I don't have much to say about Rob Graham's take on teenage hacking and I don't care about how someone did or didn't get access to Nvidia.<p>Two general thoughts about the "teenage hacking" and "NSA employee" phenemona:<p>(1) Being able to break into machines is a wildly distinctive set of skills from being able to engineer reliable exploits or to identify vulnerabilities (the latter two skills are closely related, and both are pretty far from "breaking in"). In the '90s and early '00s hacking scene, there was a pretty sharp division of labor between exploit developers and "hackers"; that division persists into professional red-teamy infosec. So, just, like, be aware that squeezing into a network and pivoting around is its own recognized specialization, and that being an expert software security person isn't a requirement to do it well. For all I know, those two kinds of expertise might even be inversely correlated.<p>(2) NSA doesn't need a feeder of enthusiastic savants. National SIGINT agencies seem to have zero problem at all recruiting people out of college to do this work effectively. There's a whole industry of people that do this work at an elite level, most of whom would roll their eyes like a Tex Avery character at the idea of participating in an HN discussion about it. This is, oddly (given our interest level) a corner of the tech industry that operates pretty far outside "Very Online" discourse.