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Comment by barbazoo | Hacker News Reader

Aren’t those Israeli software companies all supposed to be top notch, ex Mossad, yadda yadda? Doesn’t sound like it.

I hope the message dump is juicy.

And SBF of FTX fame was ex-Jane St so obviously was a serious finance professional. This is why using past employers as a shorthand for capability is unwise.

In fairness, FTX had a profitable bankruptcy [1]. So it's still better to be scammed by Jane Street alumni than to be scammed by the usual alumni of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan etc

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-15/ftx-bankr...

How is that fair? It was luck from the AI investment. Pure luck.

It wasn’t the only smart investment

Regardless of how you feel about SBF and FTX, claiming an early investment into Anthropic is "luck" rather than being ahead of the curve feels off the mark.

That is dodging the point. The guy ripped people off. By luck they got the fiat value of their investment at some past date back. Yes if a single investment pays off well enough to negate fraud losses on that scale over a short time scale. It's fucking luck.

It's not profitable. They are getting their money back from value of the assets in 2022 when they went bankrupt but most of crypto assets have gone up significantly in value so it's 2.5 years of lost profit.

I thought Israel has mandatory military service, so ex-mossad or ex-military signals intelligence doesn't really say much? Presumably they're directing people based on their skill set, so you'd expect most hackers to end up in mossad for their mandatory service.

> Presumably they're directing people based on their skill set

Big presumption.

If I were israeli, there’s no way in hell anybody with half a brain would want me near their spy agency.

When a gov is committing a genocide, their decisions are based on control and fear, not getting the best out of people.

Edit: downvote all you want. Israel is still committing a genocide. No hospitals left standing. Killing aid workers, journalists, and doctors. A million people on the brink of starvation. Literally salting the earth to prevent crops from being grown. That is war crimes, ghettoization, and genocide.

That's not a great generalisation for the whole country. How many ex Mossad people interested in doing actual implementation in tech companies do you think there are? It's like "aren't those US software companies all supposed to be top notch, ex NSA yadda yadda?"

They do start a lot of tech companies specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200#Companies_founded_by...

The US only has voluntary military service, so the dynamics are different

The CEO/Founder of TeleMessage Guy Levit was the head of the Planning and Development Department of an elite technical unit in the Intelligence Corps of the IDF according to bio.

I guess we could say that in many ways, he never left

One problem that smart people tend to make is in thinking that being really smart in one area is generalizable to all others. Just because they're good at AppSec doesn't mean they're good at networking or operating a webserver.

I agree with this. It's surprising how often I encounter people with that belief, because I was disabused of it very early on in my career; this industry is chockablock with people who are brilliant in 1 area and deficient in others.

That's why you need teams. Red team for example! Security team. App developers. Code reviews. You need all the process too. Security that relies on one genius is fragile.

That sounds more like a stupid person than smart lol

you can be smart in one area and stupid in others. the "not knowing you're stupid in others" is part of the "stupid in others".

Aka "halo effect"

I'm not sure why you'd expect intelligence agency types to be particularly good at engineering, tbh.

Spooks in general like to project a veneer of competence, downright invincibility. Entertainment media, journalists, experts play a big role in this. And by and large it works.

It’s especially true for spooks of a certain entity. Also, it’s easy to confuse brazenness, being protected from consequences, and usually downplayed or secret Western complicity with competence.

I mean, I'm sure they're competent in some stuff, but being competent in one field doesn't generally mean being magically competent in _all_ fields.

I'm not sure about this case, but maybe the assumption here is that these are people from a technical branch of Mossad, such as Unit 8200, which does SIGINT. I've interviewed 3 of them for your typical Big Tech SWE position, and to a candidate, they were very strong engineers. I never got to work with them, however, because they always got better counteroffers...

> Aren’t those Israeli software companies all supposed to be top notch, ex Mossad, yadda yadda?

Working with a few companies like these, I can tell you that the marketing is top-notch, and very aggressive. The products not so. Most get better with time.

"All supposed to be".

This is a country of 10 million people, a rather heterogeneous one at that. There are going to be better and worse companies.

They are top notch - at working for profit and for the interests of their country.

After all the concern over China and TikTok, why is the USG using a foreign chat program at all?

SuperPAC and other corruption

Yeah the /leakitbaby endpoint was meant for just them, not the world! Doh!

It only takes one guy doing one stupid thing to have a security incident. Yeah, processes should be in place, but no process is perfect.

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