When describing the first group, you use lots of seemingly negative descriptions: "rule-oriented and binary", "quickly seizes on any violation", "extends that into a personal judgment", "express their judgments harshly", and "that acid".

When describing the other group you use lots of positive language: "pluck and self-motivation", "admire the ingenuity", "generally more indulgent", and "relentlessly resourceful". Plus there is an appeal to PG's authority on this site.

There are positive and negative aspects of both sides here, and I think you're being pretty harsh toward one of the factions.

1. Originally I wrote that I was a "card-carrying member of the second group", but edited that out after imagining someone taking the joke literally.

Articles about SPAM can be engaging. But, that hardly means people support the activity. IMO, duping in online games is the same basic thing as it's a classic free rider problem. People are not going to buy duped items in a single player game it's only the 'non' duping players that make item duping a profitable activity and their game play is harmed by it.

Performance enhancing drugs fall into the same category. The methods/chemistry might be interesting, but clearly 'clean' athletes (and arguably the fans) are harmed by the activity.

PS: Or can you actually see a benefit from doping that I am missing?

If the guy had said early on, "Ok, now I realize that part of my problem is that my business was essentially parasitical, and I'm trying to learn from that" I would have been able to read the rest of the article with more equanimity.

I really do admire his pluck, and for his age he is learning a lot of hard lessons. But reading this reminded me of watching a horror movie where some goof obliviously walks along with the serial killer right behind them. You just want to shout, "TURN AROUND! LOOK BEHIND YOU!" So I'm not shocked that commenters have to get that off their chests before they can process the rest of it.

It also reminds me of the conversations I had in the mid-1990s with spammers, because back then you could actually track 'em down and get 'em on the phone. They had this same inability to see that they were their own worst enemy. They saw problems on all sides and thought the world was against them. But really, the common factor in the problems was them.

It is for all of us, of course. But it can be hard to watch others struggle with that.

I'm in this camp but not for this reason. I disagree with what he did because it made games I paid for no longer fun.

The real world is chock full of secret exploits that get relentlessly ground that then allow people with more money to spend to get ahead of me. I was hoping my games didn't have to be like that too.

Unless there's some awful crime I missed, I commend the author's hacking (if they want such a commendation).

That's just world theory. The real nature of the thing is, that if they maintain that kind of cognitive dissonance, they never reap the benefits of conquering their own biases. But this sort of "judges judging judges", I always seem to get lost in it as well.

> This dichotomy plays out on HN all the time, though rarely so vividly. Both groups are well-represented both on HN and among programmers in general.

It does, but I think calling it a dichotomy is a misrepresentation. In complex systems, black and white are arbitrary, it just depends on what content you highlight and compose inferences from, and what you discard.

> The thread is more interesting than that.

I agree.

His broken moral compass and naive sense of entitled victimhood are preventing him from leveraging his talents to find the kind of work that he wants. You can easily be misguidedly "relentlessly resourceful". Just like you can be both fascinated and saddened to see it happen.

Your second paragraph, I think, goes way too far. I don't believe you have nearly enough information to make that judgment. In fact, you can't have it, because it mostly depends on what the author learns (or doesn't learn) from his mistakes, which means it depends on the future.

And we are definitely reacting to each others' notions of how bothered one ought to be by his behaviour.

'Broken moral compass' may be a little harsh but I think you are perhaps swayed too far by the display of resourcefulness and the 'virtualness' and triviality of the setting. I'd see it differently if he were a 14 year old kid, figuring out how the world works. But he's an adult (with a spouse and a mortgage) who more or less tried to extort the developers of the mmorpg into giving him a job. This seems like sufficient information to conclude that he has rather poor ethical judgement or at least, a great deal of ethical obliviousness.

It reminds me a bit of a part of 'Reflections on Trusting Trust' that is rarely cited or recalled - open it up when you have a chance and re-read the last three paragraphs of the last section 'Moral'.

...

> One group is rule-oriented and binary, quickly seizes on any violation of the (personal or social) code they believe in, and extends that into a personal judgment of the violator. Such people often express their judgments harshly. It's worth remembering that the same harshness inevitably applies to themselves; one doesn't get to handle that acid with gloves.

Captain Crunch, from what I've read, hacked the phone system to make free long distance calls, and used that ability to play around doing things like routing call loops around the world. He probably caused some monetary harm to the phone company, but did not interfere with the use of the system by ordinary users.

Exploiting dupe bugs in MMORPGs and trading game items for non-game currency does interfere with the ordinary players of the games. Most people want games they play to be fair. In an MMORPG, that means what my character achieves in the game world should be determined as much as possible by what I do in the game world. There should be as little spill-over from the real world to the game world.

The real world cannot be completely kept out, of course. Someone with more disposable income can buy better hardware to run the game on, which can give better frame rates and let them turn on more visual effects. This can let them play their character more effectively, and so give them an in-game advantage. Someone who can afford to take time off can do time consuming things in-game that those of who have to go to work cannot.

Still, for the most part it used to be that getting the good stuff in-game came from earning it in-game. The exploiters and the traders of items for dollars changed that. If's frustrating when you are struggling to complete a quest for some rare item, or work you way to some rare monster that drops powerful loot, and you are beaten out by some lower level party that has a huge advantage because they were decked out with rare powerful armor and weapons no one of their level should have been able to obtain but they bought for real-world money from some dupe bug exploiter.

So yes, I can praise (well...I wouldn't go that far..make it "not be bothered by") Captain Crunch but damn running an MMORPG dupe exploiting business.

> The other group, of course, identifies with the author's pluck and self-motivation and doesn't hold his dodgy beginnings against him.

I don't hold his dodgy beginnings against him either. My problem with him is that it sounds like he gave up the dodgy business only because he was down to one exploit and was getting a bit burned out. It sounds like whether is next business is good or is dodgy will likely be determined by whether he happens to come across a good opportunity first or a dodgy opportunity first. There's no sign of repentance for the dodgy business.