similar qualities and strategies of those in hacking and in any entrepreneurial business
- pheon 14y ago
  this has 0 relation to anything here, period.
- davidw 14y ago
  > in which successful people have similar qualities and strategies of those in hacking and in any entrepreneurial business Yeah, there's a great article by 37 signals about how to break your competitors kneecaps so that they'll be crippled for the rest of their lives.
  - danso 14y ago
    How much is the hacker ethic about disruption? In order to disrupt an industry, it is important to understand how the established entities become established. in this case, the Yakuza, manage to retain power even though they have a reputation of criminality. According to the OP, it's through a mix of well hidden criminality and the implication of criminality, among other things, but not through outright gang warfare and ninja executions, as pop culture would have you believe. Now as a hacker/entrepreneur, you attempt to start a competitor against what seems like a backwards thinking, complacent established company. You think your product and strategy is so obviously going to win because you think you know why your established competitor succeeds, and you believe youve one-upped them. And yet you fail. Do you sit around doubting your skill? Do you accuse the competitor of doing something outright illegal and evil? Or do you accept that there might be things under the surface that you hadn't considered (some of which may be illegal but not to the point where it would cause actual, game changing prosecution)? To say that the abstracted takeaways from here don't apply to anything a hacker does, even a pure coder, is an extremely narrow mindset, and is probably the kind of mind that thinks Steve Woz would be a billionaire if he never met Steve Jobs (and even Woz knows that isn't the case). Hacking is more about literal code and computers. If HN encompasses entrepernurial strategy, then not everything about being a successful hacker can be found on github.
    - davidw 14y ago
      Organized crime is actually not very complicated or creative, which I think most good hacks are. It tends to run like this (but is obviously not limited to this line of business): "You have a nice family/business. I'll hurt or kill them if you don't pay me money." It's pretty easy because parents, wives, children or businesses are fairly soft targets. You can't always be looking over your shoulder. Organized crime is less than a zero-sum game, it's a negative sum game: the more prevalent it is, the more resources it sucks out of society, and the more resources society must dedicate to defending itself from parasites. In my mind, creative hacks are the polar opposite of that: they make something from nothing, or are a clever way to eliminate a lot of dreary work.
      - danso 14y ago
        > Organized crime is actually not very complicated or creative I was going to respond, "Well, neither are most established businesses" but I think you misunderstood me. The disruptors, in this case, are not the Yakuza. They are the established entities. How much actual power they have is up for debate, but not terribly important to the point. The point is that they have a seemingly rooted place in Japanese society and the question should be: How can a presumably criminal enterprise still exist in a lawful society? The answer, according to the OP, is relatively benign; it's not "because they utilize ninja stealth and James Bond-like technology". I think if you step back from the specific context of criminality and ask the question of why any established enterprise/institution still has power/recognition, the reasons are likely to be depressingly uninteresting than intriguing or complex. Exhibit A: Most political entities and regulations.
- scoith 14y ago
  You are why I like /. better.
- scoith 14y ago
  "Hi HN, I found a very interesting news here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/9508613/Winnie-the-Pooh-illustrator-EH-Shepards-London-home-goes-on-sale.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/9508613/Winnie-the-Pooh-... You see it's about business and I think it's interesting, so I posted this here. Any hacker would find this interesting. If you don't you're not a hacker. Oh, by the way, I'm a guy who CODE in use javascript and down-vote people on HN, cool huh, which makes me an ub3r hacker. That's the definition of a hacker after all in this age. Love"
whyenot 14y ago
Is it interesting? Is it worth reading and sharing with other hackers? Then my understanding from reading the guidelines is that it is worth submitting. I personally found it pretty interesting. On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
- antonioevans 14y ago
  I agree it's a fascinating piece but lately HN has been a dumping ground for popular reddit posts. I see it on reddit then 15 minutes someone reposts it here.
- scoith 14y ago
  Really? Is this what you understand from guidelines? What's your next post? "I found a very delicious and interesting recipe on web. It was delicious and I think it's worth sharing with hackers ♥." Get out of here. Maybe the blame is this stupid, non-central ranking mechanism which makes idiots like you and OP motivated to dump such stuff here for points and down-vote any criticism that does make sense.
  - danso 14y ago
    Such irrelevant posts are submitted to HN on a regular basis. Relatively few (glancing at the front page now, at least) ever get to the frontage or even get a single upvote. I guess your hypotthesis is that no legitimate "hacker" upvoted the OP and hey, that's a fun hypothesis to test out. The other possibility is that not everyone shares your same definition, and having to deal with those other opinions is the price you pay in participating in an online community with more than one user
    - scoith 14y ago
      Yeah keep telling yourself that. Just take your spamming friends and get the hell outta here.
  - 14y ago

danso 14y ago

FWIW, I stumbled upon this link because it was in the sidebar of another story I was reading. I submtted it to r/photography but saw that someone had posted it a few days before to a smaller sub reddit... What does it have to do with hacker culture? It's about two businesses - organized crime and documentary photography - in which successful people have similar qualities and strategies of those in hacking and in any entrepreneurial business

pheon 14y ago
this has 0 relation to anything here, period.
davidw 14y ago
> in which successful people have similar qualities and strategies of those in hacking and in any entrepreneurial business Yeah, there's a great article by 37 signals about how to break your competitors kneecaps so that they'll be crippled for the rest of their lives.
- danso 14y ago
  How much is the hacker ethic about disruption? In order to disrupt an industry, it is important to understand how the established entities become established. in this case, the Yakuza, manage to retain power even though they have a reputation of criminality. According to the OP, it's through a mix of well hidden criminality and the implication of criminality, among other things, but not through outright gang warfare and ninja executions, as pop culture would have you believe. Now as a hacker/entrepreneur, you attempt to start a competitor against what seems like a backwards thinking, complacent established company. You think your product and strategy is so obviously going to win because you think you know why your established competitor succeeds, and you believe youve one-upped them. And yet you fail. Do you sit around doubting your skill? Do you accuse the competitor of doing something outright illegal and evil? Or do you accept that there might be things under the surface that you hadn't considered (some of which may be illegal but not to the point where it would cause actual, game changing prosecution)? To say that the abstracted takeaways from here don't apply to anything a hacker does, even a pure coder, is an extremely narrow mindset, and is probably the kind of mind that thinks Steve Woz would be a billionaire if he never met Steve Jobs (and even Woz knows that isn't the case). Hacking is more about literal code and computers. If HN encompasses entrepernurial strategy, then not everything about being a successful hacker can be found on github.
  - davidw 14y ago
    Organized crime is actually not very complicated or creative, which I think most good hacks are. It tends to run like this (but is obviously not limited to this line of business): "You have a nice family/business. I'll hurt or kill them if you don't pay me money." It's pretty easy because parents, wives, children or businesses are fairly soft targets. You can't always be looking over your shoulder. Organized crime is less than a zero-sum game, it's a negative sum game: the more prevalent it is, the more resources it sucks out of society, and the more resources society must dedicate to defending itself from parasites. In my mind, creative hacks are the polar opposite of that: they make something from nothing, or are a clever way to eliminate a lot of dreary work.
    - danso 14y ago
      > Organized crime is actually not very complicated or creative I was going to respond, "Well, neither are most established businesses" but I think you misunderstood me. The disruptors, in this case, are not the Yakuza. They are the established entities. How much actual power they have is up for debate, but not terribly important to the point. The point is that they have a seemingly rooted place in Japanese society and the question should be: How can a presumably criminal enterprise still exist in a lawful society? The answer, according to the OP, is relatively benign; it's not "because they utilize ninja stealth and James Bond-like technology". I think if you step back from the specific context of criminality and ask the question of why any established enterprise/institution still has power/recognition, the reasons are likely to be depressingly uninteresting than intriguing or complex. Exhibit A: Most political entities and regulations.
scoith 14y ago
You are why I like /. better.
scoith 14y ago
"Hi HN, I found a very interesting news here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/9508613/Winnie-the-Pooh-illustrator-EH-Shepards-London-home-goes-on-sale.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/9508613/Winnie-the-Pooh-... You see it's about business and I think it's interesting, so I posted this here. Any hacker would find this interesting. If you don't you're not a hacker. Oh, by the way, I'm a guy who CODE in use javascript and down-vote people on HN, cool huh, which makes me an ub3r hacker. That's the definition of a hacker after all in this age. Love"

whyenot 14y ago

Is it interesting? Is it worth reading and sharing with other hackers? Then my understanding from reading the guidelines is that it is worth submitting. I personally found it pretty interesting. On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

antonioevans 14y ago
I agree it's a fascinating piece but lately HN has been a dumping ground for popular reddit posts. I see it on reddit then 15 minutes someone reposts it here.
scoith 14y ago
Really? Is this what you understand from guidelines? What's your next post? "I found a very delicious and interesting recipe on web. It was delicious and I think it's worth sharing with hackers ♥." Get out of here. Maybe the blame is this stupid, non-central ranking mechanism which makes idiots like you and OP motivated to dump such stuff here for points and down-vote any criticism that does make sense.
- danso 14y ago
  Such irrelevant posts are submitted to HN on a regular basis. Relatively few (glancing at the front page now, at least) ever get to the frontage or even get a single upvote. I guess your hypotthesis is that no legitimate "hacker" upvoted the OP and hey, that's a fun hypothesis to test out. The other possibility is that not everyone shares your same definition, and having to deal with those other opinions is the price you pay in participating in an online community with more than one user
  - scoith 14y ago
    Yeah keep telling yourself that. Just take your spamming friends and get the hell outta here.
- 14y ago