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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

It's also pretty much impossible for a big tech company to filter against this during hiring without risking catastrophic discrimination suits.

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That’s the big problem. It’s absolutely insane that tech companies can’t keep foreign nationals and people with foreign ties from sensitive positions.

Please elaborate on what the insanity is.

You're kinda right, but on the other hand how I'll get visa and steal some faamg jobs if they'll not accept foreigners? /s

ok, just kidding, now serious take:

US population: 330kk

Rest of the World: 8kkk

Delta (8kkk-330kk)

Even if we assume that distribution of highly skilled people is not uniform (lack of decent higher edu places, harder access to computers/internet)

then you still lose shitton of outliers

edit.

ops I misread.

Are you using kkk as a unit prefix for billion? I've never seen that before. I can't say I would recommend the practice.

>Are you using kkk as a unit prefix for billion? I've never seen that before.

afaik it's pretty common within gaming communities

e.g

1k - 1 000 (of gold)

1kk - 1 000 000 (of gold)

1kkk - 1 000 000 000 (of gold)

>I can't say I would recommend the practice.

Oh, I just realized that somebody may think about other kkk...

damn, but with number in front of it it's just like yet another unit - I guess?

Not in any of the games I’ve played.

Why not use use m for million and b for billion? That’s the standard that everyone understands.

hmm, it's the same as e.g "Y2K problem"

>The Year 2000 problem, also known as the Y2K problem, Millennium bug, Y2K bug, Y2K glitch or Y2K error,

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem

https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/39370/what-does-k-me...

At least k stands for kilo, well known prefix for 1000 in sane systems. m or M also works for both million and mega. Albeit not perfect. After that everything breaks down...

We really should use more of SI units like Mg and Gg... Even Tg...

I see it rarely, but almost exclusively in games that feature exponential growth, like mobile idle games. Growth is so explosive that you typically entirely ignore the actual numbers, and you measure progress via orders of magnitude (i.e. my currency/second in the game is 5.6*10^47, I'd just call it 47).

The repeating k scale is better than m, b, t, etc because it still preserves a sense of scale. 2m does not look 1/1000000th the size of 2t. 2kk does look a lot smaller than 2kkkk. You can also still easily convert to real number by substituting each k with 3 0s.

And lastly, I don't know the letters going all the way up to 10^47th. That's nearly enough to wrap the alphabet twice, and it's not even that high for that style of game.

The scale is fine, it's just the letter that's unfortunate. M is the Roman Numeral for 1,000; they could just use that. The worst thing I can associate with any number of M's is someone enjoying their food entirely too much once you hit like 7 of them.

> afaik it's pretty common within gaming communities

Ah okay.

> Oh, I just realized that somebody may think about other kkk...

Well more just because (I thought) it is unusual it'd be hard to understand in a context where you hadn't made it obvious. Maybe I'm just out of touch!

I know what you are trying to say, but for many people outside the US, Facebook is a foreign tech company. What makes US nationals any better in safeguarding sensitive data/access about the companies customers than people from UK or Canada or Germany or Norway or Australia or New Zealand etc?

Should a tech company silo its data and operations so each country has its own independent unit? No, too infeasible and defeats the purpose for a lot of their services.

Well, the U.S. Government isn’t likely to steal IP from American companies. For things like customer data or encryption secrets, it’s also perfectly reasonable to avoid hiring former spooks.

The problem isn't just foreign nationals. There's plenty of CIA inside FAAMG.

It is always a mistake to use nationality as a proxy for trustworthiness.

Being a US person, personally I'm much more concerned with the negative impacts of US spies spying in the US than foreign spies spying in the US.

Foreign governments don't regularly go around mass murdering and torturing Americans the way the US government does.

Americans have a lot more to lose from CIA spying than they do from Saudi intelligence agency spying.

Please elaborate on this impossibility and eluded catastrophes. Unless a candidate has a deep pocket and backers it is “impossible” to field a discrimination lawsuit based on a boilerplate rejection letter. If corporations were actually this scared of lawsuits, there would be no age ceiling in software hiring.

Twitter’s CEO is on the record being cozy with deep pocketed Saudi investors in Twitter. It was certainly not the fear of discrimination lawsuits that permitted Saudi agents gaining access to Twitter’s systems.

Discrimination is for protected classes.

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