jentist_retol

The ability of the government to do this, legally, should be factored in as part of that risk taking.

Investments have risk. Real estate is an investment. It turns out a global pandemic is a risk, and these people may lose their investments.

>if they want to prevent evictions they need to pay the landlords what they’re owed

My landlord told me to get a second job after I got laid off. Maybe the landlords should get second jobs.

In software, there is incredible demand and engineers have a lot of negotiating power. So, we have the power to actually get new jobs easily!

And fine, but then when that horrible thing makes the news and their answer is "i don't care, i was just building the feature", I take that to be an extremely unsatisfactory answer.

And if they work at Facebook with those kind of unsatisfactory answers, they are probably very qualified for a lot of positions, and I don't think they'll be hurting for job offers elsewhere.

If you take offense over a variation of "as you know [your company] made the news for being caught doing [horrible thing]. On your resume you worked on [horrible thing]. How do you feel about that?", then you have a very thin skin and also I would not want to work with you. So it would be mutual.

Posts that were doing well have been getting downvoted pretty heavily in the last hour. I'm curious to know why that is, but they don't seem to comment.

Ah well, that's the nature of an open forum such as this.

In my opinion, that's an unreasonable interpretation of: "asking a candidate how they feel about working on a product that made international news (in a bad way)"

Well, frankly, there's a need on HN for "correctness" only. And I'm not sure what's correct. And I haven't faced some of the "hypothetical" scenarios posed here.

And if a resume came on my desk with something like what was posed, I would have to pause, and think. And think. And think.

Some of the posts in here actually worry me though. There's a real failing of ethical concerns and more importantly, ethical mentorship in our field. I'm a result of that. I'm not trying to "gotcha" FAANG employees or vets or anything.

I think you're reading into it too much and injecting politics. I don't know how else to describe it without de-anonymizing other than "it was actually bad and the PM who came up with it did a bad job designing the fraud cases".

Yes, it's absolutely contextual.

At the very least, asking a softball question will help filter out someone I might not want to personally work with.

I actually think interviewing really sucks, because you spend an hour getting to know someone who you'll potentially spend 40 hours a week for years with? That's a whole separate topic, though.

Yeah, I addressed this later on. It's very contextual. You're assuming/inferring there's some strict moral framework, and then I walk into that room and say "fuck you for working at facebook, get out of my face". No! I would never!

I would still ask a new grad the question, and maybe I would put more weight on the answer if they had made it to a senior role.

>It just seems wrong to cause trouble to others because they may have had this only chance to join the elite FAANG crowd and now they pay for it because of people with your line of thinking.

I have never worked at FAANG and I don't intend to, to be honest. I did pass on an offer at A, earlier in my career.

>I have even met so many people with years of experience that are on the outside of the FAANG wall looking in with jealousy and longing.

Well, if they ever get in and show up in my interview panel, they should be prepared for a softball ethics question. That seems like a small price to pay, tbh

Frankly, because I just shit on Facebook in a public place around the hiring topic. These are all sensitive subjects.

And it would REALLY be shitty if some hack blogger posted the context-destroying "FooCo refusing to hire Facebook employees because of ethics concern"

>While you have a point about 18yo, it is very difficult to overlook the main job of the military: kill people.

Yes. And I have never been faced with someone with a long military career. If they were interviewing straight out of a long career, it would definitely fit into the "senior person" context as mentioned.

It's a tough question, for sure, but I don't think I would be able to shy away from it. I guess we'll find out if I'm ever in that position... I should probably prepare for if that ever happens.

My stance on this has been getting firmer and firmer the more senior I get. I honestly wonder if I'd have the presence or guts required to ask that hard of a question.

I'm not looking for an apology, or remorse, or a sudden revelation. But an understanding of the work they do and WHY it might receive that perception is a "passing" answer, IMO.

I hope so.

I wish I could give more information but maybe it's best to keep names out considering the context ;)

I work in the security org now, and so I deal with a lot of exmilitary and exfederal employees. Considering that the military is a institution in this country that helps a lot of working class kids get education and training...

It really comes down to choices and consent for me. If you're in the military, that may have been the option for an 18 year old and certainly I wasn't thinking about ethics when I was 18. But if you're able to work at an organization with a high bar such as Facebook, surely you have other options - unless you're a new grad - the stark reality is that when you get out of college, you take what you get.

I would definitely be a little tougher on someone who joined Facebook (or the NSA) in the last few years and already had job experience (senior/staff level) versus a Jr engineer or someone who'd been there since before a lot of these issues came to light (although that raises the question: why are yo u still there?)

And, my opinion on Facebook has changed drastically in the past few years.

So anyways, it's really contextual and empathetic. I'm not just trying to "GOTCHA" some guy who joined the military out of high school before fully appreciating the ramifications of their actions (I wouldn't have!).

But if you have 10 years of experience in software and you go work for the NSA... well, I have some questions.

I know there's a lot of gaps, and I'm ashamed to admit I don't really have a strong framework - this is a personal failing, and something I've really been thinking about more recently.

edit: i got downvoted. I'd like to know what I can improve on, please reply, thanks. I'm trying to be better!

I'd like to emphasize the nature of the answer which was a defensive "I was just following orders".

At that point, I was conducting dozens of interviews a year, and I think that sort of question came up... maybe three times? One of those people was from a medical company with a very large and very embarrassing contemporary incident, and the interviewee and I talked about development process problems. In fact, they admitted, it was part of the reason they left! We hired them and I enjoyed working with him.

>I'm sure that your employer loves your personal feelings interfering with hiring talent.

When I brought up my thoughts around the Uber candidate, I was supported by the people on the panel. One of them confessed that he had regretted not asking the question. It's part of the reason that I love working here.

If a team here built something like "god-mode" and it made the news for those levels of abuse... well, it would very possibly tank the company. It definitely hurt Uber. So it's not just personal, it's business!

We handle large amounts of sensitive personal information, and developers are tightly integrated into the product development process. We have successfully lobbied against products with serious spousal abuse cases.

If you can't handle a 5-10 minute question section in which I bring up contemporary criticism about your current employer, in the context of that sensitive information that we handle, then the feeling is mutual.

>I'm not sure where your particular cutoff bar stands

I'm not sure either! I'm not an ethics expert. I think the Uber example and the Facebook example are real outliers. They're particularly egregious examples of abuse of people's information (letting people zoom in on people's walks of shame at company parties is definitely bad!).

I've taken a hard line with people who work at Facebook. If you're still there and unwilling to represent the failings your company has done to society, then I need to hear a justification before moving further in the conversation. I don't think I've ever felt this strongly about a tech company.

I know that's tough but it's a matter of ethics. And frankly, Facebook is an amazing technical institution, and I would love to work with the majority of them based on technical chops alone.

I've put my money where my mouth is on this sort of thing in the past - I passed on an Uber employee who worked on the "god mode" feature and had no opinions on it making the news or its being abused other than "I was just building the feature". It made the news for abusiveness, at least have a little remorse!

So Facebook employees, please understand, if I ever meet you in a technical interview, there will be a five minute section for a hard "liberal arts" question politely lobbed your way :)

>It's worth noting that Pennington had already been cautioned (and fined) by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police earlier in the trip but had continued to flout the law.

He fucked around and found out, I guess!

i bought a ton of them and then hooked some zigbee light switches up. My own fault.

>operated things like AWS at a loss for long periods

They are spending billions of dollars to expand into new markets and improve existing offerings. They are definitely spending more than they make. Of course, it would be ludicrous to suggest AWS is not insanely lucrative. But, technically correct is the best kind of correct, right?

>There is no way Amazon has echo / alexa out there just so it can develop a language recognition model.

Google famously did it with goog411, Amazon's claim here is the best kind of lie: it's not technically a lie

>These companies will OWN consumer loyalty.

Im locked into alexa. and now, i'm digging my way out. I fell into the trap!

I imagine it would be constrained on shipping logistics, initially. Vaccines require temp. controlled shipping.

Effectively random.

Decentralization works great for small communities and use cases. The moment you start scaling you run into a myriad of problems:

- fraud/abuse (spam)

- outsized influence of providers who make it easy to get on board without having to self host (gmail)

- inability to easily change your protocols to handle new features (IMAP4 is from the 90s)

- inflexibility to easily fix bugs and distribute patches across the entire fleet

- unequal footing in both feature capacity and security posture from node to node

Email, Matrix/Riot, etc all suffer from these problems. As does bitcoin. That's not to say that they're not overcomeable, but many of the challenges (especially fraud/abuse) require close collaboration between different decentralized node owners - which to some, defeats the purpose. I ask, what is the internet if not a way to communicate, so I guess I don't think it defeats the purpose.

I'm actually interested to see what matrix is doing, because they seem to realize that a platform of decentralized nodes that handles a lot of the challenges (updates, auth, etc) means that people will be able to build their own new use-cases on top of the network, or diverge.

Anyways, despite these problems, despite the uphill battle in user experience, despite the pain of self-hosting, despite all of the challenges: I still do it.

The internet is a miracle and one way to keep it a miracle is to take the reins of your presence on it.

I guess I should have.

- He uses retrobrite frequently. This is a controversial practice (personally, I'm against it). Basically, restoring a yellowed case to a closer-to-original color. The long term effects of this process are unknown (some speculation is that it makes plastic brittle, which is bad enough already on some of this older hardware) - it's probably okay to do it to an Apple II, but maybe not rarer hardware.

- His work is shoddy - frequently, he powers on 30+ year old machines without inspecting the caps. He uses a screwdriver on metal to clear adhesive. When a component is malfunctioning, he does't have the capability to examine it with a scope - sometimes, it's just a bad joint you know?

- He runs an entertainment channel. This means he moves fast. It leads to the above shoddy work but also means that he needs a complete project for video views - 8bg will spraypaint a faded case to a new color and call it done.

- RaspberryPi conversions. Man, I hate these. Let the thing be the thing that it was and let a Pi be a Pi.

And you know, this is probably fine for commodity hardware like TRS80s and Apple IIs. And, he does a good job of cutting videos showing logical progression to make them easier to watch. But, you'll notice that he never does workstation, graphics, or other esoteric hardware - that stuff is a legitimate challenge to restore aside from cleaning goop and retrobriting the case.

A word of warning: 8-Bit Guy has some interesting videos, but his restorations of vintage hardware are really damaging to the hardware and generally poor quality (even if the final result looks fine). I guess it's fine if he sticks to a 2600 or something, but some of the stuff he's done destroys rare hardware with real historical significance.

Unfortunately, solutions such as this tend to break spam filtering in meaningful ways. But, it is a great first step.

And yes, you should be backing up your mail, too!

The comments on that article (and a few in here), are lamenting the churn and loss of addresses due to the whims of the market. People holding onto email addresses like precious items. It's surprisingly affordable to just have your own domain!

I won't get into other core benefits of paying for mail (no ads, business model where you're the customer, etc). But...

You can

- have a personal domain and email address for as low as $15/yr (weird tld, small mailbox)

- have something more reasonable (domain+email for $45-65 a year with 20-30GB + various PIM functionality depending on provider and price)

- go all the way up to fully hosted personal cloud solution via something like Microsoft365 ($150/yr)

- self host everything yourself - $7-15/yr for the domain

If you use email heavily, and/or if you value having the option to self-host more things, then it's absolutely worth it.

Personally, I self-host my cloud drive with a freenas box in a very close to default configuration, and use Fastmail for mail+PIM.

If my provider starts sucking, I can switch easily. The more paranoid could use the more expensive protonmail or fully self-host! But what's important is that should I ever choose to switch, it will be a one-and-done thing that probably takes me about an hour of work!