Ask HN: Why is Hacker News not interested in defense technology? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is Hacker News not interested in defense technology?

5 pointslabrador27 comments

National defense is becoming increasingly important, yet Hacker News shows very little interest in defense technology. As a Navy veteran who lives in Silicon Valley, I'm curious for reasons. Thanks.

State Department Urges Silicon Valley to Aid National Security Effort: https://archive.ph/SXpc5

Datapoint 1: Posts about Palmer Luckey and his defense company go nowhere. Before Anduril, Luckey was the man most responsible for getting VR off the ground at Oculus.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=palmer%20luckey&sort=byDate&type=story

Datapoint 2: Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract

https://gizmodo.com/google-employees-resign-in-protest-against-pentagon-con-1825729300

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We don't want our creative work to be funneled into killer robots fighting proxy wars against artificial enemies. As long as I've been alive, America has used its military not for defense but for bullying other countries to its will, benefiting our elites but hurting civilians everywhere. We're not the good guys anymore.

Much respect to those who serve, but their corrupt political leaders have misused their sacrifices for greed and profit, not country.

This excuse feels a bit hollow given the well-publicized impact that companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google have had on social discourse over the last decade.

Some of us don't want to work for them either.

Pick and choose your battles, I guess. FWIW it's easier to get a tech job not in defense than a tech job that doesn't use any FAANG at all. Morality isn't an absolute thing, you do what you can.

Some of us think ethics is what you choose between what is right and what is easy.

> America has used its military not for defense but for bullying other countries to its will, benefiting our elites but hurting civilians everywhere. We're not the good guys anymore.

I agree that not everyone wants to build killer robots, but this is a phenomenally bad read of the global situation. America is increasingly absent from its commitment to allies. We mostly left NATO out to dry, we didn't do anything to provide allies with energy security, we've left countries to deal with their own terror cells.

Even countries that hate us are dreading us pulling our security forces. China doesn't want to be fighting off pirates in the Persian Gulf. Indonesia doesn't want the Strait of Malacca to become a warzone.

Relative to what? Our post WW2 hegemony? Team America World Police? IMHO most of that shouldn't be our responsibility to begin with.

There's a difference between defensive alliances, like if Finland joins NATO and Russia attacks, that's one thing. But to drag England and Canada and a bunch of small allies with us through Afghanistan and Iraq on questionable expeditionary adventures...? Maybe let's not?

We don't need to be the one legacy superpower with force projection all over the globe cleaning up everyone else's trash and constantly irking the Arabs, the Chinese, the Russians... why do we invite ourselves into flashpoints thousands of miles overseas? Send our people there to die while we can't even take care of domestic affairs? It's a totally skewed set of old world priorities. A generation is sick of that stuff...

> Relative to what?

The Bretton-Woods system.

Prior to 1944 there was no common international market. The only for countries to acquire important commodities was imperialism.

All of the participants of WWII determined that one common international market, based on the dollar, enforced by our military, and negotiated by a series of international agencies would benefit all members and support a de-militarization globally as well as a break up of the colony system.

While the US benefited from this, we were never as dependent on it as the rest of the world. For us, it was a bribe to get other countries to help us build a wall against Russia.

I wouldn't be so excited about having America cede its superpower status though. We're looking at a future full of war and conflict for anyone not in America. There will be limited desire to trade in Euros or Rubles or Yuan - so countries around the world are going to increasingly build up their militaries and resort to securing commodities by force.

I think it's more that American weapons technology has never been used for defense of the US. It's almost purely aggressive technology used to oppress and intimidate weaker countries into doing our bidding, and no plausible attack on the US by a nation-state would involve anything less than large scale nuclear attacks, because that's what it would be met with. Doesn't really fit into the 'hacker ethos'.

I think the answer is more boring than most people think.

- most of us have never had exposure to it first-hand

- most of us don't even know anyone that works in defense, so nothing second-hand either

- most of us had zero exposure to it anytime in our education

- seemingly very few technologists in the space are prolific bloggers or podcasters so glimpses into that world is not something we'd normally stumble across.

So it's like a reverse Bike Shed dynamic. It's hard to have rigorous conversation or opinions on something we have so little insights to.

"Why is Hacker News not interested in Ethiopian mating ceremonies?" might be a good comparison.

National defense is becoming increasingly important,

Is it really? Why so?

Note: I'm not asking why national defense is important, but why it's increasingly important. That is, why is it any more important today than yesterday, or 5 years ago, or 15 years ago, or 35 years ago...

A lot of sophisticated weapons systems are being tested in the field against each other at the moment. Leaving the human tragedy for other sites, it seems like HN would be interested in how these technologies are stacking up. Also, ideas for disabling loitering drones might be a good discussion.

Go fish!

I don't want to go fish! I want it to be here, but ok. I found this: https://old.reddit.com/r/MilitaryAndDefense/ so there must be more and better sites

> A lot of sophisticated weapons systems are being tested in the field against each other at the moment

Are they though? It seems like the one takeaway from the recent conflict is that the war of the future is much further away than previously thought.

In particular, it's hard to see the drones as much more than a desperate terror weapon.

In defense, you can't bootstrap anything out of your bedroom on a minimal budget. Your sole client is the US (or some other) military and they have a procurement process and expect a level of maturity that just disqualifies startups with no funding. And, if you want to get funding from VCs, they're not neccessarily going to be interested, because military tech just won't have the kind of hockey stick growth they're hoping to ride on.

TLDR: in startupland, everyone wants to get rich quick from their bedroom. It's mostly not feasible when selling things to the millitary.

I don't think there's a lack of interest per se. Perhaps it's simply the realization that The Military Industrial Complex beast doesn't need to be fed any more than it already is?

Per former POTUS Obama in the 2016 State of the Union:

"The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It's not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined. Our troops are the finest fighting force in the history of the world. No nation dares to attack us or our allies because they know that's the path to ruin."

https://www.npr.org/2016/01/12/462831088/president-obama-sta...

There's a lot to unpack there. I trust you can manage it without my intervention. But for the most part, anyone responsible would be suspect of any MIC-driven narrative at this point. And rightfully so.

I'd add, anecdotally, the DOD and the Intelligence Community share enough of the same DNA to fear that today's "defense technology" becomes tomorrow'w at-home surveillance state.

Again, it's not the lack of interest per se. It's that HN tends to have a different set of priorities.

The motive for my question is that Ukrainian civilians are currently being terrorized by loitering or kamikaze drones, allegedly from Iran or possibly Russian built from Iranian designs. It seems to me people on this site might have some ideas for disabling these cheap gasoline powered devices.

Wow, that is not at all what I got from your original question.

I think the answer to the original question, as I understood it, is that HN is still somewhat a startup-oriented site, and defense spending is traditionally about as far from startup-like as possible. It's really slow and really bureaucratic. It's just not our kind of thing, not necessarily because of defense or violence, but because of the massive amounts of paperwork. It's a foreign land that most of us don't want to visit.

But the question you ask in the parent, that sounds like the kind of thing that a startup (and a startup mindset) could go after... if the Department of Defense could both fund them and get out of their way.

I guess I decided my original question was too specific but it led me to the bigger question.

Well, if that's your interest then I would ask *that* question. HN is known for a lot of things. Beating around the bush isn't one of them.

I think HNers perceive other technology areas as being open, that is, somebody with a good idea can start a company, possibly get funding, have a chance to succeed.

In the case of defense it seems to be a matter of who you know instead of what you know. In the adjacent aerospace field, for instance, boondoggles like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

are widespread and somehow the people involved can't see it the way that the rest of us see it -- that is, $23 billion spent on that is something we couldn't spend on something else and is a reason why "we can't have nice things". I managed to hear a significant amount of gossip about a program that a 3 letter agency decided to pursue with EADS despite EADS having no familiarity with the technology involved and being frankly completely lost about how to proceed.

There is a hermetic culture of people involved in defense contracting who, I think, just don't see the barriers involved. You, for instance, received a security clearance when you served in the Navy. For a small company getting security clearances for workers who don't already have them could seem next to impossible.

A couple of reasons:

Defense tech skews fairly conservative. You may be underselling Luckey's talent, he single-handedly created the VR industry! But his weird obsession with the border and other political hot topics makes his company very un-fun to talk about. Even if you are fairly conservative but libertarian leaning, you may find empowering government agencies to police (or harm!) civilians is unpalatable for a lot of people.

Seconding on that, a lot of defense technology is used in immigration enforcement. Tech is an immigrant-heavy sector. Working for defense tech can often require security clearance only a small segment the programming community is even eligible for.

But more than anything, I think the kind of work most programmers could do in defense technology is going to be largely unfun. Building guns and planes and space lasers is cool. But being part of government procured code is not. There is not going to be much glamour, or insight to share (if you were even allowed to share about it).

> National defense is becoming increasingly important

Is it? How? Who's planning on attacking the US?

I do see lots of posts about planes though and space rockets.

One person's defence is their opponent's offence.

On principle I'll never work for a company which by definition is equally both sides of the coin.

I like the fact HN doesn't discuss topics in this industry.

Probably because anything advanced enough to be interesting is Classified.

Anything that's not advanced enough to be Classified is too well known and boring to bother writing articles about.

I guess we are not going to question the premise that HN is inherently opposed the defense industry?

Unfortunately all defense technology is illegal over here even iron age ones so there are different things to work on first.

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