Hackers

When I was small, I didn't know C, or syscalls, or dynamic linking, or virtual memory management - yet I tried to read the stuff from Phrack anyway because I thought that was what the "cool guys" would read. I couldn't grasp how to smash the stack back then, but I understood this:

                               ==Phrack Inc.==

                    Volume One, Issue 7, Phile 3 of 10

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The following was written shortly after my arrest...

                       \/\The Conscience of a Hacker/\/

                                      by

                               +++The Mentor+++

                          Written on January 8, 1986
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

        Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers.  "Teenager
Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
        Damn kids.  They're all alike.

        But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain,
ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker?  Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
        I am a hacker, enter my world...
        Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of
the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
        Damn underachiever.  They're all alike.

        I'm in junior high or high school.  I've listened to teachers explain
for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction.  I understand it.  "No, Ms.
Smith, I didn't show my work.  I did it in my head..."
        Damn kid.  Probably copied it.  They're all alike.

        I made a discovery today.  I found a computer.  Wait a second, this is
cool.  It does what I want it to.  If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up.  Not because it doesn't like me...
                Or feels threatened by me...
                Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
                Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
        Damn kid.  All he does is play games.  They're all alike.

        And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is
sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is
found.
        "This is it... this is where I belong..."
        I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to
them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
        Damn kid.  Tying up the phone line again.  They're all alike...

        You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at
school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless.  We've been dominated by sadists, or
ignored by the apathetic.  The few that had something to teach found us will-
ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

        This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud.  We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals.  We explore... and you call us criminals.  We seek
after knowledge... and you call us criminals.  We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

        Yes, I am a criminal.  My crime is that of curiosity.  My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for.

        I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.  You may stop this individual,
but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.

                               +++The Mentor+++
_______________________________________________________________________________

In the old days, before I was born, a "cool dude" was one who sent a 2600Hz signal into a land line to get free international calls. In the 2010s, a "cool dude" is someone who sends his code to a lot of consumers to get free Lamborghinis. Every once in a while, one of these cool dudes remembers that it's not really about the free international phone calls, or Lamborghinis - although those are nice and cool tricks. They did more, and the world was afraid.

One of these dudes got caught again, and this time, he decided to take his life, instead of writing a manifesto. Too bad.

RIP, Aaron Swartz.

Stuff I wrote on the plane back to Hong Kong

(This post was written in 8/2011, and it was retracted. I'm reposting it today as I'm clearing my blog of spam comments, and because I think, as of today, it won't do anyone any harm anymore due to the time passed.)








As of this moment, I'm on a plane over the middle of Pacific Ocean - flying back to Hong Kong to start my new job at Apple Inc. For my US friends, don't worry, I'll be back and be around Cupertino in about a month. My stay in Hong Kong is just temporary.

Getting Over TixxMe

I've been trying to sleep, and there's actually a pretty comfy bed for me to sleep on the plane this time. But I couldn't get myself asleep despite the Bailey's I had right before boarding. To tell the truth, I'm still feeling angry over how things have turned out. The product is already 90% done - it's 50% if you only look at the user visible features. But the important thing is the infrastructure behind it - that took a lot of lead time but it's worth it. The infrastructure was built to let us make major changes and new features very quickly with an extremely small team (i.e. me and an intern) and perhaps some help from conventional web designers (i.e. no iOS/Android specialists needed) - and it was how I planned to beat massively more well-funded competitors with almost no resource. It proved itself in the weekly private beta releases within StartX in which we made numerous major changes in the software without many bugs and complaints - but most importantly, it meant no more overnight work for me, the sole full-time engineer in TixxMe. It meant I can hit the weekly milestones reliably without working myself to death. I'm a lazy programmer, and I'm proud of it.
And then the project stopped. To be honest I don't believe my co-founders' reasons for stopping it. It all seemed like a deliberate plan to kick out the co-founder who disagreed too much on how TixxMe should be run. Ironically, I'm also the guy who wrote the initial draft for the farewell article at tixxme.com, but the article got softened up quite a lot before it was posted. The outcome is not bad per se, but it's not my style of writing.
So.. 2 years. I've learned quite a lot, yes. But there're only so many 2 years for a twenty-something who doesn't have to worry about family (and I already have my mom to worry about, she will actually die of illness if I don't send her money), so it's also a massive loss for me. Also, having released 2 products and yet didn't get seed funding and didn't get PR in the frothy early stage investment market of 2010 is a small black mark on the personal histories of everyone involved - the problem is not the failure, but not having the balls of coming out to see the press.

What Went Wrong?

Over the life of Think Bulbs and TixxMe, we made products that went to the top of the charts in App Store - that was in 2009 though. We laughed whenever we saw another iPhone app that got 100k users and went to TechCrunch - one because we've reached that number twice, both times within a week or two from release. Two, because we never got to TechCrunch despite what we've done. So the laugh is really on us. Yes, I know, PR is only a small part of a whole product strategy. And simply the number of users isn't that good a metric for anything. But for all of two years almost all of our PR were done in Hong Kong and they're almost all done by me - the tech guy. Using "pathetic" to describe that would be an insult to the word "pathetic".
And after 2010 we went almost totally silent. There was SayCheeze which was a prototype for something bigger. We pitched the "bigger" thing in SSE Labs demo day that summer and the coding was already well in progress. If it all went well, we would have been the top dog in mobile photography for quite a while longer - probably even now.
But when the business guy came back from investor meetings, he was scared. He heard of big names going into the same space we're going into, and "pivoted". By "pivot" I mean all the code I've written in 2009 and 2010 was scrapped. That was needed because Think Bulbs' assets were sold and we had to start anew with TixxMe. And for a good few months, all I was doing was to get TixxMe's progress back to where I was at September 2010.

Cowardice - the Greatest Sin of any Startup

What it used to be.. when we were brave and not afraid. We (Puri! Lite) were #1, in 10+ countries.
Yes, the icon can be better. So? So you don't wanna release it?

.. and that was one of the bigger mistakes we made. That was not an isolated event, though. It's the general pattern of the business side of TixxMe until perhaps the last month of its life. Business guy talks to lots of people, gets scared, calls a meeting, and we decided to change something. And to be fair, it wasn't just the business guy's fault - it was equally my fault. I as a cofounder was also scared by what the business guy said and didn't stand firm in company meetings, I allowed my own code to be wasted. It was also why I went the path of mobile HTML5 - if the product requirements are constantly changing, so why not make the code base able to adapt to fast changes in the first place.
But as we went to the last month of TixxMe (and we weren't aware of the sudden stop that would happen back then - at least I wasn't), we finally learned the only real problem for us - cowardice. It slows ourselves down. It shows up in investor meetings whenever hard questions are asked - or worse, I guess, some "friendly" investors wouldn't even ask hard questions because they already know we're soft. It also shows in the quality of software - going soft on "we need quick progress for some demo event/investor meeting soon!" means buggy software; going soft on "shit! some famous guy is already in this space! let's throw away what we have and start again" means I can't even debug the software I've released even if I wanted.
Some of our advisors with the company spotted it - "not believing in yourselves". That was the single biggest mistake we've ever made. A lot of times I want to blame the business guy over this pervasive attitude within the company but I'm also to blame. Reason one, I have just as much shares as the business cofounder. Reason two, I always agreed with him eventually.

Lesson Learned

If you're a cofounder of a startup and you're hearing your advisors or investors tell you "you guys don't believe in yourselves"… you're in serious trouble. It doesn't matter if you have some funding, it doesn't matter if you already have a product. If it's just you who's constantly in doubt of the direction your company is taking, great, learn to be a real gangster and release your fucking product and talk with users instead of investors, today. If it's more than just you, run the fuck away.
And to the "let's keep ourselves in stealth mode/don't release our product yet because we may fail to get traction" crowd - good luck committing slow motion suicide. The team who failed a few times, pitched like shit in funding events, and became the laughing stock of VCs for the month will beat you. Perhaps not in this year, but beat you they will.
There're a lot more totally ridiculous things our team have done in the past 2 years. But in my mind, nothing is as wrong as cowardice. If I'm allowed to go back in time to fix just one thing in Think Bulbs and TixxMe, it's "Team! We're gangsters! Cofounder and CTO is for business cards! This is OG Martin to you! Competitors are there to be beaten up! If they're famous, even better!" As long as the team is not afraid to lose, and the consequences of losing battles here and there are fully accounted for - everything else that's right will follow.

So What's Next?

I'm broke - as anyone in StartX who observed my clothes can tell. So I don't have a choice in running my own startup any more - my bank account and my mom's health simply can't take any more risks. The project I'm on right now is probably the next most awesome thing I can do - and I plan to stay at least a few years on it. But perhaps now is a good time for me to get to know more people around the valley, instead of always sitting in the office coding shit up.
There're teams in StartX whose response to their competitor getting funded is "Yeah? Come get a piece of me! Come on!" - I admire them. That's the spirit! If you don't fight and don't experience both losing and winning in the arena yourself, why do a startup at all? Life is short and it's important to live it in the most fulfilling way possible. I've been having dinners with another startup in 500Startups in the past month, at one point they asked me how early they should release their still very in-progress product. My comment? "Release it as soon as it's usable!" Just seeing how users praise and curse you is totally worth it. Fuck the VCs who ask hard questions.

On Co-Founders and Other Startups

Next time I find a co-founder, I'd find someone who appreciates the fight (and the software!) itself - the movements of the market, the ways people's lives can be changed, what users claim they like and what they actually use, the words and emotions coming from investors and spectators in TechCrunch… The whole experience is a beauty by itself.
If your cofounder tells you he's doing a startup because he wants to retire early; or when asked about how he's going to make the world better, he talks about charity (which means he doesn't have a better idea than what every Average Joe can come up with) - you'd better run - he's not motivated to put capital to good use to begin with. Even if such a team succeeds, nobody is truly enjoying the process - because in your hearts you'll know, you're just in this startup game because it's "cool", not because you're really doing anything new. There're many excellent uses for a million or even a billion dollars, retiring early is not one. In fact, somebody better invent a way to live forever so the real innovators can keep pushing the world forward, without having to worry about their animal needs.
And for the few startup friends who'd asked me to join them... I'm truly sorry. I'd really like to fight. I'd really love to bring another thing from our imagination into the real world and see how the real world reacts to it. I'm flat broke now, though, and I have my mom to worry about.
But if it's about bringing stuff from imagination to reality... I'm still doing it. I didn't choose my job because of the brand name. Anyway, I'm not done. If you're a true gangster, see you in the arena, some time.

Possibilities

There was a time, when I would mention what kind of influence one can have on the society as an entrepreneur or an early employee of a value-creating startup - and then, people would say all I really wanted is money...

... and it's both right and wrong. It's hard to argue with these people, but simply getting rich was never my dream. My dream, is this:


I dream of enjoying sushi in a sushi bar when I'm 230 years old.

And I'd be talking with the chef about everything that happened in the past. I'd have 200 years to learn Japanese by then. That, or Babel Fish would've happened.

"Little startup companies were all the rage here 200 years ago, you see the Bay over there? That used to be where they made {X}... and it's the reason why we have {Y} and {Z} today."

"Oh yeah? I founded two of those startups there back then, but they all went belly up. I was so dumb."

"Heh. I was making electric cars there back then..."

"And they thought going 0 to 60mph in 3 seconds was cool? Booo!"

(a few sushi later)

"When I was 30 years old, I thought the industrial revolution was amazing..."

"Yeah, and then it happened again, twice."

"And all it did was putting up sushi bars in space."

"All those techniques for raising and cutting fish in space weren't invented in one day, you know."


... and the fish, tastes as good as, you know, the good old days.

Greed

About a year and a few months ago, I had plenty of arguments with two people on this word. It resulted in massive value destruction by people who're convinced they're right. To this day, I still find it shocking that people with sound minds can somehow conclude that destroying a company devoted to producing value, devoted to exploring a different path of survival for our own generation, can somehow be morally correct. It is wrong, even if your family has to suffer for it to continue, let alone small excuses.

But because of what? One of its cofounders likes playing Gordon Gekko and argues that "(a certain kind of) Greed is Good"? That it's better to be frighteningly aggressive than to be safe? That the primary objective of meeting with investors should be to bring that feeling of fright to their minds; that there are more things between Heaven and Hell, than are dreamt of in their philosophies?

What would I, a genuinely poor person who used to live next to leaking sewage in a beaten down district in Hong Kong, have become if I were to play safe?



It all happened, because greed, is a hated word. Dante's Inferno says, the 4th layer of Hell is there for greedy men. Just pick your popular religion - any one of them - and greed is condemned in its scriptures.

But what would have happened to the world, if people weren't greedy for more stable sources of food?

What would have happened to the world, if people weren't greedy for a more favorable form of government?

What would have happened to the world, if people weren't greedy for sounds that were pleasing to their ears, for visions that were pleasing to their eyes, for tastes that were pleasing to their tongues and their stomach?

That world, would be a sad, sad, world. A world without fried potation skins, without cheesecakes, or medium rare steak. A world without balsamic vinegar, or lemonade, or cheese, or ham. A world without colors, a world without Les Miserables. A world without the operatic singing methods and story writers that enables the feeble voice of a single human to penetrate the minds of thousands of audience. A world without the knowledge of how big the Universe is; of how many different species of animals and plants can live together in a coral reef; and why every living existence, no matter how feeble and dumb, are important to us.



Perhaps because of modern society - a lot of people have forgotten, that we humans, in a lot of ways, are losers the day we're born. Our eyesights are nothing compared to eagles, our sense of smell is thousands of times worse than dogs. We're slow, and we're weak. The only thing that nature has left us with, is the ability to imagine and want for more.

We used that to beat the fuck out of reality and make the impossibles somehow become possible - and that ability does you no good if a lion were to hunt you down. If there's one more thing besides our intellect that places us above the lion, it's perhaps our persistence - some people simply don't know when to give up their greed. And that's good - because theses people know, no matter how ugly or condemned that attribute is, it is part of them, and part of everyone.

If someone were to argue that human nature leads us to Hell, then it's Hell that's is wrong, not human nature.

甚麼也沒有

某八十後甚麼也沒有。

 街上的林寶堅尼，某八十後只能奢望可以行近一點拍拍照。卻不知克羅地亞的八十後正在埋頭製造一千匹馬力的電動跑車。 

某八十後夢想三十歲前可以供樓。地球另一面某人三十歲時買的，是俄羅斯的洲際彈道導彈。 

地球另一面的某人買了洲際彈道導彈之後，開了三間公司。然後窮得連租都交不起，要寄居朋友的家，面臨破產。他的浪漫，是將沒可能變成現實，所以由沒可能開始。

某八十後也想浪漫，卻沒有女朋友。 

某八十後甚麼也沒有。

Facebook 上每天看著甚麼的人幹了甚麼的事，某八十後只能概嘆，「這些機會不是我的」。

 某八十後曾幻想過，可以像古惑仔裏的鄭伊建那樣，「我唔妥你，我可以逗你；我唔鍾意你，我可以 dup 你；o靚仔你啤咩呀？出黎隻揪丫！」可惜某八十後一不夠帥，二沒急才，三沒膽量打人。

 「
不管天邊風已起
只想依依看著你
夜闌人靜會否仍可希冀

經得起憂傷與悲
只因心中有著你
路遙長夜記憶從不捨棄

長街的身影穿過風雨有傲氣
曾一起出走不怕闖進了絕地
如霧如煙　全像遊戲

彷彿天和地在挑選我跟你
如像我亦重遇了生死
難道只好淌淚心痛告別你
無法讓我此際替代你
」

某八十後某日看著老舊的電影，哭了。 不是為了電影的情節，而是為了自己 － 只懂跟隨別人教的四仔主義的他，似乎比古惑仔更加不像一個人。

四仔

子曰：「四仔：屋仔、車仔、老婆仔、BB 仔。」

這是課堂裏某些老師經常提起的，但從來沒提過其實是甚麼子。可能是來自法國瑞士交界的那位希格斯玻色子說的。

某八十後有一晚，極無聊。他無聊得連愛情動作片也不想看，他看了 BBC 的紀實片。內容講述一隻烏龜是如何成長、求偶、交配、生龜蛋，和死去的。

某八十後不耐煩，看完生龜蛋之後睡了。

他看到希格斯玻色子。

希格斯玻色子說：「一開始有光，有光之後有我，有我之後有星，星爆左之後變石頭，石頭爆左隻龜出黎，死左幾萬億隻龜之後就爆左你出黎...」

「o下？」

「搞咁多野，你而家先同我講你只係比隻龜勁左 33%。今鑊陷家剷喇！仆你個臭街呀！柒到無朋友呀！回水呀！」

迎新營

小弟進大學那年玩過兩個迎新營，其中一個遊戲是這樣的：

首先，遊戲一開始，所有人都要帶上眼罩。

第二，所有知道答案的人都不可以用任何方式提示未知道答案的人。

參與這個遊戲的學生要做的，就是要除去身上的一件衣物，放在地上。至於是哪一件呢？學生要自己想。只有一件是對的。

 一開始，通常就有不少人除去外衣，手錶，鞋等不太重要的衣服。當然這些答案是錯的。但這些錯不會有提示，遊戲會繼續。

然後就會有人開始除衫。這時工作人員會提示這個遊戲並非低級趣味。

過了一會就會有人繼續除衫，甚至嘗試除褲，除底褲。這當然就要出手制止了。

正確答案是除眼罩。 除眼罩有兩大好處：第一，眼罩是正確答案，丟了眼罩不用再猜。第二，你可以笑嘗試除褲的人。