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There was a time when the Hacker part of Hacker News meant something. But now I look around and see faces like Shaun Maguire's, Dario Amodei's, millions of engi
by dluan 1y ago
There was a time when the Hacker part of Hacker News meant something. But now I look around and see faces like Shaun Maguire's, Dario Amodei's, millions of engineering man hours being poured into the "Salesforce for Killing People". What are we even doing here.
- labster 1y agoWe are getting back to the original meaning of hacker from a millennium ago, one who chops, cuts, and hews apart, especially hacking apart our fellow man.
- bb88 1y agoIt's interesting that money has no morals, it's just money. The reality is that the more money you have, the more freedom you have too. The easier it is to pay off officials. The easier it is to escape juris diction. The easier it is to live the way you want, laws be damned.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- busterarm 1y agoOh puh-lease. The origins of the term hacker wrt computers is meant to mean somebody reckless without self-discipline. One of the earliest uses of it in print was to describe folks working in MIT's AI lab in the mid-70s. People working in a field on the fringes of respectability. That was just as accurate a description back in that day as it was of the 80s-00s "hackers" that people associate with counter-culturalism and building cool shit. I remember what technologists were like in the 90s. The same amount of effort that went into building the world wide web went into insane shit like cryogenics. Y'all complain about the fringe ideologies of people like Musk and Thiel, but that's exactly who we're talking about when we're talking about old school hackers. That and a half dozen other fringe personalities with fringe ideologies. If we were to talk about people working at the frindges of respectability, "Salesforce for Killing People" is exactly the kind of company that they would work for. Heck, back in those early decades your options were also research labs or defense industry... We were never all one team of good guys with good intentions. I mean, a sizeable percentage of people in our industry have at some point worked for Meta...
- barkingcat 1y agoyou missed the boat by about 10 years.
- UncleMeat 1y agoa16z hired Daniel Penny, a man whose key qualification was killing somebody on the subway. The system is well and truly lost.
- throwaway250624 1y ago[flagged]
- UncleMeat 1y agoEven if somehow you think that the killing was a sad but justified thing (I obviously don't), it is still an absolutely fucking insane reason to hire him to a VC firm.