anarchodev's comments

anarchodev | 6 years ago | on: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

Could be, where you're from. In the US you may need to speak to minorities, people of color, people in the LGBTQ+ communities, or Jewish Americans. Or anyone from a certain number of cities where there has been prominent neo-nazi activity, like Charlottesville or Portland.

anarchodev | 6 years ago | on: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

I'm aware of center-right platforms distinct from nazism, a good bit of our research involves tracking how these various groups cohabitate right-wing spaces (or don't). In this thread I'm referring to neo-nazis in the US -- and I haven't mentioned any of these adjacent issues you bring up.

Sometimes it's helpful to take a cursory look at resources like wikipedia for things like this. There are also numerous independent research groups which put together dossiers so you can be informed about any of this activity in your area.

anarchodev | 6 years ago | on: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

Of course, this is what you thought all along. And it's absolutely not true in the US or Canada. But even in places where there isn't an active sect of actual neo-nazis, there is usually a smattering of violent white supremacist organizations who will work with them.

What I suspect you meant is that, for you, it's not really a problem.

anarchodev | 6 years ago | on: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

So in your best-case scenario, all we have to do is wait for the current nazis (many of whom are mid-20's or 30's) to pass away? And I guess until then, just deal with the pain and loss they create? I hope you can understand why that doesn't appeal to me.

To say nothing of the reality of the situation, which is that they're not dying out -- they're actively recruiting and growing their ranks.

anarchodev | 6 years ago | on: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

That's correct. Simply disagreeing with Nazis is ineffectual and is very common among those with sympathies toward them as a shield from criticism. I'd prefer to work with people who are actively opposed to them. Sorry if that wasn't clear somehow.

anarchodev | 6 years ago | on: Privacy-focused messenger Signal is ready to go mainstream and take on WhatsApp

You could register it with a voip number. This doesn't entirely mitigate the problem, but at least you'd have more digital control over what happens to that number (and can pretty much be sure you won't lose it unless you want to).

If you already have it registered to a "real" number on your cell phone, there are processes for porting that number to google voice.

anarchodev | 6 years ago | on: On Resigning from Google

It's really not. This decision is a very personal one unique to each employee. Internal activism can be very effective especially if done in a way that gets more attention among existing employees. On the other hand, this is extremely risky to their employment (and in America that means their housing and healthcare) and on top of that it's a ton of work.

It's great when someone who quits has the resources to also try to bring some attention to the reasons why.

anarchodev | 6 years ago | on: Angular 9.0

yeah I think what people are getting at here is that there's often a large investment to figure out how to use Angular2+ correctly (and even a lot of the concepts from Angular2 have been improved upon with new features in versions 6-8). A lot of times it's not "bugs" but if you're not in a place where you can spend 8 hours a day learning the framework in addition to building your app, you're going to have to choose one or the other -- and that's where frustrations set in. I'm gonna choose "build my app" every time.

I don't think Angular is a bad choice across the board, but you need to weigh this heavily when deciding to use it.

anarchodev | 6 years ago | on: What to know before you buy or install an Amazon Ring camera

The article asserts that if you upload video from Ring devices, it will be seen by amazon employees. This has been shown to be true. Amazon employees are almost all strangers to me. What's the issue with the statement?

"Do you want a few amazon employees being able to learn your routines by watching you leave and return to your house every day?" might be more technically expressive but no more accurate and certainly not any more reassuring or comfortable to me.

The part about cops and hackers are separate issues (and lead to more convincing arguments against cops and cloud services more generally) but this seems like an entirely fair assessment.

anarchodev | 6 years ago | on: Hard negotiations: why a softer approach yields better outcomes

Your bargaining position is much better once they've already decided they want to hire you. Talking about salary first lets the company cheap out and only spend that effort on people they are reasonably sure won't ask for what they're worth.

This is why so many places have a "Salary Expectations" box or something similar on their interest form. Some will even try to brow beat you into saying a number. Never do this until they've named a number first. This puts pressure on them to offer something reasonable right off the bat, instead of having the pressure on you to not ask too high.

anarchodev | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

I know you're getting a ton of responses, but if you do see this, look up Food Wishes on youtube. Would not be an exaggeration to say it has changed my life. 5-10m videos focused on one dish, usually including quite a bit of context and instruction aimed at beginners.

Cook with stuff you like! That way even if you screw it up you're left with stuff you mostly don't mind. Can't count the number of times I've screwed up meat sauce, and ended up eating a pound of meaty-tomato slop that tasted just fine albeit wasn't recognizable as any type of dish.

Also go easy on yourself. Recognize that this is a whole skill set that people spend their whole lives cultivating (just like software). You'll start to develop an intuition.

Make sure you have the right equipment you need too. I probably spent two years thinking I couldn't make eggs, turns out my pan was warped.

anarchodev | 6 years ago | on: Hard negotiations: why a softer approach yields better outcomes

In being empathetic to their needs, make sure you're also being "empathetic" to your own needs. This means recognizing that their "need" to get their development work done without spending too much money on you is directly opposed to your need to have healthcare and money for rent, food, etc.

Obviously neither of these needs can be successfully ignored, but thinking of it this way helps me mitigate the guilt that comes with asking for more, without engaging the "winning" rhetoric even subconsciously.

anarchodev | 6 years ago | on: Hard negotiations: why a softer approach yields better outcomes

I'm sure this is true, but most companies don't want this either. They lose money and waste time when this happens -- if they waited until the end to discuss salary (like they should be).

Some companies will try to feel you out for salary right off the bat in order to "weed out" anyone who would ask for too much money, and you need to always resist this.

anarchodev | 6 years ago | on: Mozilla Wants Young People to Consider ‘Ethical Issues’ Before Taking Tech Jobs

I'm not sure I have the knowledge base to fully answer your question but one thing to consider is that no matter where you work, if you dig deep enough you'll probably find something unethical (and some might say if you don't find anything, you're not really looking). I mean under capitalism we're all working for just enough to survive and maybe retire on while our bosses take home the fruits of our labor, so we can start from there and conclude there's really no fully ethical job.

What's most important is finding out the core business models your company is aligned with, and who they work for. For example, if you thought Google was a fundamentally evil company (I'm not saying you or I think that, just an example) then by working on Angular you'd be helping to legitimize Google as a business that does a lot of good things. This will ultimately make it much harder to build a popular movement around stopping the evil Google.

You can see this play out in real time right now as Palantir and ICE try to rebrand as companies/agencies that sell/use tools which combat child trafficking. This may be true, but they also terrorize immigrant communities and must be stopped.

anarchodev | 6 years ago | on: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

What is the mis-selling exactly? Doesn't seem to me that they're saying using their VPN will make you impenetrable to dedicated actors with nation-state resources. VPNs do help maintain one small level of privacy (namely from your ISP), and if you're using one it's a good bet you'll be interested in other privacy concerns too.

There are a lot of VPNs with really bogus claims on their websites but I didn't notice anything appalling about this.

page 1