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I suspect that the NSA engineers have their own ecosystem where they are made to feel how important preventing terrorism is. I also suspect that most of the pe

I suspect that the NSA engineers have their own ecosystem where they are made to feel how important preventing terrorism is. I also suspect that most of the people in the HN crowd feel that working for such govt organizations is not exciting. These guys are not working with the latest and greatest that we see every day on HN. Hearing how they work at GCHQ, they can't have a cell phone or just google for a quick fix on Stackoverflow, having to rely on language manuals instead. So we each go our different ways and wonder about the other.

DanBC 13y ago
> I also suspect that most of the people in the HN crowd feel that working for such govt organizations is not exciting. These guys are not working with the latest and greatest that we see every day on HN. NSA and GCHQ probably have better quantum computing than D-Wave. Who, apart from Google and Lockheed have anything similar? They have big computers, big networks, big databases, big everything. GCHQ is said to have a 3 day cache of all content transiting the UK. That's a lot of storage, but it's also interesting data mining. > Hearing how they work at GCHQ, they can't have a cell phone or just google for a quick fix on Stackoverflow, having to rely on language manuals instead. Stack overflow is great. But I imagine that working with people who know in depth about the language they're using is also great. EDIT: I doubt "preventing terrorism" is part of the day to day moral justification that people use. "Providing good quality intelligence" sounds like a better fit.