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Hitman hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman
- fouc 7y agoMoral of the story - don't outsource your work?
- corobo 7y agoOr better yet keep the outsource chain going until you find the guy with an ounce of moral fibre
- quickthrower2 7y agoThese hitman need ISO9001 certification!
- tomerico 7y agoI’m surprised that the penalty for attempted murder in China is only 3 years in jail.
- zhangeru 7y agoI guess the difference here is that none of them actually attempted it, maybe it was a conspiracy charge.
- einpoklum 7y agoWhaddaya mean, none of them attempted it? Four of them hired a hitman to do it! That's not attempted murder for you? :-O
- chousuke 7y agoI think that would still count as just conspiracy to commit murder. Not a good thing to do by any means, but not everyone follows through on their plans, so it's a lesser crime. An attempt likely requires an actual failed attack against the target. It's much more severe. EDIT: On second thought, I can see how you could consider hiring a hitman as an attempted attack, since once you have agreed upon the hit, the "weapon" has in effect been "fired".
- quickthrower2 7y agoBased on watching Law and Order back in the day they seem to portray hiring a hitman as first degree murder in NY at least.
- einpoklum 7y ago_Attempted_. Just like shooting a guy and missing is attempted murder, not murder.
- quickthrower2 7y agoIntent. Hiring a hitman is like pulling the trigger.
- Laforet 7y agoThey were actually all acquitted by a lower court years ago and the prosecutor had to appeal to get a guilty verdict this year. I believe there was some technicality that made proving intent difficult - the original contract was vague enough that the defence could argue that killing was never the plan and they only wanted to intimidate the victim enough to drive him out of town, and somehow the message got distorted down the chain of outsourcing to become a hit which was never carried out anyway.
- abledon 7y agooff topic, but that side story: https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/25/teenager-terribly-burned-toddler-hopes-pioneering-surgery-help-see-10983107/ https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/25/teenager-terribly-burned-todd... god sometimes when you think you have it rough.... the strength some people have in life is amazing.
- kitsune_ 7y agoWarning, that link is not for the faint of heart.
- lifeisstillgood 7y agoI clicked through a few of the Metro "crime" links - dear god, what an horrific world we live in. I really would like a newspaper that had some kind of "sense of perspective" meter - where reading an article of "woman starved and mutilates her own child" also puts down "we estimate this sort of thing happens in one out of 100,000 households - and is out weighted by parents who gave up drugs to look after children in 1 out of 30,000 households But a daily diet of that shit unbalanced would certainly drive your world view and politics to demand "something must be done".
- jwilk 7y agoDid the 5th hitman contact the police himself? Or did they find out some other way? The article is unclear about this. Also I wonder why the 5th hitman sentence is almost as harsh as 2–4th ones.
- retsibsi 7y agoThe version I heard was that the fifth hitman contacted the victim-to-be, who agreed to fake his own death. That plan was foiled, leading to everyone in the chain getting caught. I have no idea if this is actually true, though; I think my source may have been a tumblr post.
- craftyguy 7y agoFrom the article, which apparently here actually no one read: > However, hitman number five was so incensed at how much the value of the contract had fallen, that he told the target to fake his own death, which eventually led to the police finding out about the plot, Beijing News reported.
- retsibsi 7y agoThanks. I clicked the article but got an error. (Probably fixable by whitelisting in noscript, but I didn't feel like doing that.)
- jwilk 7y agoFWIW, the article works for me without enabling JS.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y agouBlock Origin allows easy turning off JS with one click (well, two as you need to reload the page).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
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- spraak 7y agoHitmen all the way down [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
- mschuster91 7y agoThat's what happens when relying on subcontractors to do your work. The almost-victim was really lucky.
- ky738 7y agoPressing/swiping "back" on iOS/Safari loads another article but doesn't actually go back. Amazing
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- StavrosK 7y agoIt's because the other article was written by the first one for half the price.
- z92 7y agoAnalogy with software development : you hire a contractor, who outsource it to a local developer, who hires a development house in India, who hires a programmer, who hires some college kids that actually do the job.
- tyingq 7y agoI've seen this. Not common, but it happens.
- coldcode 7y agoLast employer before I started wanted 3 iOS apps built to copy the in house android apps, they hired ATT for some reason, who outsourced it to an Indian firm, who outsourced it to three random teams of people they found. $400,000 later, they got 3 crappy apps that took twice as long as estimated to be finished. I wound up rewriting most of the most important one. All 3 apps seemed to have been derived from a common ancestor and then disconnected and given to three teams; the code mutated separately from the common ancestor, so fixing things was like hunting down Ebola variants.
- arethuza 7y agoI've seen UK company -> US company -> German company -> Ukrainian company Although I worked for the UK company I did actually get to speak to one of the chaps from the Ukraine and they seemed a good team - though they had no idea who we were or why they were making the changes they were implementing. The Ukrainian team eventually disappeared though and this being 2014 we did wonder....
- sjg007 7y agoUkrainian and Russian programmers are all very good. You usually have to go through Germany though to get to them though.
- helpPeople 7y agoSay you are a vp/director at a fortune 500 company, and you need to create a complex platform for users. It's not the primary use, but to be competitive you must add this hardware/software. In-house means hiring the best of best and learning from scratch. Suppliers already make this for other companies but suppliers do exactly what you claim. What is best? The longer I live, I'm inclined to believe that from scratch with best of best engineers is best. But I worry about gaps in security and tech debt.
- temporalparts 7y agoAlternative headline from "fish fish fish eat eat eat" [1,2]: Hitman hitman hitman hitman hitman hires hires hires hires hired [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231097 [2] https://jakubmarian.com/fish-fish-fish-eat-eat-eat-is-a-grammatically-correct-sentence-in-english-with-explanation/ https://jakubmarian.com/fish-fish-fish-eat-eat-eat-is-a-gram...
- prvc 7y agoNot convinced by that sentence; I get stuck on the second "eat".
- GavinMcG 7y agoYou can't infinitely nest those. Fish [that] fish eat eat [food]. That works because the second "eat" is in the present indicative. But you can't stack those. With three "eat"s, the second one needs to be followed by an object, not another verb. That's why the buffalo sentence works: Buffalo(n) [that other] buffalo(n) buffalo(v) [themselves] buffalo(v) buffalo(n).
- tempestn 7y agoYou can infinitely nest them. Fish [that] fish [that] fish eat eat... eat. You have a compound noun "fish [that] fish eat". Call that X. Then you have a larger compound noun, "fish [that] X eat". And as with the original you can tack an 'eat' on the end as those fish eat some unspecified food. Of course you can then go further and define Y as "fish that X eat", etc. It can be infinitely recursed.
- GavinMcG 7y agoIt's convenient using "X" as a placeholder, because that specifically masks the problem of stacking up verbs. "Fish fish eat" is indeed a sensible noun phrase. And we can make that noun a subject of the verb eat. But "fish fish eat eat" is not a noun phrase, and we can't make it the subject nor the object of a further "eat".
- chrischen 7y agoI feel like if you are a hitman, you should shop around the offer first, including from the person you're supposed to hit. So if you're planning to murder someone, you better be sure you can out-pay the other guy.
- austhrow743 7y agoWhen committing crimes the less people who know the better, as this article should make clear.
- pmontra 7y agoI'm not in that business but it seems that behaving like that doesn't build up a good reputation. It could get difficult to find customers, or survive vindictive prospects.
- chrischen 7y agoYou’re also leaving a lot of money on the table.
- m0xte 7y agoThis would make a good film.
- curiousgal 7y ago"Snatch" is close to that.
- cm2187 7y agoOnly 5 years for ordering an execution? I expected a harsher sentence in China.
- _-___________-_ 7y agoGenerally citizens doing things against other citizens doesn't seem to be dealt with all that harshly (as opposed to citizens doing things against the state, or - worse - encouraging other citizens to do so). I've seen domestic violence dealt with in China by putting the victim and perpetrator in a jail cell together and telling them to talk it out.
- ncmncm 7y agoThe harshest sentences are reserved for those who refuse to participate in official corruption. Citizens-on-citizens is sort of intramural. This latter attitude is familiar in the US. When mostly black people were killing mostly other black people over drug turf wars, it was not treated very seriously. You may imagine that in China, anybody who is not a party member doesn't deserve much attention.
- praptak 7y agoMaybe it has something to do with the state ordering executions all the time.
- namelosw 7y agoThat's for failed execution. If the execution succeeds it would be death sentence for sure for all these people.
- einpoklum 7y agoPossible morals for this story: 1. If you want something done, do it yourself. 2. If you pay below-market rates, you'll get below-par execution. 3. There's much to be said for direct employment.
- fastbeef 7y ago”below-par execution” Heh.
- NullPrefix 7y agoIn this case, there was no execution at all
- quickthrower2 7y ago4. Don’t murder people.
- Waterluvian 7y agoHey now. We're here to discuss implementation, not pick apart product requirements!
- ozim 7y agoBut as he pointed out, we can implement it in next sprint as an improvement. Just put it on backlog.
- trhway 7y agomany layers of middle men each taking a fat cut is an indicator of huge inefficiencies in the given sector of the market and a sign that that sector is ripe for disruption.
- jfk13 7y agoYour new startup is Assassination As A Service?
- Shish2k 7y agoUber for Murders
- buckminster 7y agoThe self-driving division have got that covered.
- booleandilemma 7y agoObligatory onion article: https://www.theonion.com/popular-new-amazon-service-just-comes-to-your-house-and-1819917496/amp https://www.theonion.com/popular-new-amazon-service-just-com...
- crimsonalucard 7y agoThe entire finance industry in the united states is like this.
- onetimemanytime 7y agoTrue, but when he offered $250+K he must've figured that killing him is worth it that amount. Considering that you cannot put in on eBay or Fiverr he took the offer. Why does it take much to kill e person in China, cameras and surveillance ...?
- _-___________-_ 7y agoI would imagine it's not a particularly efficient market. The person offering the contract likely had no particular way to discover the correct price to pay, and there is a high risk in offering the contract (the recipient of the offer might go to the police) so he just aimed high.
- kolinko 7y ago„ Tan, who hired the original hitman, was jailed for five years, while Xi, the first hitman, was sentenced to three years and six months. Yang Kangsheng and Yang Guangsheng were sentenced to three years and three months, Mo was sentenced to three years, and Ling was sentenced to two years and seven months.” A bit funny how the sentence gets lower for every next hitman in the chain, even though technically they all commited the same offence :)
- einpoklum 7y agoBut all the last "hitman" did was con his client - and his client wanted him to _kill_ a guy. Sounds like "time served" material to me.
- lysp 7y agoIf I was getting 50% of 50% of 50% of 50% of 50% of the going rate to conduct a job - I wouldn't do it either.
- robocat 7y agoI could easily imagine a company getting paid 32× the salary of a 10× engineer. Plenty of people do accept 1/32 of their output value (and plenty of people don't know the value of their output). I think you are just saying you don't deliver much value (presuming you are on a salary). I know consultants that have been paid $x and have delivered value of 100 times x. When you work on a 100 million dollar project, and you do something to save 10 million, it is difficult to capture 1 million of that saving as a consultant or employee. (Rule of thumb: if you are a 1× engineer, you should be delivering value at least 2× your cost of salary).
- spodek 7y agoOnce the price got too low, the bottom guy could have blackmailed the guy above to blackmail the guy above to blackmail the guy above to blackmail the guy above to blackmail the guy to make more money. (was that too many levels?)
- slowmovintarget 7y agoBlackmail is hard. Each one in the chain, decided to defraud the earlier one, because it was easier. The target pretended to go along, but as an already wealthy businessman, neither blackmail nor fraud would be appealing. Let the whole chain go to jail, though, and the target gets to sleep better at night.
- megaremote 7y agoBlackmailing a hitman might not be the best idea.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agopolice police police police police police police police.
- jklein11 7y agoBuffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
- bryanrasmussen 7y agomy point exactly, but I still got downvoted.
- jklein11 7y agoSame here. Worth it though
- infinity0 7y agoThe last hitman should have hired the first hitman.
- webwielder2 7y agoSounds like someone’s been reading The 4-Hour Workweek.
- dr_ 7y agoHow is this not a Guy Ritchie movie?
- CapricornNoble 7y agoBecause it's already the sub-plot of an episode of Nicholas Winding Refn's Too Old to Die Young? Episode 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Old_to_Die_Young https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Old_to_Die_Young
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoSometimes this is called globalisation.
- onetimemanytime 7y agoIn this case it didn't work (rubber hose?) but the longer the chain the less likely you are to be exposed. The original hitman can testify that YOU paid him to kill John. The fifth hitman can only offer hearsay, that he heard from the fourth hitman that the third has said that the... ;)
- whack 7y ago> Tan, who hired the original hitman, was jailed for five years, while Xi, the first hitman, was sentenced to three years and six months. Yang Kangsheng and Yang Guangsheng were sentenced to three years and three months, Mo was sentenced to three years 5 years seems grossly insufficient for premeditated attempted murder. If the man was actually killed, I'm assuming the sentence would have been far more severe, such as 20 years. It seems ridiculous that someone can get a 75% reduction in their sentence, just because they were incompetent in their execution.
- SquishyPanda23 7y agoNice pun on execution :) But I'm not sure being an incompetent hitman is a scam that really pays when you factor in the risks...
- kijin 7y agoI read an article somewhere that said most "hitmen" who are available for hire (i.e. those who are not exclusively at the service of a drug cartel or something) have no intention of actually killing the target. The client can't sue a hitman to get their money back if the target turns out to be alive. So the crime might be more akin to fraud than attempted murder.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoTan wasn't the hitman. He was the original guy that ordered the hit. All the other guys, too (except the last), were acting as middlemen, ordering the hit and skimming some off the top. They were all requesting the murder of someone else by paying a 3rd party to do it.
- perl4ever 7y agoUber for Uber for hitmen...
- comboy 7y agoThen you're on a slippery slope of judging the intentions (which is what we are doing nowadays, but I don't think we should be). Intentions are muddy. Decisions and actions just come to us and it's later that we invent a story about how they came to be (at least that's AFAIK our current understanding of how consciousness works)
- known 7y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom
- praptak 7y agoThere was a story by Lem where a Machine built to solve a problem requested more parts, with which it built another machine to solve the problem, which... I don't remember how it ended.
- hcs 7y agoIt hasn't yet.
- indigodaddy 7y agoWhy did the 5th hitman take that crap deal? He could have said no. Obviously he had "sell my lethal services for an exceedingly low sum" remorse or something like that.. Just say no and force the 4th hitman to follow through. Unlikely any other assassin would have taken that bad deal. Obviously glad he did and it worked out that no one was murdered, but still, he could have said no.
- 188201 7y agoBecause those are not hitman but scammers. Take some buck and doing nothing is not a bad deal, if ignoring the risk.
- robocat 7y ago> take that crap deal? 1. It's a signify amount of money in China 2. You don't know if he needed the money (it may have been a fantastic deal to him). 3. He came up with a work-around — he asked victim to fake his death so he could get payout — workaround later failed for other reasons.
- CalChris 7y agoThe contract finally came to the fifth hitman, Ling Xiansi, who eventually told the police. ... Ling was sentenced to two years and seven months. Ling told the police but then was still sentenced to 2+ years in prison. Maybe the ‘moral’ here is to just pass on the contract as no good deed goes unpunished.
- daveFNbuck 7y agoThat seems like a very light sentence for someone who told the police that they commit murders for a living.
- CalChris 7y agoPeople usually get convicted for actually doing something. From the facts of the FA, Ling didn’t. He was just an informer.
- daveFNbuck 7y agoHe contracted with someone to commit a murder. That's doing something. This makes him part of a conspiracy to commit murder. The article doesn't specify what Ling was sentenced for. I assume it's for this conspiracy, but it may have been for other crimes the police learned about after Ling admitted to being a career criminal (unless this was their first contract). If you tell the police you're a murderer, they'll likely try to get you for it.
- CalChris 7y agoIt's not clear that he committed to a contract or was offered a contract. Generally, the elements of a contract are: offer, acceptance, consideration, mutuality of obligation, competency and capacity. We don't know. Conspiracy is easier: two or more people agree to commit an illegal act and take some step toward its completion. But I don't think if Joe asks me to kill Bob for $100 and I say sure but then go to the police that I've actually agreed to kill Bob. The article is very light on details and certainly doesn't mention what the charges were for Ling. Also, this is China with a different legal system.
- ineedasername 7y agoTldr: when unpacking recursive hitman contracts, the base case is 5.
- peterkelly 7y agoExercise 2b: Hitman recursion Given a predicate is_insulting_price, write a recursive function which determines the minimum amount for which a target may be killed without risk of the plot being exposed to the police by an individual receiving a lowball offer. The function will be passed an arbitrarily high value, and should recursively call itself with (1 - epsilon) * price whenever is_insulting_price returns false. For bonus marks, quantify the tradeoff between error range and stack depth, the latter representing the number of people who need to know about the plot.
- movax 7y agoSub-contractors.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mytailorisrich 7y agoThat's a very Chinese story in a way and reminded me of the movie "Crazy Stone" [1] [1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0843270/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0843270/
- bitwize 7y agoThis is like the crime version of those "software contractors" who farm the actual work out to an offshore team.
- Wistar 7y agoIs this what they mean by "chain of custody?"
- eatbitseveryday 7y agoLets not use code blocks for quotes, it makes a side-scrolling box. Just italics or sideways carrot is fine.
- jolmg 7y ago> sideways carrot First time I've heard that name for the angle bracket.
- js2 7y agoYou mean greater-than sign. :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater-than_sign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater-than_sign (I checked the source, it's a > And now I've used up my pedantic quota for the day.)
- WMCRUN 7y agoHalf a stream extraction operator :)
- jolmg 7y agoLeft-facing crocodile
- blotter_paper 7y ago270 degree mountain.
- bonyt 7y agoFallen birthday hat. Okay, but seriously, Unicode has that listed as "greater than sign," and has several similar characters. U+003E > greater-than sign U+203A › single right-pointing angle quotation mark U+232A 〉 right-pointing angle bracket U+27E9 ⟩ mathematical right angle bracket U+3009 〉 right angle bracket http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0000.pdf http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0000.pdf
- Kip9000 7y agowhy is this tech news?!
- Smithalicious 7y agoIs this kind of hitmiddlemanning common?
- austincheney 7y agoI was most amazed by the short prison terms for what would, in the US, be the capital criminal solicitation of murder. Here is the definition in Texas law (15.03) https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/docs/PE/htm/PE.15.htm https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/docs/PE/htm/PE.15.htm And the definition of murder in Texas is section 19 https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.19.htm https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.19.htm I am having trouble finding the sentencing guidelines for this crime, but I am quite certain it is analogous to a conspiracy to commit capital murder in the first degree and treated, and as such is punished similarly to capital murder.
- aiyodev 7y agoI do not believe this story. We're talking about a country that puts children in concentration camps. I do not think you can trust anything in their press releases. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7AYyUqrMuQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7AYyUqrMuQ
- dang 7y agoPlease do not take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It's repetitive, and therefore off topic. Worse, it destroys the curiosity that HN is meant for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- aiyodev 7y agoThat’s not what I said. Take down this fake article.
- tzs 7y agoOT: look at the chairs in the back area of the court in the second photo, where spectators would sit. That is way fancier than I've seen in US courts. In US courts, it is usually just plain benches. I have seen pictures of US courts with chairs, but the kind of chairs you'd expect to find in a doctor or dentist waiting room--adequate but not something you'd want to sit in for a long time. Those chairs in the Chinese court actually look comfortable. Is this normal in Chinese courts?
- yorwba 7y agoThe interior decoration in Chinese courts seems to vary. I found one that looks like it has benches: http://www.hbjc.gov.cn/ssjd/201709/W020170901659907496686.jpg http://www.hbjc.gov.cn/ssjd/201709/W020170901659907496686.jp... If you want to see more examples, try this image search: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%E5%AE%A3%E5%88%A4%E7%8E%B0%E5%9C%BA+site%3Agov.cn&t=fpas&iar=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%E5%AE%A3%E5%88%A4%E7%8E%B0%E5%9C%... 宣判现场 means the place where the verdict is announced. It's possible they use fancier court rooms when a larger audience is expected.
- peter_d_sherman 7y agoTrickle-down (aka Supply-side) economics... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics <g>
- kartayyar 7y agoMicroservices in action.
- reilly3000 7y agoSomewhere out there a person was inspired by these threads; seeing an inefficient market they started prototyping an "Uber for Assassination".
- BlueTemplar 7y agoIt was called "Silk Road".
- michaelt 7y agoAs I understand it [1] the guy who founded Silk Road paid $$$ to have six people killed, and none of them got killed. If you think that's Uber for Assassins, you must have had some shitty Uber journeys! [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/21/silk-road-founder-held-without-bail https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/21/silk-road...
- BlueTemplar 7y agoHey, nobody said it would actually work ! :p
- billsmithaustin 7y agoSounds like an opportunity for the gig economy.
- journalctl 7y agoKillr: it’s like Uber for hitmen!
- hkai 7y agoWe all did that, didn't we. I once worked for a subcontractor who received contracts from a Ukrainian company who received contracts from a foreign company that was sitting in a shiny skyscraper (the tallest in Europe) and branding itself as a top class agency, charging outrageous fees from top of the top level customers