Ask HN: I was hired and unhired in 2 weeks, for no reason

Not at all. If I hire someone, I'm making a commitment. If I made a mistake, its out of my pocket to make them whole.

Disclaimer: I have made mistakes hiring people, and have paid them for their troubles, even going so far as to be a reference for the other opportunities they had available and telling them it was our mistake.

No you're not. There are no positive or negative events in life. All events are neutral. It is within your power to see them as positive. Reality doesn't care about your "destiny."

So besides my airy fairy comment above what I mean is when something bad happens you have to take massive action to get the result you want. So when young founders make DUMB decisions that screw you over you apply to 40-60 jobs a day and find a better job. You take MASSIVE action to make the situation a positive one.

You have NO time to waste complaining about what happened. Your time needs to be spent working your butt off finding new work. That means 40-60 jobs per day. That also means you should look at investing in assets so your income isn't reliant on an employer or anyone for that matter.

Life will always do this to you. Always. How you react to situations like this is what defines you. Nobody can escape this. Everyone will have ups and downs in life.

Now. Right now. Today is your time to take massive action. Not sit on hacker news or the internet all day. Not complaining to your wife. Now is your time to make this a positive situation.

If you don't believe me don't do what I say and see what happens.

Because the individual has more to lose. Which is more likely, the public boycott the company or the companies boycott the individual? Especially in the world of tech, even if you're right about a company's bad practice just going off and posting a rant about them online reflects badly on you. It means you probably should have just left the company before you got so angry about them. I personally have some very deeply negative feelings about my time in at&t but now I realize it's my own fault for staying 6 years when I was already fed up in my first 18 months. It just made me bitter.

At the absolute minimum, when they see your name on a resume and immediately associate it with recent memory of a rant on HN or some complex ordeal described in a techcrunch article, they'll think twice about you. Maybe they'll still go forward with you; but their will be a double-think. If someone really wants to post something that's less than positive about a previous employer, that person should do it as objectively as possible. Remove all emotion, only state facts with no sensationalism or leading-questions or anything suggestive and be sure to state the whole thing as just "their very humble opinion". It would also show a sense of responsibility/maturity to state the issues that concerned in in a form of a question. "Who you the reader have done things this way?" And especially to suggest a solution. "The way I would have done it is..."

What happened to the OP here is regrettable and doesn't sound like it's his/her fault. This person handled it professionally by just asking for advice and not mentioning names.

It has nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of the situation. It is about presenting yourself to the rest of the world. Being a bridge-burner doesn't look good to potential employers.