I'm not trying to be, I'm simply trying to gain an understanding of whether your statements may come from a place of bias. I am sorry if it came off offensive.
And it's really not that hard to look up a user's profile to see where they work if they put that sort of information there.
You know, a lot of people here look up to you. When you write stuff like that it has a lot more influence than when some newbie account does. I would probably say that the influence is negative, assuming HN is a thing that you care about.
After submitting I see that you changed your post. The link is not much better.
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5992358
> I'm glad you approve. No, wait, I don't give a shit.
So someone asked if you've done work for the NSA. Who cares? Clearly you have the ability, it's not the most offensive thing in the world even if it's a bit naive. The person doesn't necessarily know that it's totally against your values, assuming that this is the source of the offense.
I'm not offended at someone suggesting I might have worked for NSA. You still don't get it.
(I changed the parent not because I'm uncomfortable with it, but because I wrote it before I saw the comment below that I ended up replying to; either "go fuck yourself" or the response I wrote downthread work for me, but both together seemed pointless).
Even if true, I wouldn't say this indicated you were a shill, because shills are generally paid to push propaganda.
People are naturally biased by their experiences in positive or negative ways. You made what could be construed as a pro-NSA comment in an environment dominated by anti-NSA sentiment, and somebody made an assumption that maybe you had a good experience working at the NSA and wanted to clarify it.
For what it's worth, it never occurred to me that you were a shill or a former employee, the suggestion is absurd and totally out of left-field.
Respectfully, not because I'm fed up talking about this but because I don't want to be one of those threads where 'pg has to comment and say "will you guys please stop", I'm going to leave it at that.