Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

We’re out hiring right now and it’s shocking how many people have a career filled totally with dodgy cryptocurrency nonsense. Loads of designers and developers have most of their experience in platforms that seem to have no utility beyond scams, gambling, and MLMs.

There certainly is a massive amount of wasted talent here.

View on HN

> There certainly is a massive amount of wasted talent here.

Yeah, taking a career in developing surveillance capitalist products and building real world spyware to harvest our personal data only to run it on tons of planet incinerating data centres (which don't work) just to try push and target more spyware ads to auction and sell their personal info around, is surely improving the world and a great career to have in big tech. /s It's no better than the scams rife in the crypto industry.

What big tech has done in the past 20+ years was a complete waste and a total violation to one's privacy which they have gotten away with for a long time and with regulations for both industries around the corner (especially big tech) they deserve massive multi-billion dollar fines for that.

No exceptions.

I didn’t say there wasn’t a lot of wasted talent elsewhere.

It’s really sad in general how much money there is in bullshit and how little there is in things like medical research and exploration.

The luxury of useful work is quite rare it seems.

What do you think is wrong with gambling?

It takes advantage of people who have a common mental disorder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_gambling

So does the ads, google, government machinery etc. They take advantage of people's common "mental disorder" (I say "mental disorder" because it is still a weakness even if it is present in a lot of people, which I take as the assumption made in your comment as well) such as very limted attention span, lack of long term memory and vulnerability to distraction..

> So does the ads

This is true, but this just means that there's something wrong with both ads and gambling

I have nothing against gambling as long as people know they're gambling. I keep seeing the same cycle of people encouraged through FOMO and taunts of “have fun staying poor”, unsophisticated investors putting at stake more than they can afford to lose, and then the relevant subreddits posting suicide hotline numbers. It's sickening and it needs to stop.

Edit: this timely link appeared on my feed: https://blog.mollywhite.net/celsius-letters/

I have only quibbles[1] with clearly labeled gambling. I have a serious problem with a casino claiming to be a bank.

[1] and that is regulated to help reduce the amount it takes advantage of people who can't help it.

It doesn't provide any value for society. Maybe a bit of entertainment, along with destroying some people's lives (problem gamblers). It basically just syphons away money from individuals to corporations while not providing much in return.

It provides return to people who like it. It does not have to provide value to the "whole society" (which really mean, it does not provide a value to "me") to justify its existence.

Casinos as-is don't need to be abolished, maybe their regulations need minor adjustment. I personally would abolish them, but it's low priority and not a hill I would die on.

But as far as the blockchain and gambling goes, that's not some silly vacation vice the guys go out to vegas for a few times a year/decade.

This stuff is advertised hard by influencers, misrepresented as investments, advertised at children, using foreign jurisdictions to be unaccountable.

It's not "it's bad because gambling bad".

It's bad because gambling is being forced shamelessly into the rest of the economy, often under false pretenses.

I didn't say for the "whole society" but as a whole, i.e. if you sum up all the positives with the negatives. Heroin provides value for people who like it and somehow can use it without getting addicted. As a whole though I'd argue it's a net negative on society.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com