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As a 15yo in the mid-90’s I was a member of and courier for a group called FaTe. Did it all over a 28.8k and later 56k modem. It was so much fun and I never once considered actually getting caught - it never felt real and the friends made along the way were worth it, at least in my case. Went to college and gave it all up. Studied a science but came back to IT and get paid today off of the skills I started learning back then.

I agree with your sentiment as well as with the parent comment. I think it’s mostly young relationships that aren’t like this, or rather relationships we have when we’re young. I would wager that 99% of people have had or will have at least one relationship like this in their lives before we learn healthier ways of being with another person.

Anecdotally, long term relationships where one party improves significantly often do not last so it’s good advice to improve yourself before you find the right person.

I was going to comment something similar - I think the messaging around this needs to be more clear. It feels like I’ve been seeing serious security folk push the unqualified use of password managers for years now. Better hope granny never needs to use SSH.

To those who say that flat earthers don’t exist in reality…

There’s a guy who drives around town where my parents live in Arizona with his flat earth position writ large on the side of his pickup truck. He will stop to debate with you even if you’re next to him at a traffic light. [1]

I think flat earthers do exist but the majority of them may not admit it openly if they’re still sufficiently “there” to fear the social ostracization (word?) that might follow.

I agree to some extent with the original article under discussion and I would point interested folks to an interesting video by Sabine Hossenfelder which makes some tangentially similar points. [2]

I would also add that the western school system teaches us to fear being wrong and finally letting go of this can be a liberating and empowering experience. After that it seems to become a little easier to believe the next similarly counterfactual thing that comes along.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/InfowarriorRides/comments/gow054/mo...

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f8DQSM-b2cc

My best friend went to UCSD for his PhD in biology. He was brilliant and had a nearly unique depth of insight into knotty problems and an incredible drive to progress the field. Unfortunately he was also a bit of an idealist with little real political sense.

In grad school he selected a difficult problem in the cancer space and worked on it in the lab for 6 years. His advisor thought he was on track for a Nature paper. Around the end of year 6 a very famous scientist who was on his larger committee decided he wanted the research for himself (apparently). He had one of his floater grad students (in their last years of grad school without any research of their own to publish) literally steal his data from his desk. They eventually published their ‘stolen’ paper in Nature themselves, before my friend could have finished writing it up by himself.

My friend found he was unable to compete with the reputation of this scientist and was repeatedly told to just move on - even his own advisor suggested that there was nothing to do about it and complaining to the university ethics committee would only hurt his career. He tried anyway, entirely unsuccessfully.

My friend was not able to move on. He left grad school with an exit Masters. He spent a few years in his parents house lost, then in institution really really lost. He eventually got himself together and built up the courage to try again (roughly 10 years later). He got into a good bioinformatics program on the opposite coast of the country. Eventually the same exact thing started happening to him again. Things got bad. I left work early one day to go cheer him up and long story short I found his body in the bathtub of his apartment. He was just not ready to go through it all again.

I still think about him every single day more than a year out from his funeral. I find myself unable to understand why some humans treat each other the way that they do or how they are able to get away with it. I’ve asked around and it seems like this is a fairly common occurrence, especially in circles around the original ‘famous’ scientist. These people basically killed my friend, don’t know it and probably wouldn’t care. They likely rationalize their behavior as the cost of doing science.

The system is absolutely disgustingly broken and much of published and celebrated science is, in one way or another, a lie. We need to stop making scientists into rockstars, especially those who somehow publish more papers in a year than physically possible. Each one of these untouchable individuals is followed by an unseen trail of ruined careers and ruined lives.

The field would not have suffered. My friend’s work would still have been published. The difference is that it wouldn’t have added to the myth of exceptionalism of this particular scientist - and maybe the floater grad student would not have gotten her PhD... but in the end my friend didn’t get his PhD either and now he isn’t here any more. Scientific prestige is not a limited resource and should not be subject to the tragedy of the commons.

My young daughter asks about him a lot and I have no idea what to say.

Interesting - how haven’t I heard about that story? I immediately thought about how Rick covers his outpost in screaming Mortys so that the galactic government can’t detect him. Morty pain as anti-Rick is a strange, appealing and disturbing thought... they’re effectively oysters soaking up the pain of the universe.

Absolutely love the idea of this service.

Trying to sign up now, site is returning a blank page near the end of account creation.

Hopefully this is a good sign and you’re seeing the HN spike. Either way, thank you for making this a thing.

Location: New Jersey, USA Remote: Open to either Willing to relocate: Not significantly Technologies: Workload Specialist - automation (AutoSys admin) and Change Detection (Change Tracker and Tripwire) and Change Management (Service-Now). Python, Powershell, Bash. MSSQL, Oracle, MongoDB. Unix or Windows SA Résumé/CV: Upon request (don’t have it on me at the moment) Email: entangledelectrons at gmail.com

Degree is in physics but career is in IT working for large financial institutions. Am open to anything and can learn new things quickly.

[dead] 8 years ago

Location: New Jersey Remote: Sure Willing to relocate: Not significantly Technologies: Workload engineer specializing in AutoSys (Automation) & Change Management (Change Tracker or Tripwire). Coding/Scripting in Powershell, Bash or Python. DB’s are MSSQL, Oracle and MongoDB. Can learn anything pretty quickly. Résumé/CV: Upon request Email: entangledelectrons at gmail.com