The "missing link" correlating furries (and trans women) with hardcore programming and is autism (and related conditions).
Autistic people tend to be very good at this kind of work, and are also more likely to find the social dynamics of these particular groups welcoming rather than off-putting[1]. You find the same overlap to a lesser degree with competitive Pokemon, LOTR, retro gaming tech, political extremism or other autism-adjacent interests.
[1]Many Autistics trend to feel much more comfortable being in groups where people don't adhere properly to social norms, because it means they're not going to be singled out and ostracized.
My hypothesis, based purely on personal experience and what friends have told me. I am not a furry.
I feel like infosec was one of the earliest "no one cares who you are if you have skills" user groups. Online, you were just a handle. Man, woman, both, neither, no one knew until if/when you met up IRL. Until then, all you had was your reputation. I think that led to people having a pretty good idea about the attitudes of people they were talking to online, staying away from people who were going to be jerks about identity or pastimes, and a lot of conversations like "General Mayhem is weird, but he's our weird, so no one mentions that fox tail he wears everywhere."
Over time, that was a positive feedback loop: people who weren't cookiecutter felt safer around infosec folks than most other crowds. => That increased the "weird density" of infosec meetups. => People who don't like being around uncommon appearance or behavior stayed away from infosec meetups. => Those meets became safer for uncommon folks. => Repeat.
I don't know if that's right, but again, that's what friends have expressed to me before. It seems plausible.
Note: When I say weird, I mean it affectionately. I've never met anyone in infosec who didn't have some quirk not far below the surface. Frankly, I love that. And because of that, and the virtuous circle I described, I've never had one single person in infosec confess to me that they weren't OK with gay or trans or furries or other type of behavior/identity/etc. I'm a straight white middle class dude, and unfortunately I have had people confess such things to me in other circles, mistakenly assuming that since I was in their demographic, I'd agree with them or at least be OK with it.
The visibility is a huge part of it. It signals "it's okay to be yourself here" when most professional life, even in tech, is dominated by keeping up "professional" appearances.
That makes sense. And I do strongly believe in the "virtuous circle" bit: people who aren't OK with others being themselves tend not to feel comfortable at, or get invited back to, events. That would make it more comfortable for the next event's attendees, making it less pleasant for the remaining pains in the necks, and so on. I've participated in conversations like:
Q: Why do rightwing websites keep getting hacked?
A: Because none of the best infosec people want to work where their friends wouldn't be welcome.
You seem to misunderstand the logic flow of why the right-wing bigots' infrastructure is repeatedly getting hacked.
They don't get hacked specifically because of who they treat poorly, but because the very people who they treat poorly won't work for them. The subset of the population of whom they are publicly abusive and disrespectful is over-represented in the top performing defensive programmers.
point A > They wont hire from this subset of the population - which excludes a significant portion of infosec top talent. The neurodivergent talent pool that is adjacent to that subgroup, which itself may not be the direct targets of the abusive behavior is also over-represented in the top talent pool is less likely to feel comfortable supporting these clients.
point 2 > The remaining talent pool is thus a less concentrated distribution of top performing infosec professionals. Not that any individuals in this group are less capable in particular, but that the mean distribution of capability is somewhat lower in the remaining group.
point D > Hackers are prolific and adept at finding the least secure aspects of infrastructure, by definition. The concentration of talent in the hacking community probably follows the same distribution curves. This creates a subset of hackers with a motive to target both the less well prepared organizations, and have a negative opinion of those less prepared organizations with a history of abusive behaviour towards groups with which the subset of high performing hackers strongly identify or associate.
> Bigots, racists, far-right-wing Republican organizations get hacked. [Perhaps more frequently - unsubstantiated]. Apparently, because the outcomes of self-identification as intolerant asshats makes their specific infrastructure both an easy target for hackers of any orientation, and a preferred easy target for hackers opposed to bigotry, racism, and far-right-wing Republican organizations.
That's exactly right. Between us, I don't understand furries at all. It doesn't remotely interest me and I can't really even imagine being interested in it. And that's OK! Someone else being into it doesn't harm me in any way. If it brings someone else joy, I don't have to understand it. I'm just glad my friends have a fun thing they enjoy with their other friends.
That matches my experience (also not a furry). But there's also a whole additional layer of offsec being (by definition) "doing things you're not supposed to be allowed to do", which has obvious parallels with people who enjoy breaking social norms. I think some people just get a rush from the "transgressive" nature of both circles.
That's possible, too. There's not a lot of respect for arbitrary rules that don't seem to clearly benefit any legitimate purpose, and people don't tend to limit that thinking to one arena.
I think it's partly also about what you see first.
It's far easier to be transphobic / racist / furry-phobic if the first thing you notice about a person is their gender / race / furriness.
If you are that kind of person, you immediately get into the mindset of "what they're saying isn't worth listening to because they're a <slur>, and <slur>s can't be smart by definition." If you first meet them online, you picture them as smart in your head, before you learn that they're black / trans / furry. When you do learn about that, you already think that they're smart, so it's much harder for your brain to dismiss them just because they're something you don't like.
The drawing including a couple of anthropomorphised animal characters hardly seems surprising or even noteworthy.
The project/product has always had a heavy emphasis on being "fun", including its dolphin mascot/theming/naming.
From the home page[0]:
> Flipper Zero is a tiny piece of hardware with a curious personality of a cyber-dolphin.
One assumes that that "curious personality", the creator's attitude and the styling/presentation of the product/project is part of the reason for the success of the product.
The "furries" (as you call them) don't seem like the primary focus focus of the picture anyway -- there's a wide variety of characters doing a bunch of stuff in the drawing. There's also a dog, a shady-looking person stick up a poster, someone with pink hair, a cyber-dolphin, and I think there might even be more than two genders being represented.
Would there be a problem if the Flipper Zero community was "intertwined with the furry community"?
It's a reference to the dolphin in Johnny Mnemonic, and more broadly, dolphins were a forced trend of the 90s. Marketing was just as much of a hive mind back then as it is now.
I understand you have personal reasons for having strong feelings about this. But the guidelines still apply, otherwise there'd be no point in having them. The problem with posting comments in an inflammatory, enraged style is that the substantive point gets lost in the emotional noise. I'm not sure if there's a viable way to share your experience in a form that is compatible with HN's ideal of curious conversation, but if there is, the style of this comment is certainly not it.
The particular parts of the guidelines we need you to pay attention to are:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Hi. Last I checked, one of the Hacker News rules isn’t “only have serious discussions regarding technical assessments. Failure to comply hereby entitles random people to fly off the handle and get very defensive”.
- Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
- Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
- Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
- Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
- Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Which, let's be honest, the top comment and majority of the responses violate these guidelines. I was quite surprised to see that that was the top comment. I would have never noticed until they pointed it out. Personally, I don't care and I'd rather read comments about the actual content of the article than talk about furries. They don't live rent free in my head.
> why is it okay for sex fetishists to act out sex fetishes in public around kids?
I don't think that's what furries generally do, nor homosexuals for that part, unless you count holding hands or kissing each other on the mouth as "acting out sex fetishes in public"? I don't think I've seen that even once, but living in a "party city", I've more than once seen drunk heterosexual couples having sex in the streets and in the metro.
Being in an animal suit is "act out sex fetishes in public" because that same suit might be used later in connection with sexual activities? Doesn't that make every heterosexual couples clothes also "acting out sex fetishes in public" somehow then?
> i can't play devil's advocate for intentionally doing that around kids. I can't even maintain good faith anymore, next time I see that shit I'm putting a stop to it, unless one of you can convince me not to.
We're gonna see some bad headlines coming from this guy's local Charles E. Cheese real soon...
you are the third responder to engage in distractory tactics instead of addressing the issue. I'm starting to see a pattern. the question remains, are furries lying to the public, or lying to themselves?
I don't have any commenting tactics except spotting the opportunity to slip in a joke. I think it's kind wild that a big thread raging about furries has spawned from the blog post of a hardware company making some quirky RF hardware.
my bad, thats pretty funny when read correctly. you are correct, it wasn't appropriate of me to have kicked this off here, dang should wipe the whole comment chain. for the record, flipper zero is designed for western kids to wreak internal havoc, product dev applicability is secondary
genuinely curious as to what makes people think it's okay to publicly engage in behaviour directly linked to a sexual fetish which links to the article as per the grandparent comment. I specified around the kids because furries near me go out of their way to have their parties exactly where kids have their parties. nobody has to respond to me, that's true. nobody has to call me names either yet here you are.
>what makes people think it's okay to publicly engage in behaviour directly linked
Because your the one linking it to your strawman that has nothing to do with the article. Furry art in the article isn't a sexual fetish. Only bigots here are saying all furries and people who like furry art are some scary sex thing. It's an entire broad genre or Art. The article has nothing to do with sex or kinks or any of this hateful crap. It's just a drawing of animal people.
Wanting to generalize your bad opinions to eveyone for no good reason is exactly what bigotry means. It's not an insult just because it describes what your doing.
> furries near me go out of their way to have their parties exactly where kids have their parties.
Are you talking about public parks? Furries meet up there because it's free public space available to everyone. I am 1 million times more concerned over what happens in private organizations own buildings or billionaire private islands than I am people socializing in a park in view of literally everyone.
The furries meeting up in public parks are mostly teenagers looking to make friends in real life who usually don't have the money to hang out at bars or other commercial venues. The (mostly American) hate of people existing in public without spending money or some special approved activity is more disturbing than anything. I can't imagine being a young person today trying to go out and be social while a bunch of HN users sneer and insinuate you must be some kind of pedo for existing in a public space. Meanwhile they cheer for their favorite billionaire who literally is.
the furries near me specifically choose to meet up at a kids playground when there are a million other public spots to choose from. public sexual deviancy has nothing to do with billionaires, trying to drag the conversation away instead of addressing the issue does not do your position any optics favors.
I was replying to GP's assertion more so than just the content in the post itself.
For minor references like the image in the OP post it's whatever. I personally find furry art/culture repugnant, but I know plenty of people feel the same way about other things I like (and of which I insert references to in my projects) so I can't exactly get mad about it.
Still don't agree with the overall concerning trend towards exposing kids to (deviant) sexual material from a young age though, and doubly so that anyone who feels the same is a 'bigot'.
First time I saw a dude on all fours with nothing but boxers, a leather bondage dog mask, and a leash being held by his partner at PRIDE while children came up to pet him was jarring, to say the least.
Context is everything though. I've met people who believe every flipper zero owner is criminal scum using it to steal cars or break in to houses. When the reality is it's a toy radio for the majority of users.
It's the same for everything. Most furry content has nothing sexual about it, the image in the article is entirely appropriate.
>saw a dude on all fours with nothing but boxers, a leather bondage dog mask
For what it's worth, as a furry I'm also very much not in favor of these people, but they are an entirely different group that doesn't have much to do with furries at all despite superficial similarities. Furries can no more control these people than developers and tinkerers can stop car thieves abusing RF bugs.
Same. If the whole point is "people should be left alone to do what they want" then fine, but that should also include my right to think, "eh yeah, that's a bit weird".
And quite frankly, I think many people in the furry community enjoy being thought weird - for many it's sort of the point.
exhibitionism being tied in with the fetish is the first valid explanation I've seen in the thread, I'll be impressed if the furries admit it themselves but so far it seems that name calling and spurious arguments is the best ill get, thanks for helping clarify things
