I was in my 20's and still had a juvenile/hacker streak. No harm was done.
Back at that time, I had dreams of actually owning a 8566, but at the time they cost $60k and it seemed impossible.
I picked one up about five years ago for $2k. It STILL has the best performing AFE of anything ever made. All the modern equipment uses signal processing, but that's cheating.
> I was in my 20's and still had a juvenile/hacker streak. No harm was done.
Lots of us did dumb/jerk things when we were younger; that makes it understandable, not okay. And would the salesperson with the now (for all practical purposes) broken demo unit agree that there was no harm?
It is a sales persons' duty to know more about the device they are trying to sell than random passers by. If using the front part of a console you really could brick the device in a couple of seconds using nothing but allowed operations that would qualify as a defect.
As far as I'm concerned this was (1) a harmless prank and (2) a significant impulse to the sales person to up their knowledge of the device.
Obviously, your salespeople should be good at handling your knives.
But a knife salesman will never be as good as a chef, because chefs have hours a day, every day working with the tools of their trade.
And if you're at a trade show selling chef's knives, and there are no chefs in attendance, you're probably at the wrong trade show.
I would say it's entirely normal for a certain fraction of trade show attendees to know the products on display better than the salespeople demonstrating them.
I've worked booths. If something like this would happen to me I would definitely want to know more about that person, if only because he might be a potential recruit or a representative of an existing customer.
The fact that your personal experience, confidence or skill would mean _you_ wouldn't have had any problems in a similar situation is irrelevant in judging the situation as it didn't happen to you.
I have to disagree. Society works in layers and mutual trust, and its not the sales person job to know the ins and outs of the device. Their job is to communicate what the machine does and how to do it.
Also, you could brick the device in a couple seconds with a hammer too. Should the sales guy have take down training too?
If thats an unrealistic argument, you failed to realize you were the only one in the room who couldnt see the hammer in your hands.
Jacques there's always been the stiff never-have-fun type floating around. They used to tell me I had to wear a suit and tie to be taken seriously in the nineties. I just roll my eyes and don't worry about it.
Man, the people in this thread have some tree-sized sticks in places where the sun don't shine.
Also seems like many of these people haven't been to an engineering conference with demo gear out. And seem to be overlooking that this was 30-40 years ago, talking about equipment that'd cost $150k in today's money. That was an engineer or two worth of annual salary for the time period.
I'd damn well expect a sales person selling me a piece of gear like that at a field-specific conference to know how to use it and be able to reset the thing to factory spec in a pinch. Which seems to be exactly what the sales person ended up doing.
How is it a harmless prank if at the end the ‘prankster’ walks away smugly and the salesperson is left with a broken demo?
It’s only harmless if the prankster turns around and fixes the demo.
I remember some years ago there were people going around trade shows with universal remote controls turning off the screens. As far as I remember most posters thought that wasn’t a very nice thing to do. And that really is almost completely harmless.
Turning off screens with universal remote controls... hm... imagine what you could do with one of those 3 Watt IR guns they use in laser arenas and a highrise building. During the worldcup soccer... Never mind.
I agree with (1), but not (2). How many sales types are going to learn to operate a debugger?
Also, there's random passers by as in "one table over at Starbucks" and random passers by as in "took the trouble to come to a tech conference". It is true that the latter are more likely to take these things lightly.
That's why you have at least one techie in your booth crew. Which has been my role on more than one occasion.
FWIW I worked the booth on a CAD/CAM show in Utrecht one memorable week in the 80's and the number of master mechanics that tried to get the toolbit to run into the chuck was rather larger than expected. Good that I took care of that in the software. But this mentality, of putting stuff through its paces and to show off what you can do with it is exactly why you have trade shows in the first place, to interact with people and to let people interact with your gear to see what they are up to and to strike up conversations. Not all of these pay off.
But sometimes the kid in the greasy jeans and the t-shirt is the guy that will land you the big contract, as opposed to the guy in the suit who passes by your booth just for the swag.
I'd like to point out that just because it is expected that folks are going to try to come and try out a product (and potentially damage it) does not justify it.
OP entering a funky command is not unexpected. But then purposely antagonizing the sales rep was a d*ck move in my book. If OP had just shown the guy "Hey here's what I did and what it does" that would be perfectly fine (important distinction, OP knew more than the sales guy compared to your case). But if the sales person was legitimately panicking that's not very polite, to put it mildly.
It is not just that the OP did a cool trick, that is not what people find objectionable. You seem to be missing the part where the OP already knew the sales guy was not able to undo their change, that the change would prevent the demoing of the device, but still just re-enabled it and walked away laughing. That is fucking sociopathic behavior, not a cool hack.
A powercycle fixed it. Really, the degree of judgment in this thread is ridiculous. "Sociopathic behavior" -> seriously, we're now into assessing their mental health on account of this?
I was at a boat show once and there was a salesman selling fountain pens that would not leak. At my all-boys school we had to write everything with fountain pens and boys being boys we would regularly spray each other with ink using a very hard flick of the pen. Standing in front of the salesman's table I picked up a demo pen to see, and gave it my hardest flick. Ink sprayed out all over the table, and all down the front of the man's white shirt.
I'm not sure whether I would consider spraying the same thing as leaking. (Yes, I went to an all boys high school, and yes I'm familiar with the trick.)
I hope that in the salesman's place I'd have had the calm to say, "What that really necessary?" and let it go at that. On the one hand, the splatter pattern does not suggest a leak, and he could explain what happened and get points for being cool about it. On the other hand, if there is one high school boy (by calendar or by mental age) who doesn't know the trick, then somebody else could get splattered.
Ah yeah, that would make a difference; my reading was that it would stay that way until someone hit the magic key sequence. If the salesperson could fix it inside 5 minutes I agree (effectively) no harm.
A lot of the things hackers did in the 70s and 80s are now recognized as very oof, as they say, today. As to whether "no harm was done", you disrupted a salesperson's pitch and caused him to think the device was broken. You introduced delays and tarnished the reputation of the product in front of customers, potentially resulting in lost sales and hence, lost revenue.
The chilling effect of your comment should not be underestimated. If this was 'extremely inappropriate behavior' I think I'll forego retelling any of my tradeshow pranks.
There are parts in their description that point to unnecessary cruelty/meaniness.
> When the display did not change, the sales guy yelled at me; "WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!?"
At this point OP could have explained what they did, and explain why what the salesperson tried didn't work, and what should be done to fix it. They did not, instead they:
> So after watching him panic for a moment
Watched him panic, then showed that they could fix it (probably ego tripping), and then to rub it in even further, put it back on and walked away. Depending on the experience or seniority of the sales person this might have caused the sales person problems, a lot of stress, ruined a presentation, and real-life consequences, all of which OP disregarded.
There are pranks, and then there are pranks. This was unnecessarily cruel.
I've been on the receiving side of such pranks in tradeshows, it's part of the interaction. You put up gear for the general public to mess with, you have to calculate this in.
Firato, the annual CAD/CAM show for the metal working industry, The Hannover Messe (which used to be the largest IT show in Europe) the building equipment trade shows. Put enough gear in front of enough people (especially nerds) and pranks will happen.
As far as I can see this was a harmless prank because a powercycle fixed the issue. If he had reprogrammed it to the point that it was bricked for the duration of the trade show that would be a different matter.
I agree that you probably should be prepared to handle such scenarios.
I don't agree that this is a good reason that doing such a prank is harmless. The sales person might not have been prepared. They may have been having a bad day already. They may not be confident that power cycling would have solved the issue and thus may have been extremely stressed out going forward, ruining an (important?) presentation.
Probably I'm reading too much into a casual retelling now, but from what I can read: The fact the sales person was panicking should've been an indicator for OP to help him out. At that point OP should've empathised with the sales person instead of make things worse.
It's not because "Oh you should know how to fix this" may be true, that it's not a dick move to throw a fellow human in distress under the bus.
But: they should have been. If you don't know the gear you are demoing you are a minder, not a sales person.
> They may not be confident that power cycling would have solved the issue and thus may have been extremely stressed out going forward, ruining an (important?) presentation.
Important presentations don't happen at the front of a booth, they happen in the back behind the partition.
> The fact the sales person was panicking should've been an indicator for OP to help him out. At that point OP should've empathised with the sales person instead of make things worse.
Fair enough. But: suits that don't know their stuff have no place on a tradeshow floor.
I recall walking up to a guy at a Tek booth and asking him about their new storage scopes, he proceeded to take the thing apart on the spot and show me what the guts looked like resulting in a very long term relationship. That's the kind of person you want to man a booth displaying spectrum analyzers, not someone who apparently doesn't even know how to program it and what bits get stored in which part of the machine.
> It's not because "Oh you should know how to fix this" may be true, that it's not a dick move to throw a fellow human in distress under the bus.
I think that's exaggerating a bit. Throwing a fellow human being in distress under the bus is a far cry from "I put my name on your device and you will have to powercycle it to get rid of that".
But one conclusion I have from this thread is that Hacker News has lots its way, and that Hackers are not really welcome here anymore. Hackers showing up (empty) suits is about as old as it gets.
You make so many assumptions about the sales person it's as if they're an NPC for you.
I can imagine all kinds of scenarios where what you say is just not true or irrelevant and out of the control of the sales person, yet the harm of the prank still falls upon the sales person.
Maybe the sales person replaced someone who got sick at the last minute. Maybe the sales person's incompetent manager put them there without giving them time to prepare. Maybe the person whose job it was to prepare the sales person was bad at _their_ job, or didn't have sufficient time, etc. Maybe their incompetent manager isn't as forgiving as you are and will fire them because of this incident. Maybe power-cycling the device caused the presenters settings they needed for the presentation to be wiped as well. Maybe this is a junior sales person who hoped for a promotion after this presentation.
> But one conclusion I have from this thread is that Hacker News has lost its way
My conclusion is that a lot of people lack empathy or the imagination to think beyond their own experience. But I guess that's not really surprising in this sector which apparently still lacks a lot of self-reflection around the common social problems associated with it. I'm just happy there's enough people here that do have empathy.
>But one conclusion I have from this thread is that Hacker News has lots its way, and that Hackers are not really welcome here anymore
I think you are conflating hackers with lack of empathy/being a dick.
I mean, "is a hacker" DOES seem like a good predictor for "is a dick" (in my experience at least), so you might be right that HN isn't all that fond of hackers nowadays.
This whole thread is a really good example of why not to judge the past by the standards of the present. There were ways of interacting that were just expected. At my first job, if you went on vacation, you expected to return to a pranked office. No way you could get away with barricading someone's office/desk with a mountain of soda cans at most places now.
I've never understood "don't judge the past by today's standards."
If today's standards indicate that someone's past behavior was dick-ish, then the fact that the standards have shifted does NOT imply that the past behavior was somehow "just fine" because... We didn't expect better of each other?
By that logic, abusive racist parentage back in the 50's is unassailable acceptable, because as you say - we're judging it by today's standards.
Acceptability in the past is no indication of an actions morality or ethical... ness.
But that's just not true - according to the OP's own retelling the sales person was in obvious distress due to his actions.
So no, this apparently was not "expected" because otherwise they would also just have had a chuckle and wouldn't have reacted like that. And regardless of whether that means the sales person was in the wrong job or not, the fact that that person was in trouble, and OP did nothing to help, means that OP was being a jerk.
Glad to hear that are people that get the environment and norms at these kind of events.
Presenting a control freak attitude around public interaction hardly seems like it would win over many customers, so this kind of thing is par for the course and reacting well to the unexpected (including pranks) is part of the skillset.
>> the sales guy yelled at me; "WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!?"
> At this point OP could have explained what they did [...]
The sales guy could also have been less accusative and instead embrace their curiosity as a customer... It was an opportunity to invite the onlookers who were already interested in what the author had coaxed the display into doing to learn more about the machine.
I can imagine a younger version of myself also reacting a bit negatively to such an exclamation after having a harmless investigation of a machine. Unfortunately it tends to be the reaction of ignorant and uninquisitive people.
Or it's a natural immediate reaction of a normal person in distress who wasn't prepared for an outsider to come sabotage their presentation and made them look incompetent in front of an audience while they're already stressed out.
Leave it up to engineers to expect everyone (else) to be the paragon of virtue rational homo sapiens sapiens with all the wisdom and maturity.
> I think I'll forego retelling any of my tradeshow pranks.
A good prank is when the two parties can laugh about it together when it’s done.
If someone is just interfering with another person’s job and then smugly walking away, it’s not really a prank. They’re just being a jerk for the purpose of smug personal satisfaction at the expense of someone else.
That’s the difference. This may have been relatively easily fixed with a power cycle, but having done a lot of long days in tradeshow booths I can empathize with the poor guy in the booth who had to deal with someone deliberately interfering with his job and stressing him out. Obviously it turned out okay, but having attendees deliberately break your live trade show demos for laughs sucks.
> A good prank is when the two parties can laugh about it together when it’s done.
Hm, that's now how I have the definition of a prank in my dictionary. To me it is a practical joke which usually has two required components, a prankster and the person the prank is being played on. Audience optional. To assume that they both have the same sense of humor seems to be a recipe for disappointment.
This is everyday life at tradeshows. Seriously. I've had people trying to destroy 100's of thousands of $ for kicks to see if the gear was as solid as we claimed it was. (it was).
As tradeshow pranks come this really does not register.
> at the expense of someone else
That's a prerequisite for a prank, it is quite literally played on someone else by definition, without that it isn't really a prank.
Whether you can see the humor of it or not depends on your personal make-up. People ring the doorbell here occasionally. I have a pretty badly injured right leg. So I go down a couple of flights of stairs to open the door.
Every now and then this includes neighborhood kids who will be in hiding at the end of the driveway. Usually their giggling gives the game away. Needless to say, their sense of humor is different than mine on this subject. That does not mean that I don't think it isn't a successful prank from their perspective, in fact the fact that they know this probably adds to the spice.
But then I think 'they're just kids' and leave it at that.
All the 'holier than thou' and concern trolling in this thread is completely over the top, in real life people pull pranks, some laugh, some don't. But it's not enough to go judge people to the degree that is done here.
I'd like to point out that just because you are tolerant of others pranking you does not mean that someone else (who might potential be fearing for losing his job) may find it funny.
In fact there's a common saying "It's just a prank bro" (1) which is used when people do questionable things as "pranks", almost always causing the other person to get worried. And (un)fun fact, courts have not taken kindly to these "pranks" (2, 3).
Side note, if you are interested you could put up a note with a message saying that you have an injured leg and take longer to come to the door. It might help delivery folks, and may also reduce/stop children from ringing the bell.
I think "extreme" might be a bit much, but i'm much more concerned about the 2nd order chilling effect of calling out people for criticizing rude behaviour, then the original chilling effect on rude behaviour.
You're on a website whose co-founder managed to disable an enormous network of computers with a piece of software, for which he served jail time and was fined.
And as computer related pranks go, this one was pretty mild and required some pretty intimate knowledge of the device. If I had been in that booth I would have engaged the person to see what else they know about it and why.
And what, is it your position that all the actions of hn founders are instrinsically above reproach?
At the very least i would hope we have better morality arguments than simple appeals to authority.
To be clear, i object to the notion that its wrong to criticize/debate the behaviour and ethics of others. I'm not really objecting to the original post about the trade show prank.
> And what, is it your position that all the actions of hn founders are instrinsically above reproach?
That's got to be the mother of all strawmen. No, obviously, I do not.
But in this particular case it is about something that is very much the sort of thing that your average hacker would do given the opportunity. Hacker used in the 'old school' sense of: technically inclined person who likes to tinker with stuff and use it in ways unforeseen by the original creators.
It's what we live for.
> To be clear, i object to the notion that its wrong to criticize/debate the behaviour and ethics of others.
I'm fine with debate. I'm not ok with off the cuff judgments. Essentially the OP simply knew more about the device than the trade show staff (which, unfortunately isn't all that rare), they used the exposed user interface to do the sort of thing that it was supposed to be able to do because that capability was purposefully built in to it.
That they put it to a novel use is what makes it interesting.
> But in this particular case it is about something that is very much the sort of thing that your average hacker would do given the opportunity. Hacker used in the 'old school' sense of: technically inclined person who likes to tinker with stuff and use it in ways unforeseen by the original creators.
Sure. i don't disagree. I think that's rather orthogonal though.
I'm objecting to the notion that we should avoid lines of debate, not because they are wrong, but because they are "chilling". Uncomfortable truths usually are (without neccesarily claiming that this is one).
You really seem to not understand hacker culture, which I guess isn't your fault, maybe it's before your time or something. But there's something special and important about it. That special and important thing is why this place is called "hacker news."
I don't think I can do it justice in this comment, but I do encourage you to try to read about it and understand what this sort of mischief meant to people. You obviously understand something about its downsides, especially from the perspective of the broader culture / "the suits," but I do encourage you to try to understand something about its many virtues.
And now I feel like an idiot, for not knowing that the co-founder was the reason we couldn't turn in our CS60C assignments by the deadline that one time.
Was a great week. I still have a copy of the email that Cliff Stoll sent around, a couple of days later. When the email servers had stopped twitching...
I had no idea either. It’s amazing how little I know about ycombinator after spending hundreds of hours on this site. I know they are somehow involved in venture capital and they employ dang.
"He was the first person to be indicted under this act. In December 1990, he was sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,050 plus the costs of his supervision. "
It looks like you are correct, gaffe on my part, thanks for the correction.
Depends on the situation. 40 years ago, software engineers were an extremely rare breed, and concerns about hacking and security were negligible compared to today.
If I was a manager with purchasing power I would have viewed it as proof that the machine was programmable and wasn’t just a “toaster” that had been built to do one thing and only one thing. It’s not like he made the machine generate garbage noise, displaying set text on the fly wasn’t a commodity back then as far as I know
Hard to think of this as almost 40 years ago, but it was... my dad drove me up to MacWorld Expo in San Francisco in 93. We got badges and walked the whole floor a few times, looking at stuff. I was
13. Dad was a lawyer who had no interest in computers or my nerdy addictions and I think it was the only time in my life he and I ever took a trip alone, without the family. But he realized I was really, really obsessed with Macs, and what I didn't know was that he was about to divorce my mom and leave us. He so didn't realize I was using the house phone to run a pirate bbs for the last couple years. But he knew how to get around at trade shows. I remember just losing my mind at a few booths... VistaPro and Infini-D and the guy doing the Claymation demo, sculpting and rigging simple characters in almost realtime.... Dad got me my first Wacom tablet at that show. We stayed the night at the SF Hilton. Drove home to LA feeling like it was the best weekend of my life.
(edit) I just realized I'm drunk and this has nothing whatsoever to do with your post. Just a memory that seemed vaguely relevant. Disregard.
Yeah, if you were there, but if you walked last the rest of the day and wanted to see the instrument working, only to be met with a "some guy broke it", you wouldn't be as happy.
I think my, admittedly unstated, point is that most managers were incapable of doing an honest evaluation of computer equipment at the time. Someone coming up to a machine and fucking with it in a way that could produce useful work results, like making a random graphing machine display programmable names, would be a strong indicator that the machine could actually do something instead of being a complete gamble
I don’t know the machine, but it sounds to me like what he did was just part of the normal operation. So the car analogy would be more like changing someone’s radio presets to some embarrassing station as a prank. Annoying, but you don’t need a mechanic to fix that.
Please. A powercycle fixed it and besides, if you don't want people to play with the gear then don't put it in the general public aisle. That's where people will mess with your gear as any trade show booth operator very well knows.
I worked in a computer store, the number of pranks that people got up to with the gear there was insane and some of them were quite a bit more harmful than this one. I really don't see the problem. As long as you can reboot the device no harm done. Once people start flashing your systems or rewriting boot loaders we're in different territory.
Well maybe the engineers should know how to sell the thing they're making? The salesperson's job is to sell, not to operate, and why should he know every last intricacy of the machine?
I don't know that a power cycle cleared the issue up, a reset definitely didn't. OP just said the salesperson power-cycled it, not that that fixed it.
> Well maybe the engineers should know how to sell the thing they're making?
I agree, why not have an technical guy there who knows how to operate the thing and can support the sales guy? If the company is sending only sales guys with no in-depth technical knowledge to a trade show, it's fully understandable and well-deserved if this sort of thing happens.
> why should he know every last intricacy of the machine?
If I am buying an expensive piece of hardware you better believe I will ask questions about the intricacies and if I don't get answers I will not be buying.
is this the kind of culture you want? no one can ever share bad things theyve done, ever? lets all lie and say we're sinless?
you "feel bad" for how "extremely inappropriate" that was? how tiny is your worldview that this is the cause you think needs correcting?
maybe add something to the conversation instead of calling someone shitty for a decades old action. how are people suppossed to recover from real problems if this is how you treat some meaningless, damageless 5 minute prank?
shovelling embarassment and guilt is the most unhealthy and unproductive forum environment possible.
In a sibling comment the GP was able to say it was indeed juvenile and they've moved on. I think that makes a fantastically healthy and productive string of comments: someone talks about an interesting past event, someone else points out it wasn't a responsible/polite thing to do since the original story doesn't touch on this, original person agrees and share more history continuing the conversation with some follow up to the story too.
> In a sibling comment the GP was able to say it was indeed juvenile and they've moved on.
That's good to know, but there are lots of folks here who defend the poster's actions to varying degrees, which I find odd. It feels like the poster is more mature (now) than some other commenters.
Extremely inappropriate behavior is a pretty strong accusation. Seems like a harmless nerdy prank that occurred 40 years ago. It's not like he changed the monitor to say "Poop Fare."
Harmless is a matter of perspective here. The sales guy might have been in serious trouble after it and who knows, could not close some deals he was about to make and maybe was maybe never allowed to be at a trade show again. We do not know.
And well, probably many do not care as sales guys are not much respected here.
(and I have my bias too, but I do not like generalisations too much, in the sense if this idiot sales guy could not fix his machine, bad for him, no harm done to real people)
"The sales guy might have been in serious trouble after it and who knows, could not close some deals he was about to make and maybe was maybe never allowed to be at a trade show again."
Yes, and that's a much scarier prospect for the sales guy today than it was 40 years ago.
A dick move would be to break it. Showing off the device's capabilities in novel an interesting ways should lead to a conversation, not a judgment.
Seriously, I've been on tons of trade shows, both in the booth and as a visitor, I'd have definitely struck up a conversation with the guy to see where and how he learned so much about the device. That also would have all but guaranteed getting my device back in pristine working order and a pointer to some information about it that I apparently had missed.
The story ends with "As I walked to the next exhibit, I saw him cycle the AC power to the instrument in frustration."
So no, this was not about showing device capabilities. Nor about striking conversation. This was about feeling good and superior for making someone frustrated.
(And no, which is not even same as not caring about other peoples feelings, this is about being happy about their feelings being negative.)
Well, if the sales guy had been more knowledgeable or more interested in someone who clearly knew his stuff better than he did then this could have ended differently.
Could the prankster have done better? Sure, no doubt, but it's not as bad as people make it out to be. Could the salesperson have done better? Yes, also no doubt, having been there this was simply a missed opportunity.
Are we really trying to claim that sales people should have the same level of knowledge as power-users / developers / engineers who build such things?
Perhaps I'm too young, but I've literally never know any such a salesperson. They're there to be charismatic and friendly, and show the features for which they've been handed a script.
Their job is to drive interest, and address very, VERY high level concerns. They're not experts, else they'd (by and large) be doing something other than sales, yes?
(To be fair, it's possible that we've just eliminated reasonable expectations of salespeople, but that's not clear to me yet)
This is pretty nice example of "blaming the victim" mentality. No, there was no missed opportunity for salesman, no the salesman done nothing wrong. Did not went out of way to make the situation sux for others either.
Only if the phone automatically returns to English on a reboot. Equipment like this from that era had very little non-volatile storage, so it basically boots clean and fresh every time.
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