Have you really ever thought deeply about your reasoning that it’s all fine and dandy and just love when your paycheck every two weeks of what you spent 50 hours a week doing was coming from, pretty convenient to look the other way when it’s a categorical fact your old employer knowingly assists in genocide, mass deportations, democratic backsliding.. your intentions may be genuine and good natured and if that’s the case then hopefully this new chapter of your company will serve good things, and hopefully not more triangulation of data points vis a vis document parsing to help continue what palantir and the likes are doing
Noted — and I did wish the founder success. I have no personal ill will towards them. But what I'd ask HN to consider is this: our world, and the technology we introduce into it, isn't apolitical or free of normative stakes and real, harmful implications for people. Treating where you've worked and what technology you've stewarded into being as an ethically neutral fact isn't neutral at all. What concerns me is that there's an increasing firewall against calling out things that ACTUALLLY harm people — while an objection gets reframed as a personal attack on someone willingly able to propagate problematic things. But this seems to be where the corporate tech world is moving as it cozies up to the authoritarians.
Sure, and HN hosts many threads where people debate these points. We're not against that and often as not agree with them.
But this is a startup launch thread about something unrelated, and hounding someone about an ex-employer is a tenuous ground for bringing such material up. It's the sort of thing this guideline (from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) asks people not to do, even apart from the personal aspect:
Planning to serve good things for sure, and appreciate your note.
Ofc I didn't agree with everything Palantir was doing (also to the extent that we even knew about them at the time). I was working on vaccine distribution and cancer research as well, so definitely felt like helping.
