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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Y Combinator's application still asks: "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage." They don't actually use the word "cheat" but that's what they're asking for: Are you willing to cheat if it gives you an advantage?

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Hacking and cheating are different things.

Hacking is looking at the rules and finding smart ways of following them. A lawyer or accountant finding legal loopholes is hacking.

The clearest place to see hacking is within games where one follows the rules and does not cheat.

Avoid thinking that hacking is unethical behaviour. A common mistake of people that don't understand the culture.

Like many great words, the meaning does depend on who uses the word. But the people who created the usage didn't use it for cheating.

Cheating is giving yourself an unfair advantage to the detriment of others, whether any explicit rules are clearly broken or not. That covers your definition of "hacking".

Yea, I include "rules lawyering" to be a mild form of cheating. The fact that it's socially acceptable is not much of a flex, to be honest.

Eh everyone I know in YC answered this in an ethical way. In fact, I suspect YC keeps this wording to catch people admitting to something unethical while rewarding people who see something in a system that could be different.

My answer that got me accepted was that there was a lip syncing competition at my college that was dwindling because everyone had to submit a CD and sign up in advance. It also was held in an auditorium.

When I took over, I moved it to Spotify and moved the venue to the lawn, and we went from ~20 people the previous year to 1.2k the year I ran it.

How is that hacking?

That's my point.

Here's pg's definition of a hacker: https://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

I left out that the rule at the time was all songs had to be reviewed by the administration, which I didn't comply with. I'm not saying my story is the greatest; quite the opposite. I was trying to show that "hacking" isn't inherently unethical or even particularly interesting.

Is that really a surprising trait to expect from a venture capitalist persona? As we go on, especially as most of the simple problems get solved, the system everyone blindly trusted has turned to uphold generally positive trends has turned to lies, manipulation, exploitative practices, loophole engineering and abuse. What I would expect from a successful VC applicant today isn't savvy business sense and actual good ideas, but an unrelenting willingness to do anything short of putting your life on the line for profit. There's no such thing as going low for these people, they are rewarded for using every trick in the book to earn an extra cent.

> anything short of putting your life on the line for profit

Why should they put their own life on the line when there are so many others whose lives could be used instead?

Is it really cheating if the system is vulnerable? What about things like a filibuster or slow walking an order?

By your logic, hacking is legal due to vulnerabilities

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