> Reuters noted that the Deputy Attorney General’s office is in charge of investigations into various crimes, "including hacking and other malicious cyber activity."
Assuming this is true, wouldn't a history of hacking activity actually be an upside? I don't like Musk but I'm not a fan of the negative spin. Hell, when I was 15 I'm sure some things I did could now be charged as "hacking" or "cyberterrorism" or something much harsher than the actual reality under today's laws.
edit after reading further along:
> Among them was Jonathan Rusch, a 25-year DOJ veteran prosecutor now in academia, who told Reuters that Stanley's apparent history of disclosing illegally acquired data should have prompted "serious concerns."
Is this guy a veteran who prosecutes, a guy who prosecutes veterans, or something else? It feels even weirder to spin the Doge employees as inexperienced kids (which they may be) but then to call a 25 year old critic a veteran prosecutor.
And if the current laws prevent you from getting a security clearance, then that is what it is. Sure the laws can be changed, but in this context it’s probably better to exclude some “reformed” people than letting “criminals” through.
> we're very happy with international engineers but if you come to me asking for a US engineer comp, it takes away the primary reason why we'd consider international in the first place
So engineers outside the US are fine if you can get them at a steep discount compared to their American counterparts? This sounded quite appealing until this line. Now I feel like the company is overly stingy. In the future you may want to leave this line out and simply tailor offers to the candidates when the time comes.
meh. it's just the reality and the last time i posted (and hired a few from HN post), it was a recurring thing. we actually pay above market locally but when someone in Brazil is demanding $200k/year USD to start... it unfortunately turns into a non-starter.
sorry it's not the same work and most of the time no where close to same effort. there are timezone, culture, language, and many other differences that have to be bridged so when I can hire an engineer in the US for $200k and an international engineer for $200k (with all of the differences), the reality is, i'm going to hire a US engineer doing the "same work".
My word of (unsolicited) advice: think about how you come across in some of these statements and responses. There are companies like GitLab which geoarbitrage and scale the pay based on location. It is fine to do but they don't approach it in an antagonistic manner. It is neutral and pay is adjusted to cost of living. That is that.
When I read the original post and the responses, why would I even bother applying if outside the US when I will clearly be treated like a second class citizen from the start?
Maybe I'm doing more harm than good here if you end up hiding your true beliefs in future job postings. Maybe only target US devs if there is such a bias already.
One last thing to consider, lets say you can pay $150-200k USD (arbitrary number). You would likely have trouble finding talent in US tech hubs like SF, but you open yourself to near top of the market in places in Romania and Bulgaria. One competent international hire can (and will likely) be cheaper multiple mediocre local hires. Except now, the way that you present yourself will certainly scare away these competent international engineers who likely have experience interfacing with colleagues in the US to expect such compensation.
edit: To last last part, basically you are scaring away international talent, leaving subpar international candidates to apply, which then goes on to reinforce you preexisting notions. Then you trap yourself in a positive feedback loop leaving you with a limited view of the world.
Easy. When it is you or your allies committing an act, it is war and collateral damage. When it is someone else, it is terrorism.
It is often a difficult topic to discuss because both sides tend to be in the wrong. It ends up being asymmetrical warfare. The stronger side accuses the weaker of hiding behind civilians while the weaker side accuses the stronger of human rights violations.
As sad as this case is, I find it pretty interesting since it is clearly an extrajudicial act of violence carried out in a foreign land. The west will likely celebrate this, but I personally find this much worse than the Indian assassination that took place in Canada "recently" and didn't have significant collateral damage, yet the west was up in arms about.
Is the target the relevant piece or is it actual impact? If you have a single military target who is known to use X brand phone, is it war to kill 5,000 people to get this one target? Is it not instilling terror on the people who use those devices?
It is this rationalization that enables powers to bomb civilians and ethnic groups under the guise of targeting military targets who stand no chance if they segregate themselves from the populace due to the power dynamics. And then the cycle only continues as each side adds fuel to the fire.
The actually impact of every war since (a very long time) are that more civilians are killed and harmed than military personal. Looking at the statistics produced by the US military on the iraq war, civilian deaths was 3x of enemy combatants. UN has estimated that globally, modern wars has an 10:1 ration of civilian deaths to military combatants.
Looking at it from that perspective there is no line between war and terrorism. All wars are terrorism.
> targeting military targets who stand no chance if they segregate themselves from the populace due to the power dynamics
This is flawed rational. If you can't find any parking lot you keep driving, it doesn't allow you to double park and block someone else's car. If you are too weak to maintain your posture at war you shouldn't fight it on the backs of civilians. Your inability to execute your wishes legitimately doesn't provide you with any right to act illegitimately and inflict the cost and pain on others.
> If you can't find any parking lot you keep driving, it doesn't allow you to double park and block someone else's car. If you are too weak to maintain your posture at war you should't fight it on the backs of civilians.
That cuts both ways. Just like hamas should not hide amongst civilians, if Israel is too weak to go into Gaza to arrest hamas, it has no excuse to act illegitimately and bomb civilians.
It's terrible, heart breaking. But that's the outcome of very slow army attacks, with evacuations, humanitarian aid and efforts to minimize civilians casualties, not maximizing it.
The army could have burn down the entire strip from the air and leave no person or stone there, in five minutes. That's what I meant by burning down the entire strip. If Hamas had the power to do the same to Israel they would gladly do so, as is evident from the way they use their power and resources.
Saying that it's 'cutting both ways' is evil statement. One side gladly ignores the lives and suffering of it's own people, while the other pay with the lives of soldiers in an effort to minimize the death toll of the same people.
Try a different approach than engaging in war/apartheid. The practice of the IDF "mowing the grass" by harming civilians has been long established and commented on. Certain Israeli politicians also empowered Hamas, in order to divide and discredit the Palestinians, so that they would not be in a suitable position to negotiate an end to the conflict. Practices like that do not produce peace. I suggest Israel do its best to look at its role in this conflict (and not just Hamas's) and then act in good faith to bring about peace, so that there are no more terrorist attacks like Oct. 7.
Oct 7 happened and you're suggesting a different approach than a war, i.e. diplomatic solutions? That's too naive—not even the most pacifist country would do that.
And let's not pretend that no diplomatic solutions have been proposed, all of which were rejected. They will only accept it if they own every inch of the land and Israel is obliterated (their own word).
> Oct 7 happened and you're suggesting a different approach than a war, i.e. diplomatic solutions? That's too naive
The actions that led up to Oct. 7 long predate it. The seeds of this have been sown every year that the IDF "mowed the grass" and every time they tried to disrupt the PLO from negotiating a peace. Remember, an Israeli prime minister was assassinated for seeking and negotiating peace- not by the Palestinians but by a radical Israeli, whose politics are aligned with the current prime minister. This current prime minister has used his long time in office to disrupt and prevent any peace from occurring.
The disappointing logic there is the idea that historical conflict of any kind, anywhere on Earth, could possibly "seed" an atrocity like Oct 7. The sheer ferocity, scale and cruelty of 3,000 terrorists storming across the border to gleefully slaughter and capture civilians young and old, is somehow reduced to "oh well, they had it coming"... "oh well, the seeds were sown"?
In my view, that is a very dark and troubling position. I will never in my lifetime form the view that Oct 7 was anything other than crossing all lines. It was end-game stuff. Standing alone in measures of evil, it therefore needs dealing with on those terms. Civilised humanity should be uniting against that senseless barbarism including renewed focus on the deeper causes and future remedies for fanatical violent groups.
This may be why many of are divided: Those who believe Oct7 crossed all lines; and those who believe Oct7 was horrific but within "resistance" seed-sowing territory. We all want peace, but it amazes me the latter has any traction at all.
> The disappointing logic there is the idea that historical conflict of any kind, anywhere on Earth, could possibly "seed" an atrocity like Oct 7
If you don't recognize causes, then you will be baffled by effects. It has been clear to observers of the Middle East that the status quo that Netanyahu has created was violent and untenable. It gave the appearance of peace only because most people remained ignorant of the underlying brutality of the situation. If you think Oct. 7 was frightening, what do you think about the generations of children that have been killed and maimed by IDF soldiers and settlers? The terrorist invasion of Oct. 7 was terrible and unacceptable, but that does not make what Israel did before or after ok. The fact that you cannot recognize that Israel has also crossed all lines, means that you are incapable of being a part of the solution.
Israel has done many terrible things, no more than any other country who has engaged in war, nothing like crossing all lines, but pain was inflicted on innocent people, for sure. So what? October 7th isn't an inevitable or just counteraction. Jews have been mascaraed repeatedly for hundreds of years, including by Palestinians and other Arabs. Can you give an example where Jews retaliated by mass raping, butchering and burning alive their oppressors?
What you referring to are war crimes. Sadly this is part of most/all wars. Not justifying or trying to reduce the evilness of the actions, but this is something very different from October 7th or any other pogrom.
One are relatively small scale horrible events within an active full scale war, the other are sadistic attacks aimed at civilians, by crowd that is made of at least half civilians, outside of active war. One is a massacre, the other is a prolonged violence torture and mass raping.
I don't think Israelis are saints, and Israel could and should have acted better in many cases, both for moral reasons and for its own good. I believe a two states solution is the only just and sustainable option, and Israel's share in avoiding it is a terrible mistake. But October 7th wasn't action of people who see the two states solution as a desired state or a viable compromise.
> Not justifying or trying to reduce the evilness of the actions, but this is something very different from October 7th or any other pogrom.
Trying to treat the terrorist attack on Oct. 7 as unprecedented and unique is not only deeply ignorant but incredibly dangerous. It allows you to suspend all normal considerations of decency, which we have seen in the words of Israelis leaders (calling all Palestinians "human animals" and terrorists) and the actions of the IDF (war crimes, murdering civilians, throwing people off buildings, torturing, etc).
Please stop with your apologies for genocide and war crimes. Even Israeli scholars and Holocaust survivors recognize that what Israel is doing now is deeply wrong. Stop
I wish that October 7th was unprecedented. It is not the first pogrom Jews suffered. I'm not aware of a case in the history where Jews behaved like that. If it did occur,it is unexcusable, just like October 7th.
Let's put it in clear terms. I'm an Israeli, humanist and supports a two states solution.
You, on the other side, are terror justifying and, I guess, antisemite.
People usually use the word 'evil' to say something is not just bad, but to imply that there is a spiritual or supernatural significance to it. I understand that thinking in those terms can make it easier to deal with suffering, but you cannot know those things. I am not saying you should not keep searching for meaning (nor find strength in the belief in a kind and loving god if you do), but you should also remember that you cannot know god, nor know the mind of god, and believing that you do is fooling yourself- especially when it comes to discounting others pain in comparison to your own
That was not a conflict within a state. No one expected the US military to attack ISIS members within the US- that is clearly a police and judicial matter (and was thankfully treated as such).
Sorry but the failure of the state to contain the terrorist organization within it does not mean Israel should be expected to sit there and be attacked. Any country, when its citizens are attacked, have a right and a duty to respond.
Or maybe you are confused and think some how Israel has security control within Lebanon? Which is clearly not true.
That was a Marine barracks that was part of a "military peacekeeping operation". Granted, 128 non-military Americans were injured, but all of the dead people were military. The U.S. politicians labelled it terrorism.
>On November 5, 2009, a mass shooting took place at Fort Hood (now Fort Cavazos), near Killeen, Texas.[1] Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others.[2][3] It was the deadliest mass shooting on an American military base and the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since the September 11 attacks until it was surpassed by the San Bernardino attack in 2015.[4]
Overall I agree. However, the difficulty that I see is when someone attacks a, sometimes nominally, military target in a situation or method where it will unreasonably injure or kill civilians. Or even when the military target is mostly an excuse to target civilians.
I think it can also get less clear when the target is an enemy's infrastructure, industry, or political infrastructure.
If an army unreasonably kills or injure civilians it will most probably be considered a war crime. Committing war crime is not necessarily better than being a terrorist, but it's different.
Thanks. I am usually not super pedantic but I've noticed some people using "mt" for meters recently. I immediately fall into confusion when the wrong symbols are used. Then go down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out if it is a cultural or regional thing.
People have used all sorts of abbreviations for the SI prefixes and SI units for as long as I can remember. I want to ask—are people not taught this in school? I had multiple introductions and revisions of the SI units and SI prefixes in secondary school, pre-university, and university, and every time, a wrong prefix or a wrong symbol was penalised by half a mark per question. I had classmates who mixed them up regularly and lost something like seven marks each time. They learnt very quickly not to, as those seven marks could make one or two grades' difference.
As someone who champions sole use of the SI units, this annoys me to no end.
I've seen things like 'kgs', 'gm', 'gms', 'mtr', 'mt', 'K' instead of 'k' (note capitals) for 'kilo-', mixing 'm' and 'M' (which are supposed to mean 'milli-' and 'mega-' respectively), usage of 'u' instead of 'μ' for 'micro-' (the one exception I will concede is 'mc' in the medical field, because people apparently confused 'μ' and 'm' which results in a 1000× over/underdose), and don't bother with the degree symbol (Alt+numpad 0176 on Windows, Option-Shift-8 on macOS) for °C, or use °K for kelvins (there is no degree, as it is an absolute scale and not relative to anything else, unlike the Celsius/centigrade and Fahrenheit scales), and so many other typographical errors.
I love this, thanks so much for writing it! I'm writing a blog post on metrication and this will be a super-useful resource for the sort of pedantry I intend to engage in.
Then see my point about the UK/metric/Imperial. ;-)
Incidentally, in that link there's a very common example of bad usage namely the volt/voltage. 120V is shown as bad usage and 120 V good. One sees the former usage on machines, appliances, in printed material etc. so often that it's almost a de facto standard.
I'm inconsistent in my use too, one time I'll include the space at other times not.
I agree about standardization, but I think this framing comes off as lacking empathy. Plenty of folks either
- Avoided the topic in school or put all their effort into other subjects
- Didn’t learn this in school—there are a wide variety of education systems across all the decades and distances that folks on this site may have grown up in
- Learned this in school, but a lifetime ago, and haven’t had a reason to revisit it. At a certain distance, your life experience and work experience massively overshadow what you learned in school.
Forgive the inference, but based on your recall of specific grading policies I would guess that your time in school is still near to you, or at least very important. It’s not that way for everyone.
(I am of course doggedly accurate with my unit abbreviations.)
"People have used all sorts of abbreviations for the SI prefixes and SI units for as long as I can remember."
In the US that is, not in metric counties that use SI by default.
For those in the US (and to a lesser extent the UK) there are multiple metric systems. The other notable system that's still in use is the cgs (centimetre–gram–second) system.
'cgs units' are still used in some areas notably physics as they can make calculations easier, there they're called Gaussian-cgs units.
Incidentally, often, as here, 'cgs' is in lowercase to reflect the case of the units' abbreviations. That said, the uppercase abbreviation is also often used. For instance, as I typed this my browser kept correcting the lowercase to 'CGS'.
> In the US that is, not in metric counties that use the SI system by default.
India which metricated in the late 1950s is still a big (ab)user of poor SI symbolism. A lot of the 'cms', 'gms', 'cc', 'kgs', etc come from Indian writers and Indian publications (case in point: the article in this thread).
> The other notable system that's still in use is the cgs (centimetre–gram–second) system.
> 'cgs units' are still used in some areas notably physics as they can make calculations easier, there they're called Gaussian-cgs units.
I'm not sure they're used all that much—I was under the impression most CGS units fell out of favour as MKS and eventually SI took over. I was an RA at my physics department for a while and we used SI as much as we could. Some specialisations use a certain form of natural units (like geometrised units in general relativity), but by and large SI dominated.
Right, there are offenders everywhere but the chief offender is the US by far (many don't have a clue about SI let alone metric, ask an American what 20°C is in Fahrenheit and they've no idea).
The UK is also troublesome in that whilst supposedly a metric country Imperial is still commonplace. For example, there's widespread use of antiquated units like the 'stone' (14 pounds)†, even BBC medical programs still regularly use the term.
Re Gaussian/cgs, in physics it's still widely used especially in field theory/Maxwell, SR (Special Relatively), etc. because in charge calculations and such involving permeability, permittivity, speed of light certain terms can be restated as 1 instead of their actual SI values.
Personally, I understand why this is done but from my perspective it's confusing if not misleading for reasons well outside this discussion (but who am I to argue with those more learned than me?). This Wiki provides justification of sorts (see Unit of charge): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_units.
† In Australia where I am, only people of my generation who've been around for decades would even know what a 'stone' was. Anyone born after say the mid 1970s would likely think you're talking about a rock. Trouble is, we see BBC/UK programs here. Fact is the UK is oblivious to the problem or it'd first correct its exports.
Why would your average American need to know what 20°C is in Fahrenheit? Very few people use Celsius here. All our appliances use Fahrenheit, weather reports use Fahrenheit, our recipes use Fahrenheit, and for science and physics we use Kelvin.
Honorable mention for "cc", which stands for "cubic centimeter" which is exactly equal to 1 ml. I can't find any logic to explain why cc is used in some contexts and ml in others.
The problem is old habits die hard and to be (or appear) to be consistent then an official designation can be unwieldy, as here.
I simply cannot remember when I last saw cm³ but cc and ml are everywhere including on commercial chemical reagent bottles etc.
The same nomenclature problem is all over chemistry too, the preferred IUPAC name for say isopropyl alcohol is propan-2-ol, and the preferred name for acetone is propan-2-one (systematic 2-Propanone). I can't say I've ever heard anyone ask me to pass them the bottle of propan-2-one, it's just not done (not in my world anyway).
If there's a choice between an awkward or simpler term then the simpler one wins out every time.
Looking back, is there anything that you would have done differently? I find that half or more of the rewrites that I have dealt with have been driven by all the wrong motivations. You get inevitable turnover and at some point people dislike code that they didn't write themselves and push for a rewrite, maybe changing the stack to something trendy, justifying it with thin arguments. Once the rewrite starts the company ends up treading water for years while incurring a ton of costs. For me, I think only 1 rewrite that I was part of was a good decision in my 15 years in tech. If I could go back in time, I think I would kill all rewrite discussions the moment that someone first whispers the idea.
How did you guys enjoy switching to Rust? I assume the safety and performance benefits for the trading system are a huge plus (didn't Kraken trading go down for an entire week a few years ago?). Did you also rewrite the webapp backend in Rust as well? How has staffing and budgeting been affected? I would assume that the supply of Rust developers is much lower unless you train them in house. Rust sounds fun, but I can't imagine trying to justify a rewrite of a legacy system, a major tech stack change, and training/building a new team all at the same time.
Sorry for the onslaught on questions. The "rewrite it in rust" fever has spread to my work and I'm fighting myself on how to respond.
With hindsight, considering the cards we were dealt, there's not much I would have done differently. If I had known better before, I would have ensured stronger buy-in because after a while our internal stakeholders were often pushing back on the effort, and that led to concessions where throw away code in the legacy systems was built even for weak business outcomes.
Overall I share your concerns. Having the right reasons to rewrite is key. I believe this blog[1] about software as theory building does a great job at describing the challenge with software gardening, and the times where a rewrite is the solution are few. Even then, it's critical to handle the rewrite in ways that can work - in our case, we chose to progressively eat the legacy software without making major changes when we could avoid them. The legacy software we had was mostly the results of one man heroics and traded off performance and availability for correctness and security. It also was designed to be maintained by a small group. Solid choices if you are early Kraken - but as many successful startups, we were victim of our success and we needed it all.
When it became clear that we had to rewrite the stack (the 2017 3-days shutdown happened just before that realization), those in charge at the time decided to experiment with Rust. It was a crazy bet in early 2018, it was still Rust 2015, no NLL, no async, far rougher ecosystem. The fact that it became successful enough to warrant pursuing a full rewrite is to credit on some lucky hires who made it a success.
In that regard, Rust was a very strong talent magnet. In my experience, having hired 200+ Rust engineers over the last 5 years, there are a few kind of engineers attracted to Rust: (1) some just like shiny things/hype, (2) some are perfectionists and never complete a project, (3) some just are doers who have found that Rust is a particularly effective language.
Overall, Rust has been a great to hire for. Many engineers out there want to use Rust, even if it's their 1st Rust professional experience. We were also known in the Rust community for hiring for full time Rust, probably also the place currently with the highest density of Rust talent (there are massive companies with more Rust devs, but smaller % overall). Budget wise, our Rust engineers are not paid particularly better than other engineers in the company, but the compensations at Kraken are generally in the higher tier.
At the risk of sounding boastful, in my experience Rust is reasonably easy to learn for experienced/strong developers (we have some very young outstanding Rust devs as well, most of the time they learned before joining). Average developers struggle and may never become productive. Again, we have an engineering excellence culture so it is okay for us, YMMV.
Re scope, yes we use Rust for everything in the backend, including CRUD type of work like Web APIs. We've found we're at least as productive than other languages (Go / Java+Spring / Ruby / PHP) while having far fewer incidents, and easier maintenance / cheaper KTLO. Rust's ability for reuse is excellent which means that there are very strong network effects when having more services in Rust, including the Web layer.
A nice "side effect" of a full Rust stack is that our p99.9 latency internally is usually stable around 3-4ms for most operations, even though multiple services are involved. That's coming from a much higher baseline with much more deviation across operations providing the same functionality (60-100ms).
Regarding your own rewrite discussions, you're not going to be convinced by a post on HN, I'll just say that I am very reluctant to even think working at a workplace that doesn't predominantly uses Rust. I've been in the industry for 20+ years, across many stacks and there's a before and an after Rust for me. It has been a super power and made our life easier. It makes it easier to model business problems thanks to algebraic data types and their usage for error handling (versus inheritance), traits allow to abstract behavior better than OOP-style interfaces, the absence of data races is a game changer for multi-threaded code, dependency management is trivial, the ecosystem is rich and things work well. A lot of these are properties found in other languages but no other has the same full package and is on its way to become mainstream.
If by excessive typing you mean complex trait bounds and the like, it's really something isolated to the most generic libraries, and reasonably rare. Most application code is simply typed - take a struct or an enum, return another. So it's not been a problem.
We don't use Copilot or any tool that sends our source code because of our security posture, defense in depth, etc. If and when there will be an offering that lets us run the server component and provides significant productivity improvements, we will subscribe.
Assuming this is true, wouldn't a history of hacking activity actually be an upside? I don't like Musk but I'm not a fan of the negative spin. Hell, when I was 15 I'm sure some things I did could now be charged as "hacking" or "cyberterrorism" or something much harsher than the actual reality under today's laws.
edit after reading further along:
> Among them was Jonathan Rusch, a 25-year DOJ veteran prosecutor now in academia, who told Reuters that Stanley's apparent history of disclosing illegally acquired data should have prompted "serious concerns."
Is this guy a veteran who prosecutes, a guy who prosecutes veterans, or something else? It feels even weirder to spin the Doge employees as inexperienced kids (which they may be) but then to call a 25 year old critic a veteran prosecutor.