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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

I think you underestimate a few things

- How great it feels to make dire predictions about the future. Only I can see how terrible M$'s latest move is going to be. The other sheeple can't. When I'm right I'll tell everyone I told them so.

- How satisfying it is to educate these younguns with their JS frameworks. They don't have my wisdom and experience so I'm doing my duty to society and HN by sharing with them. I will paste links to wikipedia wherever necessary. Like so -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

- how smart I'll look by talking cynically. Every action that someone takes will be followed by a cynical analysis which assumes the worst intentions. Wide eyed optimists will look naive to any person lacking context.

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People were shouted down here 5-10 years ago for predicting that Google might turn evil, now it's almost a mainstream opinion here.

You know, simple predictions are often correct. But ignore it (especially if your salary depends on it).

For any company brought up here, there are people that say it is/will turn evil, so it is not exactly surprising that some of them are sometimes right. A broken clock is right twice a day bla bla.

Salary is no excuse, just avoid working for ill-intention companies. You'll feel better and the world will be as well.

This is the only way to make a difference.

Making conscience-free salary doesn't necessarily mean it'll always be that way. Companies change, people change.

Are you suggesting people change companies every time they uncover their existing employer did something unethical/immoral?

I say this as someone whose employer in the past turned into a patent troll - as a new parent and during a downturn it was difficult to switch jobs for quite some time.

Who would have thought in 2010 that 10 years from now Google would be a front runner for "most evil and controlling company on the planet" and that Microsoft would be the leading / dominant corporation in open source.

I'm not sure if I would have had a harder time believing that, or a harder time believing that Donald Trump of The Apprentice would become president of the United States in 2016.

I also think you underestimate how much fun it is for people who see the people seeing and pointing out that you see what their doing.

But we can keep seeing things in what has been seen, and never debate the merits in a circular semantics game.

Do you see? I see what you did, but I guess you saw what someone else did, and boom we achieved faux transparency.

And here is wiki article because I totally see what you did with that wiki thing, like so:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight

That’s the kind of stuff Microsoft tried to lock people into before.

And we remember a world where the stranglehold by IE had to be ruthlessly shredded with open web standards just to get back to sanity.

Oh I definitely get that appeal. I just would rather see more hot takes like "Github is doomed to be the Skype/LinkedIn of open source".

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