duncan_bayne (u/duncan_bayne)

duncan_bayne commented on Spy agency ducks questions about 'back doors' in tech products reuters.com/article/us-us... · Posted by u/oblib

pulse7 · 5 years ago

"The tactics drew widespread attention starting in 2013, when Snowden leaked documents referencing these practices."

So this is what Snowden has done: he "drew widespread attention to these tactics". Before Snowden they would call you "paranoid" if you would allow yourself to mention it. Today they can not call you paranoid anymore.

And yes, it has hurt US industry reputation. Many don't trust Intel processors and Cisco routers anymore (among other products). They actually destroyed computers and internet as we knew them in the 1990'ies. It is not fun anymore to own a computer or a phone if you know that NSA can get access to it anytime they want... and you will never know if they accessed it...

duncan_bayne · 5 years ago

> Many don't trust Intel processors and Cisco routers anymore

In fairness, my lack of trust for Cisco products pre-dated the Snowden revelations, and were based on the products themselves.

Nothing I've seen since has caused me to change my opinion.

https://hub.packtpub.com/cisco-merely-blacklisted-a-curl-ins...

duncan_bayne commented on Gitlab compensation calculator is not open to everyone anymore gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www... · Posted by u/why-not

goatinaboat · 5 years ago

Caveats: this is in Australia, and I believe we've had legal advice a few times encouraging us to stop, because it could expose us to litigation

The situation in the EU is the exact opposite. As any company can be compelled to disclose electronic records, and all recruitment is done that way now, good companies get ahead of GDPR requests by proactively providing feedback.

Source: recent experience on both sides of the table. Location: South Wales.

duncan_bayne · 5 years ago

The EU situation sounds much better. To be super clear, we ignored the legal advice, because we considered that it was much fairer to provide the best feedback possible to clients who asked.

duncan_bayne commented on Gitlab compensation calculator is not open to everyone anymore gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www... · Posted by u/why-not

PopeDotNinja · 5 years ago

I have a candidate feedback once, and they showed up at our office drunk & demanding a second chance. I gave a lot less feedback after that.

duncan_bayne · 5 years ago

Wow, okay, never experienced that myself.

OTOH, sounds like you made the right call on hiring :)

duncan_bayne commented on Pons – Pre-hospital diagnostics for Brain and Spine injuries ponstech.co... · Posted by u/bead

unsrsly · 5 years ago

How can you identify brain trauma with ultrasound? The ultrasound waves cannot pass through the skull.

duncan_bayne · 5 years ago

> How can you identify brain trauma with ultrasound?

Well, put enough energy through the ultrasound transducer and you can guarantee there's brain trauma present.

Not sure that's how you meant it, though ;)

duncan_bayne commented on Gitlab compensation calculator is not open to everyone anymore gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www... · Posted by u/why-not

karterk · 5 years ago

"Cost of living" is not that straightforward to compute. In many Asian cities, the greatest cost is rent/mortgage. The cities are typically expensive and overcrowded because suburbs have no good schools and other amenities. However, most of these open salary calculators take raw purchasing power (like cost of commodity) to arrive at a rate.

duncan_bayne · 5 years ago

Not just Asian! I live in Melbourne, Victoria. Until we had three children and sent them to a private school, rent and later mortgage was our largest cost by a long margin.

duncan_bayne commented on Gitlab compensation calculator is not open to everyone anymore gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www... · Posted by u/why-not

temp667 · 5 years ago

Same applies to giving candidates you don't hire feedback. It's 100% a disaster. Most folks trying that learn pretty quickly!

duncan_bayne · 5 years ago

I strongly disagree. My experience with that has been positive, _especially_ when candidates request detailed feedback and I provide it.

Caveats: this is in Australia, and I believe we've had legal advice a few times encouraging us to stop, because it could expose us to litigation.

duncan_bayne commented on Delete Facebook and You'll Lose All Oculus Games for Good gamespot.com/articles/del... · Posted by u/AdmiralAsshat

1propionyl · 5 years ago

No, not particularly.

I know some principled, driven, and wonderful people who work for Facebook.

While I despise Facebook as a company, that doesn't reflect negatively on said people, at least insofar as they do not work on the kinds of things that I dislike Facebook for.

I would however hold them to account and openly criticize them if they did start working on such things. And I can and do criticize them when they spin apologia for Facebook as a company.

duncan_bayne · 5 years ago

> at least insofar as they do not work on the kinds of things that I dislike Facebook for.

Why do you draw that distinction? Do you believe it's possible to work for Facebook without at least indirectly benefiting the company as a whole?

duncan_bayne commented on Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests livescience.com/aliens-sp... · Posted by u/monalisauzi

natechols · 5 years ago

17th century American settlers were fleeing an environment where the child mortality rate was at least 1/3rd even for the upper classes, nearly all land and wealth was controlled by inbred gangsters, and the penalties for petty theft or incorrect religious worship included public hanging. From that perspective, the risks associated with colonization may have seemed much more attractive than the best-case scenario of spending several more decades of poverty in the same village. At least once you were in America, voting with your feet and moving west was always an option, something that was already recognized by 19th-century European socialists as a unique factor in the development of the US economy.

Of course I'm also assuming that the majority of the colonists were not only dirt poor, but also ignorant and uneducated and shamelessly lied to by the promoters of colonization.

duncan_bayne · 5 years ago

And the early colonies had their problems too. IIRC at least one colony enacted capital punishment for anyone caught abandoning the colony to join the native American tribes.

duncan_bayne commented on I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API twitter.com/rashiq/status... · Posted by u/swyx

realityking · 5 years ago

Imagine McDonalds had invented AWS and called it McCloud.

duncan_bayne · 5 years ago

It's no crazier than an online bookstore doing it :)

duncan_bayne commented on The persistence of COBOL: why a 60-year old language is still in demand idgconnect.com/article/35... · Posted by u/rbanffy

forinti · 5 years ago

These two extremes I can't understand: people who never want to learn anything and people who seem to only want to use each framework once.

duncan_bayne · 5 years ago

I think both are an example of an aversion to deep learning.