And if the author doesn't like that, than that's just too bad for them.
You are still responsible though.
"It's not my place to decide who uses the torture devices I design. My job is only to make them as painful as possible."
I completely disagree, I think most of the things that we build as developers are as innocuous as kitchen knives.
If you're building (for example) pen-testing software then I completely agree that you should be thinking about how this software might be used against others. But if you're building some software which helps run processes across multiple nodes then I don't think it's up to the developer to police how this software is used (What would they even do about it? You can't not write software like this just because it could be used for nefarious purposes.).
And I genuinely believe that 99% of us are writing software which is much more like the latter than the former.
Now you also have to consider your market segments. Some folks--we'll call them the Jack Bauers--need to maximize the compliance per time unit ratio. Sure, those devices are probably going to be painful. And expensive. So good profit margins there.
But also consider the compliance per energy unit ratio. Your basic oubliettes and music-blasting oubliettes fall into that category, along with emetic-laced meals and gratuitous bureaucratic nonsense runaround. That kind of customer is looking for something cheap, almost by definition. So maybe we look at that like a subscription service.
...wait. The torture device was a metaphor, wasn't it?
So let me point out the problems with your metaphor.... ~
What kind of geek doesn't at least temporarily lose sight of the big picture while obsessing over the cool and interesting details?
This directly led to the 2nd World War.
Any person with a little history knowledge would be able to say that everything is correct, I stated.
But people don't know about history any more, since they think, we are so different today.
We are not -- but who does refrain to learn from history, is bound to repeat it.
Now go on down voting me, and refrain from learning! This generation just builds up the ingredients for the next downfall of humanity.
Any person with a little history knowledge would indeed be able to say that what you said is correct. Any person with a little more history knowledge will understand that the reasons for WWII were complex, and the more you try to generalize from Hitler and his circle of friends to the entire population of Germany, the less clear it makes sense.
If WWII teaches us anything, it's that everyone is vulnerable to the same forces that created the Reich. It also teaches us that the more hate and more division isn't going to help anyone. This is what I fear "builds up the ingredients for the next downfall of humanity" - more hate, more outrage, more division between people. More politics and status games.
But of course, everybody just wants to see his view of the world and nobody wants to be questioned in his style of living. Just don't think about politics and make a ton of money making the world worse, is so much easier.
Snowden took a stand. You do not.
You don't know about me and the stands I took. As for Snowden, this kind of illustrates the point. Snowden took a stand, but not a political stand. Not in the meaning of "political stories" some of us don't want to discuss on HN. Snowden leaked NSA surveillance program because he saw people actually doing something harmful to everyone else. He was dealing with cold, hard facts, not with opinions and party preferences.
You also don't know me and you are just doing some guessing game here.
Just posting good sounding shallow words, is not enough (to get high marks here, it is, but that is nothing that makes better humans, I regret to tell you)
Seriously though, please then make your opinions explicit, in the form of beliefs about the world and the merit of discussing political issues (or the merit of minding the consequences of one's creative work, as per this subthread). That'll make it easier to have a constructive conversation.