anarchodev

Consider that nobody breaks into your home/vehicles because it's fun. They do it out of desperation. I'm not alleging any ignorance on your part, it's just not the sort of thing we think about often.

The penalties for these crimes are already extremely severe.

So I fall on the side of, I'd rather change the system proximally to help those who resort to this sort of petty crime for cash so they don't need it, rather than making it easier for cops to put these people back into a system which enslaves and disenfranchises them for generations (leading to more crime), and in so doing gives them an excuse to monitor literally anyone else in your neighborhood without a warrant for any reason.

This isn't a popular sentiment on HN but a lot of software jobs (even at trendy fast-moving startups) are a form of busywork. Once you get to a certain number of devs, accountability slides and it's entirely possible you'll have nothing to work on. Meetings are dominated by more senior-level devs whose work is important, and so management quotas are the only reason you're even still around.

How you react to this depends on your personality I think -- some people I know love this and are happy to sit in a corner desk and watch youtube videos for a paycheck. That won't work for me so I'll usually scratch and claw for something to do (establishing my reputation as a whiny non-team-player in the process), be given some task which often is a weird platform-specific bug that nobody else wanted, and I'll spend my time hunting that down, become emotionally drained in the process of trying to get anyone else to care about it, and then I'll spend my free time coding in order to make sure I'm growing as an engineer.

I figure this is kinda what life is like until you're a little more advanced in your career and from asking around other people at my level feel the same across many different organizations.

Yes, the idea of liberty (for everyone to use free software regardless of intent) and the liberty of immigrants in the US to live without harassment and terrorism of their communities are indeed in conflict. So you have to choose one. By not choosing one, you're choosing the existing system -- ICE uses this software to accomplish these goals.

We're not trying to infringe on ICE/CBP's ability to use popular open-source software. We're simply asking some companies not to help them with support contracts.

Hope this helps!

> If I'm doing something that I do not want recorded, I'd be using linux with a tor connection and strong opsec. The house can still be bugged as long as I don't have a camera pointed at my monitor.

Until the police are looking for evidence to confirm it was you, and they pull footage of you getting home and walking into your "secure room" 5 minutes before the supposed activity started and exiting the room 5 seconds after it stopped. No warrant required of course.

Idk man good luck with the opsec.

It's absolutely possible to use a smartphone in a way that doesn't severely compromise your privacy. This isn't true of Nest or Alexa.

"I'm not sure it's fair that you're terrified."

This is probably the darkest distillation of 2019 neoliberal energy I've heard across many platforms.

"That shouldn't push one into depression to the point of suicide or drug use."

Please spend some effort in 2020 developing empathy for other humans.

Exactly this. Also want to add that phone numbers were never really meant to function as identity providers. For this reason I think it's important not to use the real number on your cell phone for anything -- VOIP numbers are best if the only method of 2FA offered is phone number.

Maybe a better exploratory question would be: what would have been an acceptable way to phrase that criticism, if you feel the substance was acceptable sans its obvious application to the most recent hiring decision?

Executives get away with more crass offenses all the time but even if they didn’t, you’re ignoring a key power imbalance that defines this struggle. What purpose would it serve for an executive to post in this message board? They have plenty of recourse already if a bad hiring decision has been made.

I think we’re also conflating “personal” attacks with criticisms that just happen to be about one person in particular. The meme in the article is criticizing google for exposing their relationships to key actors in child imprisonment policies in the US (connection was exposed by hiring one of them). By this standard there’s no criticism you could make of the company unless it didn’t apply to anyone, which doesn’t sound very meaningful. The same criticism could be levied (with the same picture/meme text) if they decide to hire Mike Pence next year, will that also be considered an unacceptable personal attack?

Of course it's always been understood as poor form to personally attack another employee, there was never any need for a rule saying so. In the same way, a "culture of openness" is always embraced with the implicit caveat that being "open" about criticism of decisions made by executives is also unacceptable and will be met with retaliation. That doesn't go both ways -- executives can be openly critical of you by name and on whatever terms they wish. Our generation didn't invent office politics, after all.

So this new rule is so broad as to be meaningless, it's sort of like making a new "no complaining" rule (which isn't as uncommon as you'd think). It demonstrates that the "chafe" was never about the rule. When we see workers purposefully making these criticisms anyway, as with this new hire or someone like James Damore, it means they've probably already understood that google won't act unless it represents a serious threat to their productivity. This is the company's first initial attempt to squash that sort of effort.

I didn't claim that BB is a "front" for Stormfront -- just that they're closely associated communities. But if Stormfront linked to HN all the time, yeah I'd probably try to figure out what about HN was so appealing to Nazis and change that.

If you dig into either source, I think you'll find a lot more in common along ideological lines than liking pants.

This is a pretty funny sentiment -- Stormfront in fact links to Breitbart all the time.

I'm not so worried about the supreme court ruling -- businesses don't usually succeed or fail based on the justices ruling that their business model isn't technically illegal. I want to live in a world where the community embraces good things, and actively rejects fascists and bigots whether or not it's legal to do so.

> I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society. The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product

Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." Keep in mind that anyone is free to use other services (or roll their own) and gitlab can't do anything about that. Neither would it be overreaching for the workers building that product to request a say in how it's used.

> If these users are breaking laws, then put them out of business via the courts and sieze the assets (the repos in this case) via legal means.

Refusing someone a service you provide is a completely legal action. This has never been illegal afaik. In many cases I can think of the users wouldn't be actually breaking any laws, which isn't the same as saying that their actions aren't immoral.

> The tech unicorns screwed themselves over BIG TIME, the second they stopped claiming they were just infrastructure and platforms and got into content moderation. They will now forever be a pawn of whoever has some power and has some agenda.

In this last sentence, who are you claiming has power? It seems to me if I had power I wouldn't bother trying to persuade my boss not to do business with certain agencies, I'd just make it illegal and force them to change. Does that seem like a course of action available to gitlab employees?

The difference here is the potential for revenue generation stemming from the ostensibly political stance. Gitlab's goal is to make money, and they're signalling that this goal is firm regardless of who is hurt by their customers, using their tools. So they're happy to sell you a rainbow shirt to support women in tech. If there was a similar shirt they could sell about ICE and CBP (and that would be the end of their involvement in said political stance) they'd sell that too. Instead, the moral stance is obviously to not work with these organizations, and that will potentially cost them money.

This is pretty standard neoliberal politics. Just as with similar decisions at Microsoft and Palantir, this change will never come from executives. It's up to the workers to change the company's direction, and I hope they will.

It's not. Donating to help lawyers and humanitarian orgs clean up the mess your company is enabling this agency to create isn't the same as refusing to cooperate with them in the first place.

wait, TSA boots your laptop now? I don't even understand what they'd expect to find?

For sure, and starting from the assumption that we'd only get these things because they improve our typing is kind of like assuming car collectors only do it to improve their driving. Amusing to watch hackernews reverse-engineer the concept of a hobby from first principles.

I understand it can feel embarrassing to acknowledge the price of your hobbies but ultimately this is your money and you should be spending it on something that makes you happy (after you meet your personal obligations to family, those less fortunate, charities depending on your convictions, etc).

I actually think the original parent post was a more emotionally reactionary than this response. Yeah, it could be the case that mechanical keyboard enthusiasts are all virtue-signaling snobs chasing clout on the internet... or it could be that some people just enjoy the things? And want to share their cool things?

It could be that the community hivemind has decided on an orthodoxy and aggressively judges anyone who doesn't conform.. or it could be that we all just have different preferences and enjoy customizing our desks in this way!

Idk maybe some people are buying expensive kits just because they're expensive but that never occurred to me.

> One thing that will not make healthcare less expensive is "Medicare For All". It will just shift the bill to different people.

One of the myriad reasons healthcare in the US expensive is the middlemen who stand to profit from taking as big a cut of your premiums as possible, while paying for as little care as possible. Without this fundamental force driving healthcare prices it doesn't seem clear to me at all that prices would stay the same. Your dismissal of single-payer plans like M4A glosses over the largest proposed change to the structure of medical billing.

These are descriptive terms for what currently exist in the US (and have existed before in the US). If hearing them causes you to feel emotions that don’t allow you to engage in civil discussion I think it’s worth investigating why that is —- not insisting we find less precise terminology.

I saw their comment and frankly I think it's a perfectly reasonable sentiment. That objecting to incarceration practices in America is viewed as contributing to a "political flamewar" by the mods here is surprising to me.

Yes it was wrong, which will become clear if you spend any time with the people who were involved. Which you can very much still do, because the coalitions and communities formed during that movement are still active today, struggling against the rise of fascism in the US.

I'd personally love a recommendation for a set of basic security guidelines for static websites. Less interested in OWASP stuff and more as you said, hosting-specific issues. This would also be a lot to cover, from using static-site deployment tools like github pages or netlify, to throwing it up on an S3 bucket and routing using Route53, to even for whatever reason configuring a VPS with nginx or apache to serve it out of a directory.

This could further be extended to static sites that want do some authentication, covering which providers are best for that, basic security for using solutions like firebase for hosting and database, etc.

I think you might be missing out on two important points here. As an amazon worker making ~$15 an hour, what avenue would you suggest to go about "demonizing" market conditions? What does that mean from their perspective? What does that mean at all, to demonize a condition? On the other hand, the people making those decisions have names, faces, addresses, and we can apply pressure on them where they personally feel it.

Secondly, a strike that's limited in scope or duration can help build solidarity among workers which can be drawn on again and again for more elaborate and risky actions. Think about it -- would the guy sitting in the cubicle next to you at work put his livelihood on the line for you? What if he didn't have to because every single worker on your floor would do so at the same time? This is all a process of transferring power from the C-suite to the workers where it belongs, and I think we need to evaluate the results of such actions based on those broader goals.

While you're correct about the meaning of the word scab, there doesn't yet exist a word with appropriately caustic undertones to describe the customer who continues to patronize a service whose workers are striking -- and so we typically use that word for both situations. Welcome to the party.

Exactly, it's meant for high school kids looking for pocket money! That's why McDonald's is always closed during school hours.

When we talk about whether or not deplatforming "works" we necessarily have to define our goals. If your goal is, for instance, to be able to find as much hateful content on your platform of choice -- deplatforming absolutely doesn't work. If your goal is to allow fewer outlets for hateful groups to recruit new members (this is my goal), it's working fantastically. Almost better than any other tactic right now.

Yes and this already happens — check out the “cluster failure” paper documenting bugs that have been baked into statistical processing packages for fMRI analysis for years. Whole fields of science having no doubt already been built on top of these bugs, now might be a good time to start writing unit tests.

This is indeed the most commonly cited reason, but as others have pointed out it’s not a good one, and I’ll posit it’s not the real one either. The real reason is nobody in the lab has any idea if it works or ever worked most of the time.