Anduril banned from recruiting on NixOS forums | Hacker News Reader

Anduril banned from recruiting on NixOS forums

discourse.nixos.org

132 pointsOuterVale75 comments

Why is this flagged? Regardless of the side you take on Andruil (or the war machine in general), this is a relevant piece of news.

Everything vaguely anti-Trump/Putin gets flagged here now.

Does the flagging hide it from any feeds, though?

The default feed, yes. That's the incentive to flag stuff you don't agree with. It basically tanks the possibility of the story making the front page.

I (sort of) understand the idea of flagging stuff you disagree with but still struggle to understand why people apply it here.

I would seem to me that whether you're in favor or against Anduril (i.e if you care at all), you would probably want to see this information.

> I (sort of) understand the idea of flagging stuff you disagree with

that's not what flagging is for; just don't upvote if you don't like it

flagging is intentionally trying to make it more difficult for other users to see it

Right. It's not that I agree with this idea, I just understand it

Another good reason to read via an rss feed.

Or just using https://news.ycombinator.com/active

Like most people seem to have moved to.

I worked with Travis on the Electromagnetic Warfare Team at Anduril and he's one of the most phenomenal engineers I've had the pleasure of working with. Nix is already such a niche software it's absolutely baffling they'd prevent one of the few companies hiring Nix experts from advertising jobs because of a few loud individuals with anime avatars.

Are you baffled that people dislike companies that create killing machines? All the stuff made by Anduril will end up causing "collateral damage" in a middle eastern wedding.

I understand that you have an ethical framework that ignores or justifies this, but a lot of people don't. My normie mother would spit in your face, it's a given that a niche FOSS community wouldn't look kindly to MIC ads.

The NixOS team is an order of magnitude more unstable than their software. The most surprising thing here is that anyone who needs their systems to actually work would rely on it, given the history of the project and the maintainers' psychotic behavior.

Also a delightful human in every interaction I’ve had with him.

not here: while I have little against military applications in a world that needs to defend itself from putin, i've found Travis Whitaker to be unserious and adolescent when it comes to doing serious business. After interacting with Travis I would never consider working for or with him or Anduril, and I would be wary of hiring anyone that did work for them in the past.

To each their own, but if I was running a job forum, I would also be reluctant to provide ad space to companies building instruments of death and pushing regressive politics. Is this really baffling to you?

Wording in the final post [1] fwiw:

...the Steering Committee is banning Anduril from recruiting on Discourse. We will leave this specific thread up and locked (to record this decision), but the moderation team has been instructed to remove future Anduril job posts on Discourse.

[1] https://discourse.nixos.org/t/anduril-industries-electromagn...

As a former military person now working with tech, it's a bummer to see that the "neo" defense industry outside Ukraine (for obvious reasons) is trying to play the "Silicon Valley recruitment tale" without understanding the difference between the kind of people that you want to attract versus the class of people that have "mental elasticity" (sic.) to be willing to work for you.

When dealing with very important but abstract/distant terms in our daily lives like nation, war, death, patriotism, and patriotic sacrifice, you require some sort of people that are definitely not like your regular SWE.

One thing that I learned in military/defense is that the spectrum of people that ends there is between the "I went for the wrong reasons" and "hyperpatriotic on the border of being a zealot". Damn, we had guys in my Company that just went to the Army because they watched "Rambo: First Blood" and found it amazing.

Seeing the Anduril folk in the thread trying their best to recruit people in a completely different vibe related to tech, it's not only unintentionally comic but also shows how the defense tech is drunk with the VC/LP lore of "Let's get the best talent in the market and pay them well".

Edit 1: Anduril is going to learn the same thing that most of the professional military services in the world have already known for decades: Forget this misleading nerd Silicon Valley archetype and go to the Rico's [1] of the world: People willing to do things for the wrong reasons and/or naive enough to occasionally become the people that you want.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b07887ZzKiw

Edit 2: I hit submit early and I reframed my post, sorry for the confusion.

Your comment has changed substantially from its initial version.

For the latest version: I think Anduril knows who they're looking for and how to get those people. This commercial, for example, is quite deliberate in filtering out the people they don't want https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXQrci3Wff8

The idea being that you wield so much more power than your enemies, and have so much knowledge of their movements, that they are not an actual threat to you, and their knowledge of this prevents them from actually committing violence? And that force can be used to stop them from committing violence before they actually get the chance to hurt you?

I'm not trying to pull a gotcha, I'm legitimately curious to see if that is an inaccurate framing.

edit: my comment no longer makes sense after the parent comment was edited, the original talked about how after being on both sides, they've seen how tech can be an effective deterrent

>still those new players cannot recruit a broader base of folks.

to be fair this comment from the thread after the author clarified that non-citizens can apply sums the situation up:

"Would you be willing to assist the United States in an invasion/annexation of Greenland? As a Danish citizen, I think it would be slightly counterproductive to work for a company that may potentially invade me in the coming future."

I would actually sleep better if the PR damage is big enough so that the recruitment base shrinks until the risk of invading a free and democratic ally is off the table

The weirdest thing is that Denmark is a member of the European Common Security and Defence Policy. EU countries would be obligated to help defend Greenland. Any military action toward Greenland would essentially mean that US declares war on Europe. Nobody seems to mention this. We live in a weird post-facts world.

that's a bed-time story - Anduril will interview people from Europe but then explain that they can't hire people from Europe.

It's not so much the mission, as it is Anduril, and despite the fallability of taking an early survey of comments, I'd wager a good set are communicating something similar.

If you don’t want your software used for things you don’t approve of, don’t give it away for free.

> If you don’t want your software used for things you don’t approve of, don’t give it away for free.

They aren't stopping, or even trying to stop, Anduril from using it, though.

So, why were they banned? The comments there don't really explain much.

The Nix people don't want Anduril advertising on their forum.

If you operated a forum, is there no company on earth, such that you wouldn't want them advertising on your forum?

That's not what the moderator's message about the ban says though, is it?

> The moderation team brought this thread to our attention as the latest example in an ongoing controversy in the community and they escalated the decision to us so that we can provide them clearer guidance for how to proceed going forward. Our moderation team has done an admirable job, but this controversy has escalated beyond the point where moderation actions alone can resolve this.

> To that end, the Steering Committee is banning Anduril from recruiting on Discourse.

Isn't this saying that the ban is because Anduril's job posts causes the community to respond in inappropriate or off-topic ways - an exemplified by the linked thread's comments on Greenland - and that the forum moderators can't clean it all up?

No, the post referring to prior controversies. This includes the exodus of a large number of long-term nixpkgs maintainers after undoing the ban of an Anduril employee.

thank you, that was what I was asking about. I am genuinely out of the loop and don't know anything bout this NixOS forum.

>is there no company on earth, such that you wouldn't want them advertising on your forum?

Do they spread hate? Have they cast harm on members of the forum? Otherwise, I don't see the issue. Unless this is a blanket ban on defend contractors.

If it isn't, I simply see it as hypocritical. Especially since all the big FAANGs also all operate with the military in some capacity.

basically you're asking "did they hurt those people specifically? (never mind if they hurt other people)"

this is morally very shortsighted and selective and is in opposition to most people's value systems.

Anduril, as I recall, staunchly supports the current administration, which is vehemently anti-trans. (Also, Trump has nominated an Anduril executive to the role of Army Under Secretary in his administration.) If NixOS has prominent trans developers, that might be one reason to do it.

Ahh, perfect. That's exactly the context I needed to piece this together. Thanks so much. I wans't aware of any of those factor.

Why not just ban all advertisements instead of singling out one company?

I think the only company I know which spends more time than Anduril getting embroiled in completely unnecessary drama is Automattic.

I think they are very different situations. Automattic (and their leadership) used their power over the WordPress open source project as a weapon in a legal dispute with a major competitor.

What has Anduril done? Tried to sponsor some conference. Post a job ad on a project forum dedicated to that purpose - both are activities which, in the general case, the project welcomes - and then project members object, not because of anything they’ve done in the project itself, but because they don’t like the industry Anduril is in, who its customers are, etc

Seems to me like completely different situations. The WordPress situation makes Automattic look bad in my eyes, while the Anduril situation makes NixOS look bad in my eyes

As a counterpoint: to me it makes NixOS look good to publicly take an anti-militarist stance, in fact it makes me interested to look more into it than before.

Military companies have enough funding to market on their own and not rely on volunteer communities and coopting them in the process.

> What has Anduril done? Tried to sponsor some conference. Post a job ad on a project forum

make weapons for a government controlled by putin

Hey, Stalin may have murdered millions, but what has he done in the project itself? Let's stay on topic here.

Not to mention that all the companies in that whole Tolkien-named cluster funnel money directly to Sauron.

People get to pick who uses their project for advertising.

Basecamp / DHH are maybe also good candidates for that list.

I think that’ll depend on whether you’re just counting totals or drama per unit time.

Title: Anduril Industries’ Electromagnetic Warfare Team is Hiring

First comment: This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

Original post as follows (edit: I have no affiliation with this company, I am just reposting what they wrote):

Anduril Industries is hiring NixOS engineers to work on electromagnetic warfare products. This is a unique opportunity to use Nix at a large scale in an embedded setting. Anduril has adopted Nix at large and we use IOG’s generously maintained Haskell.nix project to build all of our Haskell code and ship it to thousands of customer assets across the globe. If you have Nix/NixOS/Nixpkgs experience and are interested in any of:

Embedded Linux Cross compilation Haskell Radio systems Enterprise CI/CD FPGAs please do drop me a line at travis@anduril.com, as well as submitting your application to our online portal here: Job Application for Embedded NixOS Engineer, EW at Anduril Industries . To tackle a few common questions:

Yes, Anduril is an American defense technology company. We build weapons systems for the United States and its allies. This is an on-site role at Anduril headquarters in Costa Mesa, California. Our team is building software for hardware products, so physical presence in our RF lab is often required throughout the course of software development and testing. Remote work would only be considered for candidates with something extraordinary to offer to our team. I’d be happy to answer any other questions in the thread below.

Banned because they are helping the DOD or sabotaging them?

side question:

Why do I use NixOS instead of Ubuntu + ansible combo ?

To oversimplify and only pick one aspect:

If you have this ansible:

  - package:
      state: present
      name:
        - foo
        - bar
        - baz

and remove baz from the list, baz will still be installed. If you have this NixOS config:

    packages = with pkgs; [
      foo
      bar
      baz
    ]

and remove baz, you will no longer have baz installed[0]. Or put differently, ansible is never comprehensive, nix is[1]. Of course, ansible is a lot easier IMHO so choose your tradeoffs.

[0] I mean, insofar as packages are ever "installed" in nix. But for our purposes using that word is fine.

[1] Generally. Like, nothing prevents you from creating a python virtualenv or dropping config files around or coloring outside the lines in other ways, but using the system in the straightforward idiomatic way does leave you with everything encoded in a single config.

If you have an ansible playbook that runs "apt-get install docker" you'll get a different version over time, even with no changes to your playbook.

With nix, every package version change, every single diff, is a git commit which you can roll back and track a breakage to.

If you want, you can run your own apt repos, pin all your apt package versions, etc and make ubuntu a little more reproducible, but it's hard to do it. The system fights against you.

yaml also sucks, and nix is a better language.

Use whatever you want.

> With nix, every package version change, every single diff, is a git commit which you can roll back and track a breakage to.

I think this is only true if you use flakes or jump through some hoops? Otherwise you of course can roll back to a previous generation, but not a previous commit.

If you're not using something like npins or nix flakes then you're not really using nix correctly, and have abandoned the light of god.

Difficult to summarize, but the short answer is: immutability, reproducibility, and reversibility (i.e. you can revert/de-revert almost any change instantly).

It's on another level, as compared to Ubuntu, but it's also much more intrinsically demanding.

And lately it has unfortunately become a culture war battleground.

NixOS is infrastructure-as-code, for real this time.

(The downside is that now you have to write code.)

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