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Hey, it's great that you're trying to find a place for yourself in the world. Unfortunately, you seem to have a malfunctioning moral compass, and you give off

Hey, it's great that you're trying to find a place for yourself in the world. Unfortunately, you seem to have a malfunctioning moral compass, and you give off a sociopath space-cadet vibe. Making money exploiting in video games and tricking weak-minded people into buying worthless shit is not a path to anything good. Stop trying to bullshit your way through life and if you're lucky you might just be OK.

freshflowers 12y ago
Sociopath may be a bridge too far, but there's definitely something very, very off about the way the author describes his scam as a business, and the apparent lack of emotion with which he describes the events in his life. It's cold and factual, and all "me, me, me".
- dang 12y ago
  How fascinating that we see such different things in the article. In the one I read, a guy puts his life on hold to take care of his dying father: I spent nearly every day helping him out. I couldn't bear to see him worry about me That's not "me, me, me", nor does it lack emotion, and certainly it refutes the (already self-refutingly silly) diagnosis of sociopathy. I wonder if there may be some crossed cultural signals here. Montana is not a place where people effuse.
  - Terr_ 12y ago
    Totally independently (there were 0 comments when I started reading) I've reached a gut feeling which I think closely mirrors WrathOfJay's. > > I couldn't bare to see him worry about me > That's not "me, me, me", nor does it lack emotion Switch the emphasis around, and he couldn't bear his future success being doubted. The story being told still comes back to the author's same universal preoccupation, which involves his own validation as a famous and successful person, or failing that one who is destined for it. No, I wouldn't call it sociopathy, but narcissism is definitely in the cards.
- Blackthorn 12y ago
  What was the "scam" here, exactly?
  - floody-berry 12y ago
    e.g., in Diablo 2, duped items were known to "poof" or disappear if you were not careful. There is no way to tell if an item is legitimate or not, leading to the obvious situation of oblivious players buying or trading for a dupe and having it vanish. People who create dupes and sell them for real money are exploiting naive players and putting them at risk while ruining the game for legitimate players. They're human filth.
    - Blackthorn 12y ago
      The game being referenced is not Diablo 2 and does not have that issue.
      - floody-berry 12y ago
        From his previous article on his "startup" / "business": > In my online game hacking history to that point, I'd had seven dupe methods patched across four different games, but never had an account closed. He doesn't specify what the other 3 (or more) games were (other than one is the "next most popular online game"), or if he exploited them as well. Assuming these posts are even true that is, they come off as quite hokey. I wouldn't be surprised if they turned out to be caricatures to see just what HN readers will celebrate.
        atomical 12y ago
        The moral compass / exploit is a red herring. The bigger issue is that some guy on the internet, who claims to be driven in all the right ways, isn't talking about doing real life shit to land a job so he can provide for his family. He won't take real college courses because he can learn the subjects on his own so much faster. So instead he majors in Spanish. Huh? In life you need to know when to jump through hoops to get ahead. But his ego and ideology prevent him from making the choices necessary to be successful.
- Jetrel 12y ago
  Yeah, I too got a really weird vibe from this. I can't really put my finger on it, but something's really quite creepy about this. It's not that he doesn't care, it's the way that he cares - almost like banging out a checklist - treating the symbols as the substance. I feel bad saying that, but ... I feel like it needs to be called out. Something ain't right.
Terr_ 12y ago
I definitely agree that there's something in the piece that evokes a gut-feeling I've gotten from being around certain troubled people in real life. However, I think "narcissist" is probably closer than "sociopath". While there's a lot of overlap, a narcissist sees people as an audience rather than prey. They are more preoccupied with manipulating people into validating him (or her) as a smart, successful, powerful, rich, etc. individual. That's really what this blogpost always keeps returning to, IMO. Even the "downer" points are flavored with "but some people believed I had potential" and "the other people were still too blind to notice my potential". I think the shark-jumping moment is when he sent an impromptu autobiography to a prospective employer... and did it again as an audiobook "in case they didn't have time to read"! While he admits that it was a tactical mistake, he never addresses why it ever seemed like a good idea, and his next sentence basically says "I would have been an amazing employee but their hiring system is broken."
- skunkworks 12y ago
  > While he admits that it was a tactical mistake, he never addresses why it ever seemed like a good idea, and his next sentence basically says "I would have been an amazing employee but their hiring system is broken." It's because he sees the corporate world as a game to be beaten, exploited, and hacked for profit, the same as he did with MMORPGs. There's truth about the hiring system being inefficient, and there are clever folks who find ways around it to gain entrance to a world that might be otherwise inaccessible. However, it makes me uneasy when those things are done with a narcissistic edge, i.e. to fulfill a grandiose sense of your worth and value. See: "Until I prove otherwise, consider me a 'nobody' trying to accomplish great things."
  - Terr_ 12y ago
    "No way, I'm like a thousand times better at being humble than that guy." /s
- scobar 12y ago
  It probably does seem more narcissistic because I wrote it recently after having gained back some faith in my competence. When you're at the bottom though, and you feel completely worthless, there is little narcissism left. I didn't express myself well when I said, "I truly would've been a great employee at Google[x]." What I should have said was something more like, "Even if I weren't great at first, I'd do whatever I could to improve because that was a profession I passionately wanted to try."
yourad_io 12y ago
Going against the ToS === malfunctioning moral compass? Please. Games that introduce economies will always have people exploiting them, in various shades of gray. WoW trading sites (gold, accts) are against ToS, but there is no other recourse for a player to "cash out" of WoW when they've decided they've had enough. How about the other side of the coin? Most ToS in these games reserve the right to cancel your account at any time, and are explicit that you don't actually own any of the stuff that you paid for, either with money or time. Is that kosher according to your, functioning, moral compass? And to make a more abstract point, I would suspect that the majority of users here have had to make compromises between their moral ideals and what was reasonable/necessary to be done. (example: knowing that if your company fails, your userbase's data could end up with the highest bidder and whatever morals they might have; or growth hacking techniques that are as annoying as they are effective). Edit* (premature post) --- Things are rarely black or white. We tend to draw the lines ourselves, and in this case it is interesting that you've put him on the black side because (a) he's gaming the game (albeit without destroying it) and (b) participating in affiliate marketing. My line would fall far further than yours, it seems.

freshflowers 12y ago

Sociopath may be a bridge too far, but there's definitely something very, very off about the way the author describes his scam as a business, and the apparent lack of emotion with which he describes the events in his life. It's cold and factual, and all "me, me, me".

dang 12y ago
How fascinating that we see such different things in the article. In the one I read, a guy puts his life on hold to take care of his dying father: I spent nearly every day helping him out. I couldn't bear to see him worry about me That's not "me, me, me", nor does it lack emotion, and certainly it refutes the (already self-refutingly silly) diagnosis of sociopathy. I wonder if there may be some crossed cultural signals here. Montana is not a place where people effuse.
- Terr_ 12y ago
  Totally independently (there were 0 comments when I started reading) I've reached a gut feeling which I think closely mirrors WrathOfJay's. > > I couldn't bare to see him worry about me > That's not "me, me, me", nor does it lack emotion Switch the emphasis around, and he couldn't bear his future success being doubted. The story being told still comes back to the author's same universal preoccupation, which involves his own validation as a famous and successful person, or failing that one who is destined for it. No, I wouldn't call it sociopathy, but narcissism is definitely in the cards.
Blackthorn 12y ago
What was the "scam" here, exactly?
- floody-berry 12y ago
  e.g., in Diablo 2, duped items were known to "poof" or disappear if you were not careful. There is no way to tell if an item is legitimate or not, leading to the obvious situation of oblivious players buying or trading for a dupe and having it vanish. People who create dupes and sell them for real money are exploiting naive players and putting them at risk while ruining the game for legitimate players. They're human filth.
  - Blackthorn 12y ago
    The game being referenced is not Diablo 2 and does not have that issue.
    - floody-berry 12y ago
      From his previous article on his "startup" / "business": > In my online game hacking history to that point, I'd had seven dupe methods patched across four different games, but never had an account closed. He doesn't specify what the other 3 (or more) games were (other than one is the "next most popular online game"), or if he exploited them as well. Assuming these posts are even true that is, they come off as quite hokey. I wouldn't be surprised if they turned out to be caricatures to see just what HN readers will celebrate.
      - atomical 12y ago
        The moral compass / exploit is a red herring. The bigger issue is that some guy on the internet, who claims to be driven in all the right ways, isn't talking about doing real life shit to land a job so he can provide for his family. He won't take real college courses because he can learn the subjects on his own so much faster. So instead he majors in Spanish. Huh? In life you need to know when to jump through hoops to get ahead. But his ego and ideology prevent him from making the choices necessary to be successful.
Jetrel 12y ago
Yeah, I too got a really weird vibe from this. I can't really put my finger on it, but something's really quite creepy about this. It's not that he doesn't care, it's the way that he cares - almost like banging out a checklist - treating the symbols as the substance. I feel bad saying that, but ... I feel like it needs to be called out. Something ain't right.

Terr_ 12y ago

I definitely agree that there's something in the piece that evokes a gut-feeling I've gotten from being around certain troubled people in real life. However, I think "narcissist" is probably closer than "sociopath". While there's a lot of overlap, a narcissist sees people as an audience rather than prey. They are more preoccupied with manipulating people into validating him (or her) as a smart, successful, powerful, rich, etc. individual. That's really what this blogpost always keeps returning to, IMO. Even the "downer" points are flavored with "but some people believed I had potential" and "the other people were still too blind to notice my potential". I think the shark-jumping moment is when he sent an impromptu autobiography to a prospective employer... and did it again as an audiobook "in case they didn't have time to read"! While he admits that it was a tactical mistake, he never addresses why it ever seemed like a good idea, and his next sentence basically says "I would have been an amazing employee but their hiring system is broken."

skunkworks 12y ago
> While he admits that it was a tactical mistake, he never addresses why it ever seemed like a good idea, and his next sentence basically says "I would have been an amazing employee but their hiring system is broken." It's because he sees the corporate world as a game to be beaten, exploited, and hacked for profit, the same as he did with MMORPGs. There's truth about the hiring system being inefficient, and there are clever folks who find ways around it to gain entrance to a world that might be otherwise inaccessible. However, it makes me uneasy when those things are done with a narcissistic edge, i.e. to fulfill a grandiose sense of your worth and value. See: "Until I prove otherwise, consider me a 'nobody' trying to accomplish great things."
- Terr_ 12y ago
  "No way, I'm like a thousand times better at being humble than that guy." /s
scobar 12y ago
It probably does seem more narcissistic because I wrote it recently after having gained back some faith in my competence. When you're at the bottom though, and you feel completely worthless, there is little narcissism left. I didn't express myself well when I said, "I truly would've been a great employee at Google[x]." What I should have said was something more like, "Even if I weren't great at first, I'd do whatever I could to improve because that was a profession I passionately wanted to try."

yourad_io 12y ago

Going against the ToS === malfunctioning moral compass? Please. Games that introduce economies will always have people exploiting them, in various shades of gray. WoW trading sites (gold, accts) are against ToS, but there is no other recourse for a player to "cash out" of WoW when they've decided they've had enough. How about the other side of the coin? Most ToS in these games reserve the right to cancel your account at any time, and are explicit that you don't actually own any of the stuff that you paid for, either with money or time. Is that kosher according to your, functioning, moral compass? And to make a more abstract point, I would suspect that the majority of users here have had to make compromises between their moral ideals and what was reasonable/necessary to be done. (example: knowing that if your company fails, your userbase's data could end up with the highest bidder and whatever morals they might have; or growth hacking techniques that are as annoying as they are effective). Edit* (premature post) --- Things are rarely black or white. We tend to draw the lines ourselves, and in this case it is interesting that you've put him on the black side because (a) he's gaming the game (albeit without destroying it) and (b) participating in affiliate marketing. My line would fall far further than yours, it seems.