zlacker

> After earning a degree in computer engineering from Stanford, Garry was an engineer at Palantir and then created one of the earliest and best-designed blogging platforms, Posterous.

This is a reminder that Palantir is the firm that sells data mining software to US police and military organizations that then use it to violate human rights.

It should be a black mark on anyone’s record.

>>sneak+(OP)
I don’t think it’s necessarily his, or Palantirs’ fault that the US government is evil.

>>sneak+(OP)
> It should be a black mark on anyone’s record.

Exactly. I have always maintained that a small but significant way to put pressure on 'evil' companies, like Palantir, is to blacklist any employees who have them on their resume, making it difficult for them to attract talent. Unfortunately, I have found that very people share that view, and I am hard-pressed to figure out why.

>>sneak+(OP)
I agree, but we should also go further:

Employees at Meta{Facebook, Instagram, Oculus, etc}, Twitter, Google, Palantir and Uber are all complicit in building systems that amplify surveillance capitalism and this goes for any other company engaging in this space.

It should be a big black mark on anyone’s record working at those companies.

>>Aeolun+h3
All states are evil

>>wahnfr+gO
Please keep generic ideological rhetoric off HN, regardless of ideology. It's repetitive and therefore tedious and therefore not what this site is for.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>>deepsp+c8
You don't create an ability to have redemption, forgiveness, rehabilitation, or regret. The first step to get someone to change their mind is to remove the dependency of them having an income on said philosophy, and one of the best ways to do that is to give them a chance to not work there anymore and move past it. By forcing them into an association ghetto, you create stronger supporters for the group you dislike, because they have no other options left.

Also everyone's personal set of shit companies doesn't overlap, so it's very easy for no one to get hired fairly quickly, and sometimes people chose the unpopular place out of necessity vs. choice at the time.

A large amount of employees people want to hire have probably worked at a company that people didn't like at one time or another. It's pretty easy to think of a set of nerds who don't like that you've worked at any one of google, microsoft, apple, amazon, facebook, netflix, robinhood, stripe, hospital system, any bank/finance/fintech, government, etc. Pretty much the only companies left are the ones that are not relevant enough to do anything to the world that would lead to someone being a hater in the first place.

>>novok+Uq1
I definitely see your points. I would want to reserve sanctions for companies who are widely known to be evil so that anyone accepting a position there would know exactly what they are getting into. The main tech companies that come to mind as qualifying are Palantir, Clearview AI and ByteDance. But, yes, I agree that individuals' shitlists will never overlap.

I am still not hiring ex-Palantir people anytime soon, though. It would creep me out to look at them.

>>colesa+ak
AFAIK nobody ever got murdered by a CIA drone after using Uber.

The same cannot be said of Instagram or Gmail or iCloud (you forgot Apple on your list).

>>deepsp+zs1
Microsoft is the main one.

Without MS Office, the USG probably could not make the scale of the wars that they do.

>>deepsp+c8
I believe that it is because most people are not actually actively anti-war or pro-human-rights. The median person can be made to endorse and support invasion and torture if they are fed the right media.

Most people are apathetic, and having the military-industrial complex in your work history simply doesn’t register to many.

It’s not that they endorse evil; it’s just that they don’t care.