Boycott IETF 127
411 comments
·March 21, 2025PLMUV9A4UP27D
sterlind
I remember when the ACM ICPC had to be moved from Egypt to the US during the Arab Spring. It's got to be a logistics nightmare to move a conference, but it's best to bite the bullet at the first sign of trouble.
rhaps0dy
You could host it in Mexico or Canada, they're pretty nice!
vanviegen
For many travellers it would be hard to find a flight plan without a stop in the US though.
billfruit
And since many US airports do not have facilities for 'sterile transfers', people will require a US C1 Transit Visa to travel connecting through US.
andsoitis
From which countries do you need to transit through the US to get either to Canada or Mexico?
actionfromafar
Never thought of it, but I guess that will eventually change.
Teever
That's a great idea. I can't speak about Mexican alternatives but there are many great locations in Canada for a conference.
If the conference was originally going to be held on the west coast of the US then Vancouver would be an excellent alternative and if it was going to be held on the east coast then Montreal is another excellent alternative.
Can anyone suggest some viable alternatives in Mexico?
kamma4434
Depends on when the conference is scheduled, but Mexico has some world renewed venues at the seaside - say Cancun- that nobody minds visiting when it’s winter at home. :-)
rhaps0dy
I've been in conferences in Ciudad de México and it was a very pleasant experience. I honestly haven't been anywhere else in Mexico.
andsoitis
The Canadian government has this travel advisory for Mexico: https://travel.gc.ca/destinations/mexico
assimpleaspossi
Aren't there still violent conflicts with drug gangs where citizens are killed still going on in Mexico?
null
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blackeyeblitzar
Yes absolutely. It’s odd to see people here suggesting Mexico as an alternative based on safety of travelers. It’s a giveaway that they’re simply being opportunistic in attacking America due to their opposition to the administration, rather than anything actually safety related.
As an example, this article from 2025 about a family of foreigners being shot dead also lists numerous other recent examples of tourists being killed, and links to those stories:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/01/world/americas/americans-...
Those aren’t even the only ones, and physical harm isn’t the only type of crime foreigners can experience in Mexico either. Moving a conference there for safety makes no sense whatsoever.
bakugo
[flagged]
AaronFriel
[flagged]
purplezooey
I have been going to IETFs on and off for 20 years. As if the past few months were not nauseating enough in the US, I never thought I would see my own country on a page like this, and described in this way, and I feel even more deeply saddened, ashamed and horrified.
curiousgal
[flagged]
Aeolun
Sure, by their enemies. Not by their allies.
Nursie
I don't want to downplay your feelings there, but under Trump 2.0 it has become clearer to those of us in allied nations that things are not as they were, and that even long-term friends can now be insulted and thrown under the bus. I think there is a qualitative change here.
oldgradstudent
Is this a parody?
> Beyond problems at the border, the current Secretary for Health and Human Services - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - has said that he will send those with ADHD to camps. Source: Futurism.
What he actually said:
> "I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms — drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country," he said during the podcast. "I’m going to make it so people can go, if you’re convicted of a drug offense, or if you have a drug problem, you can go to one of these places for free."
That what happens when you rely on Futurism as a source.
graeme
The full quote extends that to adderal. To be clear he said the wellness farms would be for those who want to go, and he's describing a massive undertaking that you'd see coming before it was implemented.
But he was definitely talking about ADHD. This tweet has the short video of him actually including adderal.
viraptor
Keep in mind he's also a guy who, contradicting all the available evidence, is saying incorrect things about the nature of adhd and dips heavily into moral issues when discussing medical problems. So any facilities related to his ideas are unlikely to provide actually care.
michaelsshaw
Obviously I'm super into giving the trump admin the benefit of the doubt. It's like, the number one thing that I like doing.
gherkinnn
The full quote, as per Futurism: (emphasis mine)
> I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need — three or four years if they need it — to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities,
I am not going to skim through 1.5h of deranged ramblings in a raspy voice to find him saying this though.
fastball
So he said nothing about ADHD.
philjohn
"to get off Adderall"
Are you trying to claim that because he didn't specifically mention ADHD, despite mentioning the drug used to treat ADHD, that he's not talking about ADHD despite him holding views about neurodiversity that are at odds with the published literature on their treatment?
nialse
In a historical context “wellness farms” is understood as a euphemism for concentration camp. It’s free but you can’t leave.
silisili
If you talk to a parent of a child who OD'd, most commonly of fent these days, they all have this thought.
What if I took them somewhere remote where there are no drugs and didn't let them leave?
My heart hurts for them, but I have no idea if it's a good idea or not.
Regardless, I think his heart is in the right place. Time will tell whether or not it's actually useful.
rswail
If the parents went with the child, and stayed with them, then maybe.
But they don't, they outsource the job to a group of (mostly) sadistic, uneducated-in-rehab, "boot camps" that somehow think that violently invading an individual's rights and actions is how to "cure" drug addiction, without attempting to treat the underlying causes of addictive behavior.
croes
They had camps to cure gayness.
The problem isn’t the camps but the people who have the authority in them and how the treat people especially if the cure isn’t working.
Not everything can be cured by organic food, fresh air and labor.
BTW is the food the grow for the farms only or is selling it part of the plan?
If the latter then it’s about cheap labor
qingcharles
The profit margin on drugs is good. I think it would take about zero days before "remote location" is programmed into the Google Maps of several local dealers.
I've been in max security prisons. There are generally far more drugs inside these than I've ever seen in the outside world.
I don't want to piss on rehab too much, it can work. But for every decent rehab facility there are probably 100 bogus ones.
Also remember, that to an addict who has been to prison, rehab feels like prison. It has the same locked-down, heavy-on-the-rules design that can cause serious PTSD issues for (practically everyone) who suffers some sort of trauma from being incarcerated.
lynx97
Not just parents. Its a method that actual addicts employ. I have heard this not only once. "Moved a few months to a rural place where I had no access to the stuff to get my system clean" is a tactic that people turn to. Heck, one example I am thinking of even moved from the USA to Europe in the 90s to get rid of his crack addiction.
InvisibleUp
There’s a webcomic, “Joe vs. Elan School”, that might be an enlightening read for you.
snotrockets
He has no heart. He is cruel, as he subscribes to the idea that a disease isn’t something you get because you rolled the dice wrong, but something that can be avoided by being “pure”. For him, pure health is never systematic or unlucky; the person is at fault.
This is not only immoral and vile, but borders on the psychopathic. The man should have never been allowed to make any decision affecting public health.
whacko_quacko
I had a drug problem once, and di something like that. It helped a lot. If there's no way to procure any drugs, it takes away a lot of the pain and anguish you feel coming off of drugs.
RFK might be an idiot, but even idiots might be right once in a while
bitwize
That's how kids end up at Elan School.
The current administration is setting up a modern day Spiegelgrund.
hayst4ck
Not to mention that many farms will be lacking migrant labor due to mass deportations.
"Work will set you free from your addiction."
creddit
In what historical context was “wellness farm” used as a euphemism?
froh
would you, in the context of fascist Germany or other totalitarian regimes with concentration camps, not understand the quoted text as cynical euphemism for such camps?
this understanding of metaphors is not that it was used then. the understanding happens today a contemporary application of historical knowledge.
and honestly, it's obvious.
Aeolun
Do you read ‘wellness farm’ and think it is something literal?
If it was a well accepted term it’d be one thing, but when made up on the spot it very much sounds like “place we sen out undesirables” to me.
BriggyDwiggs42
Current day
mrtesthah
[flagged]
BlackjackCF
If RFK’s comments were made in isolation, I wouldn’t be so worried.
However, you put it in context with the fact that this administration has shipped off people to an El Salvadoran prison without any due process… this becomes a lot more ominous.
jrflowers
I like that you scrolled past the relevant paragraph here and then quoted a different thing that he said as proof that the paragraph that you ignored didn’t exist. I’m curious as to why you would bother including a real quote from the article? If your starting point for crafting a post is “Nobody will read the article I’m talking about” the sky is the limit, you could say he said anything you like.
samsm1737337
Well, all I am going to take from this after reading some of the replies is that there is a slight change that the Brainwormguy is going to send the Rocketmann to a farm upstate. I can live with that.
rswail
Considering he has been a lifelong addict to various drugs, with endless wealth to be sent to "wellness farms", I'd take his opinion on how to treat any disease with the same perspective as I would any other drug-addled, brain-holed, rich narcissist, that caused his wife to commit suicide.
In other words, his opinion isn't worth the electronic bits needed to spread them.
croes
First you can go and leave as you like, then you can go but can’t leave, then you have to go.
Given the things he said about vaccines and bird flu, I wouldn’t trust him an inch.
anfilt
RISC-V moved to Switzerland as well a while ago. I think it's a shame to see stuff like this happening. Regardless, of where one stands currently in the current environment making standards bodies want to move or move events to other countries is not a good.
tossandthrow
Regardless of the political situation, the EU is probably a more friendly environment for a standards body taking their stance in interoperability into account.
p4coder
It depends on your citizenship. Some European countries reject 50% Indian Schengen visa applicantions.
https://www.cntraveller.in/story/these-3-countries-rejected-...
ABS
Schengen is different from EU.
More importantly, and according to your link, only Estonia rejected 50+% Indian applications, everyone else rejected less than 50%, with only 2 others anywhere near 50% (Malta and Slovenia).
So out of 29 countries in the Schengen area only 3 were anywhere near the 50% mark and all 3 are tiny countries as far as both area and populations are concerned (those 3 combined account for only 4 million people in total).
Also, just to take one of those 3, Estonia has an overall high rejection rate in comparison to all the others, and that started happening after the pandemic.
Details are important
Jolter
At least they don’t issue you a visa and then arbitrarily detain you at the border.
Obtaining a work visa in a particular country is not a human right, and their issuance are up to the hosting country’s policies.
dtquad
>Estonia, Malta and Slovenia rejected the highest percentage of Schengen visa applications from India last year, while Germany, Italy and Hungary were most accommodating.
Sounds like Estonia, Malta, and Slovenia didn't want their countries to become transits for illegal immigration from India to the UK.
Countries like Germany get legitimate Indian immigration for work and higher education so their rejection rate is lower.
dtquad
Not all EU countries are the same. I would avoid Hungary, Slovakia, and former Eastern Germany (except Berlin).
Jolter
As far a I know, all of the listed countries are reasonably safe to travel to. I’ve not heard any stories of arbitrary detention from any of them, which is what this article is (mostly) about.
Trans people might not enjoy Slovakia or Hungary right now, but I’m not sure they are unsafe to visit for them (yet)? Someone local might fill me in here…
perching_aix
Why?
tirant
[flagged]
sschueller
Switzerland is not in the EU.
babayega2
But it is in the Schengen area. I have a 1 year Schengen visa and I have been going there regularly without problem.
tossandthrow
You are right!
I could have said Switzerland, but I believe that my point expands to the entirety of the EU, why I expanded a bit.
As some of you sibling commenters also write: Not all parts of the Schengen / EU is equally - just like you probably wouldn't move these things to rural Alaska.
thomasfedb
Singapore and Australia might also be on the list.
clarionbell
Unless you make a mistake of bringing cannabis.
oefrha
Reminds me of [1] from 2013, and [2][3] from 2017. This is not new at all, just affecting more people, and more importantly, more Western people now.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/05/us-scientist...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643467
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24369233
Clarification: the “not new” part is foreign attendees not being able to attend conferences in the U.S. So, if you valued inclusion, holding international conferences in the U.S. has been a bad idea for a long time.
leftcenterright
Being detained is way worse than being denied entry.
> I was then placed in a real jail unit: two levels of cells surrounding a common area, just like in the movies. I was put in a tiny cell alone with a bunk bed and a toilet.
> The best part: there were blankets. After three days without one, I wrapped myself in mine and finally felt some comfort.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-det...
How is this not "new at all"? I just don't understand why some people are so blind to the ongoing abuse of power. What a shame!
Timwi
> I just don't understand why some people are so blind to the ongoing abuse of power. What a shame!
They're not blind to it. They either like it and want it (sometimes because they benefit from it), or they're indifferent to it because it doesn't affect them personally. I know — it's really hard to appreciate the mindset of people with no empathy.
asmor
Don't forget the concern trolls that imply doubt of it happening at all, and then downplay the severity if you dig a little. We have some in this very thread, deploying their "scare quotes".
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oefrha
That exact same article says someone has been tossed around in that system for ten months. That’s just someone among the 100-200 people they met. That same article even has photos of the system from the 2000s. There’s a photo of people sleeping on the floor wrapped in the exact kind of aluminum sheet “blankets” dated 2014. It’s been going on for very long. (Btw, I suspect it’s only getting attention now that the more-equal-than-others groups are also getting the same treatment, but I’m not going to push that point.)
And I was very clear about which part is “not new”. What a shame people can’t read. What a shame partisan commenters read “U.S. has been blah blah for a long time” and immediately jump to “Trump defender!!!”
Edit: I should also mention I literally emailed dang to get https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410548 (discussion thread for your link) restored when it was flagged.
leftcenterright
The links you shared in your original comment all pointed to "rejections", not "legal people being detained".
What has always been going on: people overstay their visa, depending on the scale and country, people get treated badly almost always in these cases.
What is happening now: people being critical of Trump are being rejected, legal visa holders are being detained because of the scale of the abuse.
These are clearly very different things and very much a fault of specifically Trump administration. Searching phones and messages to look for Trump critical messages .. unbelievable and totally new stuff is going on here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/trump-musk-f...
cmurf
People aren't blind to the abuse. They want plausible deniability, permitting them to opt out of the duty and responsibility attached to citizenship. Therefore the metaphor is flawed: blind suggests an inability. People are capable of understanding what's happening, and are choosing to be a spectator, and not a citizen.
What are they waiting for? To see if they will come out ahead. It's classic rebel's dilemma.
Eventually the truth will catch up to us all. We'll undeniably realize this is a tyrannical movement that intends to replace the Constitutional order without the consent of the governed.
In no universe is the election of a dictator equivalent to 3/4 of the state legislatures ratifying an amendment to the Constitution.
black_puppydog
Getting a visa to travel to conferences was one of the major blockers for non-EU citizens during my studies. It was heartbreaking to see people work for years on a subject, finally get accepted to a top conference, and then not be able to go and present just because the visa was impossible to get in time or was simply refused.
However, these cases were rejections of visa. And even Stenberg's case was about being denied entry, not arbitrary detainment and torture like we see now. IMHO this wave of cases is a change in quantity that results in a change of quality already. But the quality of the rejection/detainment has changed as well.
mmooss
The first isn't the same at all: Chinese scientists were prevented from attending based on an official government policy, not randomly arrested and detained.
The second and third are the same incident, from the prior Trump administration. But the visa was denied; nobody was arrested or detained.
oefrha
People are randomly arrested and detained base on official government policy. And they have been arresting and detaining people long before Jan 2024, but it was scaled up recently. A recent story made it clear that some people with minor visa overstays have already been detained for months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410548
The fact is if you care about people from all around the world being able to attend your conference, the U.S. hasn’t been a good location for a long time. That’s not new. In fact [2][3] is only noteworthy because it was an influential individual (in this circle) with a strong passport; people with weaker passports are routinely denied. Hell sometimes UN diplomats are denied.
mmooss
> People are randomly arrested and detained base on official government policy.
Right, but you did not give examples of that happening previously.
leftcenterright
> “This measure was apparently taken by the American authorities because the researcher’s phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy,” the minister added.
I don't think this has been a basis for denying entry to people in past?
guesswho_
[flagged]
Aeolun
Western people are more likely to make noise about it when it affects them. No surprises there.
pas
I believe people make roughly similar amount of noise depending on the situation, but we are not there to hear it. (And in case of many people from eg. South American or African countries this is not a completely new situation so.)
guesswho_
Not a westerners myself. Your response solidified my point even further.
tczMUFlmoNk
Thank you. I am in the U.S. and am threatened by these measures. I'm not a member of the IETF, but I rely on their work heavily, and the solidarity is meaningful.
eqvinox
(off-topic but common misconception that should be corrected:) IETF doesn't have "members". You just show up on the mailing lists or meetings and sometimes do productive shit, other times get into massive bikeshedding and almost-flamewars. It works surprisingly well but does have its issues.
People do take you more seriously if you've been around for a while and they know you aren't full of shit, but that's just social dynamics.
userbinator
[flagged]
jakelazaroff
This would have been a much better comment without the scare quotes.
userbinator
[flagged]
bloppe
This website mixes some very real and very big problems (erosion of basic freedoms and rights in the US) with some entirely hallucinated ones (concentration camps for people with ADHD, and torture? I'd certainly want to learn more about that than a passing mention).
Personally I think the hyperbole only serves to cheapen the real problems.
onli
Note that the German greencard holder currently being illegally detained described that he was tortured. See https://www.zeit.de/politik/2025-03/deutscher-us-abschiebeha...
doener
Translation via DeepL: "The German's mother made serious accusations against the immigration authorities in the US media. She told NHPR in New Hampshire that officers had "violently interrogated" her son for hours. He had to strip naked and was forced to take a cold shower by two officers before being put back in his chair. He was then taken to a room with other people in bright light and was given hardly any food or water. He was also denied access to his medication. According to his mother, the man eventually collapsed and was taken to hospital. It later turned out that he had the flu."
asmor
The government employees at these border crossing definitely feel too confident that whatever they do will get covered up or ignored by the people above them. And all trust I ever had in the forth estate - nationally and internationally - has gone with this entire mess of a presidency too. They mostly seem to parrot each other's assurances that things that are happening are completely normal, or at least understate heavily. I'm happy outliers exist, including some unexpected ones like Wired Magazine.
praptak
Solitary confinement is torture: https://phr.org/our-work/resources/endless-nightmare-solitar...
megous
Americans should learn that solitary detention is torture. Check out all the effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitary_confinement Also support for genocide is major international crime, btw, which is another crime Americans are very blasé about, while commiting it.
hayst4ck
This is an administration that openly is talking about annexing Canada, as well as invading panama and Greenland. It's an administration that has literally said "we want government workers in trauma."
Historians are actively comparing us to Nazi Germany. https://snyder.substack.com/p/what-to-expect-when-youre-expe...
The holocaust started as a deportation effort. Trump reportedly said "I wish I had Hitler's generals." https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-said-hitler-did-...
3-4 prominent republicans have Sieg Heiled in public, including Bannon who did not put his hand on his heart first.
You are confusing hyperbole for actually shocking news, and it's so shocking it's easily mistaken for hyperbole because if you don't bury your head in the ground it's too much to bear. Accepting the truth of whats happening means you must act, and so people are opting not to accept it to protect their mental health.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/29/nx-s1-5276898/rfk-drugs-addic...
"I'm going to bring a new industry to [rural] America, where addicts can help each other recover from their addictions," Kennedy promised, during a film on addiction released by his presidential campaign. "We're going to build hundreds of healing farms where American kids can reconnect with America's soil."
That's the kernel of truth, but when you bring in the historical context of authoritarian regimes, and the absolute lack of rule of law, you start to get very very afraid.
cmurf
In the 1965 book Night of Camp David the president's cabinet realized he was insane because of his fixation on annexing Canada.
In 2025 Americans are so anesthetized even the "opposition party" can't say the obvious out loud in public. Let alone the president's cabinet.
People voting for a dictator isn't equivalent to 3/4 of the legislatures ratifying an amendment to the Constitution. The People have not given consent to set aside the Constitutional order.
If the People want to set aside the Constitution, they must do the hard work of convincing enough people in enough states to do it lawfully. Otherwise it's settled with might makes right.
For all the flaws of the founding fathers they definitely understood power. How it gets consolidated. And how to fragment it. Their advice is polyarchy.
What we're witnessing is autogolpe to establish a CEO-dictator, the consolidation of power. In no universe are Trump, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin on the right side of history. And they will fail.
dragonwriter
> If the People want to set aside the Constitution, they must do the hard work of convincing enough people in enough states to do it lawfully.
No, they don't.
They just need to obey a government that ignores its Constitutional bounda.
> Otherwise it's settled with might makes right.
It's always settled that way. Legality isn't a substitute for might makes right, it is, a social mechanism for guiding where the “might” ends up. But if the people—who ultimately, are the muscles of the might—decide not to care about legality, than it doesn't matter any more. Words written on paper are not self enforcing.
hayst4ck
> If the People want to set aside the Constitution
No, the constitution has a maintenance cost. The constitution is already set aside if people are not willing to pay that maintenance cost. Solidarity is the price of freedom.
Despotism is the default state you will get when you don't pay upkeep to your institutions.
hayst4ck
> The People have not given consent to set aside the Constitutional order.
Inaction is largely indistinguishable from consent.
> autogolpe
No. We are experience Russian backed regime change in the same way we have instituted regime change in other countries, amplified by tried and true propaganda techniques used to propel other authoritarian regimes to power.
> CEO-dictator
This is a deliberate new age propaganda technique using conceptual metaphors (see George Lakoff).
"The CEO metaphor re-frames political rule as a business operation, which makes executive overreach appear logical rather than dangerous."
By getting someone to accept the metaphor of CEO, it manifests consent for executive overreach without having directly assessed how accurate "president as CEO" is as a metaphor.
> In no universe are Trump, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin on the right side of history.
Complete darwinism/social darwinism is a cogent and consistent moral system. It doesn't produce a world anyone should want to live in, but it is a consistent ideology. Social darwinism was the philosophical core of nazi ideology. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/09/24/hitlers-world/
singularity2001
Gitmo is still active (!?)
danielscrubs
European here, no one should take that website seriously. It’s full of incoherent ramblings.
Im a bit disappointed in HN for ranking it so high. Time to take a look at the bot detection algo?
HexDecOctBin
@dang Why is this flagged? Even without the politics, knowing that a large cohort is not going to attend in an important piece of information.
GeoAtreides
there is another, better UI for HN: https://hn.algolia.com/ set it for the last 24 hours and enjoy uncensored content
ndsipa_pomu
michaelsshaw
It's always fun when you make something only to realize it already exists. It's a pain that I'm sure you know as well.
gosub100
It's flagged because it's one-sided political activism. I mostly support the first EO that is on that front page. What am I supposed to do? 1) Post here and defend it, then get in a flame war with people who disagree? 2) bite my lip because we're not supposed to support Trump's actions? I'm not allowed to support the elected president because it's not popular?
I'm sure there's a left-leaning tech group you can join where everyone agrees with you. But this post doesn't belong here, and neither do flame wars.
redbeanpandas
This is insane, everything that criticize US and current gov is flagged. Really disappointing and frightening. As a European citizen who reads European news, it was really strange not to see topics about the deterioration of US relations with its allies and its closer ties with Russia on this site. It was major news in the EU and completely silent here.
eqvinox
To be fair, most of those are news, not hacker news. But I suspect the hacker relevant ones also got that treatment.
pas
I can easily sympathize with those who want HN to be some kind of bubble to where they can escape from the/their troubles. (Using the flag feature for this is not what I would do, or ever did.)
I use https://hckrnews.com it shows flagged posts too.
jeltz
[flagged]
raffraffraff
Maybe? But the US is a weird two-bubble system in which "you're either with us or against us" is held to be true by most people. Which is why a sane 3rd option isn't available on the voting card. And it's why "being pro-Trump" is not the only reason one might flag that post.
Outside the US, where a completely polarisation hatred between just two parties is not the norm, there are people who can agree with their opponents on some issues. MANY people outside the US hate Trump and think that he's screwing up America, the global economy, world peace, their pension etc, but they might still be able to agree with him on some things.
pas
Unfortunately it's becoming the norm. (Not to mention that in many places with de facto one-party this was also the norm since their first day on the internet.)
mdhb
And dang refuses to recognise that there is any kind of problem with this. Just tells people with a straight face to assume everyone is acting in good faith and that you shouldn’t ever question that assumption for the sake of harmony.
Aeolun
That’d be fine if there was an equal number of people that could vouch for something, but that button doesn’t exist now?
anonfordays
You don't have to be pro-Trump to flag this. I flagged it for pushing fake news and far-left extremism.
DonHopkins
[flagged]
spiderfarmer
I heard last night from my friend who works in astronomy that they decided to cancel their event in the US and let the US attendees travel to Europe instead.
I can’t get used to the fact that the US seems dead set on destroying its reputation in the world.
But with the direction the comment section of HN has taken over the last few years I’m sure there will be lots of commenters who will dismiss this as virtue signaling.
nextts
It is real. It is interesting, because I don't think US wars or international interference over the years have caused this effect but now people are avoiding the US for pure "look out for number 1" reasons. I.e. it isn't safe enough for them to enter and it ain't worth the risk for some conference, holiday or work thing.
croes
Because the wars didn‘t affect white people or people of certain countries
The targets usually have darker skin or are from countries far more east, but now it affects people like themselves.
eqvinox
Wondering why this is flagged. Sure, it's politics, but it's also a serious issue on one of the major internet SDOs. It's certainly relevant for "good hackers"?
asmor
Cowardice.
Fence-sitting these days is a political decision all by itself. Well, it always was, but now that we've established a new normal (that's not very normal) rooting for the status quo is even more partisan.
phtrivier
The tech community has an interesting role to play here - I wonder how long it will take for gafam to start having issues recruiting skilled foreigners (or simply flying them to the US for interviews.)
It's not too much of a problem now, as t Big Tech is not in the "software business" so much as in the "laying off people to make the stock look good" ; but at some point they'll have to bring people in to actually write code.
Or, are they expexting LLMs to really make the bulk of the jobs?
Or maybe everything settles down in two years, and this is just a bout of neo-McCarthyism.
Time will tell. In the meantime, I guess Europe must not be that bad, if people are organizing conferences here instead of China or Dubai ?
praptak
They do hire in LCoL countries (hello from Warsaw). Whether this will make the dent I'm a bit skeptical though. Nobody flies candidates anymore.
I told the last recruiter flat out that it's no longer ethical for me to work for a US company but I don't think many people will do the same.
sam-cop-vimes
Hear hear. Great initiative. I am not in the US but I do feel threatened by the way the US is conducting itself these days. It's time for people working in tech to push back.
chgs
Half the people on HN either support what’s happening in the US now or say “doesn’t directly affect me so leave me out of it” as if this is an argument about yankees vs mets.
asmor
I feel like we took the wrong lessons from atrocities in history. We treat them like they happened before some special enlightenment that magically shields us from history repeating, so it's okay to face the early warning signs with apathy or paint anything as a difference in opinion. Surely someone will care when things escalate; surely there would be an outcry more loud than this if it was serious.
Maybe teaching about the holocaust should be accompanied with copies of daily newspapers from the late 1930s to demonstrate their mundanity.
ofcourse9
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At my company we make a niche software used by companies globally. Our plan was to arrange a conference in the US for our clients in North/Cental America. Considering the state of the US, we will probably cancel it, as we don't expect our Mexican and Canadian clients to feel comfortable at all. Neither do we at the head office in Europe. We will instead host it in Europe most likely.