It seems to take an American or a European to be so paranoid that even this can be cast as a sinister activity.
They know their history. The possibility that their governments would do something as underhanded as hide a person with ulterior motive inside a humanitarian organization is not irrational.
I am starting to sense some elitism and bandwagoning from the design community.
Starting to? That's kind of what the cutting edge of design is all about. When a design advances past certain middle of the road thresholds of usability and tolerably it become more and more just a matter of personal taste. When a bandwagon (or pieces of it) has appeal, it becomes a wider trend. It's still a bandwagon though, styles in the 1980's are(/were?) the go-to example of things that appealed to tastes at the time but are laughable in retrospect.
Sure, they're fair questions in and of themselves. That doesn't mean they're not used as part of unreasonable or just nonsense rhetoric.
Does the person asking them want to start a real discussion about skill- and merit-based hiring practices? I'm sure much of HN is familiar with the argument there is an over-reliance on formal education as prerequisites to employment.
Armchair quarterbacking someone's leak and escape plan is the same sort of story. There is a lot more to consider in that discussion too (maybe he's got a Chinese hookup for forged travel identification), but I don't think the blowhard on the radio actually wants to have either of those discussions.
Having questions is not the same as smearing character.
And 9/11 truthers would tell you they've just asking questions. Blowhard punditry relies on couching their ramblings in "questions" so much an entire south park episode was dedicated to it: http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/255329/preview-im-aski... This might be a bit of an odd link for HN, but we're discussing conversational tactics couched as meaningful discourse and I'm always reminded of this as a quintessential example of the difference.
I was surprised on the drive home yesterday when they interviewed his neighbor. He didn't win the local chilli cook-off, dude just revealed multiple gigantic surveillance operations. There's got to be someone more relevant to interview, right? Is this just a path of least resistance thing, where anybody with anything worth hearing about this story refuses to speak to the news?
Why is it that IRS targeting is not important enough to merit a single post, but Verizon et. al giving the NSA access to all our data is?
One is a widespread systematic invasion of privacy. The other is a bit of red tape that unequally scrutinized 501(c)(4) applicants based on party affiliation. The scope of these two things are so incomparable that I don't even know where to begin.
It is important the IRS (c)(4) process get fixed, but if they had applied the same level of scrutiny to both left and right leaning groups the reaction would have been more of a murmur. Or maybe even a productive debate on (c)(4) review (lol, probably not). Its not OK that they targeted by ideology, but the fact the criteria was political means Americans are just going to use it as an excuse to be loud. American politicians act like their parties are such delicate flowers, I've seen more dives taken in DC than in Johannesburg 2010.
On top of that, Hacker News is more or less about tech and startups. Not only is the NSA is data-mining from 3rd party tech companies, security and privacy concerns have been large elements of tech culture for decades. A few items on the IRS scandal did get posted here, but didn't get many comments. If I had to speculate, I'd say that even if this this audience finds the actions wrong, they just don't have a whole lot to say on the topic of the burden faced by political organizations abusing (c)(4) classification to hide their donation lists.
From what I understand, modern X applications run remotely are just painting a region of bytes to be shot over the wire anyway. I'll borrow X terminology for a second here, what functional difference is there between these two approaches:
I get the feeling that the pushback (not necessarily yours, but in general) might be rooted in the visual interface where an X server will manage and composite remote applications as if they were local but vnc and rdp (in most use cases) offer a window to the remote system. As I understand it, the former presentation style isn't precluded by wayland's approach.
Wayland's design for a client and server on the same machine doesn't do much more than pushing a buffer full of painted bytes to the server. So anything fancier than that isn't something they refuse to implement for just a network connection, they don't do it at all.
Giving an inch doesn't mean you want to give a mile. Or perhaps more appropriately to facebook, giving a mile doesn't mean that any passerby who wants an inch is entitled to it.
Making privacy tradeoff decisions about facebook doesn't mean someone has given up on privacy all together, just that facebook has proven itself worth the cost of the information they give to facebook.
Not to mention the fact most people don't understand just how deeply facebook is datamining them in the firstplace.
The government doesn't do anything at market rates. They employ below market rates, and contract external companies above market rates. This is (unfortunately) by design.
Normally I have a kneejerk reaction to someone calling someone else jealous. It always strikes me as someone projecting their own jealousy onto someone who very well may have legitimate criticism.
That having been said, it is a bit rich for Vibhu Norby to be concerned about the hurt feelings of employees by making a 17 year old a millionaire. That is an incredibly, incredibly, incredibly, narrow area of the social consequences of wealth to focus on. I have a hard time taking such a myopic point at face value.
C'mon, this can't be the first time you've noticed that "innovation" has been overused to the point of meaninglessness in tech. "Disruption" doubly so. Don't harp on this kid, he is no less innovative than 95+% of "innovation" I've heard about in the last year.
Do you seriously believe the female or feminist tech community has the resources to perform DDoS?
Take a good hard look in the mirror my friend. You're calling "take your head out of your ass" abrasive, but that is downright tame compared to the sexism on display in your presumption that female(s) couldn't possibly have the necessarily tools and ability to launch a DDoS attack.
Well, considering that whenever the actions of an employer are questioned people on the internet are quick to assert that privacy in the work place does not exist and that employment is at-will.
I can see where our foreign friends get the impression.
I disagree with what you said. Please tell me where you work so that I may go create a PR nightmare for your employer that is best solved by firing you.
Conferences are a minefield. Conflicting opinions of if a particular conference should be, is, and what qualifies as, a "professional work environment" run rampant.
When you have everyone attending because it's necessary and/or just a break from the office, they have a professional setting because people are not excited to be there. I see this in the business domain (not-tech) conferences all the time, any recreation happens completely separate from the conference.
Tech conferences get tech enthusiasts. Suddenly people actually want to be there and have fun with the other attendees. An easy example is DEFCON, people treat it like a party with talks, because for over a decade it was unambiguously a party with talks.
Problems are multiplied when people want to relax standards of professionalism on some axis but maintain it on others (or even ratchet it up beyond what people are used to in their own offices). Clearly defining socially feasible expectations of behavior and communicating that to attendees never happens, then "incidents" occur.
They know their history. The possibility that their governments would do something as underhanded as hide a person with ulterior motive inside a humanitarian organization is not irrational.