What a Hacker Stole from Me

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Love for MyNoise and Its Impact

  • Many commenters describe myNoise as one of the best things on the web: highly intentional, minimal, and unusually effective for focus, sleep, and masking intrusive noise.
  • People report using it for years, buying the app, becoming lifetime members, and preferring it over commercial alternatives.
  • Several say the story puts a “human face” on a tool that already tangibly improved their lives.

What Actually Happened? Targeted Attack vs Background Noise

  • Some readers assume this was a deliberate, malicious attack aimed specifically at the site or its creator.
  • Others argue it’s almost certainly just “normal internet noise”: automated scanners, misconfigured bots, scrapers, and opportunistic vulnerability probing that every public site sees.
  • A few suggest possible sources: LLM/AI scrapers, certificate-transparency-driven crawlers, generic mass scanners, or a clumsy script kiddie.
  • There’s disagreement over how “personal” this kind of incident really is.

Motivations for Harmful Behavior

  • Several threads explore why anyone would do this:
    • Desire to make an impact or provoke any reaction at all.
    • Hurt/alienated people lashing out; nihilism; “wanting to watch the world burn.”
    • Gamified mindset where sites are just endpoints or puzzles, not people.
  • Others push back on overly simple explanations, noting system-level factors (capitalism, institutions, incentive structures) that channel this behavior.

Emotional Impact and Loss of Trust

  • Commenters relate similar feelings after hacks, vandalism, arson, and domain theft: not just material loss, but a shattering of safety and trust.
  • Several note how one nasty event can outweigh years of quiet appreciation, and how open-source and small creators rarely receive thanks compared to the abuse they absorb.

Defensive Measures and Internet Infrastructure

  • Practical advice: rate limiting, fail2ban, firewall rules, WAFs like ModSecurity, and CDNs such as Cloudflare.
  • There’s debate over relying on Cloudflare:
    • Pro: free, highly effective protection and bandwidth offload for small creators.
    • Con: centralization, single point of failure, and de facto man-in-the-middle for much of the web.

Philosophical Responses: Keep Building Anyway

  • Several comments frame the creator’s response as “lovely but naive” yet admirable: building is always harder than destroying, but worth continuing.
  • Stoic-style attitudes are encouraged: treat obstacles as chances for virtue, focus on the journey, keep “planting trees” rather than letting vandals dictate your path.