tidepod12

I mean it's certainly no secret that the US government suffered from incredible incompetence when it came to managing the pandemic.

With that said, the start of the pandemic was ~1 year ago. Even if it started right then, 12 months for a country-wide, government-run IT project is a rush job.

Yes, these companies sub-contract, but that doesn't change my comment. Sub-contracting is something that Deloitte et al know how to do, and have existing relationships with staffing agencies, have an existing management structure to manage those subcontractors, have existing contracts so you don't need to waste time negotiating, etc.

And with all that said, companies like Deloitte do have hundreds of people ready to go. They may not have a deep bench for certain niche projects, but I used to work at a Big4 and for something generic like "build us a website for people to sign up", we had entire offices of people around the globe in our offshore delivery centers just waiting around for work like that. Oftentimes we would still subcontract because it works out to be cheaper if 10-20% of your resources on any given project are subcontractors, but they weren't always necessary.

I'm sure if you actually looked at their full track record, the vast vast majority of projects probably result in "mediocre but workable" systems, you just don't hear about them because that's a boring headline. Deloitte is a $40 billion company, it's not like every single one of their projects is a complete failure.

I've no love for Deloitte, but the one benefit they do have here is the ability to mobilize quickly on something like this. It's simply impossible to "hire 146 engineers" within any reasonable time frame, let alone get them all organized in a way that you can manage them effectively (and don't forget the project managers/scrum masters/etc that would need to be hired too). Deloitte, OTOH, has an entire existing business model based on taking vague business requirements and having huge teams of project managers/developers/consultants/advisors/etc ready to go at nearly a moments notice.

$44 million is an egregious number and I don't know how it's that high, but I'm betting at least part of it has to do with the fact that this was a website with an accelerated timeline, which probably necessitated a premium.

Evidence of what? Of wrongdoing? No.

Re-read his comment. The Discord that was wiped certainly did have plenty of porn, racism, and homophobia.

That's like saying that southerners flying confederate flags is "just their culture, not meant to be taken literally". That dog don't hunt.

Incredibly naive to think that WSB itself isn't filled with rich and well-connected people. In its early days, WSB was almost entirely a bunch of rich wall street traders with extra tens/hundreds of thousands to spare on crazy bets. Nowadays, it's one of the largest subreddits on one of the largest websites in the world. WSB isn't some niche gathering of "average joes" - all of the major wall street firms monitor it, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that many of them downright manipulate it via astroturfing.

"Gay bear" is almost exclusively used as an insult on the subreddit, and this week has been one of the primary insults used in reference to the short sellers (everyones #1 enemy on WSB right now). It would still be pejorative even if not used that way, but it's ridiculous to claim that it's not a pejorative when it is explicitly used as an insult.

WSB is notorious for also posting a lot of anti-LGBT slurs (for example, one of WSBs favorite insults is calling someone a "gay bear", or more commonly a rainbow emoji followed by a bear emoji, or even calling people f*gs).

Also worth noting that the Discord group is so much worse than WSB the subreddit. Sometimes on the Discord server there are just people spamming the N word for no reason.

The annoying truth is that offensive security roles, despite being the "sexy" face of security, are in much less demand compared to defensive security roles. There are some very prestigious pentesting or research shops that pay a lot for highly-skilled offensive security professionals, but they are rare. The average company treats offensive security as an entry-level position meant to attract newbies to security with the "sexy hacker role" before pushing them into more in-demand positions like application security. For context, many of the large companies I consult for have ~5 people max on their red teams, while having 100+ on the rest of their security teams (the "blue" teams). There just relatively aren't that many offensive security positions available.

If you really want to do security, then my advice is to either look at some dedicated security consulting shops that do penetration testing (and be prepared to take a pay cut), or alternatively use your software development experience to pivot into an application security role. From there, you might find it easier to get involved with some offensive security efforts through that.

I've been in security for the better part of a decade. I have none of these certs (I have no security certs at all). The OSCP is the only certification in this list that I've ever even heard of being part of hiring discussions, and even then I've really only ever seen it required/desired in penetration testing roles.

In fact, this article is very narrowly focused on penetration testing-type roles. There are a whole host of other security roles that require all kinds of different skillsets which aren't even mentioned here.

If you do want a penetration testing role, I don't see anything wrong with this roadmap other than the fact that it over-emphasizes the need for certs. Like all other types of roles, some hiring managers might be part of the "certification chaser" crowd and might require certs for candidates, but IME most don't care and someone not having a cert has never stopped me from hiring them, and quite frankly if someone does have certs it doesn't make me any more inclined to hire them.

Here is another article that isn't just about farmland, but about land ownership in general: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/11/25/these-people...

Of note, the Gates don't even appear on this list. At first I thought it's because OP is only talking about farmland, but in the USA Today article the Simplot family apparently owns more than 400k acres for potato farming in Idaho, but doesn't even appear in the OP. I'm not sure what to make of the discrepancy.

Also for the sake of comparison, 240k acres is a good amount, but (as another commenter mentioned), it's also not. There are some cattle ranches larger than that. And for an example of non farm/ranch use, Bezos apparently owns over 400,000 acres in West Texas to be used for the Blue Origin launch facilities.

It's the same thing. COBRA means you continue any healthcare plan you had while employed, with the only difference being you pay the full premium rather than your company subsidizing it. But in this case, it seems Dropbox is still subsidizing it (if that is indeed what that sentence in the letter means)... so it is just continued health coverage.

I have a couple connections on LinkedIn that work at Dropbox, and through them I have noticed a decent amount (certainly more than usual) of somewhat-high-up individuals leaving Dropbox in the past couple weeks. Might just be completely coincidental, but I wonder if they had advance notice (or perhaps just saw the writing on the wall)?

Also anecdotal and total speculation, I interviewed at Dropbox a couple years ago and they were making a big push into b2b Dropbox, particularly with Paper, but I've yet to really hear about them successfully breaking into that space (have never met or even heard of a company using Paper in the wild). Olivia (the COO that's also leaving) used to head up b2b functions at Google before joining Dropbox. I wonder if these layoffs are also from the b2b teams and perhaps Dropbox is pulling back from (or at least rethinking) those efforts?

Lower cost premiums maybe, but I doubt any low-premium marketplace plans will be lower deductible than the corporate/COBRA plans offered by a company like Dropbox.

They aren't talking about internal chat. The article suggests trying out several third party SaaS discussion forums like Discourse/Carrot/Basecamp. It's unlikely most orgs have internal servers for these services. GP is pointing out that using these third party SaaS discussions forums is usually a nonstarter unless its first been pre-approved by legal (whereas email is almost certainly already approved).

That article, which is from 1977, is about an earlier incarnation of Radio Free Asia that was originally run by the CIA, but ceased operation in 1955 (the article even mentions this). The current RFA started broadcasting in 1996 and is under direction of the US Agency for Global Media.

RFA is still run by the US Government, which is worth considering when talking about the possible biases of RFA... but the NYT article you linked has nothing to do with the current RFA.

Antitrust laws are broader than that. A company can be guilty of anti-competitive behavior even if that company is not a direct competitor of the parties affected.

Why do you use antifa as an example when there are much better examples like the Nation of Islam [1] and the Taliban [2] on Twitter?

1: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/grou... ; https://twitter.com/OfficialNOI

2: https://twitter.com/Zabehulah_M33/status/1343458261459218432

Upgrade your argument!

Are you aware of what "double standards" means? The fact that they are not the same thing is the point.

Furthermore, please review the HN guidelines for posting. Your comment is not substantive nor constructive.

When Gab was removed from MC/Visa, plenty of people were indeed saying "MC/Visa are private companies and have no obligation to serve Gab. If Gab wants to accept payments, they can build their own network or use cash/crypto".

Then the pornographic performers should just make their own payment network, no?

That's what everyone's been telling Parler since they started being removed from these platforms.

I also don't know how you can reconcile this comment with the fact that Gab and others were removed from Visa/MC networks, to much fanfare.

To be clear, I'm in favor of Parler going away, but I can't help but notice the double standards.

I don't think you can discount them like that. Maybe they aren't as front of mind as services like S3, EC2, etc, but if you were to try to rebuild your setup in a personal data center, replacing the capabilities of VPC, IAM, CloudTrail, NAT gateways, ELBs, KMS etc would be a huge effort on your part. The fact that they are "basic building blocks" makes them more important, not less. In a discussion about the complexity of cloud providers versus other setups, that seems especially relevant.

Spoiler, because clickbait headlines are disingenuous and annoying:

> As many of you may have suspected, this post is not entirely truthful. I have not released this fitness app onto the Play Store, nor have I collected millions of master tokens. ... But yes, these methods do work. I absolutely could release such an app, and so could anyone else (and maybe they have).

>That is definitely not the agreed upon definition of net neutrality today. Comcast is allowed to offer different classes of service (e.g. speeds) to different people. It is allowed to ban you for violations of terms of service (e.g. illegal downloads).

That's because net neutrality does not exist today. Like I mentioned in my first comment, there are no NN laws in the US.

NN has long stood for the principle of dumb pipes, regardless of you being the sender or receiver.

You edited one of your earlier comments to mention the 2019 NN law that passed in the House; I encourage you to go read that law, as it specifically strengthens consumer protections in regards to ISPs and makes it so that Comcast could not refuse to serve you based on whatever arbitrary restrictions they want. If you are downloading torrents illegally, they could ban you. But under NN, they could not ban you because you were, for example, sharing legal content that Comcast employees have political disagreements with.

Net neutrality is a principle that applies in both directions. One of the main ideals of the NN that was being pushed for in the early 2010s in the US was for "dumb pipes" where Comcast would not be able to ban you just because you used their "pipes" in a way that they didn't like.

>If AT&T terminates customers’ access to websites, customers will go to Verizon etc.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the ISP market in the US, but the point here is that there are many areas in which customers cannot switch to another ISP. If AT&T were to block websites, those customers would have zero ability to access them. Hence the "some companies are too big and influential" bit.

The CEO of CloudFlare famously said that the reason he decided to deplatform Daily Stormer (after previously saying he would not deplatform them) was because one morning he woke up in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the internet. Literally all it took was one CEO waking up on the wrong side of the bed one morning. It seems entirely inaccurate to say that Dorsey or Bezos couldn't make a decision unilaterally like that if they really wanted.

I'm not sure about Twitter, but Bezos is the majority shareholder at Amazon and if he really wanted to, could make the decision to ban anyone he wants and nobody would legally be able to stop him, will of the employees/shareholders/public be damned.

The US does not have any net neutrality laws that would make the posed scenario illegal.

But! That brings up a great point, because I certainly am a proponent of net neutrality laws: would/should such laws not also apply to major internet infrastructure providers such as AWS, thus making it illegal for them to block/ban sites at their leisure?