After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered • Hacker News Board

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#191

Post by metabagel » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #94

piva00 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emotional responses shouldn't trump your sense of justice and fairness to human life. I have someone that was close to me murdered and I don't think that a harsher punishment only for my enjoyment is the answer to "what is justice?".

A desire for punishments generally isn't for 'enjoyment', but motivated by someone's sense of justice. "Being punished for bad deeds" is a very common notion of 'fairness'. If your notion of justice doesn't include retribution, that's completely legitimate, but to insinuate that your sense of justice is somehow less of a emotional response than someone else's is ridiculous.

It probably starts with corporal punishment of children. That gives society a baseline predisposition towards violence and doled our suffering in order to enforce conduct. Adults who were beaten as children or felt that they suffered for their transgressions may feel that it’s unfair for someone to avoid suffering for transgressions, when they had to suffer in the past for theirs.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#192

Post by discordance » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #118

ryandvm wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, front-end development is probably the most forgiving area of all for tech workers returning from an extended hiatus. Front-end churn is like the apocryphal factoid about the human skin replacing itself completely every few years. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that you're never more than 4 years behind the state of the art in front-end development.

I got out of school in 2013 and then went to a job that was pretty self isolated, working in proprietary format that wasn't really aware of the rest of industry - at best there was some Python and some .Net work. I took another position a couple of years ago where I got throw into the deep end of the modern material - ASP.NET Core, Node, NPM, React, Typescript, modern ES, the whole kit and kaboodle. I can tell you it…

Do you think for the better? - I don't think so

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#193

Post by esperent » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 3:57 PM UTC

desstap wrote: post #107

throwablePie wrote: post #87

> "Caging me for a decade is not rehabilitating. I may be making excuses for myself, though there is a lesson that could have been learned with the same amount of value for justice if the sentence was 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, even 6 years." From the article at: https://forklog.media/ex-convicted-hacker-ghostexodus-severi... I don't consider myself a bleeding heart lib but I think that a decade in prison is excessiv…

You are in Asia right? Let’s see China - disappeared for comparing xi jing ping the dictator to Winnie the Pooh, or mention Hong Kong or Taiwan in a postiive light on wechat Singapore - 2 years in jail for selling gum, death penalty for Having drugs Vietnam - 34 years for drug trafficking

I currently live in Vietnam. Yes, they have very harsh penalties. They also have the least police presence I've experienced anywhere. I feel like when I do see a cop (besides traffic cops) every so often it's quite a surprise.

Also, a friend's weed dealer was busted about a while ago. He got 8 years, not 34 years, from what I heard.

I'm not trying to paint a rosy picture here. Theres huge corruption in the government and a lot of pollution and traffic problems. But it's not the dystopia that it's often portrayed as in the west. On the contrary, it's a beautiful and easy country in which to live, as long as you're above the poverty line. But food and necessities are amazingly cheap here and only about 10% are below the national poverty line here (in the US it's around 12%).

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#194

Post by JoeAltmaier » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

rfrey wrote: post #63

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, a sense of justice. A powerful emotion in people. Who know how many more criminals there might be, if punishment was off the table? Recidivism doesn't count that. So there's that social pressure too. Its pretty easy to figure out 'why punishment', if you try.

It's pretty easy to figure out 'why we shouldn't focus on revenge', if you try. edit: I may be guilty of not listening to what you're actually saying. If you're saying there is something in the core of people that is delighted by revenge, therefore the current system, I agree. If you are saying that justifies a focus on punishment, I disagree.

Not necessary to color everything with the worst adjective at hand. A sense of 'justice' is a thing. Calling it 'revenge' devalues it, and implies a personal component that isn't present.

Justice is the sense that good action will be rewarded, and bad actions will come to a bad end. Not "I'm gonna kill anybody that crosses me!" They are very different, and its not useful discussing this if that is not clear.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#195

Post by jaybeeayyy » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

> That summer the temperature inside my cell reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit.

I hope people understand common this is in jails and prisons around the US. The prison I worked at was the same way. We were told to lie about the temperatures in the pods because the thermometers were broken but the common areas would reach up to 100 degrees. Hell, even the control rooms would get 115+ because they wouldn't fix our air conditioner. I got heat exhaustion once and had a heat stroke. These places are the worst human rights abuses in the US and should immediately be abolished and replaced with something much less sinister and more helpful.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#196

Post by aardvark291 » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 4:05 PM UTC

koolba wrote: post #156

masukomi wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't consider myself a bleeding heart lib but I think that a decade in prison is excessive for most non-violent crimes. you miss the point. prisons are a massive industry with serious lobbying clout. Putting lots of people in prison for a long time isn't a punishment to the prisoner, it's a gift to the prison system. The "punishment" is just a side effect, and the longer it lasts, the richer the people in power…

> Classic example is getting more time in jail (and loosing your house) for having a marajuana joint than if you raped someone. Do you have a source for this ever actually happening?

Yes. Brock Turner got six months for rape.

Here's a selection of decade+ prison sentences for marijuana: https://www.boulderdefenseattorney.com/top-10-non-violent-ma...

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#197

Post by risyachka » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 4:05 PM UTC

TallGuyShort wrote: post #123

risyachka wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was arrested in 2009 for installing botnets and commercial remote access programs on a handful of sensitive clinic systems, which included a critical SCADA system Hacking an online store and a sensitive clinical system should be punished with very different levels of punishment.

That does jive with our sense of justice, yes, but I think the point is what are we achieving. Is it actually disincentivizing the crime? Is it preventing recurrence of the same individual committing future crime? I would argue that US prison statistics point at a massive failure in one, both, or is simply incarcerating people unnecessarily in the first place. This article is touching on the second one specifically.

We don't know what will happen in the future. Prison time at least ensures this won't happen for multiple years, and gives you a chance to think it over.

If medical systems he hacked could have hurt people then this is basically conscious intention to hurt others, and it doesn't matter that he didn't. So in this particular case its really hard to stand on his side. If we were talking about some credit card scam - than I would gladly support you that we better try and change a person, and prison is super overkill for this type of crime. But if we are talking about hurting others - this can't be justified.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#198

Post by devalgo » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #78

annoyingnoob wrote: post #56

I recently had someone in a restroom ask me how to flush the toilet. The toilets had IR sensors and flushed automatically. This person had been in prison for many years and had never seen that before. I think part of the social reform that people are protesting for recently needs to extend to people in prison. Our system does nothing to rehabilitate people or to prepare them to re-enter society. We need to treat pris…

FWIW, the rest of the world considers prison sentences in the US to be absurdly long. This guy apparently got 10 years for hacking; in much of Europe, you'd get less than that for murder.

Couple of guys in Israel just got 6 months of probation for running the world's largest Botnet for Hire.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#199

Post by carapace » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

V-2 wrote: post #81

CalRobert wrote: post #26

This bit at the end was the most interesting to me. "For me, I stepped out into an uncertain future. I don’t really see meaningful human interaction anymore. I see a society that is impossibly distracted by likes and selfies, smartphones, and similar technologies, and I often find it frustrating to find my place in the midst of this new interconnected world simply because I was not there to naturally evolve with it."

Has it really changed that much in 10 years, or is part of it just the sense of alienation everyone experiences getting out of jail after a long time? I mean, 10 years ago people lamented over the exact same thing; and before that, and before the before. I can't prove it of course, but I'd bet you might feel that "human interaction" is not quite what you remember it to be if you had only just spent 10 years behind th…

I can't find it now but I saw a before & after picture of Cuban street life. For reasons Cuba got smart phones all at once, recently. The before picture shows a lively scene, in the after picture everyone is alone, staring into a phone.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#200

Post by selykg » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

rib3ye wrote: post #183

selykg wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, paying to have someone murdered is, kinda sorta violent.

He wasn’t charged with it.

That's true. Wikipedia has this to say:

> Federal prosecutors alleged that Ulbricht had paid $730,000 in murder-for-hire deals targeting at least five people,[29] allegedly because they threatened to reveal Ulbricht's Silk Road enterprise.[37][38] Prosecutors believe no contracted killing actually occurred.[29] Ulbricht was not charged in his trial in New York federal court with any murder-for-hire,[29][39] but evidence was introduced at trial supporting the allegations.[29][38] The evidence that Ulbricht had commissioned murders was considered by the judge in sentencing Ulbricht to life, and was a factor in the Second Circuit's decision to affirm the life sentence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Silk_Road,_arres...