I was in my 20's and still had a juvenile/hacker streak. No harm was done.
Back at that time, I had dreams of actually owning a 8566, but at the time they cost $60k and it seemed impossible.
I picked one up about five years ago for $2k. It STILL has the best performing AFE of anything ever made. All the modern equipment uses signal processing, but that's cheating.
> I was in my 20's and still had a juvenile/hacker streak. No harm was done.
Lots of us did dumb/jerk things when we were younger; that makes it understandable, not okay. And would the salesperson with the now (for all practical purposes) broken demo unit agree that there was no harm?
It is a sales persons' duty to know more about the device they are trying to sell than random passers by. If using the front part of a console you really could brick the device in a couple of seconds using nothing but allowed operations that would qualify as a defect.
As far as I'm concerned this was (1) a harmless prank and (2) a significant impulse to the sales person to up their knowledge of the device.
Obviously, your salespeople should be good at handling your knives.
But a knife salesman will never be as good as a chef, because chefs have hours a day, every day working with the tools of their trade.
And if you're at a trade show selling chef's knives, and there are no chefs in attendance, you're probably at the wrong trade show.
I would say it's entirely normal for a certain fraction of trade show attendees to know the products on display better than the salespeople demonstrating them.
I've worked booths. If something like this would happen to me I would definitely want to know more about that person, if only because he might be a potential recruit or a representative of an existing customer.
The fact that your personal experience, confidence or skill would mean _you_ wouldn't have had any problems in a similar situation is irrelevant in judging the situation as it didn't happen to you.
There was a point in time where tradeshows moved from having technically competent people in the booths to having pretty girls (with zero tech chops) and suits. This is roughly where the OPs story falls in time, and I wonder if that has something to do with it.
Personally, as long as a powercycle took care of the issue I really don't see the problem, if you do then that's fine by me. Breaking things is bad, afaics nothing got broken here.
I'll grant you that possibly there were zero consequences here, just a little extra sweat on the sales person's back, and OP or my interpretation have hyperboled the effects a little.
If you dump clueless suits with expensive gear and hackers in the same environment the outcome is somewhat predictable.
So either you accept the risks, staff your booths with competent people or you stay away from tradeshows. What point is there to have a salesperson there who does not understand what they are selling? At a minimum you'd have to study up on the device to be able to demonstrate its capabilities. If you can't do that then you have no place in that booth.
The fact that apparently even Bill Gates would mess with the systems at tradeshows (in much the same way, in fact) speaks volumes. This kind of behavior would have been very much expected in the tradeshow environment of the 80's.
In fact, if you went home afterwards and your gear still worked and wasn't stolen (either by the visitors or the nightwatch) that counted as a win.
"If you dump clueless suits with expensive gear and hackers in the same environment the outcome is somewhat predictable"
This is essentially bigotry, endemic among arrogant groups of people with limited social skills, narrow understanding (and therefore respect for) subjects beyond their purview, but who might have developed some strength of understanding in their niche.
"What point is there to have a salesperson there who does not understand what they are selling?"
It's ridiculous to assume that a salesperson might have to have the same level of knowledge that an Engineer may have, and betrays a total lack of understanding of how organizations work, levels of expertise required.
Imagine if Engineers were required to have the knowledge and skills to have to actually 'sell' the devices they make, after all, why shouldn't they be expected to know how to 'have a conversation' and 'collect money'? My god.
That's a pretty high horse you're on. Again, I've been in the salesperson's position, and it would have gotten no more than a laugh and a powercycle out of me, and probably a conversation with where he found out so much about a system that I was supposed to know like the back of my hand.
You don't demonstrate spectrum analyzers, especially programmable ones if you don't know how to use them in anger.
I went to a music fair a while ago (ok, a long while ago meanwhile) to watch some gear demonstrated, the people manning the booths were musicians, and they were competent. That's the sort of interaction you strive for when you pick the people to run a booth at a tradeshow.
Otherwise the answer to every question about the device is going to end up with 'I don't know'. And that's potentially a lost sale right there.
what says the sales person wasn't competenz? They are targeting EEs and are trying to show how to make productive use of the device when dealing with electronics. Sure, you can do more with the device and use it like a free programmable comouter, however that is not the purpose. The sales petson could have been strong in using it to analyse a broken curcuit.
Going deep on an aspect of the datasheet abd abusing it doesn't mean one understands a thing on the device (in its proper use)
If you (you login name here changed though) would have written that powercycle fixed it, comments would probably have been different. Narration gave the impression you bricked it for good/skillset of the salesperson.
Ok, let's say hypothetically it's not the salesperson's job to know everything about the device they're selling. I disagree, but let's assume this, anyway.
Why did the company not send an actual engineer to the trade show as well? I've done plenty of trade shows as a customer and there's almost always an engineer on-hand to assist with more technical questions and issues with the demo device.
Even assuming the prior claim, the company still screwed up not buying another plane ticket for an engineer.
I have to disagree. Society works in layers and mutual trust, and its not the sales person job to know the ins and outs of the device. Their job is to communicate what the machine does and how to do it.
Also, you could brick the device in a couple seconds with a hammer too. Should the sales guy have take down training too?
If thats an unrealistic argument, you failed to realize you were the only one in the room who couldnt see the hammer in your hands.
Jacques there's always been the stiff never-have-fun type floating around. They used to tell me I had to wear a suit and tie to be taken seriously in the nineties. I just roll my eyes and don't worry about it.
Funny, they used to tell me the same. Anecdote: one boss gave me some money so I could go out and 'buy some proper clothes'. I spent one part of it on a piece of software that I was saving up for, the rest on a white rental tuxedo. I wore the tux to work the next day and did absolutely nothing all day long (just like most of the rest of that particular IT department). At the end of the day I asked my boss if he wanted me to wear a suit again the next day. He was fine with jeans and t-shirts from then on. (I was with distance the most productive team member.) I have never worn a suit on any other occasion in my life and I still don't understand why people wear something that is extremely uncomfortable and takes way too long to put on (or take off) as well as specialized cleaning services.
I used to do that with emails to vendors or the occasional end-user. Also learned a key tip that you either remove the "to" line or write those emails in a text editor first. They you can't accidentally send the nasty first email!
Man, the people in this thread have some tree-sized sticks in places where the sun don't shine.
Also seems like many of these people haven't been to an engineering conference with demo gear out. And seem to be overlooking that this was 30-40 years ago, talking about equipment that'd cost $150k in today's money. That was an engineer or two worth of annual salary for the time period.
I'd damn well expect a sales person selling me a piece of gear like that at a field-specific conference to know how to use it and be able to reset the thing to factory spec in a pinch. Which seems to be exactly what the sales person ended up doing.
How is it a harmless prank if at the end the ‘prankster’ walks away smugly and the salesperson is left with a broken demo?
It’s only harmless if the prankster turns around and fixes the demo.
I remember some years ago there were people going around trade shows with universal remote controls turning off the screens. As far as I remember most posters thought that wasn’t a very nice thing to do. And that really is almost completely harmless.
Turning off screens with universal remote controls... hm... imagine what you could do with one of those 3 Watt IR guns they use in laser arenas and a highrise building. During the worldcup soccer... Never mind.
I agree with (1), but not (2). How many sales types are going to learn to operate a debugger?
Also, there's random passers by as in "one table over at Starbucks" and random passers by as in "took the trouble to come to a tech conference". It is true that the latter are more likely to take these things lightly.
That's why you have at least one techie in your booth crew. Which has been my role on more than one occasion.
FWIW I worked the booth on a CAD/CAM show in Utrecht one memorable week in the 80's and the number of master mechanics that tried to get the toolbit to run into the chuck was rather larger than expected. Good that I took care of that in the software. But this mentality, of putting stuff through its paces and to show off what you can do with it is exactly why you have trade shows in the first place, to interact with people and to let people interact with your gear to see what they are up to and to strike up conversations. Not all of these pay off.
But sometimes the kid in the greasy jeans and the t-shirt is the guy that will land you the big contract, as opposed to the guy in the suit who passes by your booth just for the swag.
I'd like to point out that just because it is expected that folks are going to try to come and try out a product (and potentially damage it) does not justify it.
OP entering a funky command is not unexpected. But then purposely antagonizing the sales rep was a d*ck move in my book. If OP had just shown the guy "Hey here's what I did and what it does" that would be perfectly fine (important distinction, OP knew more than the sales guy compared to your case). But if the sales person was legitimately panicking that's not very polite, to put it mildly.
It is not just that the OP did a cool trick, that is not what people find objectionable. You seem to be missing the part where the OP already knew the sales guy was not able to undo their change, that the change would prevent the demoing of the device, but still just re-enabled it and walked away laughing. That is fucking sociopathic behavior, not a cool hack.
A powercycle fixed it. Really, the degree of judgment in this thread is ridiculous. "Sociopathic behavior" -> seriously, we're now into assessing their mental health on account of this?
I was at a boat show once and there was a salesman selling fountain pens that would not leak. At my all-boys school we had to write everything with fountain pens and boys being boys we would regularly spray each other with ink using a very hard flick of the pen. Standing in front of the salesman's table I picked up a demo pen to see, and gave it my hardest flick. Ink sprayed out all over the table, and all down the front of the man's white shirt.
I'm not sure whether I would consider spraying the same thing as leaking. (Yes, I went to an all boys high school, and yes I'm familiar with the trick.)
I hope that in the salesman's place I'd have had the calm to say, "What that really necessary?" and let it go at that. On the one hand, the splatter pattern does not suggest a leak, and he could explain what happened and get points for being cool about it. On the other hand, if there is one high school boy (by calendar or by mental age) who doesn't know the trick, then somebody else could get splattered.
Ah yeah, that would make a difference; my reading was that it would stay that way until someone hit the magic key sequence. If the salesperson could fix it inside 5 minutes I agree (effectively) no harm.
A lot of the things hackers did in the 70s and 80s are now recognized as very oof, as they say, today. As to whether "no harm was done", you disrupted a salesperson's pitch and caused him to think the device was broken. You introduced delays and tarnished the reputation of the product in front of customers, potentially resulting in lost sales and hence, lost revenue.
The chilling effect of your comment should not be underestimated. If this was 'extremely inappropriate behavior' I think I'll forego retelling any of my tradeshow pranks.
There are parts in their description that point to unnecessary cruelty/meaniness.
> When the display did not change, the sales guy yelled at me; "WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!?"
At this point OP could have explained what they did, and explain why what the salesperson tried didn't work, and what should be done to fix it. They did not, instead they:
> So after watching him panic for a moment
Watched him panic, then showed that they could fix it (probably ego tripping), and then to rub it in even further, put it back on and walked away. Depending on the experience or seniority of the sales person this might have caused the sales person problems, a lot of stress, ruined a presentation, and real-life consequences, all of which OP disregarded.
There are pranks, and then there are pranks. This was unnecessarily cruel.
I've been on the receiving side of such pranks in tradeshows, it's part of the interaction. You put up gear for the general public to mess with, you have to calculate this in.
Firato, the annual CAD/CAM show for the metal working industry, The Hannover Messe (which used to be the largest IT show in Europe) the building equipment trade shows. Put enough gear in front of enough people (especially nerds) and pranks will happen.
As far as I can see this was a harmless prank because a powercycle fixed the issue. If he had reprogrammed it to the point that it was bricked for the duration of the trade show that would be a different matter.
I agree that you probably should be prepared to handle such scenarios.
I don't agree that this is a good reason that doing such a prank is harmless. The sales person might not have been prepared. They may have been having a bad day already. They may not be confident that power cycling would have solved the issue and thus may have been extremely stressed out going forward, ruining an (important?) presentation.
Probably I'm reading too much into a casual retelling now, but from what I can read: The fact the sales person was panicking should've been an indicator for OP to help him out. At that point OP should've empathised with the sales person instead of make things worse.
It's not because "Oh you should know how to fix this" may be true, that it's not a dick move to throw a fellow human in distress under the bus.
But: they should have been. If you don't know the gear you are demoing you are a minder, not a sales person.
> They may not be confident that power cycling would have solved the issue and thus may have been extremely stressed out going forward, ruining an (important?) presentation.
Important presentations don't happen at the front of a booth, they happen in the back behind the partition.
> The fact the sales person was panicking should've been an indicator for OP to help him out. At that point OP should've empathised with the sales person instead of make things worse.
Fair enough. But: suits that don't know their stuff have no place on a tradeshow floor.
I recall walking up to a guy at a Tek booth and asking him about their new storage scopes, he proceeded to take the thing apart on the spot and show me what the guts looked like resulting in a very long term relationship. That's the kind of person you want to man a booth displaying spectrum analyzers, not someone who apparently doesn't even know how to program it and what bits get stored in which part of the machine.
> It's not because "Oh you should know how to fix this" may be true, that it's not a dick move to throw a fellow human in distress under the bus.
I think that's exaggerating a bit. Throwing a fellow human being in distress under the bus is a far cry from "I put my name on your device and you will have to powercycle it to get rid of that".
But one conclusion I have from this thread is that Hacker News has lots its way, and that Hackers are not really welcome here anymore. Hackers showing up (empty) suits is about as old as it gets.
You make so many assumptions about the sales person it's as if they're an NPC for you.
I can imagine all kinds of scenarios where what you say is just not true or irrelevant and out of the control of the sales person, yet the harm of the prank still falls upon the sales person.
Maybe the sales person replaced someone who got sick at the last minute. Maybe the sales person's incompetent manager put them there without giving them time to prepare. Maybe the person whose job it was to prepare the sales person was bad at _their_ job, or didn't have sufficient time, etc. Maybe their incompetent manager isn't as forgiving as you are and will fire them because of this incident. Maybe power-cycling the device caused the presenters settings they needed for the presentation to be wiped as well. Maybe this is a junior sales person who hoped for a promotion after this presentation.
> But one conclusion I have from this thread is that Hacker News has lost its way
My conclusion is that a lot of people lack empathy or the imagination to think beyond their own experience. But I guess that's not really surprising in this sector which apparently still lacks a lot of self-reflection around the common social problems associated with it. I'm just happy there's enough people here that do have empathy.
> You make so many assumptions about the sales person it's as if they're an NPC for you.
I just use the bits from the OPs story as a way to place the person on my scale of technical competence.
> Maybe the sales person replaced someone who got sick at the last minute. Maybe the sales person's incompetent manager put them there without giving them time to prepare. Maybe the person whose job it was to prepare the sales person was bad at _their_ job, or didn't have sufficient time, etc. Maybe their incompetent manager isn't as forgiving as you are and will fire them because of this incident. Maybe power-cycling the device caused the presenters settings they needed for the presentation to be wiped as well. Maybe this is a junior sales person who hoped for a promotion after this presentation.
I think these are assumptions. Maybe they did. Or maybe they just powercycled the device and it all came back.
Tradeshows are 'hostile territory', you know this going in. If you've never staffed a booth at a tradeshow then I will forgive you but really, if this is the worst that happened there then they got extremely lucky.
I've had people 'test' our systems to see if they could break them. And the fact that they could not was proof that we had done a proper job designing them, which in turn led to interesting conversations and some sales. This is what a tradeshow is for. It's not for people to stand around static displays or recipe style demos without the ability to improvise.
Tradeshows are 'hands on' which is why the gear is exposed in the first place. And some of those hands will be more capable than yours, which is the moment where you make your living as a salesperson.
> My conclusion is that a lot of people lack empathy or the imagination to think beyond their own experience.
No, it's just that the experience factor is a two way street. If you don't have relevant experience then maybe you should not be so quick to judge.
I've seen the OP derided now as a sociopath, as a bad human being overall and whatever else people are slinging at him. You can take it from me as someone who has staffed the booths at tradeshows that on a scale of 1 to 10 this was a 'meh'.
> But I guess that's not really surprising in this sector which apparently still lacks a lot of self-reflection around the common social problems associated with it.
Ah ok, that is what this is about. Well, guess what, it is possible to have a conversation about a tradeshow prank without drawing in the problems of the entire industry.
> I'm just happy there's enough people here that do have empathy.
OP pulled a prank 20 years ago, which temporarily destabilized a piece of gear.
We're now discussing their promotion chances, their ostensibly important presentation on a piece of gear that they have no problem allowing other people to mess with, their chances of getting fired by their incompetent (why would their manager be incompetent) manager, their lack of time to prepare and so on.
> I think these are assumptions. Maybe they did. Or maybe they just powercycled the device and it all came back.
They're possible reasons that could explain the part in the Op's story which you might have missed where the sales person was panicking and yelling in distress. Your argument basically goes "well, they should have been competent enough to be able to deal with it" basically saying it's their own fault and they deserved it.
My point is that this is not a good argument to disregard the feelings of the sales person. One reason is because it's not clear that the incompetence of the sales person is his own fault, and what I'm listing are possible reasons why that might be the case.
But even if it were within the control of the sales person, I'm also of the opinion that his mistake of not being competent enough shouldn't mean his feelings on the situation aren't valid, and that it wasn't somehow a dick move.
All we know is that the sales person was stressed about what the OP did, and that OP did nothing to help him out, and whatever the reason for this stress may be, or whatever consequences that might or might not have happened, by not helping him out, OP was being a jerk.
> OP pulled a prank 20 years ago, which temporarily destabilized a piece of gear. We're now discussing ...
This I agree with, I think we're trying to extract too much context from a very casual retelling, and going in circles anyway.
>But one conclusion I have from this thread is that Hacker News has lots its way, and that Hackers are not really welcome here anymore
I think you are conflating hackers with lack of empathy/being a dick.
I mean, "is a hacker" DOES seem like a good predictor for "is a dick" (in my experience at least), so you might be right that HN isn't all that fond of hackers nowadays.
Agreed, you should totally tell jacquesm that. He seems to think that it's par for the course for hackers to bully total strangers on the pretext of "showing up a suit". He even seems to think that HN has lost its way and is no longer inhabited by hackers, when it's pointed out what bad manners and lack of empathy such a prank would be.
This whole thread is a really good example of why not to judge the past by the standards of the present. There were ways of interacting that were just expected. At my first job, if you went on vacation, you expected to return to a pranked office. No way you could get away with barricading someone's office/desk with a mountain of soda cans at most places now.
I've never understood "don't judge the past by today's standards."
If today's standards indicate that someone's past behavior was dick-ish, then the fact that the standards have shifted does NOT imply that the past behavior was somehow "just fine" because... We didn't expect better of each other?
By that logic, abusive racist parentage back in the 50's is unassailable acceptable, because as you say - we're judging it by today's standards.
Acceptability in the past is no indication of an actions morality or ethical... ness.
Unacceptability in the present isn't a reliable indicator either. For example, it is today socially unacceptable for me to be friends with most of my extended family because they are republicans. But that doesn't mean it's right.
Besides, what's with this tendency to escalate way beyond the topic at hand? We're talking about professional pranks and suddenly...racism?
There are likely many totally innocuous things you say/write today that will be taboo in 30 years. Someone will merely have to go back trawling through an Internet archive to dig up all sorts of stuff that shows that you (by 2053's standards) are a horrible, bigoted, evil person.
But that's just not true - according to the OP's own retelling the sales person was in obvious distress due to his actions.
So no, this apparently was not "expected" because otherwise they would also just have had a chuckle and wouldn't have reacted like that. And regardless of whether that means the sales person was in the wrong job or not, the fact that that person was in trouble, and OP did nothing to help, means that OP was being a jerk.
People used to be better at dealing with "obvious distress." Seriously why is this argument worth 80+ comments? I agree with jacquesm -- HN (in this thread) has lost its way.
Glad to hear that are people that get the environment and norms at these kind of events.
Presenting a control freak attitude around public interaction hardly seems like it would win over many customers, so this kind of thing is par for the course and reacting well to the unexpected (including pranks) is part of the skillset.
>> the sales guy yelled at me; "WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!?"
> At this point OP could have explained what they did [...]
The sales guy could also have been less accusative and instead embrace their curiosity as a customer... It was an opportunity to invite the onlookers who were already interested in what the author had coaxed the display into doing to learn more about the machine.
I can imagine a younger version of myself also reacting a bit negatively to such an exclamation after having a harmless investigation of a machine. Unfortunately it tends to be the reaction of ignorant and uninquisitive people.
Or it's a natural immediate reaction of a normal person in distress who wasn't prepared for an outsider to come sabotage their presentation and made them look incompetent in front of an audience while they're already stressed out.
Leave it up to engineers to expect everyone (else) to be the paragon of virtue rational homo sapiens sapiens with all the wisdom and maturity.
> I think I'll forego retelling any of my tradeshow pranks.
A good prank is when the two parties can laugh about it together when it’s done.
If someone is just interfering with another person’s job and then smugly walking away, it’s not really a prank. They’re just being a jerk for the purpose of smug personal satisfaction at the expense of someone else.
That’s the difference. This may have been relatively easily fixed with a power cycle, but having done a lot of long days in tradeshow booths I can empathize with the poor guy in the booth who had to deal with someone deliberately interfering with his job and stressing him out. Obviously it turned out okay, but having attendees deliberately break your live trade show demos for laughs sucks.
> A good prank is when the two parties can laugh about it together when it’s done.
Hm, that's now how I have the definition of a prank in my dictionary. To me it is a practical joke which usually has two required components, a prankster and the person the prank is being played on. Audience optional. To assume that they both have the same sense of humor seems to be a recipe for disappointment.
This is everyday life at tradeshows. Seriously. I've had people trying to destroy 100's of thousands of $ for kicks to see if the gear was as solid as we claimed it was. (it was).
As tradeshow pranks come this really does not register.
> at the expense of someone else
That's a prerequisite for a prank, it is quite literally played on someone else by definition, without that it isn't really a prank.
Whether you can see the humor of it or not depends on your personal make-up. People ring the doorbell here occasionally. I have a pretty badly injured right leg. So I go down a couple of flights of stairs to open the door.
Every now and then this includes neighborhood kids who will be in hiding at the end of the driveway. Usually their giggling gives the game away. Needless to say, their sense of humor is different than mine on this subject. That does not mean that I don't think it isn't a successful prank from their perspective, in fact the fact that they know this probably adds to the spice.
But then I think 'they're just kids' and leave it at that.
All the 'holier than thou' and concern trolling in this thread is completely over the top, in real life people pull pranks, some laugh, some don't. But it's not enough to go judge people to the degree that is done here.
I'd like to point out that just because you are tolerant of others pranking you does not mean that someone else (who might potential be fearing for losing his job) may find it funny.
In fact there's a common saying "It's just a prank bro" (1) which is used when people do questionable things as "pranks", almost always causing the other person to get worried. And (un)fun fact, courts have not taken kindly to these "pranks" (2, 3).
Side note, if you are interested you could put up a note with a message saying that you have an injured leg and take longer to come to the door. It might help delivery folks, and may also reduce/stop children from ringing the bell.
I think "extreme" might be a bit much, but i'm much more concerned about the 2nd order chilling effect of calling out people for criticizing rude behaviour, then the original chilling effect on rude behaviour.
You're on a website whose co-founder managed to disable an enormous network of computers with a piece of software, for which he served jail time and was fined.
And as computer related pranks go, this one was pretty mild and required some pretty intimate knowledge of the device. If I had been in that booth I would have engaged the person to see what else they know about it and why.
And what, is it your position that all the actions of hn founders are instrinsically above reproach?
At the very least i would hope we have better morality arguments than simple appeals to authority.
To be clear, i object to the notion that its wrong to criticize/debate the behaviour and ethics of others. I'm not really objecting to the original post about the trade show prank.
> And what, is it your position that all the actions of hn founders are instrinsically above reproach?
That's got to be the mother of all strawmen. No, obviously, I do not.
But in this particular case it is about something that is very much the sort of thing that your average hacker would do given the opportunity. Hacker used in the 'old school' sense of: technically inclined person who likes to tinker with stuff and use it in ways unforeseen by the original creators.
It's what we live for.
> To be clear, i object to the notion that its wrong to criticize/debate the behaviour and ethics of others.
I'm fine with debate. I'm not ok with off the cuff judgments. Essentially the OP simply knew more about the device than the trade show staff (which, unfortunately isn't all that rare), they used the exposed user interface to do the sort of thing that it was supposed to be able to do because that capability was purposefully built in to it.
That they put it to a novel use is what makes it interesting.
> But in this particular case it is about something that is very much the sort of thing that your average hacker would do given the opportunity. Hacker used in the 'old school' sense of: technically inclined person who likes to tinker with stuff and use it in ways unforeseen by the original creators.
Sure. i don't disagree. I think that's rather orthogonal though.
I'm objecting to the notion that we should avoid lines of debate, not because they are wrong, but because they are "chilling". Uncomfortable truths usually are (without neccesarily claiming that this is one).
You really seem to not understand hacker culture, which I guess isn't your fault, maybe it's before your time or something. But there's something special and important about it. That special and important thing is why this place is called "hacker news."
I don't think I can do it justice in this comment, but I do encourage you to try to read about it and understand what this sort of mischief meant to people. You obviously understand something about its downsides, especially from the perspective of the broader culture / "the suits," but I do encourage you to try to understand something about its many virtues.
And now I feel like an idiot, for not knowing that the co-founder was the reason we couldn't turn in our CS60C assignments by the deadline that one time.
Was a great week. I still have a copy of the email that Cliff Stoll sent around, a couple of days later. When the email servers had stopped twitching...
I had no idea either. It’s amazing how little I know about ycombinator after spending hundreds of hours on this site. I know they are somehow involved in venture capital and they employ dang.
"He was the first person to be indicted under this act. In December 1990, he was sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,050 plus the costs of his supervision. "
It looks like you are correct, gaffe on my part, thanks for the correction.
Depends on the situation. 40 years ago, software engineers were an extremely rare breed, and concerns about hacking and security were negligible compared to today.
If I was a manager with purchasing power I would have viewed it as proof that the machine was programmable and wasn’t just a “toaster” that had been built to do one thing and only one thing. It’s not like he made the machine generate garbage noise, displaying set text on the fly wasn’t a commodity back then as far as I know
Hard to think of this as almost 40 years ago, but it was... my dad drove me up to MacWorld Expo in San Francisco in 93. We got badges and walked the whole floor a few times, looking at stuff. I was
13. Dad was a lawyer who had no interest in computers or my nerdy addictions and I think it was the only time in my life he and I ever took a trip alone, without the family. But he realized I was really, really obsessed with Macs, and what I didn't know was that he was about to divorce my mom and leave us. He so didn't realize I was using the house phone to run a pirate bbs for the last couple years. But he knew how to get around at trade shows. I remember just losing my mind at a few booths... VistaPro and Infini-D and the guy doing the Claymation demo, sculpting and rigging simple characters in almost realtime.... Dad got me my first Wacom tablet at that show. We stayed the night at the SF Hilton. Drove home to LA feeling like it was the best weekend of my life.
(edit) I just realized I'm drunk and this has nothing whatsoever to do with your post. Just a memory that seemed vaguely relevant. Disregard.
Yeah, if you were there, but if you walked last the rest of the day and wanted to see the instrument working, only to be met with a "some guy broke it", you wouldn't be as happy.
I think my, admittedly unstated, point is that most managers were incapable of doing an honest evaluation of computer equipment at the time. Someone coming up to a machine and fucking with it in a way that could produce useful work results, like making a random graphing machine display programmable names, would be a strong indicator that the machine could actually do something instead of being a complete gamble
I don’t know the machine, but it sounds to me like what he did was just part of the normal operation. So the car analogy would be more like changing someone’s radio presets to some embarrassing station as a prank. Annoying, but you don’t need a mechanic to fix that.
Please. A powercycle fixed it and besides, if you don't want people to play with the gear then don't put it in the general public aisle. That's where people will mess with your gear as any trade show booth operator very well knows.
I worked in a computer store, the number of pranks that people got up to with the gear there was insane and some of them were quite a bit more harmful than this one. I really don't see the problem. As long as you can reboot the device no harm done. Once people start flashing your systems or rewriting boot loaders we're in different territory.
Thanks for the link. I have not read that manual for over 40 years. Appendix B "Advanced Display Programming" is where I learned the mischief I did at the show.
I guess I could have prevented a lot of HN grief if I had clarified that a AC power cycle absolutely clears all display memory and completely eradicates anything that I had put there.
You did make it clear by stating that it was in volatile memory.
I'm really surprised at the venom and all the extrapolation here.
Obviously, nobody should be judged by the stupid pranks they pulled decades ago, it's like telling my neighborhood kids that they are terrible people for ringing my doorbell.
By the way, awesome piece of gear. I never owned one but did work with one at a physics institute in Amsterdam on Sundays when the place was deserted.
Oh, and just in case some pedantic HN reader notices that the manual you linked comes up for the 8566B, which did not hit the market until 1985, and that was less than 40 years ago, I had actually read the manual for the 8566A which was released in 1978. I think the HP event was in '83 at the Hyatt Regency Long Beach.
Well maybe the engineers should know how to sell the thing they're making? The salesperson's job is to sell, not to operate, and why should he know every last intricacy of the machine?
I don't know that a power cycle cleared the issue up, a reset definitely didn't. OP just said the salesperson power-cycled it, not that that fixed it.
> Well maybe the engineers should know how to sell the thing they're making?
I agree, why not have an technical guy there who knows how to operate the thing and can support the sales guy? If the company is sending only sales guys with no in-depth technical knowledge to a trade show, it's fully understandable and well-deserved if this sort of thing happens.
> why should he know every last intricacy of the machine?
If I am buying an expensive piece of hardware you better believe I will ask questions about the intricacies and if I don't get answers I will not be buying.
is this the kind of culture you want? no one can ever share bad things theyve done, ever? lets all lie and say we're sinless?
you "feel bad" for how "extremely inappropriate" that was? how tiny is your worldview that this is the cause you think needs correcting?
maybe add something to the conversation instead of calling someone shitty for a decades old action. how are people suppossed to recover from real problems if this is how you treat some meaningless, damageless 5 minute prank?
shovelling embarassment and guilt is the most unhealthy and unproductive forum environment possible.
In a sibling comment the GP was able to say it was indeed juvenile and they've moved on. I think that makes a fantastically healthy and productive string of comments: someone talks about an interesting past event, someone else points out it wasn't a responsible/polite thing to do since the original story doesn't touch on this, original person agrees and share more history continuing the conversation with some follow up to the story too.
> In a sibling comment the GP was able to say it was indeed juvenile and they've moved on.
That's good to know, but there are lots of folks here who defend the poster's actions to varying degrees, which I find odd. It feels like the poster is more mature (now) than some other commenters.
Extremely inappropriate behavior is a pretty strong accusation. Seems like a harmless nerdy prank that occurred 40 years ago. It's not like he changed the monitor to say "Poop Fare."
Harmless is a matter of perspective here. The sales guy might have been in serious trouble after it and who knows, could not close some deals he was about to make and maybe was maybe never allowed to be at a trade show again. We do not know.
And well, probably many do not care as sales guys are not much respected here.
(and I have my bias too, but I do not like generalisations too much, in the sense if this idiot sales guy could not fix his machine, bad for him, no harm done to real people)
"The sales guy might have been in serious trouble after it and who knows, could not close some deals he was about to make and maybe was maybe never allowed to be at a trade show again."
Yes, and that's a much scarier prospect for the sales guy today than it was 40 years ago.
A dick move would be to break it. Showing off the device's capabilities in novel an interesting ways should lead to a conversation, not a judgment.
Seriously, I've been on tons of trade shows, both in the booth and as a visitor, I'd have definitely struck up a conversation with the guy to see where and how he learned so much about the device. That also would have all but guaranteed getting my device back in pristine working order and a pointer to some information about it that I apparently had missed.
The story ends with "As I walked to the next exhibit, I saw him cycle the AC power to the instrument in frustration."
So no, this was not about showing device capabilities. Nor about striking conversation. This was about feeling good and superior for making someone frustrated.
(And no, which is not even same as not caring about other peoples feelings, this is about being happy about their feelings being negative.)
Well, if the sales guy had been more knowledgeable or more interested in someone who clearly knew his stuff better than he did then this could have ended differently.
Could the prankster have done better? Sure, no doubt, but it's not as bad as people make it out to be. Could the salesperson have done better? Yes, also no doubt, having been there this was simply a missed opportunity.
Are we really trying to claim that sales people should have the same level of knowledge as power-users / developers / engineers who build such things?
Perhaps I'm too young, but I've literally never know any such a salesperson. They're there to be charismatic and friendly, and show the features for which they've been handed a script.
Their job is to drive interest, and address very, VERY high level concerns. They're not experts, else they'd (by and large) be doing something other than sales, yes?
(To be fair, it's possible that we've just eliminated reasonable expectations of salespeople, but that's not clear to me yet)
A booth like that would usually be staffed by suits and engineers, and if you are extremely lucky, engineers in suits.
But plenty of companies sent minders and order takers, technically incompetent, they might be able to do a scripted demo but likely would not know the first thing about the actual uses of such a device.
> Perhaps I'm too young, but I've literally never know any such a salesperson.
This was about 30-40 years ago, so it's far more in the time frame where you'd have technically competent sales folk, as you'd be pitching this gear to other engineers at this trade show.
When you're at a trade show for the very field that equipment is designed for and someone is trying to pitch you a piece of equipment that's nearly double the annual salary of an entry level engineer, I think you'd be far more likely to see a salesperson knowledgeable about their gear.
This is pretty nice example of "blaming the victim" mentality. No, there was no missed opportunity for salesman, no the salesman done nothing wrong. Did not went out of way to make the situation sux for others either.
Yes, let's bring out the pitchforks for a spur-of-the-moment thing that someone did 40 years ago. Really. I'm sure the victim is still seeing his shrink on account of this.
Only if the phone automatically returns to English on a reboot. Equipment like this from that era had very little non-volatile storage, so it basically boots clean and fresh every time.
"Without being dependent on countries that dont share the same view on the european security order, integrity of borders, sovereignty of countries and so on"
There are many such countries, but there is only one near Europe and its easier to just say "Russia" tbf.
> Zeloof’s family was supportive but also cautious. His father asked a semiconductor engineer he knew to offer some safety advice.
As impressive and independent as this is, you have to wonder if any other gifted child could have done the same feat. The article seems to skip over this point, how many people know a "semiconductor engineer"?
This is a story as old as time. When I was a kid growing up in the 1970s and 1980s and the school held science fairs, the kids whose parents were scientists and engineers had the coolest fair-winning projects while the rest of the kids made baking soda and vinegar volcanoes or lemon batteries.
I would have been ecstatic to even make a baking soda and vinegar volcano or lemon battery. The poor schools didn't have science fairs or anything like that.
Uh, I was just reminded of something - when I was a kid (5th grade) I was gifted a book of science experiments for kids. I was only able to do maybe 1 experiment in the book because I didn't have access to any materials needed for the experiments. Those books should come with a warning or something, cause I remember being like "what kid has access to this stuff? Where do you even buy this stuff?"
This isn't meant to be a "Woe is me" story, just trying to give some context.
On the order of millions of kids have parents who know semiconductor engineers, and 1 of them ended up manufacturing chips in the garage.
Please don't try to pick apart his accomplishments to make a point. He's still doing something that almost nobody with equivalent resources took the initiative to do.
I promise you that there are not millions of kids. Your argument may still hold, but the was majority of children knows no one with this level of technical experience, let alone any programmers.
> There are ten thousand semiconductor engineers kicking around Silicon Valley and Albuquerque and Portland, and another hundred thousand in Shenzhen and Taipei and Seoul. So conservatively ten million people know a semiconductor engineer.
Nobody says they were best friend with one. You know a lot of people, and those engineers know a lot of people. I don't know why you're doubling down on this.
Zeloof's father runs a sheet metal fabrication shop that makes components for other manufacturers. They do excellent work, I've worked with them in the past. I'm guessing his father knows engineers in all sorts of industries.
Success is a combination of talent and circumstance. It’s always been like that. It’s also why giving opportunities to as many people as possible is so important.
This is what I think whenever I see an Olympic gold medal athlete. Would they even be on the winners podium if every other person out there attempted to reach that place?
However, most winners have had to deal with losing, so they know they should be humble about it.
Isn't persistence exactly the thing that makes them distinct? Saying everybody could do it if they were persistent... Well yeah, but the point is most people aren't.
I am quite confident that almost nobody could have blazed this trail, even with the same support network. The resilience, ingenuity and practical skill required is outrageous.
There are ten thousand semiconductor engineers kicking around Silicon Valley and Albuquerque and Portland, and another hundred thousand in Shenzhen and Taipei and Seoul. So conservatively ten million people know a semiconductor engineer.
Instead of focusing on the problem that only one person in a thousand knows a semiconductor engineer, we should figure out how to fix the much worse problem that out of the ten million people who do, only two people have made transistors in their basement, because that leak in the pipeline is apparently about five thousand times worse.
There are probably 1000s of logic designers kicking around Silicon Valley, probably not 10s of thousands. These days little semiconductor engineering is happening there, all the new fabs have been built elsewhere for decades now
Would also add the fact his blog links to a brother who seems to be involved in Electronics and Photography, both critical for this project. Not taking away from his focus, but being surrounded by domain knowledge over a dinner table is a huge advantage.
If a user wants to parse integers etc. from a string, the function snprintf and family is often applied. It is a neatly simple function. This article seems to invent a problem rather than an organic one.
The article argues that there is no easy way to detect whether the parsing finished successfully. As a consequence, the C standard library is unsafe when used normally.
It's interesting how beginners are encouraged to use various string functions which are not safe to use with external input.
the build process of C is one of its absolute benefits. Each unit compiles on its own, producing an object file. The fact that people have now started to make header-only libraries makes the story even better! Each function gets a name. No namespaces, classes, scopes, modules, w/e. You can even just declare a function as extern at compile time!
C compilation is not that bad, what makes it atrocious is the preprocessing step.
Show me the large-ish (100K+ LOC) codebase with dependencies that can be cross-compiled, does not come with tons of cruft like autoconf or Meson, and does not require installing reams of software on the host as "libraries", and then we are talking.
While a programming language and ecosystem includes some of the culture, bad code and project structure IMO should not be blamed on C. Modern C projects are a breeze
Why would you think Java is a descendant of C++? There may be overlap in some syntax, mainly from C. C++ is not, and was not, the only OOP language, and I have heard no such that that is should be descendant of C++.
I was once at a talk given by James Gosling. He said that Java-the-language was «a trick to get C++ programmers to use the Java Virtual Machine». He deliberately made Java very similar to C++ but removed what he saw as the hard and risky parts (memory management, operator overloading, etc) that are typically not required for standard applications.
Well, that was my interpretation of what he said, errors are my own etc. But this would make Java a direct descendant of C++, in my mind.
I have never heard that quote from James before. Are you sure about the JVM? The JVM was quite controversial back then, Java first had to prove that you could make a performant virtual machine.
But Guy Steele claimed "We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."
Well, it’s many years ago and memory corruption is real. I got the impression that their goal was to get adoption of (what at some point became) the JVM, or the «compile once run anywhere» vision. They envisioned many languages to coexist on the JVM, which kinda happened but maybe not as much as they thought. So they designed a language to get started, Java, and made it familiar-looking to get people om board.
Java's object semantics are explicitly intended as a streamlining of C++, the keywords are the same for the most part, and it was sold as a C++ which runs anywhere with no memory leaks.
Note that I mentioned the semantics: the object semantics of Java and C++ are so similar as to have corrupted the entire concept of objects in their favor.
This wasn't an accident, and it wasn't malice, it just feels like it sometimes.
I'm not a Java programmer but as far as I can tell java object semantics, far from being corrupted, do indeed come from simula via c++.
Thanks to reflection and a featureful VM, Java does have a significant amount of dynamic behaviour that can be used to implement a lot of features of the smalltalk side of the OO family tree.
They took a lot of inspiration from C/C++'s syntax and seemed to be pretty concerned with improving memory management, security and developer velocity.
Another programming language being popular by no means mean that it is a derived language of any sort. Any development is of course retrospective, but it is sorta like saying all music is descendant from pop.
I understand the point you’re trying to make but writing music is a creative process whereas marketing programming languages isn’t.
I was around at the time and C++ was trendy so Sun were
marketing it as the future for C++ developers. It was definitely influenced by what was in vogue at the time even if it doesn’t adopt all of the traits of C++.
I remember this because I wasn’t a fan of C++ back then as I’d come from the ALGOL family of languages so found C-style syntax a little alien (and tbh I still don’t like C++ now even though I’ve since warmed to C’s syntax) so it took me years before I warmed to Java.
In particular, if Java kept (almost?) all the keywords, and the operators, and the statement terminators, and the block delimiters, and the same approach to object-oriented... how is it not derived from C++?
No, but it was the only one that mattered at the time, as far as adoption was concerned, and regarding marketing Java as similar to existing programmers and their managers...
That's also how it was hyped at the time and the kind of people it was sold too (I was -barely- there).
An actual belief in this is ridiculous, and taking light on literal war and anti democratic effort and meme'ing it as "freedomed" is absolutely disgusting. You know that these are real human beings we are talking about right?
I think that's part of the (dark) joke - "freedom" being the reason that the United States always gives before destabilizing a region and propping up corrupt dictators or puppet democracies which are anything but "free."
Oh wow, someone getting upset and moralistic at black humour. I’ve never seen this episode before.
No, the real joke is that the US ‘freedomed’ a democratically elected socialist government and replaced them with a ‘pro-freedom’ dictator with the full support of other western countries, as they have done multiple times before.
Why is it that all weed enthusiasts always believe that MJ has any relevance to the, in this case Danish, economy? The amount of MJ use in Denmark is minimal compared to other countries, and certainly there is no where near "billions" of Euros sold. Certainly "drug tourists" make little to no impact on the tourism of Copenhagen.
Maybe drug tourism has little impact, but 24% of adolescents report that they’ve used it in the past year, and 41% report they’ve tried it. With it being illegal, there’s no doubt that a fair amount of money is being moved around society shadily because of it.
Why is it that everytime a bad story about MJ is mentioned, there are always so many people in comments doubting authenticity and relevancy? It is almost like an agenda or something
People are skeptical on any side about purely anecdotal experiences. I've posted pro-marijuana anecdotal experiences in here, but I don't expect people to take it as gospel, and frequently specifically call it out as a personal anecdote. In the past, have seen the exact sort of response your replying to directed towards me.
And that's fine, because anecdotes aren't data!
But it's just hard to separate correlation from causation here. Not all people who drink or smoke or do other drugs are depressed, but plenty of depressed people will drink or do drugs.
Plenty of people that have natural talent or skill, or who worked long enough to get to "the top of their game" get complacent even if they do not regularly engage in any of the vices we're talking about here. Arrogance and complacency are hardly unique to drinkers and smokers.
Even from an anecdotal perspective, assuming that marijuana was a contributor to the person becoming complacent, it seems unlikely that the marijuana was a strong causative factor in the suicide attempt. There are a lot of people that smoke pot regularly, and by definition, most of them are not the best person at their hobbies or professions, and they're not committing suicide. There's obviously some deeper issues in play here. (And I think it might be totally reasonable to say that people that have those deeper issues should avoid mind-altering substances)
Most positive anecdotes are not nearly as extreme as this one, but there's certainly skepticism for even mild positive statements.
You can look in the comment section for this very article for multiple examples - I replied to someone who indicated that another person must have "depressing" nights because they stated that they sometimes enjoy having a night with friends listening to music while high, for example. Subjective opinions of how to enjoy an evening are greeted with being told they're wrong - a bit beyond even skepticism, even!
If us potheads start posting anecdotes about how smoking took us from being unsuccessful and contemplating suicide to successful and having wonderful personal happiness and contentment - basically the reverse of the original post in this thread - I'm sure we'd see similar levels of skepticism. As it is, the positive anecdotes are basically "It's fun and helps me relax", "I feel more creative while high", "It sometimes helps me approach things from a different perspective" and similar.
I've had the same reaction from sharing a story about bad experiences with mushrooms. It wasn't in the context of evidence either, but still got people saying it sounded like anti-drug propaganda.
I think it's just the result of a cultural perception shift swinging hard the other way from the decades that drugs were demonized to now people looking at many drugs (mdma, marijuana and psilocybin especially) as miraculous substances that will solve all our issues. This happens with most shifts - it starts on one end of the extreme, then gets a reaction which swings the pendulum to the other extreme. In a decade I'm sure it will even out and we can have open conversations without reactions being so dogmatic.
I wouldn't call it a 'bad story', rather a story giving false impression of the general situation, even if from your perspective its how it looks like. But things are almost always more complex than first glance makes them look like, as in this case. Why - MJ being a gateway drug is mostly about being one of the most accessible and 'light' drug for people desperately wanting to escape/avoid reality of their lives.
Kids growing up in dysfunctional families (who might actually look OK from outside), or with some mental issues often desperately seek any kind of escape in whatever comes around. For many Alcohol, cigarettes and MJ are most accessible but sooner or later they find these substances don't work as they thought, the ugly reality is still there. So they move up the ladder for stronger escape.
Its false to paint MJ as cause of this, taking perfectly fine and balanced young individuals and bending them on path of addiction. Yet this is how it has been sold to public for past 60 years all around the world.
I think its the fact that a story about a 14 year old using drugs is not an example of what 99.9% of the "nerds who think weed is excellent" have in mind when they talk about using cannabis
