nulldev

This. Simply saying "certifications are bad don't get them" is not universally helpful advice. Some people will definitely face improved career prospects with the right cert(s) depending on their market and level of experience. Not all companies have equally enlightened hiring practices - and not all prospective employees can pick and choose the way some veteran HN members can.

I think you guys are comparing apples to oranges

> Certification in a field such as vulnerability research

OSCP is basically tool-based network pen testing with a bit of outdated websec and buffer overflows thrown into the mix. It's not "vulnerability research" in any meaningful sense of the word. They have some other certs (OSCE) that might purport to target that domain, but idk much about them.

> As for job prospects, generally certification won't get you into companies that are only looking for talent as opposed to a checklist of certifications

So apparently OSCP won't get you a job at Matasano - but they're not the only game in town, and a lot of other security shops with less name recognition and lower standards do in fact use the OSCP as a positive signal.

No, it won't be l33t but it will be a job that they can use to transition to those fancy schmancy companies whose founders are HN regulars.

Is that in any way related to the somewhat apocryphal / mostly untrue anecjoke about the aircraft carrier and the lighthouse?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_and_naval_vessel_ur...

Turning on transponders across the entire fleet is not a proportional response here. There are lots of military vessels out there and 99.99% of the time they don't crash into cargo ships. A lot of things went completely sideways for this to happen, and there are reasonable failsafes that can be enacted to prevent it in the future.

What word do you suggest he use? If anything, I feel like 'postmortem' most commonly implies an after-action report - with the specific word 'autopsy' being used to describe, well, autopsies - at least in US english.

> no one was playing chicken because everyone was asleep on the cargo ship.

Unless everyone on both ships was asleep, this statement doesn't have to be true. If anything, it seems eminently plausible the destroyer's crew was playing chicken with the freighter thinking they were playing against a human opponent, when in fact they were dealing with an automated system.