HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr Steps Down
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The flavor of logic and discourse on this site has taken a definite turn for the worse. Nonsensical and somewhat juvenile reactions to my comments occur with frightening regularity.
As for your link, people thought you were talking about the overreaching of the Tolkien estate; you were talking about what appeared to be a button taking sides in an imaginary cultural divide. Simple miscommunication.
People got confused by your somewhat unclear (at least to some people), off-topic comment, and you started ranting about people not using their brains, lacking reading comprehension, being lazy and small-minded.
Wouldn't it suffice to point out that you were commenting on the content of the button, without attacking the people confused by the comment?
What actually happened: People read the first line, jumped to a conclusion, and further reading/brain activity was a fail.
I think it speaks volumes when you have to comment with this level of "tl;dr" mentality in mind. I did not have to do that in days past.
I long for the days when I could simply express thoughts needing 3 or more sentences for complete expression on HN. This used to be the big advantage of commenting in text over speaking. Now, I have to treat the first line of each comment like a headline, because the pool of readers has already jumped to a conclusion.
Sorry if this comes off as harsh, but people blaming their poor communication on others is a pet peeve of mine.
The article was about a button, and what Tolkien's estate did about it. I guess you could say "only tangentially."
If you're communicating in text to strangers, it's best to err on the side of being overly specific
More specificity is fine. Specificity is not the issue here. If you knew of the contents of the button, the comment makes sense. If you read the comment, then looked at the link and the article, the comment makes sense. I draw the line at those reading only the 1st sentence and not bothering to make sense of the 2nd and 3rd sentence. How is that any different from a dog parsing an angry utterance from a human containing 'Fido'?
Such bot sockpuppet swarms had been around for years before HBGary Federal ever tried to sell them to corporations and the government.
on HN it would be difficult for these to be "botted out", due to the usually higher quality commenting
You don't need that much commenting to manipulate HN. Just getting karma up to the point of being able to submit on a number of accounts is enough to enable a lot of manipulation. Being able to recruit 20 or so college aged users for a several days would be enough to get you started. Increasing the speed of submissions past a certain point reduces the influence of the established population and increases the power of voting cabals.
Not that it isn't egregious for the DOJ to recommend reputation fixup to Bank of America because BoA is presumably about to get hammered by Wikileaks disclosure.
Anyway, my personal favorite has always been Philip Morris turning into Altria Group. I can just imagine the meeting where they came up with that one: "you know what, fuck it, let's just make up a nice sounding word."
Tallyrand, Napoleon's Foreign Minister, observed that one of the functions of a government is to rename institutions which have, under the old name, become odious.
It's nice when going into a new line of business to be able to do it under a new name and not have to deal with that crap.
I recently had a moving company move my car across the country. I picked the #1 rated broker in the United States the last 2 years running. They're just the broker, though. They pick an actual trucking company to move your car. I found out that the individuals involved in the company moving my car had opened 3 other companies in the past 4 years and closed them all. I dug more and found that they had absolutely horrible ratings on the biggest rating site for car-hauling companies and also horrible ratings on the BBB site. Luckily, I got my car without incident, but we need a good way to track scum.
If you tried hard and played by the rules in business and didn't do shady things and failed, then I can understand trying again without serious stigma, but if you're forming new companies all the time, you should be informally punished through lots of information/transparency. It's easy to say "don't go with a company that hasn't been around for X years", but that's really unfair to legit startups trying to innovate.
We need a better answer to this problem.
I'm pretty sure that with the advent of decentralized currencies like BitCoin, we could probably implement Whuffie now.
He'll do just fine.
I've worked for several defence contractors, and each one is crazy about ethical training. Monthly online ethics training courses are mandatory. Any perception of wrongdoing is incredibly harmful when dealing with the federal government. Billion dollar contracts are won and lost based on those perceptions.
My point was, many customers,the government included, would love to have some of this information, and access to social botnets. The background of the seller is irrelevant.
Of course your ethical training at work is top notch. I've done work at similar companies, and I have to pass ethical tests on a regular basis, yet, we have incidents that set records, in a bad way. If you think taking tests at work means your company is taking something seriously, you haven't been working long enough. :)
Anon's comments under that article really rub it in. No mercy at all.
I think the lesson for everyone here is not to fund a company sharing your brand name without some degree of control over what they're doing and the ability to immediately fire the guy in charge if they endanger the parent.
Every time I read the name, my reading flow stops and I stare at the name. HBWhat? Does that stand for something? Are they initials? Who is Gary? Are they from Indiana?
It triggers this bizarre, deep-down irritation like nothing else I've ever seen.
It's right on par with naming your company "ImSo$#@!Awesome Inc." or something.
To make matters worse, they've got women wearing shirts that say "GoDaddy" on their front page. Gotta wonder what their target audience is, with that featuring so prominently.
Lately, though, I'm bothered in a different way. It seems like they want to create an image of celebrating empowered women. Their execution, however, revolves around turning them immediately into sex objects. My conclusion is that Bob Parsons has a fetish about putting women under his control, he made it his corporate image, and it creeps me out.
Their marketing is truly cringe-worthy though. I only keep the registration of that single domain there, and I will probably move it elsewhere when it expires in a couple years.
Inc magazine did a segment on Bob Parsons: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/the-way-i-work-bob-pars...
How much you want to bet that the H. B. and G. of this company had ties/tenure in DoD or other governmental departments and were thus situated to reply to RFPs from their previous colleagues.
This is very common in the MIC.
With HBGary, though, only the 'H' can be clearly attributed to a founder declared on their 'about' page, Greg Hogland. But they probably had other people in mind for the rest at the founding.
My problem with it is that by having the term "solutions" in your name, you have a clearly defined problem for which your company is the only answer. Invariably, I find that any company with the word "solutions" in their name cannot succinctly define what it is they do.
They imply they are the solution to something, but I just see it as a company founded by the marketing department.