People on Hacker News are also pretty likely to back ups. Getting your work laptop confiscated by agents will probably only earn you points at work.

There's also a good argument to be made that the search is illegal, it's important that everyone stand up for that, even if its stressful.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/bill-rights-border-fou...

The audience here is not uniform. Andreas Gal is definitely in the target audience for HN and was able to stand up to the border agents.

Of course there's a relevant xkcd for that: https://xkcd.com/538/

But that's why relying on a trusted external party, like the company you work for, to control your access to your data, is a much more effective strategy. TSA/Chinese police can threaten and bully you, but not your co-worker in a different country following company policy.