My memory is that Hacker News comments were even more anti-Snowden at the time, but I could be mistaken. I would have thought people here would be very supportive of his whistle blowing, but I think a lot of people on this site unfortunately have a strong loyalty to the government organizations that were exposed.

This was the main thread about Snowden on the day his identity was revealed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850590

> You need to have been convicted to receive a pardon, the petition should be not to prosecute.

Hahaha / I’ve made myself sad

The critics weren't ever the brightest lights in the sky, but this was horribly naive even for that time. It is as if you took the whole lot of human literature, took a dump on it and honestly believe you would know better.

Oh! That's a cool site I didn't know about. Bookmarked.

i think a lot of people on this site work on the same types of projects snowden worked on and blew the whistle over, for the same organizations, and feel good about it. i wonder how many users here are happily employed by booz allen hamilton?

unrelated, but I recently saw an ad by booz allen that proudly said "Stopping Fentanyl" as part of their mission. Like, really? Are people really that gullible to believe that?

The line tested wonderfully with the focus groups.

The people that didn’t know the name before the ad?

Yeah.

Even if they do, they are not the people who shape policy or have any Power. When is the last time you saw someone with real wotld power show up and comment on HN? So its like worrying about what farm animals think about how the farm runs. What Snowden/Assange/Panama Papers/DOGE teaches us is that it doesnt matter what info about the farm is public, there is a pecking order. If you want to change something about how the farm works and how the farm animals are treated then you have to learn how to be a farmer. No free lunch and shortcuts just because you access info.

> Even if they do, they are not the people who shape policy or have any Power.

i am comfortable making this statement: anyone in the middle of the venn diagram of "booz allen hamilton employee" and "hacker news dot com reader" has the "Power" to work literally anywhere else that produces technology products.

Even in the case of a CRUD app, I think it's not bad to aim for a wow. Like "with this new feature, I'll no longer need to do x, y, and z repetitive tasks, great!"

Ever been to a shooting range? It's basically a bunch of random people with loaded guns.

That's not as random as letting me choose them! They had to be allowed onto the range, show ID, afford the gun, probably do a background check to get the gun unless they used a loophole (which usually requires some social capital).

I'm proposing the true proposal of many guns rights advocates: anyone might have a gun.

So let me choose the 50 and you give them guns! Why not?

Can you give up citizenship of the old country? Not being willing to give up your old citizenship could be one example of "not integrating enough".

Does that also apply to people living under oppressive governments? Anonymity can be a useful tool for sharing information that those in power don't want released, for example whistle blowing.

The only "system for payoff" I've seen with software patents is patent trolls. Are there cases of software inventors being rewarded for their software more fairly because they had a patent?

I think every every company I've worked at that had R&D had some kind of reward system for patents. Yes, most of the software patents were nonsense but those who have their names on it still did get paid.

Guessing those rewards are in the hundreds of dollars, probably a fraction of the engineer salary that went into the technical work.

In addition, software is also copyrightable, which makes much more sense than patents for protecting unauthorized use. IMO, patents for software should be mostly eliminated, and even copyright terms should be much shorter.

5 years full copyright, 5 years noncommercial unrestricted fair use with mandatory attribution, then straight to public domain. Berne Convention be damned, and multigenerational copyrights can go straight to hell as well.

Software patents are stupid, and even more so with AI soon to be able to take arbitrary compiled code and produce readable, well composed source in a target language with documentation and optimizations.

Studios and platforms and funds and giant corporations that "own" terabytes of IP are a cancer.

We're going to have to fix copyright. Until then, pirate everything.

A person born in a war torn country who is killed at a young age doesn't get much opportunity for good or bad choices. That's what I think of regarding bad luck.

A school's budget is tied directly to attendance. Less students = less budget.

I think it might be less about left/right and more about suburban and car culture vs. urban or rural. People living in the suburbs tend to drive everywhere anyway and perceive things outside of the car as dangerous.

I feel like the two things are in a causal loop.