I went to school with Daniel at Illinois, we were in the ECE program at the same time and took classes together (with other HN readers, surely).
I dispute all posts saying "the sentence is too harsh" and that this was "a genuine accident." This person is dangerous and willfully endangered others in his pursuits.
This type of "accident" would not happen "in normal circumstances" because there is no normal circumstance in which your employer intentionally masks your location and forces you to defecate into a bucket in the basement of their own home.
Personally I believe Daniel used the investment he made in the victim's company to manipulate him into this situation.
From my POV it was only a matter of time that he did something that resulted in serious harm. It is terribly unfortunate that someone had to lose their life before he was able to get help for his mental illness.
I do not have an axe to grind against him personally, nor do I lack empathy for the mentally ill. But for those quick to jump to the other side, you should know what the experience is like living near someone in this circumstance. It is quite viscerally terrifying, to the extent that I have made no public comments about this for fear of retribution on his part despite the fact he'll be separated from society for quite some time.
I believe that one of the scariest aspects of living in proximity to a person with severe mental illness is that their actions and responses are not necessarily rational, or predictably irrational, or even consistent day-to-day. Any random action (or lack thereof) is capable of triggering a disproportionate response, and there can be no warning signs ahead of time. This is mentally exhausting, since the healthy person must devote a large portion of their emotional energy decoding and understanding the current mental state of the ill person, proverbially "walking on eggshells" to avoid a negative situation.
People who are liabilities are liabilities. It's sad when naive people don't recognize them and/or don't defend sensible personal boundaries against crazy/unreasonable intrusions.
> since the healthy person must devote a large portion of their emotional energy decoding and understanding the current mental state of the ill person, proverbially "walking on eggshells" to avoid a negative situation.
Dealing with mentally ill people is quite challenging, but if one is 'walking on eggshells to avoid ..' one is doing it wrong. The necessary role for the healthy person is to be the healthy person, and not let the ill person's issue distort healthy behavior.
I'm suprised that he got 9 years in prison and was convicted of 2nd degree murder for this. What he was doing was definitely strange and ended up causing someone's death, but I haven't seen anyone from Tesla or Uber going to jail when people died because they're beta testing autonomous cars on public roads. The double standards are crazy.
He's a weird guy, which means certain jurors will be biased against him. He's also an asshole, which also means certain jurors will be biased against him. Also he killed someone, even if out of negligence rather than spite. This doesn't seem like a giant miscarriage of justice.
If I had enough money I would definitely be building weird shit which could include tunnels. I already like caves. I don't particularly care about DPRK, but I'm sure normals would find something wanting in my motivations.
The problem is not that he built some tunnels. The problem is that he lethally endangered his employee. Rich people make tasteless decisions all the time (for proof, drive through any tony suburb). It is important that their tastelessness not be negligent.
OK, if they didn't hear him talk they might not have picked up the "asshole" vibe, although they might have made some assumptions in that vein about any BTC millionaire. Any testimony about his actions or public statements would have transmitted the "weird" vibe loud and clear.
Corporate officers of companies go on trial all the time. In the UK it even happens for manslaughter - you can be held responsible if someone working for you dies if you didn't take the right precautions.
If comma.ai had killed someone while illegally testing their self driving cars I would expect someone to go to jail. If Tesla and Uber are following the laws regarding testing then they probably wouldn't be held liable.
I do think there's a huge double standard where companies get treated better than individuals, but I also think that this guy ignored enough regulations regarding construction that he should definitely be held liable for this death.
Well, you can't put corporations in jail though you can most certainly fine them. Passing through criminal liabilities can circumvent one of the purposes of corporations (though those should properly apply in extreme cases).
I expect that a lot of people here would prefer not to be personally liable because some bug they were responsible for caused a significant financial loss much less an injury even though they worked for a company.
If you are an individual, you should probably set up a corporate structure and take out insurance.
You're confusing two very different issues- civil and criminal liability. Corporations protect their shareholders and officers from a variety of civil liability claims, as the corporation itself takes on that responsibility. Criminal liability does not get shielded by a corporation.
Your example about a software bug is a great one- that would clearly be a civil issue in most cases, but in the case that the law was broken in the process (say, a car company explicitly programs their vehicles to have lower emissions during testing than they do in real world scenarios) then you should expect some jailtime[1].
So going back to my example- if people follow the law but kill someone during testing (such as with Uber) then they probably shouldn't be held criminally liable, but if they are breaking the law (like comma.ai did) and kill someone as a result I would be shocked if they weren't held criminally liable.
>urinating and defecating into a bucket Beckwitt lowered down to him.
Does that mean that he was unable to get out of the tunnel by himself? If the poor guy was trapped in a hole with no way out then you could argue that this goes beyond being a simple accident.
Did you even read the article? If you want to build secret tunnels under your house, employ a licensed contractor and several engineers. Have them sign NDAs even.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
I think calling people out would be against the ethos of the site. The first guideline for comments is Be kind. And not snarky. Sure some people may need it but I don't think it contributes anything good to the community. Some discussions could be about or related to the submission's title and not the actual article.
I know you mean well but that attitude is basically equivalent to "be rich enough to pay other people to have the liability or don't bother" in practice.
This is the only way this can work. If you want to build and occupy your own construction, that's great. May you only cut the corners that won't result in your own painful death. If you want to pay others to labor under your direction, you have to get that inspected.
I say this as someone who does a great deal of unprofessional carpentry, electrical work, mechanical repair, excavation, plumbing, etc. for myself and for family members. I would never have gone willingly into that hole. I certainly would never have asked anyone else to do so. No unexploited worker would have done this work.
There's a hell of a lot of space between "yeah, that hole is fked but you do you" and "hire someone or GTFO" which is what the comment I initially replied to is advocating for.
Property owners should be able to do their own work on their own property or act as their own general contractors. Disallowing that is right up there with gated communities that tell you exactly how tall your grass should be but that's the only way to prevent this kind of thing. I don't think everone's (already highly limited) right do what they want on their own property should be further curtailed because of one bad actor.
I had a different reading of parent. It doesn't mean Beckwitt had to hire someone; after all Beckwitt already had decided to hire without any input from us. It means that if you do hire someone for hazardous technical work, hire someone capable of doing that hazardous technical work (which would include the judgment to walk away from unsafe jobs), not some poor clueless guy you can bully.
Yes that would have been too expensive for Beckwitt, and he would have never been able to get permits for it. That would have been society functioning correctly.
Say what you will about Musk, but I haven't heard reports of him installing toilet-buckets in their factories yet and lowering them down to employees with ropes.
It is far more reckless to expose everyone in the public to your murder machines than one hapless contractor.
We don't allow people to drive without seatbelts because of the risk of them losing control and causing avoidable fatalities but half-baked autonomous machines vaguely guessing about what might be in front of them are perfectly ok?
Auto-steer is just one step above radar cruise control, which is also semi-autonomous and hugely buggy. Shipping cars come with radar cruise which suddenly turns off below 25 mph, presumably because radar processing is imprecise with position. No one is crusading to ban it.
Furthermore, using a massive training set comparing against human interventions is precisely how you get up the safety curve given the current tech approach, which will never suffice for full autonomy sans humans.
The thing I see is that he wasn't really doing anything strange. Building structures and digging tunnels that humanity has been doing for a very long time. There exists laws, regulations and engineering knowledge developed over thousands of years to ensure that these activities are safe.
In order for this to happen he had ignore this body of safe practice knowledge that has been built up. Safety regulations are written in blood and to ensure that more blood isn't spilt unsafe practices that result in death have to be punished.
I don't think that there is an equivalent with the autonomous cars issue. It is a young field and we still don't know what the acceptable practices are in it.
This is a great podcast. I started listening to it recently but finished around 75% of the episodes mostly in the gym! Recommended it to some of my colleagues who are hooked on it as well.
I have so many questions I want to ask both the victim and the guy who is going to jail. For example, was he actually good at trading or hacking?
In the last few years I have become increasingly aware of a trend where we wonder if successful people with blatant signs of being an idiot are in fact geniuses. My recent favorite being the pizza bomber woman from the aptly but honestly completely inappropriately named Netflix documentary “Evil Genius”. (I would recommend maybe two episodes and then just wikipedia’ing the rest)
I’m curious if this is Protestant work ethic fallacies in American culture or if it is prevalent elsewhere too.
> In the last few years I have become increasingly aware of a trend where we wonder if successful people with blatant signs of being an idiot are in fact geniuses. [...]
> I’m curious if this is Protestant work ethic fallacies in American culture or if it is prevalent elsewhere too.
In my opinion (as a German), the reason rather lies in the fact that very smart people (by, say, IQ), (IMHO rightfully) observe that their intelligence does not lead to success. So they try to "reverse-engineer" the "true success formula". For this, it is obvious that people who are "idiots", but very successful provide good test cases to validate/disprove the "reverse-engineered success formula".
Beckwitt's alias "3AlarmLampscooter" is a reference to the excellent novel "Interface" by Neal Stephenson and George Jewsbury (previously published under the pen names Stephen Bury or J. Frederick George).
Coincidentally (?), the phrase occurs in the novel shortly before a politician is evacuated from the capitol building through a secret Cold-War-era civil defense tunnel.
There's something upsetting about that combination of traits, don't you think? "Millionaire hackers" should be using their influence and money to try to avert a doomsday scenario if they believe it's likely. Not just prepare to hole up and wait it out.
Your garden variety millionaire doesn't have enough influence to manipulate a well-organized homeowner's association. Averting nuclear holocaust is well outside their capabilities. The only way they could amass enough influence would be by grouping up with like-minded people and fighting for a common cause, but that's just called politics, and there are indeed many, many millionaires in politics. I have not seen many people suggest that this is a good thing.
At least you understood what I was implying. Most other commentors seemed to think I believed a single person with a million dollars could affect the change needed to avert the apocalypse. Or that I was implying said apocalypse was real in the first place.
> There's something upsetting about that combination of traits, don't you think? "Millionaire hackers" should be using their influence and money to try to avert a doomsday scenario if they believe it's likely. Not just prepare to hole up and wait it out.
"Nobody" is willing to appoint such "millionaire" hackers as "benevolent dicators" in multiple countries, which would be near to a necessity to enable them to avert this scenario. So the best they can do is dig holes.
Being a millionaire doesn’t carry as much influence as one thinks these day. My net worth is over a million and I have no real influence on the world except in making things comfortable for myself.
Yeah, there are a lot of variables there, such as where you live and whether your million is in liquid assets or just your net worth. But a person with money who owns land still commands more influence than one without who doesn't. I wouldn't expect a single person to avert doomsday, millionaire or pauper. I just think it's a shitty mentality to not even try to avert a disaster one believes is imminent and to just work on shielding oneself.
Oh yeah, dude, I forgot we could just use one million dollars to stop North Korea from detonating a nuclear device. Absolute genius. Don't know why we didn't think of this one. Good one, mate.
I think this guy is partly being punished for being mentally ill or at least very atypical. What he did isn't normal behavior. And then there's the hoarding. From my armchair, it seems like some sort of obsessive condition. The sentencing seems terribly long for a genuine accident.
I went to school with Daniel at Illinois. He is quite simply a dangerous and manipulative person. Having known him I would have preferred he spend significantly more time in jail or otherwise separated from society.
It should be telling that I created a throwaway account to post this for fear of my safety _even if he won't get out for another decade_.
Absolutely agree, he is being convicted for having an accident in weird circumstances. If this sort of accident happened in a normal-circumstance with a person who has no mental illness, it would be 2 years at most.
Darknet Diaries episode 39 covers quite a bit about Daniel. He also used to call in to the PLA Phone Show under the pseudonym “Skunkworks”, and talk about dissolving bodies and vocal cords.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
I didn't even look at what race the victim was, you are commenting in bad faith. I don't think the guy should get any time at all for doing this, probation would be more than adequate.
Sorry about that; I need to recalibrate my assumptions. Not everyone reads TFA before commenting. I'm normally not a throw-the-book-at-them kind of person, but I don't think any employer who locks his employee(s) into an uninspected burning deathtrap should get off without prison, regardless of his mental state at the time. There is too much history behind this. I'm also not convinced that this dude actually has any mental problems beyond "asshole with too much money". I already have half of that mental problem...
I was unable to parse it too. I'm Italian (that says it all) my English is not stellar, but usually I find my way around with English. Not this time though. :)
How's it better, really? Besides being exclusively one-sided, it tries hard to make up a very strange connection between the fact that the guy was treated mildly for hacking into his university network, and the death which essentially was caused by combination of paranoia, poor electrical engineering skills, and hoarded house (which is often a sign of mental problems too). Apparently, if you won't put a hacker into prison as early as possible s/he will cause a deadly fire!
> why are people inclined to believe in conspiracies also happen to be hoarders?
Because they are prepare themselves for the scenarios that they believe might happen and will be uncomfortable for them. You cannot mitigate against all conspiracies, but for some, prepping is a form of mitigation against the possible consequences.
I dispute all posts saying "the sentence is too harsh" and that this was "a genuine accident." This person is dangerous and willfully endangered others in his pursuits.
This type of "accident" would not happen "in normal circumstances" because there is no normal circumstance in which your employer intentionally masks your location and forces you to defecate into a bucket in the basement of their own home.
Personally I believe Daniel used the investment he made in the victim's company to manipulate him into this situation.
From my POV it was only a matter of time that he did something that resulted in serious harm. It is terribly unfortunate that someone had to lose their life before he was able to get help for his mental illness.
I do not have an axe to grind against him personally, nor do I lack empathy for the mentally ill. But for those quick to jump to the other side, you should know what the experience is like living near someone in this circumstance. It is quite viscerally terrifying, to the extent that I have made no public comments about this for fear of retribution on his part despite the fact he'll be separated from society for quite some time.