Ask HN: Where do conservative, pro-military software engineers hang out online?

Here's a hand-wavy analogy from the ML world. When searching for "better" under uncertainty, one has to decide how quickly to "learn", which is basically updating one's learned information (parameters) in a way that one hopes will ultimately lead to better results.

A "conservative" strategy updates that information more slowly, while a "progressive" strategy updates faster. The tradeoff is that if one updates too slowly, one loses the possibility to improve more quickly and perhaps to adapt more quickly to changing circumstance. If one updates too quickly, one can actually "forget" hard-learned lessons, leading to poor outcomes.

Looked at that way, a conservative is someone who is more wary of change, for fear of losing important societal knowledge.

jmspring2• 6 years ago

Interesting article from about 5 years ago —

https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/390048/

sendbitcoins2• 6 years ago

Follow twitterers, look at their bios, some will point to social spaces: telegram, discord, fb page.

throwaway153923• 6 years ago

Do you have any specific recommendations?

sendbitcoins2• 6 years ago

Sorry, I don't have anything specific, but I empathize with your situation

remarkEon2• 6 years ago

I suspect if there is such a place, they would not divulge its location on Hacker News.

jmspring2• 6 years ago

The interesting thing is there are technology intersections, like drones, radio, etc.

Discussion here are always interesting in that interesting forms of libertarianism come through, some discussions even what would be moderate positions on things like homelessness get attacked, etc.

The question and responses are certainly interesting.

An example where a discussion can be neutral but go very left or right - off grid living, homesteading, etc - off gridder or prepper? Same topic in many discussions, but different flavor of discussion.

remarkEon2• 6 years ago

I'm having a hard time parsing what a "conservative" discussion of these topics would mean though. Like the left right now, the right doesn't really seem to have a coherent take on these technologies, except maybe some hostility to those who run the companies that make them. It's a grab bag of techno-libertarians, leftover neocons, traditionalists, and some statists. None of these people agree on much of anything anymore.

So, insofar as there's any interesting discussion to be had at all it would just be a mirror version of the left's own infighting on these topics.

Discussion here are always interesting in that interesting forms of libertarianism come through, some discussions even what would be moderate positions on things like homelessness get attacked, etc.

I assume you mention this because you'd think it interesting to see less libertarianism leak through in the discussion. I'll admit, yeah, that does sound like an idea I haven't really explored too much.

krapp• 6 years ago

Probably Voat, Gab and 8Chan.

burfog• 6 years ago

thedonald.win has a couple posts about software development:

https://thedonald.win/p/4AjIzHU/im-a-coder--there-are-many-o...

https://thedonald.win/p/46BjSob/want-me-to-build-a-mobile-ap...

Other than that, mostly they endure soylentnews.org and news.ycombinator.com as best as possible.

In real life, they tend to have families that suck up lots of time. If you want to meet them in real life, work for a defense contractor. They might also be found working for relatively industrial companies all across the middle of the USA.

throwaway153923• 6 years ago

soylentnews.org lol

ya it totally makes sense those with more traditional family values spend more of their life in real life. working for a defense contractor is an interesting idea. thanks for the links i'm going to check them out

Ask HN: Where do conservative, pro-military software engineers hang out online?

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