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Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

(timsh.org)
1957 points apokryptein | 4 comments | 02 Feb 25 17:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.658s | source
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ta988 ◴[02 Feb 25 17:20 UTC] No.42910030[source]▶
Shame on all of the people working on those systems. Legit companies trying to make the world better struggle to find competent people.
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quacked ◴[02 Feb 25 17:33 UTC] No.42910131[source]▶
I think a big part of the ability of these shady companies pulling the brightest minds away from more clearly beneficial fields is that important flavors of ideology necessary to motivate people to take less lucrative work have been stripped from "business". There's a lot fewer appeals to art, history, cultural stewardship, or empire-building present in things like transportation, medicine, construction, etc. than there were in the past. Any flavor of "for the glory of God/the nation/the People/the Art" etc. is pretty effectively stripped out of American business, and I think that's the only kind of thing that would motivate someone who could make $250k in Adware to make $100k in something else.

People are now very well-trained to look out for their own bottom line, and take jobs accordingly.

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1. quantified ◴[02 Feb 25 18:03 UTC] No.42910377[source]▶
Doing things because they increase some non-monetary value has fallen out of fashion for sure. A colleague of mine recently shared, in a group social setting, a sense of disappointment that his daughter was studying to be a doctor. I was, as far as I could tell, the only one to note that there is practical utility to having doctors.

But the "be part of our mission" was shown to be hollow over and over too. First and foremost, you as an enployee are making the investors and CEO rich. The mission is usually exploiting the employee, even when it's not exploiting the world. Employees have recognized the real social ethic (money over everything) and are just playing the same game. Which is sad.

Ideally the people who see these choices would make alternative choices that will leave their grandchildren better off in the world. It has taken only a generation for the "greed is good" mentality to drop us into this fetid soup.

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2. quacked ◴[02 Feb 25 18:41 UTC] No.42910672[source]▶
I think the phrase you called out--"be a part of our mission"--that most corporations (and, mimicking them, government agencies) regurgitate is itself the approach to socialization that causes people to feel less inclined to work for any non-profit reason. "Part of OUR mission" redefines the company as the entity to be loyal to, rather than casting the company as part of society itself. You can't replace constructs that tend to inspire people to heroism and selflessness with a corporate avatar and expect the fabric of society to remain similarly motivated. It does make a set few people a hell of a lot of money in the short term, though.
3. ForHackernews ◴[03 Feb 25 13:01 UTC] No.42917782[source]▶
Aren't doctors extraordinarily well-paid? Was this outside the US?
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4. quantified ◴[03 Feb 25 21:33 UTC] No.42923513[source]▶
In the US. Among techies who are in the upper 10% but not the 1%