I worked with Travis on the Electromagnetic Warfare Team at Anduril and he's one of the most phenomenal engineers I've had the pleasure of working with. Nix is already such a niche software it's absolutely baffling they'd prevent one of the few companies hiring Nix experts from advertising jobs because of a few loud individuals with anime avatars.
To each their own, but if I was running a job forum, I would also be reluctant to provide ad space to companies building instruments of death and pushing regressive politics. Is this really baffling to you? I expect most people would actually feel this way.
...the Steering Committee is banning Anduril from recruiting on Discourse. We will leave this specific thread up and locked (to record this decision), but the moderation team has been instructed to remove future Anduril job posts on Discourse.
>is there no company on earth, such that you wouldn't want them advertising on your forum?
Do they spread hate? Have they cast harm on members of the forum? Otherwise, I don't see the issue. Unless this is a blanket ban on defend contractors.
If it isn't, I simply see it as hypocritical. Especially since all the big FAANGs also all operate with the military in some capacity.
Anduril, as I recall, staunchly supports the current administration, which is vehemently anti-trans. (In fact, Trump has nominated an Anduril executive for the role of Army Under Secretary in his administration.) If NixOS has prominent trans developers, that might be one reason to do it.
That's not what the moderator's message about the ban says though, is it?
> The moderation team brought this thread to our attention as the latest example in an ongoing controversy in the community and they escalated the decision to us so that we can provide them clearer guidance for how to proceed going forward. Our moderation team has done an admirable job, but this controversy has escalated beyond the point where moderation actions alone can resolve this.
> To that end, the Steering Committee is banning Anduril from recruiting on Discourse.
Isn't this saying that the ban is because Anduril's job posts causes the community to respond in inappropriate or off-topic ways - an exemplified by the linked thread's comments on Greenland - and that the forum moderators can't clean it all up?
No, the post referring to prior controversies. This includes the exodus of a large number of long-term nixpkgs maintainers after undoing the ban of an Anduril employee.
As a former military person now working with tech, it's a bummer to see that the "neo" defense industry outside Ukraine (for obvious reasons) is trying to play the "Silicon Valley recruitment tale" without understanding the difference between the kind of people that you want to attract versus the class of people that have "mental elasticity" (sic.) to be willing to work for you.
When dealing with very important but abstract/distant terms in our daily lives like nation, war, death, patriotism, and patriotic sacrifice, you require some sort of people that are definitely not like your regular SWE.
One thing that I learned in military/defense is that the spectrum of people that ends there is between the "I went for the wrong reasons" and "hyperpatriotic on the border of being a zealot". Damn, we had guys in my Company that just went to the Army because they watched "Rambo: First Blood" and found it amazing.
Seeing the Anduril folk in the thread trying their best to recruit people in a completely different vibe related to tech, it's not only unintentionally comic but also shows how the defense tech is drunk with the VC/LP lore of "Let's get the best talent in the market and pay them well".
Edit 1: Anduril is going to learn the same thing that most of the professional military services in the world have already known for decades: Forget this misleading nerd Silicon Valley archetype and go to the Rico's [1] of the world: People willing to do things for the wrong reasons and/or naive enough to occasionally become the people that you want.
Your comment has changed substantially from its initial version.
For the latest version: I think Anduril knows who they're looking for and how to get those people. This commercial, for example, is quite deliberate in filtering out the people they don't want https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXQrci3Wff8
The idea being that you wield so much more power than your enemies, and have so much knowledge of their movements, that they are not an actual threat to you, and their knowledge of this prevents them from actually committing violence? And that force can be used to stop them from committing violence before they actually get the chance to hurt you?
I'm not trying to pull a gotcha, I'm legitimately curious to see if that is an inaccurate framing.
edit: my comment no longer makes sense after the parent comment was edited, the original talked about how after being on both sides, they've seen how tech can be an effective deterrent
It's not so much the mission, as it is Anduril, and despite the fallability of taking an early survey of comments, I'd wager a good set are communicating something similar.
>still those new players cannot recruit a broader base of folks.
to be fair this comment from the thread after the author clarified that non-citizens can apply sums the situation up:
"Would you be willing to assist the United States in an invasion/annexation of Greenland? As a Danish citizen, I think it would be slightly counterproductive to work for a company that may potentially invade me in the coming future."
I would actually sleep better if the PR damage is big enough so that the recruitment base shrinks until the risk of invading a free and democratic ally is off the table
The weirdest thing is that Denmark is a member of the European Common Security and Defence Policy. EU countries would be obligated to help defend Greenland. Any military action toward Greenland would essentially mean that US declares war on Europe. Nobody seems to mention this. We live in a weird post-facts world.
I think they are very different situations. Automattic (and their leadership) used their power over the WordPress open source project as a weapon in a legal dispute with a major competitor.
What has Anduril done? Tried to sponsor some conference. Post a job ad on a project forum dedicated to that purpose - both are activities which, in the general case, the project welcomes - and then project members object, not because of anything they’ve done in the project itself, but because they don’t like the industry Anduril is in, who its customers are, etc
Seems to me like completely different situations. The WordPress situation makes Automattic look bad in my eyes, while the Anduril situation makes NixOS look bad in my eyes
As a counterpoint: to me it makes NixOS look good to publicly take an anti-militarist stance, in fact it makes me interested to look more into it than before.
Military companies have enough funding to market on their own and not rely on volunteer communities and coopting them in the process.
Original post as follows (edit: I have no affiliation with this company, I am just reposting what they wrote):
Anduril Industries is hiring NixOS engineers to work on electromagnetic warfare products. This is a unique opportunity to use Nix at a large scale in an embedded setting. Anduril has adopted Nix at large and we use IOG’s generously maintained Haskell.nix project to build all of our Haskell code and ship it to thousands of customer assets across the globe. If you have Nix/NixOS/Nixpkgs experience and are interested in any of:
Embedded Linux
Cross compilation
Haskell
Radio systems
Enterprise CI/CD
FPGAs
please do drop me a line at travis@anduril.com, as well as submitting your application to our online portal here: Job Application for Embedded NixOS Engineer, EW at Anduril Industries . To tackle a few common questions:
Yes, Anduril is an American defense technology company. We build weapons systems for the United States and its allies.
This is an on-site role at Anduril headquarters in Costa Mesa, California. Our team is building software for hardware products, so physical presence in our RF lab is often required throughout the course of software development and testing. Remote work would only be considered for candidates with something extraordinary to offer to our team.
I’d be happy to answer any other questions in the thread below.
and remove baz from the list, baz will still be installed. If you have this NixOS config:
packages = with pkgs; [
foo
bar
baz
]
and remove baz, you will no longer have baz installed[0]. Or put differently, ansible is never comprehensive, nix is[1]. Of course, ansible is a lot easier IMHO so choose your tradeoffs.
[0] I mean, insofar as packages are ever "installed" in nix. But for our purposes using that word is fine.
[1] Generally. Like, nothing prevents you from creating a python virtualenv or dropping config files around or coloring outside the lines in other ways, but using the system in the straightforward idiomatic way does leave you with everything encoded in a single config.
If you have an ansible playbook that runs "apt-get install docker" you'll get a different version over time, even with no changes to your playbook.
With nix, every package version change, every single diff, is a git commit which you can roll back and track a breakage to.
If you want, you can run your own apt repos, pin all your apt package versions, etc and make ubuntu a little more reproducible, but it's hard to do it. The system fights against you.
> With nix, every package version change, every single diff, is a git commit which you can roll back and track a breakage to.
I think this is only true if you use flakes or jump through some hoops? Otherwise you of course can roll back to a previous generation, but not a previous commit.
Difficult to summarize, but the short answer is: immutability, reproducibility, and reversibility (i.e. you can revert/de-revert almost any change instantly).
It's on another level, as compared to Ubuntu, but it's also much more intrinsically demanding.
And lately it has unfortunately become a culture war battleground.
With all due respect, Anduril already knows how the NixOS forum feels about them. The purpose of this listing is to insult and inflame the community. In politics we call this bear-baiting.
It is a different argument, but they do not contradict one another and they(edit) does single out Anduril in the original post:
> It has nothing to do with Anduril's business (which is a separate discussion) and everything to do with insulting a community they're dependent on.
so it seems like it was always somewhat specific to Anduril and the claimed behavior of Anduril. Though I do not know what the insult that Anduril committed against the community.
They don't contradict each other, and they don't have to. The generic "argument" is plainly wrong for the reason forrestthewoods pointed out: this is an official section of the forums dedicated to advertising by private companies. So why did they say that, instead of explaining what grave insult Anduril committed? I don't know, I guess they're having a strong emotional response to the situation.
> The generic "argument" is plainly wrong for the reason forrestthewoods pointed out: this is an official section of the forums dedicated to advertising by private companies.
I would not say their argument is wrong. My best read is that they were arguing against and completely open job forum for corporations in general and for some kind of gatekeeping.
It seemed an argument against current practices. I can not call that wrong, though I would want to see what they would want as an alternative.
An argument against the current practice where Anduril is banned? Come on. Your attempt to steelman them is admirable to an extent, but there's nothing there to save. They overreached and got called on it.
> An argument against the current practice where Anduril is banned?
An argument against Anduril being able to post in the first place before they were banned, or maybe all corporations. The current practice was to allow Anduril to post, when they made their post. The poster was celebrating the removal and the ban as a step in the right direction, but my impression is they would go farther.
They seemed to revel in Anduril's ban which seemed at least to be schadenfreude, and they did not back some of what they said while doing so, but I think that can be separated from the rest of their argument/desires.
You're saying they advocated a policy that pre-emptively and specifically banned Anduril from posting in the jobs section of their forum before they posted a single thing? There's no evidence that that's justified or that the top level poster believed that. And it still wouldn't change that their swipe at corporate advertising was nonsense.
Maybe they advocate for removing the job board entirely? They didn't say that though, even when forrestthewoods specifically mentioned it. Instead they moved the goal posts.
> You're saying they advocated a policy that pre-emptively and specifically banned Anduril from posting
At(edit) this point I can not double check the post to see if I was reading it right since it is currently hidden after being flagged. Most of the stuff I see flagged to removal on HN is more extreme than what was said by the OP here.
At least advocating for gatekeeping like I mentioned before. They did not get into specifics from what I remember.
> There's no evidence that that's justified
I think we are on the same page about them not posting evidence for justification around Anduril.
> And it still wouldn't change that their swipe at corporate advertising was nonsense.
There is a wide amount of opinion on what is justifiable corporate advertising. I do not remember any specific policy that they advocated for that came off as nonsense. I would say it did not sound like an opinion held by the majority of this forum or my everyday life in the USA.
> Maybe they advocate for removing the job board entirely?
If they came back and said 'yes that is what I want' I would not be surprised, but all we have to go off of is:
> Good, private corporations should not be allowed to leverage a public utility like this as their advertisement soapbox.
So maybe as long as the private corporations do not "leverage a public utility" as an "advertisement soapbox" they could post on the forum.
> Instead they moved the goal posts.
I do not see the goal posts moving, maybe they were, in the OP's head, but I can not extract that from the text. Moving the goal posts in my mind would be if the OP set some criteria, then someone pointing out Anduril met that criteria, then the OP changing the criteria so Anduril did not qualify anymore. The only criteria given though was:
> private corporations should not be allowed to leverage a public utility like this as their advertisement soapbox
And the thread did not dig down on that, no one said Anduril met the criteria, and the criteria was not changed. Would have been a more interesting conversation if the thread had dug down on: What did Anduril do? Why does it disqualify them? What is the OP's standard? Is it consistent?
I've had to dig internet archive to see original post [0], but I don't see anything particular inflammatory there? Pretty standard job description, and being in the "Jobs" section is right on-topic.
The only potentially objectable part is this one:
> Yes, Anduril is an American defense technology company. We build weapons systems for the United States and its allies.
but I feel it's a useful good warning, given that a lot of people don't want to work on weapons, and it does not go overboard by saying it's the best or anything like this.
Yeah, I wish other studios would do that did me instead of hiding "LLM" or "we 3" down in the middle. They should know the vibes by now, don't wastr a call if we aren't aligned on the core mission.
Still very confused though. Is there some history here everyone else knows but I don't?
> With all due respect, Anduril already knows how the NixOS forum feels about them. The purpose of this listing is to insult and inflame the community. In politics we call this bear-baiting.
Is there a history posted somewhere of Anduril's history with Nix? I feel like there is context I'm missing
Some people in the Nix community are opposed to Nix being used for weapons. Thus they're opposed to Anduril using Nix, sponsoring Nix conferences, or participating in the community in any way.
Alternatively, the purpose was probably just to find some good candidates? I mean the first few replies had several interested people before the mods shut it down.
No doubt certain vocal community members feel very strongly about Anduril. But I’m not sure it’s an actual majority.
This is an irrational conclusion to leap to, it only makes sense if you're a weird extremist.
the NixOS project did have purges and even ousted theirown founder though so i'm not surprised by this kind of comment appearing here assuming a corporation is aware of the insane nixOS drama train.
Yeah, corporations are great because we have little other choice. And, soon, we'll have no other choice! Because they're the only reason free software exists, according to my Excel spread.
I read it as, even if "corporate contributions power a huge chunk of the free software ecosystem" there is no obligation to compensate(~special treatment) them for this act.
Why is this flagged? Regardless of the side you take on Andruil (or the war machine in general), this is a relevant piece of news.
Everything vaguely anti-Trump/Putin gets flagged here now.
Does the flagging hide it from any feeds, though?
The default feed, yes. That's the incentive to flag stuff you don't agree with. It basically tanks the possibility of the story making the front page.
I (sort of) understand the idea of flagging stuff you disagree with but still struggle to understand why people apply it here.
I would seem to me that whether you're in favor or against Anduril (i.e if you care at all), you would probably want to see this information.
> I (sort of) understand the idea of flagging stuff you disagree with
that's not what flagging is for; just don't upvote if you don't like it
flagging is intentionally trying to make it more difficult for other users to see it
Right. It's not that I agree with this idea, I just understand it
Another good reason to read via an rss feed.
Or just using https://news.ycombinator.com/active
Like most people seem to have moved to.
I worked with Travis on the Electromagnetic Warfare Team at Anduril and he's one of the most phenomenal engineers I've had the pleasure of working with. Nix is already such a niche software it's absolutely baffling they'd prevent one of the few companies hiring Nix experts from advertising jobs because of a few loud individuals with anime avatars.
To each their own, but if I was running a job forum, I would also be reluctant to provide ad space to companies building instruments of death and pushing regressive politics. Is this really baffling to you? I expect most people would actually feel this way.
Wording in the final post [1] fwiw:
...the Steering Committee is banning Anduril from recruiting on Discourse. We will leave this specific thread up and locked (to record this decision), but the moderation team has been instructed to remove future Anduril job posts on Discourse.
[1] https://discourse.nixos.org/t/anduril-industries-electromagn...
If you don’t want your software used for things you don’t approve of, don’t give it away for free.
> If you don’t want your software used for things you don’t approve of, don’t give it away for free.
They aren't stopping, or even trying to stop, Anduril from using it, though.
So, why were they banned? The comments there don't really explain much.
The Nix people don't want Anduril advertising on their forum.
If you operated a forum, is there no company on earth, such that you wouldn't want them advertising on your forum?
>is there no company on earth, such that you wouldn't want them advertising on your forum?
Do they spread hate? Have they cast harm on members of the forum? Otherwise, I don't see the issue. Unless this is a blanket ban on defend contractors.
If it isn't, I simply see it as hypocritical. Especially since all the big FAANGs also all operate with the military in some capacity.
Anduril, as I recall, staunchly supports the current administration, which is vehemently anti-trans. (In fact, Trump has nominated an Anduril executive for the role of Army Under Secretary in his administration.) If NixOS has prominent trans developers, that might be one reason to do it.
That's not what the moderator's message about the ban says though, is it?
> The moderation team brought this thread to our attention as the latest example in an ongoing controversy in the community and they escalated the decision to us so that we can provide them clearer guidance for how to proceed going forward. Our moderation team has done an admirable job, but this controversy has escalated beyond the point where moderation actions alone can resolve this.
> To that end, the Steering Committee is banning Anduril from recruiting on Discourse.
Isn't this saying that the ban is because Anduril's job posts causes the community to respond in inappropriate or off-topic ways - an exemplified by the linked thread's comments on Greenland - and that the forum moderators can't clean it all up?
No, the post referring to prior controversies. This includes the exodus of a large number of long-term nixpkgs maintainers after undoing the ban of an Anduril employee.
thank you, that was what I was asking about. I am genuinely out of the loop and don't know anything bout this NixOS forum.
Why not just ban all advertisements instead of singling out one company?
As a former military person now working with tech, it's a bummer to see that the "neo" defense industry outside Ukraine (for obvious reasons) is trying to play the "Silicon Valley recruitment tale" without understanding the difference between the kind of people that you want to attract versus the class of people that have "mental elasticity" (sic.) to be willing to work for you.
When dealing with very important but abstract/distant terms in our daily lives like nation, war, death, patriotism, and patriotic sacrifice, you require some sort of people that are definitely not like your regular SWE.
One thing that I learned in military/defense is that the spectrum of people that ends there is between the "I went for the wrong reasons" and "hyperpatriotic on the border of being a zealot". Damn, we had guys in my Company that just went to the Army because they watched "Rambo: First Blood" and found it amazing.
Seeing the Anduril folk in the thread trying their best to recruit people in a completely different vibe related to tech, it's not only unintentionally comic but also shows how the defense tech is drunk with the VC/LP lore of "Let's get the best talent in the market and pay them well".
Edit 1: Anduril is going to learn the same thing that most of the professional military services in the world have already known for decades: Forget this misleading nerd Silicon Valley archetype and go to the Rico's [1] of the world: People willing to do things for the wrong reasons and/or naive enough to occasionally become the people that you want.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b07887ZzKiw
Edit 2: I hit submit early and I reframed my post, sorry for the confusion.
Your comment has changed substantially from its initial version.
For the latest version: I think Anduril knows who they're looking for and how to get those people. This commercial, for example, is quite deliberate in filtering out the people they don't want https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXQrci3Wff8
The idea being that you wield so much more power than your enemies, and have so much knowledge of their movements, that they are not an actual threat to you, and their knowledge of this prevents them from actually committing violence? And that force can be used to stop them from committing violence before they actually get the chance to hurt you?
I'm not trying to pull a gotcha, I'm legitimately curious to see if that is an inaccurate framing.
edit: my comment no longer makes sense after the parent comment was edited, the original talked about how after being on both sides, they've seen how tech can be an effective deterrent
It's not so much the mission, as it is Anduril, and despite the fallability of taking an early survey of comments, I'd wager a good set are communicating something similar.
>still those new players cannot recruit a broader base of folks.
to be fair this comment from the thread after the author clarified that non-citizens can apply sums the situation up:
"Would you be willing to assist the United States in an invasion/annexation of Greenland? As a Danish citizen, I think it would be slightly counterproductive to work for a company that may potentially invade me in the coming future."
I would actually sleep better if the PR damage is big enough so that the recruitment base shrinks until the risk of invading a free and democratic ally is off the table
The weirdest thing is that Denmark is a member of the European Common Security and Defence Policy. EU countries would be obligated to help defend Greenland. Any military action toward Greenland would essentially mean that US declares war on Europe. Nobody seems to mention this. We live in a weird post-facts world.
[flagged]
I think the only company I know which spends more time than Anduril getting embroiled in completely unnecessary drama is Automattic.
I think they are very different situations. Automattic (and their leadership) used their power over the WordPress open source project as a weapon in a legal dispute with a major competitor.
What has Anduril done? Tried to sponsor some conference. Post a job ad on a project forum dedicated to that purpose - both are activities which, in the general case, the project welcomes - and then project members object, not because of anything they’ve done in the project itself, but because they don’t like the industry Anduril is in, who its customers are, etc
Seems to me like completely different situations. The WordPress situation makes Automattic look bad in my eyes, while the Anduril situation makes NixOS look bad in my eyes
As a counterpoint: to me it makes NixOS look good to publicly take an anti-militarist stance, in fact it makes me interested to look more into it than before.
Military companies have enough funding to market on their own and not rely on volunteer communities and coopting them in the process.
Hey, Stalin may have murdered millions, but what has he done in the project itself? Let's stay on topic here.
Not to mention that all the companies in that whole Tolkien-named cluster funnel money directly to Sauron.
People get to pick who uses their project for advertising.
Basecamp / DHH are maybe also good candidates for that list.
I think that’ll depend on whether you’re just counting totals or drama per unit time.
Title: Anduril Industries’ Electromagnetic Warfare Team is Hiring
First comment: This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.
Original post as follows (edit: I have no affiliation with this company, I am just reposting what they wrote):
Anduril Industries is hiring NixOS engineers to work on electromagnetic warfare products. This is a unique opportunity to use Nix at a large scale in an embedded setting. Anduril has adopted Nix at large and we use IOG’s generously maintained Haskell.nix project to build all of our Haskell code and ship it to thousands of customer assets across the globe. If you have Nix/NixOS/Nixpkgs experience and are interested in any of:
Embedded Linux Cross compilation Haskell Radio systems Enterprise CI/CD FPGAs please do drop me a line at travis@anduril.com, as well as submitting your application to our online portal here: Job Application for Embedded NixOS Engineer, EW at Anduril Industries . To tackle a few common questions:
Yes, Anduril is an American defense technology company. We build weapons systems for the United States and its allies. This is an on-site role at Anduril headquarters in Costa Mesa, California. Our team is building software for hardware products, so physical presence in our RF lab is often required throughout the course of software development and testing. Remote work would only be considered for candidates with something extraordinary to offer to our team. I’d be happy to answer any other questions in the thread below.
Banned because they are helping the DOD or sabotaging them?
side question:
Why do I use NixOS instead of Ubuntu + ansible combo ?
To oversimplify and only pick one aspect:
If you have this ansible:
and remove baz from the list, baz will still be installed. If you have this NixOS config: and remove baz, you will no longer have baz installed[0]. Or put differently, ansible is never comprehensive, nix is[1]. Of course, ansible is a lot easier IMHO so choose your tradeoffs.[0] I mean, insofar as packages are ever "installed" in nix. But for our purposes using that word is fine.
[1] Generally. Like, nothing prevents you from creating a python virtualenv or dropping config files around or coloring outside the lines in other ways, but using the system in the straightforward idiomatic way does leave you with everything encoded in a single config.
If you have an ansible playbook that runs "apt-get install docker" you'll get a different version over time, even with no changes to your playbook.
With nix, every package version change, every single diff, is a git commit which you can roll back and track a breakage to.
If you want, you can run your own apt repos, pin all your apt package versions, etc and make ubuntu a little more reproducible, but it's hard to do it. The system fights against you.
yaml also sucks, and nix is a better language.
Use whatever you want.
> With nix, every package version change, every single diff, is a git commit which you can roll back and track a breakage to.
I think this is only true if you use flakes or jump through some hoops? Otherwise you of course can roll back to a previous generation, but not a previous commit.
If you're not using something like npins or nix flakes then you're not really using nix correctly, and have abandoned the light of god.
Difficult to summarize, but the short answer is: immutability, reproducibility, and reversibility (i.e. you can revert/de-revert almost any change instantly).
It's on another level, as compared to Ubuntu, but it's also much more intrinsically demanding.
And lately it has unfortunately become a culture war battleground.
NixOS is infrastructure-as-code, for real this time.
(The downside is that now you have to write code.)
[flagged]
> Good, private corporations should not be allowed to leverage a public utility like this as their advertisement soapbox.
It’s a jobs subforum. It exists literally for corporations to advertise job opportunities to relevant and likely interested communities.
With all due respect, Anduril already knows how the NixOS forum feels about them. The purpose of this listing is to insult and inflame the community. In politics we call this bear-baiting.
Cool, but that's a very different argument from your previous:
> private corporations should not be allowed to leverage a public utility like this as their advertisement soapbox
Clearly it's not about corporations in general, it's this specific corporation.
It is a different argument, but they do not contradict one another and they(edit) does single out Anduril in the original post:
> It has nothing to do with Anduril's business (which is a separate discussion) and everything to do with insulting a community they're dependent on.
so it seems like it was always somewhat specific to Anduril and the claimed behavior of Anduril. Though I do not know what the insult that Anduril committed against the community.
They don't contradict each other, and they don't have to. The generic "argument" is plainly wrong for the reason forrestthewoods pointed out: this is an official section of the forums dedicated to advertising by private companies. So why did they say that, instead of explaining what grave insult Anduril committed? I don't know, I guess they're having a strong emotional response to the situation.
> The generic "argument" is plainly wrong for the reason forrestthewoods pointed out: this is an official section of the forums dedicated to advertising by private companies.
I would not say their argument is wrong. My best read is that they were arguing against and completely open job forum for corporations in general and for some kind of gatekeeping.
It seemed an argument against current practices. I can not call that wrong, though I would want to see what they would want as an alternative.
An argument against the current practice where Anduril is banned? Come on. Your attempt to steelman them is admirable to an extent, but there's nothing there to save. They overreached and got called on it.
> An argument against the current practice where Anduril is banned?
An argument against Anduril being able to post in the first place before they were banned, or maybe all corporations. The current practice was to allow Anduril to post, when they made their post. The poster was celebrating the removal and the ban as a step in the right direction, but my impression is they would go farther.
They seemed to revel in Anduril's ban which seemed at least to be schadenfreude, and they did not back some of what they said while doing so, but I think that can be separated from the rest of their argument/desires.
You're saying they advocated a policy that pre-emptively and specifically banned Anduril from posting in the jobs section of their forum before they posted a single thing? There's no evidence that that's justified or that the top level poster believed that. And it still wouldn't change that their swipe at corporate advertising was nonsense.
Maybe they advocate for removing the job board entirely? They didn't say that though, even when forrestthewoods specifically mentioned it. Instead they moved the goal posts.
> You're saying they advocated a policy that pre-emptively and specifically banned Anduril from posting
At(edit) this point I can not double check the post to see if I was reading it right since it is currently hidden after being flagged. Most of the stuff I see flagged to removal on HN is more extreme than what was said by the OP here.
At least advocating for gatekeeping like I mentioned before. They did not get into specifics from what I remember.
> There's no evidence that that's justified
I think we are on the same page about them not posting evidence for justification around Anduril.
> And it still wouldn't change that their swipe at corporate advertising was nonsense.
There is a wide amount of opinion on what is justifiable corporate advertising. I do not remember any specific policy that they advocated for that came off as nonsense. I would say it did not sound like an opinion held by the majority of this forum or my everyday life in the USA.
> Maybe they advocate for removing the job board entirely?
If they came back and said 'yes that is what I want' I would not be surprised, but all we have to go off of is:
> Good, private corporations should not be allowed to leverage a public utility like this as their advertisement soapbox.
So maybe as long as the private corporations do not "leverage a public utility" as an "advertisement soapbox" they could post on the forum.
> Instead they moved the goal posts.
I do not see the goal posts moving, maybe they were, in the OP's head, but I can not extract that from the text. Moving the goal posts in my mind would be if the OP set some criteria, then someone pointing out Anduril met that criteria, then the OP changing the criteria so Anduril did not qualify anymore. The only criteria given though was:
> private corporations should not be allowed to leverage a public utility like this as their advertisement soapbox
And the thread did not dig down on that, no one said Anduril met the criteria, and the criteria was not changed. Would have been a more interesting conversation if the thread had dug down on: What did Anduril do? Why does it disqualify them? What is the OP's standard? Is it consistent?
I've had to dig internet archive to see original post [0], but I don't see anything particular inflammatory there? Pretty standard job description, and being in the "Jobs" section is right on-topic.
The only potentially objectable part is this one:
> Yes, Anduril is an American defense technology company. We build weapons systems for the United States and its allies.
but I feel it's a useful good warning, given that a lot of people don't want to work on weapons, and it does not go overboard by saying it's the best or anything like this.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250403111805/https://discourse...
Yeah, I wish other studios would do that did me instead of hiding "LLM" or "we 3" down in the middle. They should know the vibes by now, don't wastr a call if we aren't aligned on the core mission.
Still very confused though. Is there some history here everyone else knows but I don't?
> With all due respect, Anduril already knows how the NixOS forum feels about them. The purpose of this listing is to insult and inflame the community. In politics we call this bear-baiting.
Is there a history posted somewhere of Anduril's history with Nix? I feel like there is context I'm missing
edit: https://save-nix-together.org/ & https://lwn.net/Articles/970824/.
Some people in the Nix community are opposed to Nix being used for weapons. Thus they're opposed to Anduril using Nix, sponsoring Nix conferences, or participating in the community in any way.
Alternatively, the purpose was probably just to find some good candidates? I mean the first few replies had several interested people before the mods shut it down.
No doubt certain vocal community members feel very strongly about Anduril. But I’m not sure it’s an actual majority.
This is an irrational conclusion to leap to, it only makes sense if you're a weird extremist.
the NixOS project did have purges and even ousted theirown founder though so i'm not surprised by this kind of comment appearing here assuming a corporation is aware of the insane nixOS drama train.
You do realize that corporate contributions power a huge chunk of the free software ecosystem, yes?
Yeah, corporations are great because we have little other choice. And, soon, we'll have no other choice! Because they're the only reason free software exists, according to my Excel spread.
If anyone really feels thst way, good time to move to a country that actually protects it's consumers instead of kowtowong.
Yes or no, where is this going? Please elaborate.
I do realize that, and their investment doesn't obligate them to special treatment. That's the point of free licensing and compulsory donations.
"compulsory donations". I did not expect to ever meet someone using this non-ironically, but you seem serious...
What is the special treatment?
I read it as, even if "corporate contributions power a huge chunk of the free software ecosystem" there is no obligation to compensate(~special treatment) them for this act.
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