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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

"just remove the duck"

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/06/05/duck/

I learned this lesson dealing with auditors many times. These people whose job really should be collaborative in nature (internally) still feel the need to find something, because if they don't, then their bosses say "did you look hard enough?"

So yeah, sometimes as we presented our security policies or documentation, we would highlight an existing problem for which we had a solution or proper executive backing to justify, so that when it was called out, we would haggle and then say "okay, let's fix that". Everyone had done their job.

Off-topic: I was blocked from reading that site using Proton's TX datacenters, but it worked as soon as I switched to Sweden.

Stop blocking VPNs, Rachel.

Same with mortgage applications and other gatekeepers. No matter how much you have your ducks in a row they will always ask for something to show they did their due diligence. It's helpful to leave out something obvious and easy to produce.

I don’t think that’s what gatekeeper means

That's exactly what gatekeeper means: entities that control access to something (in this case financial capital on terms suitable to buy property, but equally it can be social capital to access in-group acceptance, etc).

This control of access to resources is where the name comes from, and its broader use (rather than the highly specific social use we see online) is recently exemplified in the EUs Digital Markets Bill describing large search providers (like google) and social media (facebook) as gatekeepers.

Makes sense to me. Is a mortgage officer not a gatekeeper of the bank's capital?

Is a police officer not a gatekeeper to doing whatever one pleases?

It’s known as Atwood’s Duck. https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/

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