the_cyber_pass's comments

the_cyber_pass | 8 years ago | on: An Anarchist Critique of Democracy (2005)

My argument was that you said police were invented largely as a force in the 19th century for "largely questionable purposes such as racism and anti-unionism." I brought up a pretty clear example of a police force existing in the time of Augustus which had no ties at all to the modern climate. I'm not arguing for or against anarchism. I am arguing for historical accuracy. You can define it as taking the authorities shit as much as you want, but I'm sure I could hear plenty of reasonable counter arguments from state loving people as well about how enforcement of the rule of law provides a stable framework for settling legal disputes and references to Hobbes.

the_cyber_pass | 8 years ago | on: An Anarchist Critique of Democracy (2005)

Just to comment on this. A common google search would have pointed out that your ideas about local police forces are largely incorrect. Police have been a thing for much longer. The big thing that happened in more recent history (Meaning 1700s) is separating them from the private market, the military or unregulated local mobs. You can trace the enforcers of civil law through force all the way back to ancient Babylon because civil unrest is bad for raising taxes. You could argue this were not police but rather various forms of 'authority,' but it's dishonest to say that they were not acting like police.

Easy example of this would be Cohortes Urbanae in ancient Rome which was specifically formed because the Praetorian Guard was too corrupt even by Roman standards at the time and mobs, gangs and 'random' violence were common.

the_cyber_pass | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: How did you get started in Network Security/Penetration Testing?

Coming from someone who holds your company in high regard and loved your companies work in the CGC I really have to disagree. You can be neither a script kiddie or a non-technical manager and still have webdev shops view you with suspicion for much the same reason node shops might see someone who has a lot of Java on their resume as someone who may not be a good fit because of 'technical baggage.' We can say that someone just needs to 'git gud' but I do think it's important to acknowledge that many times their are biases that get placed which are not always 100% rational.

Edit: Also I do believe your claim about all 30 of your engineers being able to find work elsewhere. You have to admit the average employee you have probably isn't reflective of anywhere near the average of the industry or even the enthusiast community.

the_cyber_pass | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: How did you get started in Network Security/Penetration Testing?

As someone who has tried a couple times to jump the other way I can attest to this. Completely stonewalled for full stack developer positions.

I have found exploits by knowing the quirks of all sorts of libraries and I have to be able to understand how things work on a deep level. But because a lot of the job is tracing other peoples work and finding gaps in their logic, you don't have as much 'dev' time in the traditional sense. Most of your coding turns into ways to prep your exploit. Your life gets wrapped up chasing obscure malloc bugs or strange chrome behavior rather than contributing in normal developer ways and companies don't recognize this as transferable. I'm only a little bit bitter about it, but I love my work. I just hope the pay stays solid and I don't end up in a dead end job later in life.

Also it's really hard to be good in this industry. It is almost entirely driven by the top 1% of people and as someone who is not in that demographic it feels like a constant struggle to keep up.

the_cyber_pass | 8 years ago | on: API to detect toxic comments

Although on a technical level I think it could prove an interesting challenge, I worry about it's implications on speech across the web. Besides potential fears about the creators bias training it, all I think this will do is create clever slang to get around the filter. There was a joke on 4chan a long time ago about starting to use the names of major companies as racial slurs because it would be harder to filter and I could easily see something like that happening here.

the_cyber_pass | 8 years ago | on: Richard Stallman Explains [video]

I see someone hasn't had GPL conflicts in their code base before. There is a reason companies specifically look for them and it's because the FSF and it's communities will make your life hell.

the_cyber_pass | 8 years ago | on: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

I appreciate that, but I don't think raising up some random guy on reddit is a valid way of drawing a conclusion.

Person A thinks X.

Person B who belongs a group the blue tribe hates also thinks X.

Therefore person A is a bad person because they agree with person B about X.

We have failed to prove that the group person B belongs to is actually bad and not just an exercise in signaling and we are also trying to smear person A by saying they agree with some other completely unrelated person who may belong to a distasteful group. Additionally X can still be correct and both people can be distasteful, but it wont change the fact that X is correct.

Sorry if I am not being clear, it's been a long day.

the_cyber_pass | 8 years ago | on: There is no such thing as EQ (2016)

I think pop media needed a phrase to describe someone who was obviously smart but had a lot of trouble interacting with others. I am sure we all have run into Bob or Alice the cave troll who for lack of a better word can't pick up on any of the needs of other people no matter how hard they try. Pop media isn't going to go for words with academic rigor. They just know IQ = Smart and Bob is obviously smart, but Bob is also an idiot when it comes to reading social situations so Bob is also an idiot. People realize that Bob can't both be smart and an idiot at the same time so society created a way of differentiating that Bob is both an idiot and genius at different things aspects of life.

the_cyber_pass | 8 years ago | on: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

If you are talking about IQ the data would support you, the problem comes when you look at standard deviation and we see men have a slightly higher standard deviation which leads to the extremes on both sides being overwhelmingly male. It's not something we need to worry about much in day to day interactions because you wont notice it but in hyper selective environments it might become an something people notice.
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