link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675112
this thread is filled with insane shit
all about things technology has done to actively make life worse for us all
This is why I tell people outside of engineering majors that I despise my major and everyone in it. 90% aspire to make shit like this. Maybe they know what the end goal, maybe they don’t. I’d say those who are gleefully making hundreds of thousands of dollars without researching what they products do are worse than the ghouls who are self aware
Yup.
Everyone plays golf, half of them have 5 or 10 year plants to become management/executives, many of them love to network...
I know 1-2 people who seem remotely cool in my entire ass fortune 500 company, and I'm scared that 1 of those is some kind of weird ass libertarian
I've been making the same jokes about my law degree for the past 4-5 years. Even before I radicalized and moved left, I despised so many of the people in my classes. Like a solid third of all the men in my courses wanted to be Harvey Spectre SO badly, and they all just fell flat. Also, way too many fucking people showed up to class in a suit, but thankfully we were able to bully those people into not doing it again.
message to all hackernewses: detonate bombs in your boss' office to get into heaven
This is such a good thread they should show this to up-and-coming labor aristocrats lol.
Every single comment in that thread should be a Hexbear tagline.
And yet it is controversial to say that this person has a parasitic relationship with the Global South.
Nooooooo they're a WORKER, that means they're inherently good!
And yet it is controversial to say that this person has a parasitic relationship with the Global South.
I don't know that anyone has ever argued that logistics software engineers, or DOD Contractors are not pimples on the ass of humanity.
It's when you extrapolate that proposition out to literally anyone & everyone who ever breathed the air of a country in the Imperial Core that you start sounding like a "Pol Pot Guy".
It seems pretty obvious to me that the mass of American workers are not poor, misled souls controlled by the evil government, but largely rational actors who correctly see that they gain more from the American project than they are exploited by it, on an almost 1:1 basis that scales with how much money they make.
Just like the poor white settlers who undertook the project of Manifest Destiny, they correctly see where their interests lie.
Obviously these people’s interests aren’t in alignment with those of their capitalists class.
All of the time? Certainly not. Domestically? Almost entirely not.
The extraction of wealth from the Global South? 100%. The only reason what money the poorest Americans have is worth what it is is due to the plunder of the rest of the planet. The depravity poor Americans experience is nearly unique among the parasite nations, but it's really quite a lot better than what most of the world (almost all of the world outside of Europe) experiences.
ever heard of ActiveX? you know, arbitrary code installing and running in your browser on Windows and available to be scripted by javascript? like, instead of Java? sorry. I'm not solely responsible, but sorry, pretty responsible. we were young. code-signing as a means of validating origin was a great idea. though it needed additional infrastructure to prevent abuse and allow global revocation, and that wasn't perfectly thought through or executed. live and learn. :grinning-emoji:
finally a good one lol
People who just like new things and don't bother to think out what's going to happen afterwards. Novelty-seekers who are easily bored and want the next new thing.
Bane of my freaking existence. We hundreds of millions had to suffer because a few dozen at Microsoft were really excited about their jobs.
People who just like new things and don’t bother to think out what’s going to happen afterwards. Novelty-seekers who are easily bored and want the next new thing.
fuck yea
ActiveX was an alternative to javascript or Java applets, which was an absolute security disaster. Just 10,000 ways for people to install malware no matter how much they tried to patch it. Even once Microsoft realized it was an absolute shitshow that shouldn't exist, they had a hard time getting rid of it, because corporate users kept complaining - they just loved making all their internal tools in ActiveX for some reason.
Unlike some of these, this is a technical disaster rather than an ethical one. Except in the sense that, ethically, you should be good enough at your job that you don't design bridges that collapse.
I built software to track our traders. This was at one of the largest investment banks in the world and at the time they had a rudimentary system for tracking and recording their in-house traders activities - orders, trades, and other order/trade related information. At the time, the rudimentary system was built mostly to comply with government regulations, and was later modified by someone else to capture and report a larger scope of information about the traders to a higher-up department.
My system was built entirely from scratch because the existing system was antiquated, poorly structured, and really not conducive to future expansions.
After testing and implementing my system, a handful of traders lost their jobs as a result. One criteria often looked at was their number and reasons for failure to delivers (FTD's).
Other than that, it's mostly automating things that I almost sort of regret. A lot of folks in the bank were fired after I wrote a series of apps that could do the work they do. Mostly repetitive tasks. Still feel bad about that but if I didn't do it, they would have hired someone else and at the time I was really, really in dire need for a paycheck.
lol
On the ethical side I built a paywall for a billion dollar news company and stoped people from bypassing it, then they change the cancel button for a call customer support button to effectively steal money from the elderly etc who signed up but don't want to go through the long cancel process
I spent a day on the phone playing operator tag while trying to cancel my Houston Chronicle subscription. At the end, I just called my credit card and told them to stop payment.
Newspapers legitimately trying to reach the same deep layer of hell as gym managers lmao.
of course the second top comment is saying they feel guilt for writing some tracking code for China.
edit: and another one, kinda spooky comment about how the western companies were using my tech totally wholesomely, but not Syria and Burma!!
I used to work at a grocery store in a very small town. The late shift was just me and one other person. 11:30 pm on a Tuesday in a small town of less than 700 people, right? Nothing going on, there hadn't been any customers for hours. My coworker was amusing himself by throwing pencils against the ceiling and catching them as they bounced back down.
11:36pm, we get a phone call. It's someone claiming to be from "corporate surveillance" who asks us to stop throwing pencils against the ceiling. I never felt comfortable at that job again.
Ah fuck... The things I got up to in the store while it was closed, lol
"Built an aircraft-mounted camera gimbal pointing system that I thought was supposed to be used by energy companies to look for power poles but was also sold to US Border Patrol to hunt down immigrants. Not my finest hour."
- Least fascist enabling ycombinater poster
