jsprinkles

That child's doctors personally examined the child, have expertise to deal with the situation, and are aware of any details which are important. A HN commenter has not personally met either party, in most cases is not a lawyer so he does not have expertise to deal with the situation, and most importantly, are only aware of what one party has told them. There is a significant difference.

No, I agree, I just think relying solely upon a disclaimer is dangerous. I certainly respect your take more than my own, though, as you do it for a living, and I'm definitely paying attention.

You skipped right over where I said "in the general case," as I am certainly aware that there are exceptions as you are pointing out. Specific legal advice is almost universally dangerous. Specific technical discussion is almost universally not.

I'll reiterate this for the benefit of context at this very location, but I have personal experience with a very similar scenario that I am not legally permitted to discuss; it was a situation of unsolicited advice resulting in consequences for people. I cannot say who. I think you'll find if it's a common experience, most people are (wisely) not going to discuss it.

I have mentioned several times that I have firsthand involvement with unsolicited advice being given on the Internet resulting in consequences for people. I am simply not legally permitted to talk about it, nor will I say if I was the person found legally responsible.

Remember, a liability does not require a law, and there are such things as torts.

Couldn't agree more. What do you think about specifically mentioning legal advice?

It's anecdotal, so it doesn't carry much weight, but I have firsthand experience with comments such as those in that thread carrying legal consequences for people. I'm not legally permitted to discuss it beyond that.

True enough. I'm more concerned with the welfare of the person who blindly follows this advice, and the liability being created for people giving him advice is a close second.

You are intentionally being disingenuous, now, because you're upset. That's fairly transparent in your reply. Multiple people have told you that you are giving legal advice, and suggested that you stop, and pointed out how I am correct, and yet you're sticking to your guns that I'm a troll.

I can't even begin to attack the amount of stupid in this comment, so I'm cutting my losses, adding your name and company mentally to my personal blacklist for doing business or hiring, and getting out of the thread before this consumes even more of my time.

My valuable knowledge is that this discussion shouldn't be happening, because I've seen firsthand what an Internet comment can do legally, both to plaintiff and defendant. So yes, I would prefer it be shot down. I am not legally permitted to discuss the cases in question nor provide specifics of my knowledge, nor will I create liability for myself by refuting specific legal advice being given in this thread.

> Imagine what HN would be like if only state approved programmers were allowed to have an opinion on technical subjects.

Technical subjects do not carry the risk of legal consequences in the general case, now do they?

Wow. Let me respond point by point:

> You have merely engaged in ad hominem

That's the second time I've been accused of ad hominem attacks in this thread, and the second time it's been flatly wrong. An ad hominem is me refuting your point by implying that you personally are not qualified to give it. I am not refuting your point, at all, and I have been careful to do so except to generally label some of your advice bad. I am telling you to shut up and stop giving advice on a case you're not personally familiar with. You are aware that there is legal liability for YOU being created as we speak, right?

> and quite successfully derailed the discussion

Good. It needs it. Your comment in particular.

> Thanks for the down vote brigade, by the way.

This is a tall accusation, and I do not have a "down vote brigade". I downvoted your parent post and nothing else. I suggest, since you have been around the block of Hacker News a few times, that you step back and take a few breaths and think about what you're saying.

> I must conclude that actually trying to help people on HN is not tolerated if the person attempting to help has offended someone who feels comfortable in the level of dishonesty you are.

Fuck you. I seriously have no other response to that, and I'm ashamed that I've gone there, but really: fuck you, and everything you stand for, with that little remark.

> nearly every perspective I give is qualified with a "may" or a "it appears" or some other similar language.

That's called weasel wording.

> Nowhere did I give a single bit of legal advice.

Uh, your entire comment is how to respond to this legal threat, which is legal advice. The only advice anyone on Hacker News should ever give to someone in legal trouble is "consult an attorney", not how to consult an attorney, research to do ahead of time, bupkis.

FYI, what I wrote is not an ad hominem argument, and "ad-hominem argument" is not an a.k.a. for "personal attack" (neither of which my comment is, for what it's worth).

In this case, there are legal repercussions and serious consequences to doing most of things on this page. This is stuff to talk about with a lawyer, not the fucking Internet, and the person I replied to is already giving frighteningly bad advice.

You know how in criminal proceedings, they say "anything you say can and will be used against you?" It's the exact same for civil actions like this, which is why Public Relations 101 (which should be of interest to most in this audience who want to do their own startup) says "being sued or otherwise challenged legally? STFU. No comment."

This isn't about credentials, it's about being smart when it comes to threats that can genuinely hose your business, and not listening to a bunch of armchair lawyers on HN who think they have the best course of action without any sort of context.

I wish your comment was the only one, frankly, and we could really use a "you are not a lawyer, stop pretending to be one" guideline.

Edit: I've made a "Ask PG" to ask for just that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4055661

It concerns me that I'm attacked personally for advocating for common sense when it comes to the law. Being sued? Shut up. Don't post to HN. Don't comment on the case. Don't challenge the other party to Quake 3 on Twitter. Don't give people legal advice after saying "I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice". Stop being stupid.

This advice transcends my allegiance, which is to nobody involved in this discussion (and which doesn't matter at all, frankly), and I'm annoyed that you think I'm stupid enough to involve myself in something I'm personally vested in.

I appreciate what you're doing, but you just wrote an essay full of legal advice, including conclusions on how the proceedings will go -- something you really shouldn't predict. By putting the words "this isn't legal advice" before your comment, you aren't magically making it okay to give your opinion in the guise of advice. Just be aware of that.

You want to completely buy in to one side's story without any context or response from the other side, then start a Kickstarter to fund a legal assault upon that company? Really?

Not only are you surprisingly easily manipulated, apparently, don't you have better things to hack on?

Gazelle is awful, and far too many private trackers use it.

Why create yet more problems for yourself?

I work with two people who did.

> Please stop.

No. I will not silence my opinion because you disagree. Although your comment is almost devoid of insight, I would infer that you're implying I'm being obtuse regarding the role of computer science in making my stuff better. Example of a performance improvement: choosing a frobnicator that uses multiple cores to frobnicate instead of a single core to frobnicate. Do I have computer science to thank for that? In a way, the same way I have medical research to thank for Advil. However, it's disingenuous to say medical research got rid of my headache. The Advil did.

Computer science has its place, but it needs to be more aware of that place. This thread is a very poignant demonstration of that.

> customers can go fuck themselves.

Oh, dear Lord. This comment makes me hurt.

Your salary from Bank of America comes from customers -- even if you're paid from investment, the investment is only there because Bank of America has customers. Your research in academia is paid for by customers of the institution, both former and present, and possibly governments (who are also interested in the product of the research). Your shortsighted world view is tragically common in those who favor academia, and without paying customers driving research into new areas, your precious academia wouldn't exist and you'd do well to understand that. Money is everything.

What the hell do you think the point of academia is? All throughout history, the sciences are almost always advanced due to a pressing need or mistake from practical execution.

> cs is what matters.

Execution is the only thing in the world that matters. You are basically admitting that you're the idea guy, searching for a "technical co-founder".

Had Mark Zuckerberg spent a lot of time worried about the runtime efficiency of parts of his code or whether there was a more efficient algorithm for sorting friends, Facebook would be nothing today. He executed and didn't give a shit, because he wasn't exercising computer science, he was exercising building a product.

Surely people went back and made things more efficient as Facebook scaled, but I've been at a rapidly-growing startup a while, and I haven't made my product more efficient through many computer science advances. Most have been using better software, better network topology, better configuration, less dumb code, and so on.

Your attitude completely misses what the article is explaining, and, frankly, your ad hominem on the guy talking about Agile is completely out of place when practically your entire LinkedIn profile is buzzwords, just your field instead of his.

(Aside: I love that HN makes it really easy to build a list of no-hires, fairly easily, just by observing how people think and communicate.)

Theory is thinking about how to build a self-driving car, and the algorithms and considerations that would be required to do so, and perhaps writing a paper about how best to go about doing it. Practical is writing code, running wire, and testing the car. Surely they've done both, but now that the car exists they're into the practical territory. As they adventure through the practical part, surely new theoreticals are discovered and published.

Just because nobody has built a self-driving car before does not automatically make actually building one a theoretical exercise. The process is applying the sciences to making a car do something, which is very practical. Your awesome sort algorithm and the paper explaining it is theoretical. My implementation of it is practical.

That is the differentiation that most people can't see.

> Software engineering 'ideas' regarding modeling and testing have gone way overboard.

Maybe, but he also said specs and maintenance.

> As an example, take Google's self-driving cars. Would you say the meat of their body of work theoretical?

No.

> I was personally not cut out to do scut work. I had zero interest and respect for maintenance, unit tests, requirements & specs, UML modelling, refactoring, waterfall method, agile, kanban...

The world in which this is "scut work" is not the world I want to live in.

Let's be honest. You don't want to do practical, you'd rather do theoretical, and that's fine. However, don't disrespect practical just because it isn't your bag of chips, particularly to an audience that is full of practical engineers. I could spend all day disrespecting theoretical -- mainly because most of those passionate about theoretical at the expense of practical make comments like these -- but I do not, because I see theoretical as necessary for our craft.

Probably because the vast majority of the "programming" field as it stands today barely exercises computer science knowledge. Linked list optimizations, heaps, that stuff isn't even on the radar of most devs hacking on a startup, frankly, because the language hides it away. And they are not inferior programmers if they can execute on their knowledge, are they?

I hate that, to most folks who are into CS, CS is a yardstick for how much value a hacker will develop. "Can't optimize this from O(n^2) to O(n)? I have no idea how you keep your job." There is far more to the value produced by a hacker than the typical interview questions, and this elitist attitude out of most compsci folks is obnoxious.

This is why, even though I understand CS, grilling me on theoretical CS in your interview is automatic points off and I'll accept the position that actually quizzes on practical. I'm definitely of the mind now, being a self-taught programmer with a working knowledge of compsci, that I will learn things when they're needed to execute (not so they'll sit around in my brain waiting for the manager that Googled hard interview questions to ask).

Yours.