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Comment by _2d30 | Hacker News Reader

My meta-comment is that it's a really sad state of affairs that we don't as a society have an immune system that makes it so that an individual who posts openly about creating software whose sole (and even if not "sole" then certainly intended) purpose is to enable others to deceive and cheat their way to "success" is made a pariah.

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It's a hobby project I decided to share. I won’t deny it’s problematic. I understand both sides of the argument, but if I was going to make it for fun anyway, why not publish it?

Posting it publicly on GitHub is the main reason I got invited to job interviews this spring. I'm a third-year student with no prior IT experience, and now I have a great summer job lined up.

And for the record—I enjoy playing legit. I don’t cheat.

"Pariah"? Do you really want to ruin the life of a person that ruins your entertainment? Okay, they will do this quietly. Then what?

Bypassing a good anticheat was and still is a good way to obtain a ton of reverse engineering and software security-related knowledge. Many people are doing this for fun and I don't see any problem with this. Cheating is another question, though.

> Do you really want to ruin the life of a person that ruins your entertainment?

They're not ruining my entertainment, I don't play any such online game. Even still, poisoning any element of trust in society should default make you a pariah. This is no different from anyone else who purposefully breaks the social contract in any other context for their own gains.

> Bypassing a good anticheat was and still is a good way to obtain a ton of reverse engineering and software security-related knowledge.

Getting into street fights with strangers is a good way to obtain a ton of self-defense related knowledge. I still think that's no excuse for someone to get into street fights with strangers. There are plenty of other ways to gain similar knowledge that don't require poisoning the community well.

> Cheating is another question, though.

??? How do you think you figure out how to bypass the good anti-cheat???

It's clear this isn't a topic you have any familiarity with, so why such strong opinions?

It's clear you're incapable of making a substantive contribution to the discussion, so why bother posting at all?

I see.

Because that would be a simple solution to all societies ills, and it's obvious the world does not work this way. And unless you're suggest banning all anonymous communication under an alias you quickly see ideas like this don't work.

> Because that would be a simple solution to all societies ills

No it wouldn't and I don't lament its absence as such.

> and it's obvious the world does not work this way.

Agreed which is my lamentation.

> And unless you're suggest banning all anonymous communication under an alias you quickly see ideas like this don't work.

I'm very clearly not, but even given the case that all communication around this moves to anonymous is itself fine. The impact of people understanding that they would be pariahs for developing such tools is itself a good deterrent. That social deterrents do not work with perfect 100% efficacy is not an argument against their usage.

You mean half of all AI products?

The ones trained to clone anyone’s voice for example. Oh sure, those vibrators and wand massagers were marketed for medical purposes too. But we all know how 99% will be used…

It’s just that we are all powerless to stop it because our entire society is based around competition, especially at the nation-state level.

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