Hitman hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman

https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/23/hitman-hires-hitman-hires-hitman-hires-hitman-hires-hitman-tells-police-10971438/

by occamschainsaw • 7 years ago

321 239 7 years ago

metro.co.uk

fouc• 7 years ago

Moral of the story - don't outsource your work?

corobo• 7 years ago

Or better yet keep the outsource chain going until you find the guy with an ounce of moral fibre

quickthrower24• 7 years ago

These hitman need ISO9001 certification!

tomerico• 7 years ago

I’m surprised that the penalty for attempted murder in China is only 3 years in jail.

zhangeru• 7 years ago

I guess the difference here is that none of them actually attempted it, maybe it was a conspiracy charge.

einpoklum4• 7 years ago

Whaddaya mean, none of them attempted it? Four of them hired a hitman to do it! That's not attempted murder for you? :-O

quickthrower24• 7 years ago

Intent. Hiring a hitman is like pulling the trigger.

Laforet• 7 years ago

They 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• 7 years ago

off topic, but that side story: 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_• 7 years ago

Warning, that link is not for the faint of heart.

lifeisstillgood• 7 years ago

I 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".

jwilk2• 7 years ago

Did 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.

retsibsi3• 7 years ago

The 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.

craftyguy2• 7 years ago

From 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.

TulliusCicero• 7 years ago

I don't get why the last hitman got convicted of attempted murder if he didn't actually try to kill the guy.

craftyguy2• 7 years ago

Did the 5th hitman contact the police himself? Or did they find out some other way? The article is unclear about this.

It's literally right there in the article..

The contract finally came to the fifth hitman, Ling Xiansi, who eventually told the police.

retsibsi3• 7 years ago

Combined with the quote you posted in response to my comment, this does make the article (which didn't load for me) seem confusing. One one hand the fifth hitman 'eventually told the police', but on the other hand 'he told the target to fake his own death, which eventually led to the police finding out about the plot'. On balance it seems like hitman 5 didn't initiate contact with the police, but confessed when caught.

yorwba2• 7 years ago

The (much better) BBC article says it was the victim who called the police: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50137450

spraak• 7 years ago

Hitmen all the way down [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

mschuster91• 7 years ago

That's what happens when relying on subcontractors to do your work. The almost-victim was really lucky.

ky738• 7 years ago

Pressing/swiping "back" on iOS/Safari loads another article but doesn't actually go back. Amazing

StavrosK• 7 years ago

It's because the other article was written by the first one for half the price.

z92• 7 years ago

Analogy 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• 7 years ago

I've seen this. Not common, but it happens.

coldcode• 7 years ago

Last 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• 7 years ago

I'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....

ericol2• 7 years ago

who hires some college kids that actually do the job

Sounds about right, except that

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

the job was actually not done, but faked.

The last developer from India that my company hired (2009 or so) left us with some sub par script, which had some 500+ lines of code for some data validation that was actually never executed.

We then switched to people from the Eastern Block, and we never looked back.

KaoruAoiShiho• 7 years ago

*bloc

delinka• 7 years ago

the value of the contract had fallen

Why would I, Middleman Hitmeister, tell the marksman I'd hired about taking a cut and passing the job on?

"They hired me for $500K to get this done. I'll pay you $250K to get this done." Now I risk the guy killing me to take the full $500K for the contract.

Amateurs.

inovica• 7 years ago

We did the same.

_jal2• 7 years ago

Except in this case, recursive outsourcing proved to be socially beneficial.

Perhaps we should encourage criminals to act more like professionals?

coding123• 7 years ago

Which happens, and it's a very bad practice if things are not transparent.

analog31• 7 years ago

During the outsourcing craze, I came up with a business idea, to create a fake job shop in India, but actually have the work done by programmers in the US.

temporalparts• 7 years ago

Alternative 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

[2] https://jakubmarian.com/fish-fish-fish-eat-eat-eat-is-a-gram...

prvc• 7 years ago

Not convinced by that sentence; I get stuck on the second "eat".

GavinMcG3• 7 years ago

You 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).

tempestn3• 7 years ago

You 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.

sib• 7 years ago

Ship shipping ship shipping shipping ships?

https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ACYBGNSVOGMnms9RKigZTLds...

nshepperd2• 7 years ago

This is an example of center embedding, which is generally considered grammatical but difficult to process with more than a few levels (to the point where people don't naturally produce such sentences).

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

chrischen2• 7 years ago

I 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• 7 years ago

When committing crimes the less people who know the better, as this article should make clear.

pmontra• 7 years ago

I'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.

chrischen2• 7 years ago

You’re also leaving a lot of money on the table.

m0xte• 7 years ago

This would make a good film.

curiousgal• 7 years ago

"Snatch" is close to that.

gherkinnn• 7 years ago

And to quote from Snatch:

You should never underestimate the predictability of stupidity.

Such a fun film.

cm2187• 7 years ago

Only 5 years for ordering an execution? I expected a harsher sentence in China.

_-___________-_2• 7 years ago

Generally 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• 7 years ago

The 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.

namelosw• 7 years ago

That's for failed execution. If the execution succeeds it would be death sentence for sure for all these people.

einpoklum4• 7 years ago

Possible 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• 7 years ago

”below-par execution”

Heh.

NullPrefix• 7 years ago

In this case, there was no execution at all

quickthrower24• 7 years ago

4. Don’t murder people.

Waterluvian• 7 years ago

Hey now. We're here to discuss implementation, not pick apart product requirements!

daveFNbuck10• 7 years ago

I don't see how that's a moral of this story. These people were caught and punished because of their unwillingness to murder.

mazesc• 7 years ago

Didn't he pay too much if 3 extra hitmen accepted a reduced offer? Only the last one was below market rates it seems.

iakh• 7 years ago

Or not enough since the job was not done

crimsonalucard2• 7 years ago

Morals for stories are usually conclusions drawn from a sample size of one. Aka the anecdote.

For this story though... 4 out of 5 people subcontracted to another hitman. First anecdotal story I've seen that could be statistically significant.

La1n• 7 years ago

Alternatively to 2. If you pay someone so much money that the can contract the work out to someone else and still make profit they might.

Alternative 2 to 2; If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

onetimemanytime4• 7 years ago

Moral of the story: Pay a decent price and then pay someone else to kill the killer. In most countries you have an idea how much it takes to kill a person, with prices varying depending on the target and degree of law enforcement. If word is out that there's a contract on X...you're screwed since you might be #1 on the list of said person's enemies

BlueTemplar3• 7 years ago

Oh yeah that's going to work out really well if the killers know each other and have some mutual respect...

trhway• 7 years ago

many 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• 7 years ago

Your new startup is Assassination As A Service?

Shish2k• 7 years ago

Uber for Murders

booleandilemma• 7 years ago

Obligatory onion article:

https://www.theonion.com/popular-new-amazon-service-just-com...

crimsonalucard2• 7 years ago

The entire finance industry in the united states is like this.

onetimemanytime4• 7 years ago

True, 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 ...?

_-___________-_2• 7 years ago

I 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.

CapricornNoble2• 7 years ago

Just seems like he was going about this ALL wrong. US Spec ops guys moonlight as "security contractors" basically doing assassination missions in Yemen for ~$25,000/month[1][2]. You mean to tell me a Chinese guy with $250,000 to throw around couldn't find a recently-retired Chinese Special Operator to do this job reliably? I would think that anyone with that much money would have at least SOME Communist Party connections or People's Liberation Army connections. Hmmmm, unless his intended target was the one with such "protection".......that would make more sense actually.... maybe nobody in good standing with the CCP would take on such a contract, hence the above-market-rate compensation offered, and the fact that only unreliable, desperate, two-faced idiots accepted the job.

[1]https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/mercenaries-...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear_Operations_Group

kolinko• 7 years 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 :)

einpoklum4• 7 years ago

But 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• 7 years ago

If 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.

robocat2• 7 years ago

I 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• 7 years ago

Once the price got too low, the bottom guy could have

blackmailed the guy above

to blackmail the guy above

to blackmail the guy to make more money.

(was that too many levels?)

slowmovintarget• 7 years ago

Blackmail 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• 7 years ago

Blackmailing a hitman might not be the best idea.

bryanrasmussen2• 7 years ago

police police police police police police police police.

jklein112• 7 years ago

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

bryanrasmussen2• 7 years ago

my point exactly, but I still got downvoted.

infinity0• 7 years ago

The last hitman should have hired the first hitman.

webwielder2• 7 years ago

Sounds like someone’s been reading The 4-Hour Workweek.

dr_• 7 years ago

How is this not a Guy Ritchie movie?

CapricornNoble2• 7 years ago

Because 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

TheOtherHobbes• 7 years ago

Sometimes this is called globalisation.

onetimemanytime4• 7 years ago

In 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... ;)

whack2• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Nice 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• 7 years ago

I 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.

comboy• 7 years ago

Then 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)

daveFNbuck10• 7 years ago

Why would your understanding of consciousness change whether we should judge intentions? Either way we have a person who is acting on a decision to murder.

If we discovered that a robot had been programmed to murder after it tried to kill someone, we wouldn't let it back into society sooner if it failed in its attempt. We'd do our best to make sure it wouldn't murder anyone when released first.

LegitShady2• 7 years ago

Suggest some situations where hiring the hitman to kill a rival would be done with the correct intentions, then.

Because it sounds more like boilerplate you could use yourself to muddy things that aren't muddy.

It's ok to just say "killing your competition is bad". No moral ambiguity to it.

AJ007• 7 years ago

Consider that in China 55 crimes carry the death penalty. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_China

badrabbit5• 7 years ago

That's the whole point of a legal(criminal) judgement! The only thing that matters is your intention. Your intention is what the prosecution needs to prove and you need to defend against their accusation.

You can literally kill anyone and get away with it if the prosecution can't prove your intent has either negligence or premeditation and you were not intending to kill in a way approved by law (e.g.: did the soldier intend to kill his enemy within rules of engagement or did he intend to kill the enemy out of personal need for vengeance or hatred)

exegete• 7 years ago

Someone accidentally hitting someone with a car and someone intentionally doing so are very different things. The key is what evidence you have to show one or the other. If there is evidence someone hired a hitman then I don’t see how that can be muddied. The person intended to murder someone.

I’d also like to see a source on your claim about consciousness. I’m not sure how decisions and actions can just come to us and then we can purposely add a motivation afterward (but not before?).

al2o3cr• 7 years ago

    Then you're on a slippery slope of judging the intentions

I mean, who hasn't spent more than 40x the average disposable income in their country on a hitman just to jump out at the last minute and yell "IT'S JUST A PRANK BRO"?

Larrikin• 7 years ago

This point is constantly brought up on message boards like its a valid point, but in reality a large chunk of the law is literally about judging intent to determine the severity of the crime.

make3• 7 years ago

man in this case his intentions are crystal clear. he hired a hitman for a giant sum in his country. there is no ambiguity at all about his intentions

gregmac• 7 years ago

Once you've hired a hitman, the outcome is basically out of your control. Is there an argument where someone had hired a hitman with the intent they're unsuccessful? That seems far fetched to me.

I can buy your argument if they had intended to commit the murder themselves, because they can change their mind at any point up to actually doing it.

Similar situations to the hitman exist, too: planting a bomb, poisoning food, etc. Just because they're a bad bomb maker, or the poison wasn't potent enough, or the target doesn't drive/eat the food/etc doesn't change that they clearly intended to kill someone. To be clear, I draw a distinct line between possessing a bomb and actually planting it in someone's car - the former might be still be a crime but is clearly not the same severity as actually killing someone, whereas the actions the perpetrator took in the latter are indistinguishable, regardless of outcome.

hn_throwaway_992• 7 years ago

Slippery slope? Our entire legal system is based on intention, which is why there is a huge difference in sentencing between crimes like negligent homicide and premeditated murder.

gumby• 7 years ago

It gives you an incentive to change your mind. If the delta between attempted and performed murder is small, if you have doubts at the end you might as well go ahead and perform it, as at least one witness is now gone.

This is why a horrible crime like rape is typically not punished as strictly as murder: if the penalty were the same, why not do away with the witness. Though the effect of the crime on the victim can last a lifetime, at least they will be alive.

throwaway691732• 7 years ago

This is why a horrible crime like rape is typically not punished as strictly as murder: if the penalty were the same, why not do away with the witness.

FWIW this probably doesn’t make any sense in practice. Most rapes are done by people who think they will get away with it either because it’s very hard to catch or because they have sufficient social power. Now, these people are clearly huge pieces of shit, but they’re probably not going to decide to murder the victim to minimize legal risk just because the potential penalties if convicted are closer. Murder is much harder to get away with and social power is much less likely to save you. Also, people don’t like committing murder generally, even if they’re apathetic enough to commit rape. The proposed logic feels like it describes the world in which rapes are committed by scary men who randomly break into your house because they’re just criminals. Not to trivialize the unfortunate fact that the latter does happen and it’s very sad, but it’s relatively rare.

gameswithgo• 7 years ago

various studies have shown that harshness of penalty for violent crimes has no deterrence effect at all.

maybe it would work for white collar crimes, sadly we don't really punish those at all.

TwoBit2• 7 years ago

OK but the guilty businessman here didn't change his mind, nor did any of the first four hitmen.

dodobirdlord4• 7 years ago

This is why a horrible crime like rape is typically not punished as strictly as murder: if the penalty were the same, why not do away with the witness.

As an aside, something feels off about this example. Choosing to differ the penalties to incentivize not murdering the victim suggests that the murder outcome is less desirable, i.e. the crime is more horrible. The argument implicitly assumes that murder is the more horrible crime while making a case for why the punishments differ. Given that punishments are generally expected to be in proportion to the horribleness of the crime that assumption suggests that the punishments would differ to begin with.

glofish3• 7 years ago

there are other interesting variations to this.

Someone hires a hitman - the hitman kills a different person by accident. Is the contract giver guilty? They never intended any harm to the person that got killed.

etc. law is a funny business

ip26• 7 years ago

Our legal system seems to be like that a lot. Someone can nearly run you over, or nearly shoot you, and you survive only because you manage to escape or dodge- you're going to have a hard time sticking them with anything. (Unless you are an officer)

As a bicycle commuter it's on my mind a lot.

dghughes• 7 years ago

Not only that but China is notorious for its brutal laws. A Canadian was executed on rumors of drug trafficking. You often see people accused of financial crimes executed. China's court system has something like a 99.9% conviction rate.

perl4ever3• 7 years ago

It should go without saying, but without context, a high conviction rate could be from convicting people who are not clearly guilty, or it could be because only people who are clearly guilty are prosecuted.

gjm11• 7 years ago

There's a nice paper by the philosopher David Lewis (http://andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Punishment_Chance.pdf is a copy of it; I don't know whether it's in any sense a legal copy) that offers (though it doesn't exactly endorse) the following justification for this:

1. Imagine a system where the punishment for murder is exactly the same as the punishment for attempted murder, but that punishment has an element of chance: you might get a longer or a shorter sentence.

This doesn't seem particularly unreasonable. Now we're going to make successive modifications to the system, which (Lewis claims) don't obviously make it worse.

2. Now suppose that we attempt to make the punishment for more wholehearted attempts at murder greater. It's hard to tell what was in the criminal's heart, so as a reasonable proxy we try to evaluate, somehow, how likely the murder attempt was to succceed, and we punish more-likely-to-succeed attempts more harshly.

3. Now suppose, more specifically, that the way in which we punish more-likely-to-succeed attempts more harshly is by increasing the probability of getting the longer sentence. In fact, we'll say that the probability of getting the longer sentence is to be the same as our estimate of how likely the attempt at murder was to succeed.

4. How to estimate that probability? One effective but obviously impractical way would be to run some sort of reenactment or simulation of the crime, and give the longer sentence if and only if the victim dies. Aha! But we can simplify and improve this by using the original crime as the reenactment, and give the longer sentence if and only if the actual victim died.

And now we've arrived at pretty much our present practice!

TwoBit2• 7 years ago

huh?

Surely there's a better way to describe it.

throwaway691732• 7 years ago

These feel... dumb?

Specifically step 2 sounds like it’s skipping the important bit that people disagree with on the original problem. Again, compare hiring the cheapest hit man vs the most expensive.

dodobirdlord4• 7 years ago

Doesn't seem compelling. After all, the root of the argument is about probabilities, but the argument then goes on to propose that we base our decisions on a single simulation of a result drawn from a weighted random distribution.

andrewflnr2• 7 years ago

You lost me at point 1. Punishment that varies randomly is unjust.

known• 7 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom

praptak• 7 years ago

There 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• 7 years ago

It hasn't yet.

indigodaddy• 7 years ago

Why 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• 7 years ago

Because those are not hitman but scammers. Take some buck and doing nothing is not a bad deal, if ignoring the risk.

robocat2• 7 years 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.

CalChris3• 7 years ago

  The 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.

daveFNbuck10• 7 years ago

That seems like a very light sentence for someone who told the police that they commit murders for a living.

CalChris3• 7 years ago

People usually get convicted for actually doing something. From the facts of the FA, Ling didn’t. He was just an informer.

ineedasername• 7 years ago

Tldr: when unpacking recursive hitman contracts, the base case is 5.

peterkelly• 7 years ago

Exercise 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.

hluska• 7 years ago

Great comment - I came here to brainstorm how this could be turned into an exam question and you beat me to it.

bjornsing• 7 years ago

Stack overflow...

movax• 7 years ago

Sub-contractors.

mytailorisrich• 7 years ago

That's a very Chinese story in a way and reminded me of the movie "Crazy Stone" [1]

[1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0843270/

bitwize• 7 years ago

This is like the crime version of those "software contractors" who farm the actual work out to an offshore team.

Wistar• 7 years ago

Is this what they mean by "chain of custody?"

eatbitseveryday• 7 years ago

Lets not use code blocks for quotes, it makes a side-scrolling box. Just italics or sideways carrot is fine.

jolmg2• 7 years ago

sideways carrot

First time I've heard that name for the angle bracket.

js2• 7 years ago

You mean 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.)

rizz0• 7 years ago

It’s not a quote, it’s a coding challenge.

rmtech• 7 years ago

yeah, this is unreadable on mobile.

dang• 7 years ago

Ok, We took the leading spaces out of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21364038. (And detached this subthread therefrom.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Kip9000• 7 years ago

why is this tech news?!

Smithalicious• 7 years ago

Is this kind of hitmiddlemanning common?

austincheney• 7 years ago

I 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

And the definition of murder in Texas is section 19 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.

tzs• 7 years ago

OT: 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?

yorwba2• 7 years ago

The 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.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%...

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• 7 years ago

Trickle-down (aka Supply-side) economics...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics

<g>

kartayyar• 7 years ago

Microservices in action.

reilly3000• 7 years ago

Somewhere out there a person was inspired by these threads; seeing an inefficient market they started prototyping an "Uber for Assassination".

BlueTemplar3• 7 years ago

It was called "Silk Road".

michaelt• 7 years ago

As 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...

billsmithaustin• 7 years ago

Sounds like an opportunity for the gig economy.

journalctl• 7 years ago

Killr: it’s like Uber for hitmen!

hkai• 7 years ago

We 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

Hitman hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman

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