It's not a lie to point out the truth. Words have meaning and wantonly applying the most scariest sounding words you can find does not help your cause.
And what exactly is that way? Semi-official paramilitary groups harassing americans? Desperate attempts to demonize minorities? Threats to prevent future elections? Trade wars that fuck over the american economy and moronic foreign policy that pisses away decades of power accumulation? That's all the fault of asking people to be humane?
The erosion of accountability and personal responsibility. If there weren't any illegal immigrants there wouldn't be any need to go looking so invasively for them. This is a very strong course correction after many years of neglecting things.
The presence of illegal immigrants does not, in fact, mean we have to go looking for them. It definitely does not mean we have to break the law while doing so.
Also it's weird how the group that used to talk about personal responsibility elected trump, the literal antithesis of taking responsibility for anything ever.
> The presence of illegal immigrants does not, in fact, mean we have to go looking for them.
It does unless you are calling for the selective enforcement of laws.
> It definitely does not mean we have to break the law while doing so
Which is fair but most people upset with ICE are essentially calling for no enforcement due to a couple of incidents among a country of 300 million just like with any other issue being advanced by the opposing tribe. I think we can objectively say that the previous level of enforcement was not a sufficient deterrent to reduce the level of illegal immigration. Whether the current enforcement is "breaking laws" or if incidents are tolerable mistakes will be for courts to decide.
> Also it's weird how the group that used to talk about personal responsibility elected trump, the literal antithesis of taking responsibility for anything ever.
I think many of the voters, certainly enough to swing the scale, voted for the lesser of two evils rather than being believers in everything trump. As a random non-American I am not convinced they made the wrong choice.
Your metaphor is slightly insane but I agree with the conclusion 100%. People who try to segregate every single line of text into a completely seperate walled off space is incredibly annoying, if for no other reason than real conversations tend to cover multiple subjects.
In Zulip, if a thread meanders with messages about a tangent, the authors/mods can choose to move those messages to a new thread (and IIRC messages with links between the two threads are created so it's easy to jump back and forth for any missing context)
When the code is written, it's all laid out nicely for the reader to understand quickly and verify. Everything is pre-organized, just for you the reader.
But in order to write the code, you might have to try 4 different top-level approaches until you figure out the one that works, try integrating with a function from 3 different packages until you find the one that works properly, hunt down documentation on another function you have to integrate with, and make a bunch of mistakes that you need to debug until it produces the correct result across unit test coverage.
There's so much time spent on false starts and plumbing and dead ends and looking up documentation and debugging when you code. In contrast, when you read code that already has passing tests... you skip all that stuff. You just ensure it does what it claims and is well-written and look for logic or engineering errors or missing tests or questionable judgment. Which is just so, so much faster.
> But in order to write the code, you might have to try 4 different top-level approaches until you figure out the one that works , try integrating with a function from 3 different packages until you find the one that works properly
If you haven’t spent the time to try the different approaches yourself, tried the different packages etc., you can’t really judge if the code you’re reading is really the appropriate thing. It may look superficially plausible and pass some existing tests, but you haven’t deeply thought through it, and you can’t judge how much of the relevant surface area the tests are actually covering. The devil tends to be in the details, and you have to work with the code and with the libraries for a while to gain familiarity and get a feeling for them. The false starts and dead ends, the reading of documentation, those teach you what is important; without them you can only guess. Wihout having explored the territory, it’s difficult to tell if the place you’ve been teleported to is really the one you want to be in.
The goal isn't usually to determine whether the function is the perfect optimal version of the function that could ever exist, if the package it integrates with the the best possible package out of the 4 mainstream options, or to become totally and intimately familiar with them to ensure it's as idiomatic as possible or whatever.
You're just making sure it works correctly and that you understand how. Not superficially, but thinking through it indeed. That the tests are covering it. It doesn't take that long.
What you're describing sounds closer to studying the Talmud than to reading and reviewing most code.
Like, the kind of stuff you're describing is not most code. And when it is, then you've got code that requires design documents where the approach is described in great detail. But again, as a reader you just read those design documents first. That's what they're there for, so other people don't have to waste time trying out all the false starts and dead ends and incorrect architectures. If the code needs this massive understanding, then that understanding needs to be documented. Fortunately, most functions don't need anything like that.
> And when it is, then you've got code that requires design documents where the approach is described in great detail
And how do you write those design documents? First, you need to understand the landscape, and that means reading code, building experiments and trying out different variants, which then allows you to specify a design.
Our job isn't writing code, our job is to gain the understand required that allows us to write specifications and/or optimal code.
And while AI may be a better typewriter, it obscures the actually hard part of our job, the actual engineering, and the reason why others pay us to consult them.
Most human written code has 0 (ZERO!) docs. And if it has them, they're inaccurate or out of date or both.
Lots of code is simple and boring but a fair amount isn't and reading it is non trivial, you basically need to run it in your head or do step by step debugging in multiple scenarios.
> If I got code like Joel describes for a code review, I'm sending it back asking for it to be clearly commented.
I'd argue that most code written today is never code reviewed. Heck, most code today isn't even read by another human being, and I'm talking about code generated by other humans! :-)
Most code written today (and most likely most code ever written) is poorly written code.
Now, these days there are many companies with good engineering practices, so there are lots of islands where this isn't the case.
I can read a line of code and tell you that it's storing a pointer in this array cell and removing this other pointer and incrementing this integer by 6 and so on. None of that tells me if that is the correct thing to be doing.
Detecting obvious programming errors like forgetting to check for an error case or freeing a variable or using an array where a set should be is, usually, obvious, and frequently machine can and will point it out.
Knowing that when you add a transaction to this account you always need to add an inverse transaction to a different account to keep them in sync is unlikely to be obvious from the code. Or that you can't schedule an appointment on may 25th because it's memorial day. Or whatever other sorts of actually major bugs tend to cause real business problems.
I mean, sure, if someone documented those requirements clearly and concisely and they were easy to find from the section of code you were reviewing such that you knew you needed to read them first, then yes, it becomes a lot easier. My experience as a professional programmer is this happens approximately never, but I suppose I could be an outlier.
And yes if you want to be extremely literal, some code is easier to read than write. But no one cares about that type of code.
Outside of life saving critical software or military spec software, no one needs to review so hard they understand it to the level you’re describing, and they do not.
There is a mathematical principle that verification of a proof is easier than any proof. The same is true in code.
I mean, it's even easier to just not read the code in the first place, I'm not sure what that proves, other than perhaps an implicit collorary to the original quote "reading code is quite hard (so people rarely bother)"
Well said, you’re absolutely right. In practice code review is orders of magnitude faster than code creation and it always has been, baffling anyone is arguing otherwise. Perhaps they’ve never worked in a real organisation, or they’ve only worked on safety critical code,m or something?
Sometimes code review is so fast it's literally instant (because people aren't actually reading the code).
I think it's one of those sort of, dunno, wink wink situations where we all know that doing real in depth code reviews would take way more time than the managers will give (and generally isn't worth it anyways) so we just scan for obvious things and whatever happens to interact with our particular speciality in the code base.
I’ve rarely seen this happen personally but it does happen from time to time. Even thorough code reviews don’t take anywhere near as long as the writing though.
What is it with people feeling compelled to talk about starship troopers movie being different (lesser) than the book?
Like, there's not that much to the book. It's a decently written "joins the military" story with a couple of well developed characters and one unique idea about sci-fi warfare (the suits spending most of their time jumping, which in retrospect would just make you a giant target...)
None of this is bad, it's just like, there's dozens of other mil-sci-fi books and yet everyone has to jump in and go "but the book is better!!!"
Most people don’t want to admit that the author of the book wants you to take the book and movie at face value and thus the film/book are unironically right wing coded.
A lot of liberals don’t want to admit that.
Similarly, “they live” might have tried to pretend to be liberal coded and that might be the directors intention, but it’s schizo /pol/ right wing coded too in practice. After the Epstein stuff, we need reparations for /pol/ schizos.
Mortal Kombat ost had a ridiculous influence on my childhood music tastes, another absolutely amazing sound track is The Saint, check out the artists involved.
Interesting, I wouldn’t have thought of that one since I remember not being impressed by the movie at the time. On Wikipedia, a quote from a review said “on the whole, it's one of the few soundtracks that works better as an album than as a movie.” That tracks!
Awhh, I love the movie also. Could be a nostalgia thing but it's just fun. Val kilmer is basically always great and it's a nice mix of sort of spy movie tropes while having fun with it.
Look, this is a mostly reasonable, if slightly vague, article about investigating fraud and mechanisms by which you do so.
What it lacks is any concrete suggestion as to what should change, beyond some vague allusions that perhaps racial/ethnic profiling should make a comeback.
The real problem here though is that the entire article ignores the duty[1] the government owes its citizens.
It's "fine"[2] if stripe or visa or whoever flips a coin and if it's tails they decide this person isn't allowed to be a customer of their company. The company loses any profit they might have made and life goes on.
It's considerably more problematic when the government refuses to serve a citizen (or even worse, levies an accusation).
There's some famous quotes about how many innocent people are appropriate to harm in the pursuit of the guilty but I'll leave those up to the reader.
[1] duty feels like too weak of a word here. Obligation? Requirement? The only reason the government even exists is to benefit the citizens.
[2] it becomes rapidly less fine when the company essentially has a monopoly over a system requires to participate in modern life, but that's a different topic...
This article isn't vague at all. It references various sources, and uses precise language (if you can recognize it) to convey its message. Yes, innocent until proven guilty, but the fact that the government has "lesser" educated Fraud analysts, chooses to ask for reimbursement of overbilling, and many more nuanced topics talked about in the article is not vague.
It's very indirect. The message is "the government is soft on fraud, partially because of liberal values", but the author does everything possible to not actually say it.
I don't think that's indirect at all. It's pretty clearly what did in fact happen in Minnesota. I don't read the author as claiming it's endemic to liberal values, any more than the isomorphic pathologies are endemic to the finance industry (which Patrick also writes about), or the defense industry. Again: it's easy to find Democratic sources saying the same thing.
Why is it so difficult for people to acknowledge that Minnesota fucked this up badly? What is that going to cost us? The attempts to downplay it seem pretty delusive.
Well, we live in a world where someone ran for president on the basis of "stopping welfare fraud" that turned out to be mostly a myth, so, you know, context is a thing.
As the article literally says, a whole bunch of people got sent to prison, that seems like pretty solid evidence.
Run the rest of them down? Figure out the total scope of the fraud, so we can enact countermeasures to prevent anything like it from happening again?
Fraud targeting social welfare programs is a grave crime; it strikes at public support for those programs. It enriches criminals very specifically at the expense of those people who would most benefit from the program.
So what is supposed to change based on that? Pay more for better fraud investigators? Accept a lower burden of proof like stripe et al do? What's the take away here?
If you want a TLDR; style take-away, the last paragraph is a good place to start:
>"Responsible actors in civil society have a mandate to aggressively detect and interdict fraud. If they do not, they cede the field to irresponsible demagogues. They will not be careful in their conclusions. They will not be gentle in their proposals. They will not carefully weigh consequences upon the innocent. But they will be telling a truth that the great and the good are not.
The public will believe them, because the public believes its lying eyes."
Is auditing state-subsidized service providers fascistic?
From this piece, it seems like the state auditor detected some fraud, but there was little follow-up from either the state or 'responsible journalists', so the sensationalists came in with a (predictably) extreme take, after which everyone started slinging mud. The sensationalism could have been forestalled by better auditing by the state, or journalism by large-scale media. I am not sure what part of this is fascist.
Except the article does mention a whole bunch of people who were investigated, arrested and convicted.
So again, now what? Are they supposed to hire more investigators? Work harder? Require less evidence? What part of the system is supposed to change and how?
as far as i can tell trump is all about not trusting people but aggressively enforcing arbitrary rules no matter the cost. exactly what i am criticizing.
McKenzie uses paraphrases to avoid writing certain keywords. For example, he never writes "DOGE" or "Elon Musk" in this article. Instead, he writes "We had a poorly-calibrated federal initiative led by a charismatic tech entrepreneur."
If you've been reading the news then you can decode these paraphrases, but they do make his articles significantly harder to read.
I'm tempted to ask an LLM to replace them with more straightforward references.
> beyond some vague allusions that perhaps racial/ethnic profiling should make a comeback.
It suggests nothing of the sort, and in fact explicitly attempts to establish that none of this is intrinsic to any affinity group. The point isn't that the fraudsters in this case were of a particular ethnicity; it's that they shared an ethnicity, which enables the kind of internal social trust that fraud rings require.
Further, it suggests many clear heuristics that are nothing to do with ethnicity. The suggestions are clear and explicit; they just happen to involve occasionally denying services without proof of already-committed fraud, which you apparently consider unacceptable. But here is an experienced person telling you from expertise, with abundant citations and evidence, that nothing else really works, and furthermore that this is common knowledge in a well established industry specifically devoted to the problem.
I've called the phenomenon of private corporations refusing service the "Maoists in the Risk Department" in the past.
The reason why risk departments all inevitably reinvent Maoism is because the only effective enforcement mechanism they have is to refuse service. Fraudsters are fundamentally illegible to businesses of this size. And as the article stated, recidivism rates in fraud are high enough that someone caught doing fraud should never be given the time of day ever again. So the easiest strategy is to pick some heuristics that catch recidivist fraudsters and keep them a jealously guarded secret.
This calculus falls apart for the government. If someone rips the government off, they can arrest them, compel the production of documents from every third party they've interacted with, and throw them in jail where they won't be able to rip anyone else off for decades. Obviously, if we gave the Risk Department Maoists these same permissions, we'd be living under tyranny.
Well, more tyranny than we already live under.
But at the same time, the fact that we have these legal powers makes Risk Maoism largely obsolete. We don't need to repeatedly reinvestigate the same people for the same crime "just in case".
> The reason why risk departments all inevitably reinvent Maoism is because the only effective enforcement mechanism they have is to refuse service.
How is it Maoist to refuse service???
> This calculus falls apart for the government.
It really doesn't. The judicial process is expensive and jail time isn't at all proportional to the amount defrauded (especially not when there is no political appetite for locking up a disproportionately "racialized" set of culprits, never mind the facts); nor does it solve the problem of recovering those funds. Further, the projections on the amount of fraud uncovered make it seem rather likely that a high percentage of those responsible are going free.
> We don't need to repeatedly reinvestigate the same people for the same crime "just in case".
The entire point of the system you're calling "Risk Maoism" is that it does not involve reinvestigation; it involves a presumption that reinvestigation would be a waste of time.
Right now we have either some form of fine, and while this can be incredibly painful, usually is not, then we go straight to like multiyear prison sentences, with perhaps a few suspended sentences in between there.
I dunno, maybe a world where "you did a small bank fraud so now you have some kind of antifraud system attached to you" is genuinely worse than the one we live in now, but the idea of being able to target more specific aspects of someone rather than just prison/not prison seems interesting.
I guess we have stuff like "not allowed to use a computer for 5 years" (thanks hackers movie!), dunno how effective or practical that is.
> [2] it becomes rapidly less fine when the company essentially has a monopoly over a system requires to participate in modern life, but that's a different topic...
That's the real thing here. Concentrated power is scary-- whether it's the federal government, Visa/Mastercard, Google, etc.
At least power concentrated under the control of a government might be held accountable to the people. With private, concentrated power: fat chance.
I'm working on making it a thing, but my theory is that power can't be destroyed, merely transferred, and in most cases I'd rather have the power be vested in a democratic government.
When an asteroid strikes Earth, its kinetic power is rapidly transferred primarily to the atmosphere, surface, and subsurface in the forms of thermal energy (heating and vaporization), mechanical energy (crater formation and ejecta), and seismic energy (earthquakes and waves).
He literally writes about how the claims of racism and profiling were in bad faith, intended to frighten the state investigators, and that this is known from email communications revealed in discovery on some of these prosecutions where the fraud participants discuss the strategies they will employ to maximize the impact of their bad faith allegations of racism and racial profiling. There is no ambiguity here so I don’t understand why you still want to carry water for these fraudsters.
The particular people patio11 is referencing are in jail and charged but not yet convicted. The emails have been entered into evidence and thus made public as part of the trial.
My bicicle got stolen a long time ago and I never recovered it. The perpetrator was never caught.
From this we can conclude many things. Maybe the thief was very crafty. Maybe the local police are incompetent. Maybe everyone is trying their best and the job of going after bike thieves is very hard.
But you cannot ever convince me that an appropriate conclussion could be "your bicicle didn't actually get stolen". I saw it. I can't identify the thief, there will never be a conviction, but don't tell me it didn't happen.
A conviction in a court of law is very important to be able to confidently say "so-and-so has committed fraud". But requiring a criminal conviction just to be able to say that fraud has happened is lunacy.
Yes, but we're not talking about whether or not bike thefts happen, or medicare frauds, we're talking about what actions we're going to take in the future.
I too have had a bike stolen and it was an incredibly awful experience, but I'm not going to vote for a law requiring us to execute people accused of bike theft.
This is what is so incredibly frustrating about these types of conversations because so frequently you have one side proposing fact based strategies developed via reaearch and experiments and historical analysis and so forth, but that makes them quite complicated to explain in 30 seconds on tv, and on the other side you have some asshole going "all these problems are caused by <subgroup> and if you give me power I'll be cruel to them and everything will be better".
The latter's simplicity seems to be highly appealing and attempting to argue against it using facts and logic requires A) the listeners to actually respect facts and logic and B) and lot more effort to research/cite/develop the facts and logic.
So again, it sounds like fraud happened. This is bad. Some people were imprisoned because of it. Now what?
I keep asking this basic question because that's whats actually missing from the article.
Is there a specific person who should be in prison but isn't? Is there a law that could be passed to make fraud harder? What, specifically should be done?
The entire story of what happened in Minnesota, as agreed on by basically everybody involved including significant chunks of the government of Minnesota, is that convictions are not a reasonable measure of accuracy here. The story is that they didn't pursue fraud prosecutions in proportion to their severity. Responding to that with "but there weren't convictions" is literally just begging the question.
It's very annoying that I feel like I have to say this but: I'm a committed Democrat, and I feel like my anti-Trump anti-racism bona fides, including on this site, are quite solid. The Minnesota thing happened. We can debate the scale, but it happened.
Yes, fraud is bad. I agreed before I read the article.
I've learned (from the article) that there was apparently some fraud in Minnesota, some of which was successfully prosecuted and, possibly, some that wasn't.
If pressed, I would say the take away from the article is that the fraud investigators should have been more willing to use race/ethnicity and accept a lower standard of evidence before taking action.
My take-away from the article is a bunch of fraud-identifying and fraud-thwarting tips.
Ideally, state programs should:
1. not pay out until a beneficiary's bona-fides are first verified. Paying out first, with no verification, and only retrospectively trying to claw back fraudulent claims, only after expensive investigations, is ruinous on the state budget.
2. work with private industry to identify alleged fraudsters
3. require much more verification of alleged fraudsters before agreeing to pay anything out
4. snoop around to find fraudsters' abettors because they're easier to find than the fraudsters
Other than one section saying that fraud investigators should expect to find ethnic clusters (because fraudsters of all ethnicities use their families and friends), there's nothing about ethnicity being a "flag". The biggest flag is that the same person previously committed fraud, and the article laments that civic government often gives a "clean sheet" to known fraudsters, in a way that the finance industry never would.
There was also the point about lack of granularity and follow-through.
The government has the power to ruin your whole life, so it's reasonable that they have high standards of evidence to ruin your life. But if they can't secure a conviction they do nothing, they'll let you open another NGO and apply for another government grant as if nothing happened.
A business has the power to inconvenience you by refusing to do business with you. That's less ruinuous than what the government does so it's OK that their standards of evidence are lower.
But perhaps there should be something that the government can do in between nothing at all and ruining your life. Otherwise the same frauds will happen again and again.
I agree, but you've already mentioned the issues with the government having a punishment system that isn't based on the courts. We all know how great the secret no-fly list is.
Did you read the actual report? The part about how a single investigator didn't like how some daycares were run, the level of supervision, and then used that to extrapolate a hypothetical invalidation of all payments to those facilities as "fraudulent"?
Democrats have rationalized much worse things than this, for example the ethnic cleansing (genocide) in Gaza. So with all due respect frankly I'm not at all assuaged by your caveat.
> (unless you have gone back and deleted the comments, haven't checked yet!)
Minor point: I'm pretty sure that HN comments cannot be deleted/edited after about an hour. Very different from most web forums in this regard, and worth keeping in mind when digging into past discussions! Maybe the rules are different for a superuser like tptacek here with lots of karma, but I doubt it.
I can't help but notice that said other person's profile claims "out of here"; and before this thread, had not commented since October 2024 — in that case also to get in an extended political argument with you specifically. That's quite a grudge to hold.
Eh, that part's not so weird. Not weird to forget that HN is weird in this particular way. I just wanted to clarify it for myself & for anyone reading.
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