It's funny how arrogant you seem to have gotten working at Google. Looking through your post history a couple of years ago you were doing grunt work you would see as below you now. The belief that all Google employees are doing hard innovative work is untrue. A large portion are centering divs and wrangling JSON.
Do you remember a time when you had to make a plan with a friend to meet at a specific place at a specific time and if one of you wasn't there or had a last minute problem there was probably no way to contact the other person? That was annoying, true.
I also refused to get a mobile phone for years, much to the chagrin of my girlfriend(s). It meant I used to come home to an answering machine full of messages and feel much more loved than I ever have with the immediate drip feed of messages I get now.
I wonder, what will I really miss that a book and a dumbphone won't be able to replace in my life? Perhaps the maps.
You could, but that really isn't any different than "I don't want to come (for some other reason)."
There's a difference between "don't want to" and "can't do".
But, we have a pretty tight-knit group of friends, most of whom live within walking distance, and due to kids, we usually just have dinner at somebody's house. We're boring white collar suburbanites, I guess.
Yes, it collects your email when you install. This lets me send a couple onboarding messages and determine what plan you are on. There's more info in the (human readable) privacy policy.
When I started this project I wanted the onboarding experience to be as simple as possible, i.e. no annoying sign up stage. I wondered whether this approach would lead to lots of questions like yours: in fact, I think less than 5 people have asked about this since 2015. My sense is that, on balance, most people benefit from the "install = sign-up" flow.
In my experience the good teams have truly exceptional people and the bad teams are filled with people who would be superstars elsewhere. But yeah this isn't proof and hey maybe I'm just saying that because I'm not that good , which is definitely possible.
Yeah that makes sense. I'm sure after 5+ years there you would be far better than the average developer. I am talking from the perspective of people that I've seen go to those companies. Sure they were above average programmers, smart and driven but they weren't superstars or truly exceptional.
"Dealers are scum" makes no sense. Is the college guy selling weed and mushrooms to his friends "scum"? Maybe the guy that gives out free samples of meth or heroin to get people addicted is bad but that sort of generalising is why drugs are illegal in the first place.
I wonder about this too. What sort of people do international criminal organisations hire to manage their info-sec? A criminal that became a computer expert or a computer expert that became a criminal?
Well the criminal organizations can offer a whole range of addictive non-monetary incentives that a computer expert may desire, so I'd guess that's the main path in.
There's more unemployed tech people out there than many here realize though. People that don't present well in interviews, people that didn't stay employ-ably current in tech, hardware guys replaced by the cloud, people in less hot locations for tech, etc. Criminal organizations are much less picky and judgmental than your average tech startup and in some cases may be the only one's willing to give them a chance.
In some countries, getting into tech is impossible if you're not lucky to have the right credentials. In France for example, any even remotely technical job will require years of higher education and experience (yes there's an obvious catch-22 here). You can have perfectly serviceable skills that would put you at a junior/mid developer or sysadmin level and be completely unemployable - at this point crime doesn't sound that bad if you have no other alternative despite otherwise having no propensity/attraction to participate in criminal activities.
For what it's worth, I would still be completely unemployable in France despite having 7 years of successful commercial experience under my belt in some well-known companies. Thankfully I played my cards right and managed to move to a saner country where tech is still more or less a meritocracy.
Those are the worst. There was this one candidate who gave all the interviewers mousepads with his picture and aol email address on it. Who even wants that kind of stuff? The best ones give some candy, like there was someone who gave us gum with a custom printed wrapper “Hope I ‘stick’ in your mind!”
Never mind people who struggle to get a job in IT because of a previous criminal record. Those people may also have been in prison and made connections while inside.
I suspect that people don't fall into such neat categories. You could pose a similar question re: lawyers whose bread and butter is protecting and representing people associated with organised crime (the kind of individuals represented by Maury from The Wire or Neil Mink from The Sopranos). Are they lawyers who developed a slippery version of ethics & morality, or people with loose ethical standards who entered law?
I'd bet good money that the truth is usually quite banal: these individuals make a series of small and highly contingent decisions over time that gradually push them in the direction of criminality or culpability, reinforced over time by social & financial reward for doing so.
What? Representing criminals is not unethical or 'immoral'. Period. Protecting criminals legally is not unethical unless you are knowingly doing something illegal yourself.
I imagine that most layers are just doing their job and getting paid for it. Bringing morality into that equation makes no sense in a legal system that has little to nothing to do with morality.
Representing criminals is fine, but aiding them in committing future crimes isn’t. If you do that, you’re just part of a criminal conspiracy, and being a lawyer doesn’t give you an exception from moral culpability.
I think the GP meant 'aiding them in commiting future crimes' in the literal sense (e.g. helping launder money, abusing attorney privilege etc.) rather than implying that by defending them in court the lawyer would then be culpable.
I haven't seen all of The Wire, but as to the character cited as an example, Wikipedia says, "[Maury] is corrupt and unscrupulous, willing to aid his clients in furtherance of their criminal activity." So he crosses your line, and I think that's what the GP post meant.
You don’t get to declare what is unethical by adding the sentence “Period.” after your claim. Ethics is a matter of opinion; I believe that knowingly aiding violent criminals is wrong; if you feel otherwise, that’s just like, your, opinion, man.
They aren't criminal until the court system declares them criminal. The lawyer is defending them before they are declared criminals.
That is what "presumption of innocence" means.
Everyone has the right to be represented in court, even people that later on will be convicted.
Otherwise we can just go back to use pitchforks and similar (and actually it's happening on social media, and it's not looking good)
It is a thin line, most of these groups are in contact with lawyer teams before they start the operations and the lawyers are in the know.
These groups do risk assessment before going ahead.
Again, ethics are a matter of opinion, laws are a matter of fact. Yes, in the US you have the legal right to an attorney. Whether that attorney is behaving ethically depends on the attorney’s behavior and the person making the judgment on the ethics. You and I don’t have to have the same opinion on what’s ethical. We can each advocate for our own ideas of ethics to be codified into policy.
Lawyers, even in the United States, are bound by rules of conduct, and will stop being lawyers very quickly if the overstep the rules of ethical conduct.
The standards of ethics they are checked against are not yours or mine, they are the rules they agreed to. To pretend like ethics aren't a thing for lawyers is surprisingly uninformed for HN.
Which is good and fair. I think the example was Tony Soprano though and the (imaginary) lawyer in question knew full well the kind of shennanigans he was up to, these lawyers know they're defending murderers and people that ruin lives.
But that’s the point of lawyers. When they defend a guilty party, most of the time they know that the party is indeed guilty. They need to, to prepare a good defence.
Your life as a human being can't have little to do with morality unless you are a sociopath. On the one hand we need someone to provide all accused with adequate representation to ensure we don't wrongly convict innocent men however at the mob boss level we are virtually always talking about trying to protect horrible people everyone knows are guilty from punishment.
A system that didn't need to hold a trial or give the mob boss a lawyer would be irredeemably immoral but one in which they go free is a shittier world. I don't envy anyone trying to remain moral while walking that line. I don't see how anyone who specialized in such clients could live with themselves.
Kids born after that article are nearly finished with high school. I’m pretty sure the dynamic has changed a little since then. Interesting to at least see how it used to be though.
Over my life Ive met people who while they seem competent and can tie their shoe laces appear to make bad decisions because they have trouble with judging likely outcomes. Those are the people getting hired to do this sort of work.
These people are organised in that they make deals with each other in friend networks. But the people involved are not the sharpest knives in the draw. They get their positions via violence and intimidation more than cunning and planning.
There are cleaver crooks, but we do not often hear from them. A lot of them work at Wall Street, which contains the biggest and most profitable criminal gangs
Not quite. They were using an app developed by the police as a honeypot. Someone else had even discovered this and blogged about it[0]. If they had used email and PGP they likely wouldn't have been caught in this way. 3-letter agencies are not going to use their trump card of backdoored OS or hardware to catch drug runners.
True.. however the three letter agencies are going to pass along any relevant information that they stumble across while filtering for money laundering in relation to terrorism.
