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Comment by voytec | Hacker News Reader

> Docker should have been a neat tool made by one enthusiast, just like curl is.

I have nothing but mad respect for Daniel Stenberg. 25 years of development of great software, for which he had been threatened[1] and had ridiculous US travel visa obtaining issues[2].

[1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26192025

[2] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/11/09/a-us-visa-in-937-days...

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There are lots of high functioning but harmless crazy people out there . I used to work for a government job and I found one of the most common tells was exactly what this "slaughter" person did. They love to list dozens of agencies to you for no reason. They have no authority so they hope they can borrow it from your fear of a random place. I cannot tell you how many emails/calls I have had left that fit this pattern, dozens at least.

>I have talked to now: FBI FBI Regional, VA, VA OIG, FCC, SEC, NSA, DOH, GSA, DOI, CIA, CFPB, HUD, MS, Convercent

Bonus Tell: They also love to say they are a doctor or PHD of something or often say PHD in multiple subjects.

I remember someone abusing a ticketing system I had to work with for reporting technical issues with a vast computer network, raising a ticket with an attachment from some absolute nutcase in multicolored manyunderlined .RTF format which was like as you described as "hate mail" in the subject line and the ticket being closed as "not hate mail", still makes me chuckle every time I think about that

> [1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/

Wow that's clearly someone with serious mental issues :( I hope he could find some help for his condition.

Maybe it's a good thing that the guy affected hasn't been awarded the defense contract as a result.

People suffering from psychosis can create "facts" supporting their ideas and believe in them. Usually it's the stuff like "someone follows me", "someone wants to hurt me". Psychosis is the entry point to schizophrenia which is more or less, an illness in which brain makes stuff up and the ill person cannot differentiate facts from hallucinations.

Possibly there was no defense contract at all.

That sounds very much how chatgpt acts.

Is it? GPT just halucinates the next words in a given text.

Of course it is. What in the parent's post is different from that? The parent post's first sentence is, "People suffering from psychosis can create 'facts' supporting their ideas and believe in them."

I don't think GPT believes something.

It's not just people suffering from psychosis who do that.

"29% believe aliens exist and 21% believe a UFO crashed at Roswell in 1947. [...] 5% of respondents believe that Paul McCartney died and was secretly replaced in the Beatles in 1966, and just 4% believe shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining power. 7% of voters think the moon landing was fake." -- https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...

"Belief in both ghosts and U.F.O's has increased slightly since October 2007, by two and five percentage points, respectively. Men are more likely than women to believe in U.F.Os (43% men, 35% women), while women are more likely to believe in ghosts (41% women, 32% men) and spells or witchcraft (26% women, 15% men)." -- https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/belief-in-ghosts-2021

"A new Associated Press-GfK poll shows that 77 percent of adults believe [angels] are real. [...] belief in angels is fairly widespread even among the less religious. A majority of non-Christians think angels exist, as do more than 4 in 10 of those who never attend religious services." -- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-nearly-8-in-10-americans-b...

If we go that way, a lot more believe god exists!

"Belief" or stated belief to an anon survey?

The other day some one mentioned any of these surveys consistently have about a 5% troll rate.

The 77% belief in angels is bizarre though. Like I believe in the possibility of aliens, the universe is quite large. Although I think all spacecraft sightings are almost certainly just mundane stuff from spy planes to weather balloons, etc. I even believe in the possibility of ghosts being real, more likely some strange phenomenon we can't explain that we might misidentify as ghosts. But angels?

One man's angel is another man's ghost or alien though I guess.

if you buy into god, angels are on par with aliens, possibly even more probably present.

Indeed. According to [1], it would appear 58% of the US officially believes in angels by creed (Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox, Jewish, or Muslim). Only 11% are atheist or agnostic, and there's a 30% group that's religious but "unaffiliated" or "other". I totally buy that two thirds of "religious but unaffiliated or other" would believe in angels.

The difference here is that to the religious mind, angels are credible in a way that UFOs, ghosts, and magic are not. (The irreligious mind probably finds them all equally credible, hence the disconnect.)

Put another way, it would not surprise me that someone who was "religious but not affiliated" might have a high regard for the Bible. Angels figure prominently in the Bible, and hence fall in that bucket.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_the_United_State...

I would be very interested to see a citation on the troll rate.

Lizardman’s Constant by Scott Alexander:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

That's not a citation. That's a guy making things up.

I'm surprised aliens is the low one here. The exact question is "Do you believe aliens exist, or not?", not something more specific like little green men in flying saucers abducting cows.

The universe is large. In the tiny slice we can observe well enough to draw conclusions, Wikipedia currently lists 62 "potentially habitable exoplanets". I'd be much more surprised by intelligent life being unique to Earth than by there being many planets harboring intelligent life, or to answer the question as asked: I believe aliens exist.

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

Yea schizophrenia is no joke. Even the follow up apology makes it clear he hasn’t recovered.

In the pdf there's mention to terry davis so I'm tempted to think this is actually a bit of a troll.

That PDF links to https://web.archive.org/web/20210223111850/https://www.nerve.... Would be quite the troll to go to the effort of buying a domain just to mess with an open source author.

You're probably right - I assumed the name terry davis being embedded in an email following a schizophrenic rant about software was a ruse.

I think it was genuine admiration, at least that is how I took it.

If you have your name all over the place, I guess that it bound to happen eventually. Curl is used by millions of people which makes Daniel Stenberg kind of a celebrity. With so many users, there have to be some crazies like the "I will slaughter you" guy.

It must be a common occurrence among famous software people, I wonder how they deal with that. Do they actively hide their real identity, for example by using a proxy for licensing, do they just ignore such madness, is it a burden or on the opposite, they enjoy their fame?

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/08/09/nocais-apology/ allegedly schizophrenia.

The Terry A. Davis reference was bemusing.

Replying to child I can't reply to?

There was a period where the US was treating public key encryption like arms exports, and involved in spreading the technology outside the US as tools were in us.govs sht list

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

After a report from RSA Security, who were in a licensing dispute with regard to the use of the RSA algorithm in PGP, the United States Customs Service started a criminal investigation of Zimmermann, for allegedly violating the Arms Export Control Act.[5] The United States Government had long regarded cryptographic software as a munition, and thus subject to arms trafficking export controls. At that time, PGP was considered to be impermissible ("high-strength") for export from the United States. The maximum strength allowed for legal export has since been raised and now allows PGP to be exported. The investigation lasted three years, but was finally dropped without filing charges after MIT Press published the source code of PGP

They tried to ruin the man.

Because he was competing with a private military contractor, and the US government is a wholly owned subsidiary of the MIC: or often acts like it is. Customs should have told RSA "no", "this is a private contract dispute", "hire a lawyer and file suit". Of course it was much more than that. Zimmerman put real privacy protecting encryption in the hands of the public, and the Many Eyes (that included state allies and adversaries) couldn't have that. But they needn't have worried: decades on the public is still ignorant about encryption, except as a marketing term, and most have no idea what a key pair is or what to do with it. Fraud around unauthorized access to government and commercial accounts is rampant (you _have_ set up and secured your online identity on your government's social security and revenue collection sites, haven't you?). That could have been prevented by early adoption and distribution of key pairs, alongside a serious public education campaign. Problem is, that would be at cross purposes with the goal of keeping the public uneducatable. Better for them to while away their time watching cable TV or delving into the latest conspiracy theory (pro or con).

I consider him equally important to people like Tim Berners-Lee for building the foundation of the web.

I read the travel issues post you linked, but am not seeing the causal link you’re drawing between development of software and visa issues. Was there more to the story?

I may have remembered incorrectly, which post was it. Here[1], in the paragraph titled "Why they deny me?" (unlinkable), Daniel hints at the possibility that this may have been due to development of (lib)curl which is used for malware creation by 3rd parties. There was no proof though.

[1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/07/28/administrative-purgat...

Ah, that makes sense. I have no dog in the fight and am far from the emotion of having a visa delayed in this circumstance. I would say that it was much more likely to be some level of incompetence than malice, having dealt with large government bureaucracies myself.

The most superficial (and likely) reason to me seems to be that he uses haxx.se. I really wonder what kind of investigation they do. If they just start with Google, this one might come up immediately.

> ridiculous US travel visa obtaining issues

Ridiculous? This is pretty common issue for anyone who travels to US. Visa may be denied for whatever reason and tough luck on appeal. I am EU citizen and had similar experience just for visiting Iran on tourist trip. Do not even ask about guys from India, Pakistan or less fortunate countries.

And it got even worse with pandemic. US required vaccination for very long time, long long after it was relevant. Maybe they still do, frankly I do not care to look at this point!

I think biggest WTF here is why international organization like Mozilla is organizing company wide meetup in US, and not in country with liberal visa entry policy such as Mexico!

I applied for US travel visa as a citizen of Poland in 2012 and was denied travel due to "wrong type of visa". I was planning to visit my employer and spend 1-2 weeks traveling across the country. Apparently both business and travel visas were inappropriate for these purposes. To add, I was questioned in a US consulate/embassy (can't remember) in Warsaw by a person who repeatedly refused to speak in English, insisted on Polish and I, as a native Polish speaker, had issues understanding them. Poor experience.

This was not a case for Swedish citizens, which is mentioned at the beginning of Daniel's linked post. Sweden is a member of ESTA[1] and Daniel traveled to the US multiple times before being denied travel (with still valid ESTA) and only then applied for a visa.

[1] https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/

I believe that B1/B2 should work just fine for these purposes.

Probably you answered an officer (or airline worker) that you were gonna "work" there, not just visit your employer for an event?

Absolutely not. I had, and still have, my own small business in Poland and I was clear (in writing) that I am planning to visit my main client.

You mentioned both employer and client, are they the same?

Yeah. I treat one-man small business serving mainly one big client to be comparable. On paper it's B2B, in reality it's working for the client and if the client is small business' main source of income, it's pretty much an employment.

Differences, in Poland at least, are that small business owner in this scenario is not protected by employment laws (3-months notice layoff, max 3 months salary-equal damages liability etc) and uses company's (EU)VAT registration number instead of personal social security number equivalent (PESEL number). It eases abroad contract agreements, invoicing and allows serving more clients easily. Company existence can also be validated on EU VIES[1] website quickly.

In the visa case, I have of course used the "paper" phrasing as in reality I was, and am, only employed by my own small business.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/#/vat-validation

Ridiculous does not mean uncommon. Situations can be both common and ridiculous (absurd).

I'm American, but I have enough friends and family from other countries (my wife is an Iranian passport holder) to know what you're talking about and how difficult it can be.

While it’s true that US visa applications can be difficult, the same is true for any first-world country.

I was born in a third-world country, and ended up getting tourist visas to the EU, US, and Canada. US was by far the easiest - for me anyway.

If you want a large global meeting in a safe country (I would never in my life go to Mexico) there will be visa issues.

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