The Hacker's Renaissance

Man everyone says every article/blog post that is on HN is written by an LLM. Almost every single post.. I actually didn't get strong AI vibes from this one but maybe I just am bad at recognizing. Sure it's a bit cringy but I think that's kinda the point? idk...i like the idea of keeping the culture of exploration of technology just for the sake of it (not to monetize everything) alive.

I feel like the irony of a post complaining about the death of hacker culture written entirely by ChatGPT pretty well summarizes where we're at.

I think it captures the original motivation and thrill of exploration beautifully. Who doesn’t remember as a kid seeing a blinking cursor and the feeling there was an entire universe to be discovered?

I’m 100% on board with the message of getting back to exploration for its own sake, and that conformity gets in the way of that.

In ancient days, I printed out the original and hung it on the wall by my computer.

This one I'd regret wasting space in my trash.

I'm a professional hacker, and I love what I do, but this is one of the most cringe articles I have ever read. You shouldn't idolize the activities that you do and elevate them to a quasi-religious practice. Can you imagine a plumber or an airline pilot writing a manifesto like this? This happens with a lot of professions, but particularly in tech and ESPECIALLY in the offensive disciplines of cybersecurity. It makes for some of the most insufferable people you can ever interact with. They put all the eggs of their identity into one basket and it makes them overly self-important on that one topic, prideful, snobbish, and insecure. My advice to other hackers: pick up at least one or two other hobbies. Realize that it's not what you do that matters, but how you do all things, and most importantly how you engage with people.

what hits harder, the fact that this was written by an LLM or inspecting the monospace font and finding cloudflare analytics javascript

From the article

> Then: Phrack was the Rosetta Stone. 2600 was gospel. IRC was sacred ground. Zines were copied, not monetized. We earned respect by contributing tools, ideas, or code, never by chasing clout.

2600: The Hacker Quarterly is definitely not quite what it was decades ago, but I was still so giddy when my first article got published there that I dereferenced a null pointer on purpose.

The original "manifesto" was a deeply cringe zine article written about a group of people who would go on to run IT security practices at the major I-banks.

This update applies a fresh layer of vaseline to the camera lens: "creators in a world of closed systems", "anarchists with a cause". "Our goal was not destruction." Who are you calling "we"? I was there. It was for the most part a bunch of people trading scripts and running them in the hopes of possibly shutting people's phones off or stealing mail spools.

I'm not high-horsing or condemning 90s hackers. They were teenagers fucking around doing what teenagers do (though: I cough a bit when I read Blankenship writing about how we all "existed without skin color" and not "judging people for what they looked like").

What's insidious about this piece is how they use hagiography to cover for a pure gatekeeping argument. Bug bounties commoditizing vulnerability development to produce CVEs! Why, I never: the audacity to pay teenagers in Indonesia to document vulnerabilities when our forebears had to surreptitiously trade source trees on EFNet to participate in the scene.

This piece was written about 6 months before LLMs upended vulnerability research. What LLMs are going to do to the scene is a can of worms, so let's just put a pin in that, and judge it by the standards of August 2025, which by the standards of 1994 were a golden age of hacking, both in opportunity and in the intellectual depth of the field and the possibilities for engaging meaningfully with computer science.

This resonates. I have just got back to hacking an old flip-dot display after sitting on the shelf for years.

https://www.bobek.cz/buse/

this doesnt really reflect the vibe old school hackers give. "solder a wifi module to a calculator" sounds like a cartoon-inspired project.

Why not reference call spoofing (i forgot the name) where they were able to call for no charge because they were able to spoof a real call. that's the kind of hacker vibe i want continued.