Hacker News Reader

Well a long time ago, came a man on a track

Walking thirty miles with a sack on his back

And he put down his load where he thought it was the best

He made a home in the wilderness

He built a cabin and a winter store

And he ploughed up the ground by the cold lake shore

And the other travellers came walking down the track

And they never went further, no they never went back

Then came the churches, then came the schools

Then came the lawyers, then came the rules

Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads

And the dirty old track was the Telegraph Road

Then came the mines, then came the ore,

Then there was the hard times, then there was a war

Telegraph sang a song about the world outside

Telegraph Road got so deep and so wide

Like a rolling river

Never thought I'd get to quote a Dire Straits song on Hacker News :)

And now you've pointed out a hole in my mp3 collection, thanks! I have the CD but somehow forgot to rip the song.

Great album that one.

When I ran a torrent site I had a nuisance hacker working for a competitor who would regularly try to take down my site and leak all the content everywhere. I would talk to him on IRC to try and get info from him to figure out who he was. Claimed he was a 24-year-old Russian living in London. Made lots of claims about the cars he drove and the women he used.

One day I'm in my home office and he says "watch this" on IRC and my wife's phone started to ring in the living room. She picked it up and someone started screaming down the phone at her. She was bemused and wondered what it was. I never told her.

I immediately put a €15,000 bounty on the guy's info. Three weeks later some guys on my site found him. He was German, 15 years old, working at a video store. They tapped me in and phoned first his boss and then his mother to tell them what a naughty boy he was. He never bothered me again after that.

>I've already made up my mind to walk when dang does.

I used to hate dang with a passion because of a previous account that got banned for ... reasons.

But, with time, I've come to appreciate the job that he's been doing in order to keep the community sane. Thanks dang and I hope HN stays the way it is for a longer while :).

Nice to see you come around. And props for owning up to it. That gives a bit of hope.

> Incredible how the assholes will even destroy something so obviously good and by going after the guys' wife and kids no less. It is absolutely disgusting.

Wonder if it'd be helpful to publish and name names:

> However, yesterday they came at my children and my wife. They came at my family….. little fanboys of certain YouTubers that have obviously been raised horribly. What was in my inbox I won’t even show my wife. I’m tearing up writing this with absolute disgust for how horrible people are becoming. All of this is created by the personalities (I refuse to call them creators), they feed off of it, they profit off of it and they don’t care.

When I was in college, my girlfriend lost her driver's license. Somebody mailed it back to her, but with a pornographic image pasted onto her face picture.

I just don't get it.

That's 'mixed feelings' personified.

> And then all the bad stuff that happens in big cities came right along with it, including the jerks, the swatters and the drive by shooters.

That stuff also happens in towns and villages. They just don’t have enough people to make it as much of a news story.