I don't think anyone is surprised by this struggle.
I have noticed in my life that there are people who operate on a principle that is sometimes called out as "It's not illegal if you don't get caught." Clearly that statement isn't literally true. The essence of the colloquialism is that rules are "arbitrary" and following them, when you don't have to fear the consequence of breaking them because you are unlikely to get caught violating them, is for "chumps." (sorry, another colloquialism).
What is lost on people is that people who don't follow rules erode trust. Especially when they could have easily followed a rule and didn't anyway. That trust erodes and is difficult if not impossible to recover. And not surprisingly those same people who are so happy to have "gotten away with it" have no idea that at some point in the future they are going to need that trust and it won't be there.
The moderators at HN have banned every single prominent right winger.
If you are right wing and have not been banned - it is just a matter of time. I know some people tried everything to stay inside the rules and they failed.
I don't know that this pattern is the fault of Dan and Scott directly - I think there is something deeper at work which goes beyond the political pattern recognition of the people who talk here.
I won't jump into the topic here but I am going to iterate - there exist three powerful factions in our political system - the left, the right and the liberals. I believe if we don't hang together we will hang separately.
For one political philosophy to have a monopoly is the last thing we need. It is as moronic as one sex winning the War of the Sexes.
Look at how economists are now reconsidering the position on global trade - positions that seem incontrovertible get walked back in time - do we want to slow down that mechanism?
Can you mail me a full version of what you are trying to say here please? As a European, HN seems pretty right wing to me. You see a lot of people complaining about identity politics, complaining about too much (social security and empowering minorities) state while defending (property rights enforcing, military and security spending) state and about being persecuted by a "liberal media". Yes, you also have lots of what we would call centre left or "socially leftwing, fiscally conservative", but it is by no means leftist. So I'd be curious for some specific examples in a space where you won't have to fear being censored (email which can be found in my profile)
For the one that downvoted me, I'm sorry you feel personally attacked /s
Please state facts.
An extreme right party in Belgium looks for better benefits for the poor than Democrats in the US ( cfr. Vlaams Belang in Belgium, i'm not approving them btw)
Their party programme was based on Denmark.
The most extreme is currently in Hungary and he is hard against immigration, but that's it.
I don't know how/why it happened, but most users here are left-wing now. This means that, if you post a right-wing point of view, you are likely to attract lots of responses. Posts that attract lots of responses are always seen as flamebait, and flamebait is flagged. Many flags will get you labelled as a troll and banned.
Whether this is on purpose (a system used by the mods to keep the site left-wing) or not (just a consequence of the times we live in + a desire by the mods not to have flames all day) is another matter.
The HN forum's population is now very different to what it was at the start. I'm convinced people like Paul Graham would get crucified.
There is a conformity - I don't want to label it leftist - it leans there at the moment but it will go the other way in future.
It is not anybody in Silicon Valley's job to moderate the population's speech - that our governments did not produce a public space for the online world was a strategic error. I suppose we could just take the China route but no amount of machine learning is going to stop Americans telling the other side to fuck off - that is a feature and not a bug.
Can you mail me a full version of what you are trying to say here please? As a European, HN seems pretty right wing to me, so if you have examples of statements which you feel get flagged/banned while not deserving so in a noncensored setting (my mail which can be found in my profile) I'd be grateful
Forgive me but I don't feel like writing too much about this subject, which is getting pretty old and tiring. So I'll type it here even if I get flagged.
The political compass can be separated in economical and social issues. Economically, HN is right-wing, as you say. It's full of libertarians. But socially, it's strictly left-wing. Things that get you flagged? Men and women are not the same, we should not turn the world around to appease to non-heterosexuals, perhaps people of different races/ethnic backgrounds/religions are fundamentally different (for better or for worse), all humans aren't worth the same, countries should have the right to manage themselves in any way they want without having human rights shoved into them by the west... Stuff like that cannot be discussed here.
And as I said, I don't know if it's a conscious effort by the mods, or those topics only incite flames so they have to be shut down. What I do know is that just yesterday we got https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21365411 on the front page (which is, quite literally, left-wing political propaganda) but something that criticised those points would be flagged in minutes.
You are a very new user and may not know how the site works with regards to downvoting and karma. There are links to follow but the short faq is that regular users get access to downvotes and flags, and thus older users often will flag kill topics that they think will only be a flame war.
That, and there are automated things which identify when a topic becomes flame
I am not a very new user, in fact by looking at your profile I have been here for much longer than you.
Older/active users are predominantly left-wing and use their flag power to flag right-wing points of view, because they deem them as trolling (charitable point of view) or because they want to silence them (uncharitable point of view). Then, mods come and ban those who amass many flags because someone who's got many flags is irredeemably a troll.
That's something of a special case in a lot of ways. And not someone we banned for political reasons. (Edit: I should have said: not someone we moderated for political reasons. We didn't ban him.)
>Men and women are not the same, we should not turn the world around to appease to non-heterosexuals, perhaps people of different races/ethnic backgrounds/religions are fundamentally different
Obviously these examples are reductive by necessity, and both constructive and insubstantive/hateful posts can be reduced in these ways. Personally, the examples of such downvoted/flagged posts I've seen have almost always betrayed the latter quite unsubtly. (Your choice of wording is also kind of unfair - you've chosen reductions that are, again in my opinion, no-brainers to say "yes" to without context and assuming good faith).
What you're asking for is easy to test. I can send you a list later. You probably won't like some of the list - this will be you roleplaying as a right winger for experiment.
Europeans - I am one so I know - if they are Anglos - are heavily influenced by the American information-sphere. It is normal for a European to listen to NPR or watch CNN and think they're hearing neutrality because there's context in American politics we're not aware of.
This is not about people skirting the rules, this is a poignantly political concern.
"Hiring an exec who supported Trump's travel ban" is purely a political issue. Temporarily halting travel from a list of countries designated by the Obama administration as 'dangerous' - specifically because there's a degree of lawlessness and/or the governments can't/won't cooperate with background checks etc. has very reasonable arguments supporting it. (FYI the nations were Libya/Yemen/Syria/Somalia/Sudan/Iraq - all of which have dysfunctional governments unable to provide reliable identity information - and Iran, which has other problems). Note that Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Indonesia, Saudi, Oman, Pakistan etc. etc. and the vast majority of states with many Muslim citizens were not affected.
Contextualising this within Trump's ugly rhetoric is another thing entirely and this part subject to interpretation.
If Googlers are going to be discontent about an issue like this then I'm afraid it's game over for their peace - because they are effectively internalising American political discord.
Google's direct participation in China etc. is another issue entirely, much more salient as it directly reflects 'what Google is doing' - but even this can be very complicated.
Google is essentially 'choosing' a very specific political ethos which is problematic in itself because most of us tend to confound our own version of morality with that of others in a very intolerant manner.
> "Hiring an exec who supported Trump's travel ban" is purely a political issue.
Yes it is. And that issue is that the person did something in a previous job which many employees found repugnant.
But the trust issue, is that the employees also don't trust that Google has the integrity to hire someone who did that, without understanding the whys of it. Or being sensitive to both their existing and new employee on the issue.
If I were in Google management, and I had the trust of the people I managed, I could explain to them the reasoning that went into the hire; The skills that came with the candidate, the business need, the qualities of the candidate. And the sensitivity around their previous job choices and how they made those choices (most people do what the boss tells them to do) and what was expected of them at a place like Google. And the people who trusted me would expect me to hold the new hire to those standards and to fire them if they didn't live up to them. I would be able to lean on that trust and say, "Hey, we need to give this guy a chance to prove he can do the right thing and we and he both understand he is held to a higher standard here."
Folks I managed wouldn't trust me if they had found out that I had allowed a sexual harasser to work for me after I knew that they had a problem. That is because they would lose trust in me saying that I would hold people to a certain standard.
That is the difference in a "only if you get caught" situational morality play. Someone with principles and integrity will take the necessary action, even if it is painful, even when they could "get away with it because nobody else knows."
It is a good litmus test. That test being to evaluate how you respond to people who do the right thing even when no one is looking, and to people who do the right thing only after the need to do it comes to light through some other path. In my experience, I trust people who do the right thing even if no one is watching way more than I trust the opportunists.
> Contextualising this within Trump's ugly rhetoric is another thing entirely and this part subject to interpretation.
A different administration could have implemented a policy that limited travel from certain countries without backlash.
This one started by -- without warning -- revoking the right to re-enter the country for all legal visa holders from these countries on 1/27/2017, a week after the inauguration, INCLUDING GREEN CARDS.[1] That's a permanent residency visa. People were stranded away from their jobs, homes, families.
I was a green card holder not so long ago, and had family in the states on green cards. I felt real fear after the Muslim ban was announced on 1/27/2017.
The action seemed calculated to cause as much harm to ordinary people as it could.
Policy can be debated, but it's not the policy that is at issue here. It's the disregard bordering on malice. This was just one of many examples, from pardoning Joe Arpaio[2] and separating asylum-seeking families with no plan for re-uniting them,[3] to going looking for decades old citizenships to revoke[4].
I understand that we're too politically weak for anger to work, but I'm only human. It's galling to be told we're the intolerant ones in this situation.
I'm an ex-Googler, and I know how PRISM worked. This did not happen. All the statements made in https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html are true at the time they were written. The sentiment in the title of that post accurately reflects how everybody involved felt about it.
(I can't talk about whether they're still true because I've not been there in nearly two years, I wouldn't know)
Google was not innocent in the matter (there is clear public evidence internal Google data got into the hands of the NSA), but it appears that data was stolen due to poor security of Google's systems rather than handed over voluntarily. Google underestimated the abilities of their adversary. I don't believe any other company back then would have been resistant to the same attack.
There is sufficient evidence in the leaked snowden docs and public blog posts to figure out what the bug was and how it has been fixed.
A small but not insignificant number of employees move between the security services and Google each year.
In fact, the design of the NSA's interception nodes, rulesets and filtering systems resemble strongly many of Google's internal technologies (as evidenced by a leaked config file in the snowden documents)
Still remember the picture from the NSA with a line between two Google data centers and the Google frontend terminating SSL and traffic between datacenter being in cleartext. And there was this big smiley face from the NSA on the slide!
I wonder if the foundational idealism ("don't be evil") is acting more like a baggage. Look at Microsoft. There were dissenting voices in the company regarding their involvement with the military, but the CEO was blunt. "We made a principled decision that we’re not going to withhold technology from institutions that we have elected in democracies to protect the freedoms we enjoy” [1]
On the other hand, Google had to back down [2]. I don't think this would work out for Google in the long term, that is, if they keep caving in to pressure from employees. Maybe trust erosion is inevitable if you're trying to pretend you're not just another profit-making corporation.
I'm actually quite impressed by that line from Microsoft, it's clear, well thought out, and communicates a simple moral principle that can be used to reason about their entire policy. It's also quite bold in that it clearly implies that it won't co-operate with non-democratic regimes on projects they think are wrong, which I'm sure is not a zero cost decision.
I see it as one using weasel wording to sound principled while in fact it's not.
In particular using "institutions we have elected to do X" instead of just "institutions that do X" steps around the question whether the institutions really do X. Which is, incidentally, the major concern of the opponents.
Microsoft has a less passionate employee base. They want to show up and get their check and go home to their families. Not as many single twenty somethings who take a lot of pride in being “Googlers” and care a lot about what that means.
The big thing for me was when they started using GPS and WiFi location data on Android phones a few years ago to track which physical stores you visited, for advertising purposes. Somehow people here didn't think it was a big deal. If it was, say Microsoft, that did the same, I think it'd have been a big controversy. I think there's a bunch of "Google good, MS and Apple bad" mentality that lets Google get away with a lot of things.
> He said he tries “to understand when I feel there is something which caused breaking of trust and see what we can do to improve,” adding that “it’s definitely gotten harder to do this at the scale we are doing it.”
It's funny how concepts that any 15-year-old could grasp become "harder to understand" when someone offer you millions of dollars to not understand them.
That goes both ways. Google employees live extremely pampered lives and expect to go on doing so, while protesting the things the company does in order to provide them that.
In a way. Transparency at scale is truly challenging because as you grow bigger you naturally end up with more diversity of opinions and thoughts. Diversity (and transparency) isn't easier -- though it is of course valuable. When you combine autonomy at the lower levels with large quantities of diversity your company moves in lots of directions. What they're struggling with IMO is either (1) front-line folks have too much autonomy and are moving in directions that no longer reflect the views of leadership or (2) the beliefs of the executive team do not materially line up with those of the majority of employees anymore.
It should be 'shut up' but it comes across as pandering. A strong man approach could be utilized, but a liberal fully open organization doesn't run that way.
I'm not convinced that it would be bad for shareholders to properly split the company, instead of having a holding like Alphabet.
I don't think you can mix a defense contractor and an advertising company that has a lot of public scrutiny, for the same reason tobacco companies and breakfast cereal companies tend to be separate entities (despite doing essentially the same thing: selling agricultural commodities to consumers).
What I genuinely don’t understand about all these split up tech companies arguments, is I don’t see how you’ll end up with a small company from this process (I also don’t see why smaller is necessarily better, but that’s a separate point). If you split google search and ads from everything else in alphabet, it’s still a multi hundred billion dollar business. If you split Facebook proper from Instagram from the rest, you’ll have a couple of multi hundred billion dollar companies. What makes a 500 billion dollar company less likely to do shitty things than a 900 billion dollar company, for any given definition of shitty?
What makes a 500 billion dollar company less likely to do shitty things than a 900 billion dollar company, for any given definition of shitty?
Because it’s constrained to its niche. Let’s say split search/ads from the rest of Google. It’s still a money-printing machine but what can it spend that money on? It has to pay dividends to shareholders rather than propping up YouTube and GMail and Google Cloud and cross-pollinating data with them. Ditto if any of them become profitable. Shareholders win, regulators win, its good for everyone.
Us split-advocates aren’t just knee-jerks, we have thought about this.
The problem of these companies isn't size, it's their make up. Google only has an advertising business because they're dominant in search. The point of these businesses isn't to make the total size of the companies smaller, it's to increase competition. The advertising side of Google might be as big as it was before the split, but once it actually has to compete with other companies for ad space on Google's search engine there's suddenly a competitive market for advertising on search that previously there wasn't. Without the monopoly on search result ads Google's ad business suddenly won't be able to leverage that into being dominant selling adverts through their Adsense.
It's about the fact that there is an entire market that has been closed because Google has a monopolistic power to bundle.
At the minimum search, GMail, YouTube, GCP, Android need to be split and legally forbidden from any information sharing whatsoever between them. Employees can be free to chose which one they want to be in before split day.
Yeah. That split makes no sense because those parts couldn‘t survive on their own. maybe GCP could. But until a much bigger part of Google‘s revenue is made up by cloud it‘s difficult.
Besides, Google is an AI-first company now. Stuff like Assistant, which is arguably their most promising user-facing service relies most on all these services being seamlessly connected. This split would cripple such a profuct.
“ But many of the questions related to software embedded internally in Google’s Chrome browser that employees worried was designed to monitor large gatherings. The software engages when employees try to create meetings for 100 or more workers.
Pichai and others said the intent of the software is not to prevent meetings or to stifle conversation, but they acknowledged that its implementation was flawed. ”
As soon as TGIFs started leaking, Pichai had to start treating them like public press conferences, resulting in them now being completely devoid of content.
Googlers are overwhelmingly young compared to what they used to be. What these people want most, beyond the usuals of money and perks, is for their employer to give them moral structure in life and the constant reassurance that they are good people - something they've been told since birth is the most important thing to be but with nearly no guidance on what that means, beyond the plots of Disney movies.
In effect they want Google to be a church and executives to be priests, preaching a moral code and equally importantly railing against heretics, sinners and apostates.
This need for a new religion can be seen in many walks of life but it seems strongest amongst those immersed in the university system for longest. They've never been judged by any system that wasn't artificial and based purely on the opinions of superiors - from school to college to promo committees and peer bonuses, very few of them have ever really hunted hard for a job, made a product themselves or taken any risky decisions. They've got nothing to give them self confidence and thus fall back on membership of a group identity defined by a mishmash of whatever ideas they picked up from others just like them. Google struggles with them the most because it has hired so many and because Google internally is such a poor approximation of the real world: absolutely stuffed with "rewrite X in Y" style projects and people that don't have any strong reason to be there.
The best way for Google to solve this is a major reduction in headcount, least experienced first. But I think headcount is rather sacred there as it's used as a proxy for ambition, so instead they will continue struggling to be as holy as their student staff demand.
I strongly disagree with this. In fact, what this criticism boils down to is akin to whining about the younger generation. What is happening at Google is actually the opposite of your first paragraph, the employees aren't looking to Google to give them moral structure, their using their own moral code to judge whether google is behaving morally and holding Google to account for it.
The fact that the employees are speaking out and in many cases actually taking direct action that will effect their career prospects is the antithesis of
>They've got nothing to give them self confidence
People with 0 confidence aren't conducting walk-outs, they aren't whistleblowing on Google's questionable military deals. The problem Google has is exactly the opposite- they market themselves as a morally good company and so they end up with a high number of people who view that as important working for them. When they fail to live up to those actual standards, the employees protest. I think trying to ascribe the protests to a lack of courage is a very strange conclusion.
I think you missed my point, which is quite tricky to put into words so I may have not done it well.
"Google" in that context doesn't mean exclusively its management, but rather, the whole group of people. When Googlers stage walkouts and so on they don't care much about the specific situations at hand. If it wasn't one thing it'd be another thing. This is clear from scratching the surface of their complaints in any detail: it's all built on very brittle foundations.
What they want is the feeling of collective moral action, of clarity of purpose, of being a part of something bigger than building the next chat app, and they're able to get that at Google where it wouldn't be tolerated at most companies. It's exactly because this sort of activity does not affect their career prospects or might even enhance them that is why they do it: remember that their promotions aren't decided by management at Google but rather, by committees of the same sorts of people who are protesting.
People with 0 confidence aren't conducting walk-outs, they aren't whistleblowing on Google's questionable military deals.
This is exactly what people with no self confidence in their own goodness would do.
If they were secure in their own morality, in their own sense of living a right life, they wouldn't be attempting to find it by engaging in constant cultural crusades inside their own place of work. It seems quite clear to me that many of their supposed moral positions aren't well thought through and exist primarily so they can protest. In other words, the protests aren't a means to an end (change of policy by Google's management), the protests are the end, in and of themselves, because it's via noisy displays of moral virtue that they find what they're truly looking for.
If you like I can go through some of the inconsistencies in the various positions their employees have taken.
The university system will implode and there will be a lot of political turbulence when these institutionalized young adults struggle to adjust. Putting children for half the population into the education system with the expectation of higher wages through knowledge work when they came out the other side was delusional. Our middle class still believes in a kind of information perpetual motion machine.
I don't see where the problem is with hiring someone who supports Trump's travel ban. I disagree with it and I wouldn't want to drink a beer with that person, but on which level would this hinder me professionally working with that person so long as that person does not abuse their power for their political views, which we must assume, until it can be proven otherwise? Isn't that what democracy is all about? Has the work environment become so casual, that we cannot set aside our differences in a professional setting?
>I disagree with it and wouldn’t want to drink a beer with that person.
Wow, are you projecting an image with that statement? Just realize that your attitude of blind judgement of others perpetuates this partisan divide. Not wanting to talk to someone based on a differing policy perspective is /exactly/ the problem. This breaks our republic. You should desire to try and understand their perspective and enlighten them to yours. Honestly sickening to read that.
Erm? I'm saying that I wouldn't want to spend my personal time with someone who supports that, that's my own business, but that I wouldn't mind working with them, because that's a professional environment.
The Googlers are the ones who'd do neither, so what do you think of them?
And I’m saying that by not engaging with people you disagree with based on politics in your personal life you are shirking your civic duty. It’s selfish, short sighted, and intellectually dishonest behavior. Seriously reconsider because it reveals a certain closed mindedness and breeds partisanship and tribalism in others; things I’m guessing you aren’t for based on parent comments.
I think a business is a business, it has its own charter to follow and it seems fair that it’s within the abilities of that charter to limit the speech of at-will employees to some extent.
I can’t believe Google is putting up with this behavior from employees, and makes me think their hiring process needs a rework and reaffirms the feeling I have that Google has a culture of immaturity. It just seems like a personal attention grab to me on the part of the Googlers. They should leave if they feel so strongly. People who really think the people they work for are evil defect, possibly after leaking information or making a mess, but usually posthaste. Google is letting them make a mess right now.
I'm surprised they still had any trust at all. I thought it was pretty obvious - especially after dragonfly - that the company is only going through the motions of caring to pacify their employees concerns.
The moral questions that face google's rank and file are so poorly discussed in the tech sector or by society at large I'm not surprised that they only get rankled when the company does something that can be blogged about with a hot take. I guess it's good that things like "military contracts" and "former Trump staffer" can penetrate thick skulls, but they're many many years past nip-it-in-the-bud phase. They have no intention of establishing an overarching moral philosophy and have set themselves up to just rationalize questions away as come up.
Even if you don't underestimate Google, there are really 2 options: current management is not doing the best job, or they're doing the best job but the company size prevents improvements (Google itself should be changed).
"But many of the questions related to software embedded internally in Google's Chrome browser that employees worried was designed to monitor large gatherings. The software engages when employees try to create meetings for 100 or more workers.
Pichai and others said the intent of the software is not to prevent meetings or to stifle conversation, but they acknowledged that its implementation was flawed."
If I am not mistaken Google has recently made a change to its Chrome browser (77.0.3865.105) that removed the ability to disable javascript, cookies, etc. (via chrome://settings/content or clicking to the left of the address -- "site information" -- in the address bar) for all websites when in Guest mode. It can still be disabled for individual websites.
Assuming I am not mistaken, suprisingly, I have not read anything about this change. Is it possible there was no intent to stop users from turning off javascript and cookies and this was simply another example of a "flawed implementation".
One theory is that the update is making it impossible for Chrome to save settings when in Guest Mode and chrooted in Developer Mode. Probably not intentional but frustrating because it will neither be noticed nor fixed by Google.
ChromeOS/Chrome gets new update and sure enough, problem is partially "fixed". Now there is a new settings page: chrome://settings/content/all
These settings seems to stick, however the ability to globally turn off cookies and javascript remains broken. Also, it is so time consuming to change settings for each site, one has to wonder if this inconvenience is deliberate.
I have noticed in my life that there are people who operate on a principle that is sometimes called out as "It's not illegal if you don't get caught." Clearly that statement isn't literally true. The essence of the colloquialism is that rules are "arbitrary" and following them, when you don't have to fear the consequence of breaking them because you are unlikely to get caught violating them, is for "chumps." (sorry, another colloquialism).
What is lost on people is that people who don't follow rules erode trust. Especially when they could have easily followed a rule and didn't anyway. That trust erodes and is difficult if not impossible to recover. And not surprisingly those same people who are so happy to have "gotten away with it" have no idea that at some point in the future they are going to need that trust and it won't be there.