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It's a dog-eat-dog world out there.

That's a worldview you choose to hold because it suits your capitalistic philosophy. I've literally fought for my life in dark alleys and I don't agree with your claim - the fact that competition exists and can even be deadly does not establish it as the baseline norm of human behavior.

a lot of this socialization is provided by people who simply don't want you to become a strong competitor, and have indoctrinated this imaginary, soft, cushiony world into everyone's brains so that it's easier for them to come in and take what they want

I could just as easily say that people like yourself attempt to indoctrinate people with the notion that Darwinian competition is the unalterable way of the world in order to inculcate a combination of stoicism and paranoia that will inhibit them from coordinating with each other to limit your predatory activities. See, I can make up specious motivations for my interlocutors too.

>That's a worldview you choose to hold because it suits your capitalistic philosophy. I've literally fought for my life in dark alleys and I don't agree with your claim - the fact that competition exists and can even be deadly does not establish it as the baseline norm of human behavior.

It's a baseline norm of biology, which some humans are more willing to accept than others. "Survival of the fittest" implies that some are more fit; that is, some are winners and some are losers.

As long as energy cannot be created ex nihilo, this world will be fundamentally competitive. Wishing really hard won't work until someone wishes hard enough to undo the law of conservation of energy.

If most people are not willing to accept this, that explains a lot about tribe and power dynamics.

>I could just as easily say that people like yourself attempt to indoctrinate people with the notion that Darwinian competition is the unalterable way of the world in order to inculcate a combination of stoicism and paranoia that will inhibit them from coordinating with each other to limit your predatory activities. See, I can make up specious motivations for my interlocutors too.

Sure, there are people who make that assertion. That's fine? I think it's called a disagreement.

how are you supposed to compete if you can't see what your competitor is doing?

Well, that's the issue, isn't it? I had your mindset going into this, but Uber is getting sued for exactly that, and public opinion is (apparently) strongly against the idea that you should use your competitor's API's at all. So how do you look objectively at this and conclude "Well, even though a popular company is now being sued for this, and all of my friends would think less of me for doing this, I should go ahead and do it anyway"?

I'm genuinely curious since you hit on exactly what I've been struggling to figure out.

I tried to say "It's hard to believe Lyft isn't doing exactly the same thing" at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14104646 and the reply was "No, it's actually really easy to believe that Lyft isn't tricking Uber's computer systems into giving Lyft real-time info on Uber's drivers and fare prices. Please stop trying to make excuses for Uber's shitty behavior." And that's probably a fair reply. So how do you figure out whether you're doing something shitty, or just "breaking rules in a sporting way?" Is it just a coin toss? Is there an objective way to navigate these questions? It feels important to figure out answers to this kind of thing.

>Well, that's the issue, isn't it? I had your mindset going into this, but Uber is getting sued for exactly that, and public opinion is (apparently) strongly against the idea that you should use your competitor's API's at all. So how do you look objectively at this and conclude "Well, even though a popular company is now being sued for this, and all of my friends would think less of me for doing this, I should go ahead and do it anyway"?

PR is a thing because public opinion is extremely fickle. Most people are going to go wherever the wind is blowing.

You can see this readily on HN (and most other social media). The tone of the title and the first several comments set the tone for the entire thread. You can post the same comment in two different threads, one that started with positive comments and a neutral or positive title and one that started with negative comments/title, and find your comment +5 or +10 in the thread it aligns with and -1 or -3 in the thread it doesn't (this is particularly true on controversial topics).

This is also true of survey design. The way the questions are framed and phrased and the surrounding context of the survey has a huge effect on people's responses to the same fundamental question.

So I wouldn't worry too much that this is unpopular when it's framed as the big bad dominant player getting sued by the sweet innocent upstart for lurking under the covers, when the title calls the program "Hell", and when the larger context has been a flurry of negative press for Uber over a variety of topics during the last few months. Consider a few alternative framings, especially if you swap Uber and Lyft's positions, and you'll see that the hubbub is not really related to the actions alleged.

All in all, people prefer to believe nice, soft things as opposed to true, hard things. The powers that be take full advantage of this to socialize people away from meaningful competition or resistance.

It's very common for people to loudly oppose a tactic and work to cast it in a negative light while they quietly go about practicing it. The negative publicity they drum up deters a lot of potential competitors from using the same tactics and makes people unlikely to believe that they're engaging in something they "fight so hard against". With a little diversionary work, it's rare for these things to get blown open.

>the reply was "No, it's actually really easy to believe that Lyft isn't tricking Uber's computer systems into giving Lyft real-time info on Uber's drivers and fare prices. Please stop trying to make excuses for Uber's shitty behavior." And that's probably a fair reply.

I would speculate that this reply is solely about the poster satisfying his own ego. There is no content aside from "nuh-uh".

It might be easy for the naive to believe that everything is puppy dogs and rainbows, but after they get out there and give it the old college try, they'll quickly learn that it's not and either retreat into the cocoon of wage slavery or try harder next time.

>Is it just a coin toss? Is there an objective way to navigate these questions? It feels important to figure out answers to this kind of thing.

There is no hard formal definition. There isn't a way to compile it. The closest thing we have as a fundamental baseline is the law, but the law itself is up for interpretation and has many contradictory components, as we all know.

That's not to say that there aren't some moral absolutes, but ultimately, each person must find lines of comfort for himself independent of the commentary, because as discussed above, that commentary/outrage is more likely manufactured by enemy action than anything else. pg discusses this some in his essay on taboos [0], which you will probably find thought-provoking if you haven't read it yet.

I mention the tech bubble because stepping outside of it is shocking, and we have to manually internalize some of these harder lessons about human nature that others have to learn and accept immediately.

Why do so many software engineers have a disastrous run at getting promoted to management before falling back and telling everyone they're just more comfortable with code? Because as soon as they enter a field where there isn't a compiler to give a binary yes/no to their work product, perception becomes the primary field of battle.

That's a hard to place to live for someone who is used to meritocracy. You soon discover that you're vulnerable to all sorts of machinations and weaponry that you hadn't really noticed before. You notice that people will respond to you in very strange ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with the chain of events that lead to it, demanding a type of reasoning that departs hugely from what we're used to when we're dealing with code.

It's easy for us to think we have all of that down until we actually get in there, and then most of us end up with our heads spinning. That's ultimately good for us because it really helps us differentiate between what people say and what people mean, and appreciate what would be politely termed as the "nuance" in human behavior.

Put simply, there is a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that goes on to craft an illusory world for the general public. As PR and marketing become more advanced, this only increases. Don't worry so much about what people are saying, because more often than not, they're acting as mouthpieces for someone else, whether they're conscious of that or not.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

This sounds ultimately like a political question and not an ethical one. Meaning, public opinion needs to spar with private interests on numerous related matters in order to arrive at a conclusion, because no one person is going to be able to figure it out themselves. Until then the area is a frontier where you must tread carefully and keep your wits about you.

What makes the US a good place for business is its very willingness to forgive certain types of transgressions, which would get you crucified in Europe. We instinctively understand that this stuff is hard and until legal lines are drawn and sometimes even in that case, we're not going to hang your ass out to dry.

I think the reason for this is that a lot of innovations can come out of this process. If we held ethical transgressor's feet to the fire without fail then we'd never find really interesting products and services that never would have existed otherwise.

If you operate outside of safe, established, legal and ethical grounds, then you're throwing your fate to the court of public opinion, and that feels right to me.

I wish I could agree, but I can't. The court of public opinion is fickle and monstrous. You don't have to go far to see examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/instant_regret/comments/67g6lj/moun...

Many of those people probably would've preferred the horse kill that guy instead of just bump him a little. Half of them probably feel that he deserved it, and they were happy to see him get hit.

It's easy to feel like the court of programmer opinion is much more evolved and sophisticated, but as far as I can tell, we're cut from the same cloth.

I was hoping there were a way to navigate ethical issues from a personal standpoint. It would be helpful to have a template: "I'm going to do S, and I know it's right because X." "I'm going to do T, even though it might be wrong, because Y." "I'm going to do V, even though it's wrong, because Z."

The moral dilemmas of life are incontrovertible. Everyone must make cost-benefit decisions that don't have an absolute or clear answer; situations in which any of the options hold both moral virtues and moral hazards.

These decisions become ever-higher-stakes as responsibilities accrue. Is your loyalty to your employees and investors, whom you can pay more if you charge more, or your customers, who are looking to keep more of their "surplus" and may very well already have that money allocated to other needs? You can cast such dilemmas about most choices.

Anyway, religion is the framework that has been formulated to satisfy your very natural yearning for a moral standard or compass.

But even in religion, there is no hard deterministic path. Much like law, there are some baselines, but beyond that, the decision falls back into the individual's lap. That is why regular self-examination through prayer and introspection are core components of religion.

Good luck to you.

> I was hoping there were a way to navigate ethical issues from a personal standpoint.

What would you be hoping to accomplish? To never step on anyone's toes or piss anyone off? A lot of these questions just don't have easy answers, no one has all the information.

Even when there's law available to draw from, you still have to have a court case or settlement negotiation or something because every situation is really different and nobody has all the facts.

There's no template because these are humans we're dealing with. They're smart, and not all of them care. If all you ever had to deal with were other ethical people, then you wouldn't need the law at all, you could just agree on things and nobody would try to abuse it.

I do have a fair bit of business experience, including seeing how destructive anti-competitive behaviour (both others and my own) can be. Successful businesses have lots of customers, and customers like the businesses they patronise to behave fairly.

So although you are right that it's a competitive world, you have to compete fairly - and be seen to compete fairly - or you will drive your customers away. You do need consider what people have been "socialised" to think (which is what morals are, really) because otherwise your competitors will have a significant edge.

Look at it this way. It is beneficial to society for entities (people or companies) to spend their energy improving their own service rather than degrading their competitors', because this results in the best possible service being available to that society. This is what all our anti-competitive laws - and innate sense of fairness - spring from.

>So although you are right that it's a competitive world, you have to compete fairly - and be seen to compete fairly - or you will drive your customers away.

I think you're right that you have to be seen as fair. I think it's important to actually be fair, but as I said above, the popular conception of "fairness" does not necessarily map. It really comes down to how good your PR dept is at framing your company and making sure you're in the news for things that no one can fault, and that your strategic moves are never publicized.

The short version is that people don't want to hear "how the sausage is made", but the environment, ultimately including your customers, still demands that you make it.

>You do need consider what people have been "socialised" to think (which is what morals are, really) because otherwise your competitors will have a significant edge.

Yeah, again, this is PR. I agree you need good PR. You also need to be realistic enough to know that the crap someone's PR department pumps out is not the end of the story. You have to make winning plays.

"I've found the guiding star to be "Is this really immoral, or have we just been socialized to believe it's impolite or in bad taste?" One should realize that a lot of this socialization is provided by people who simply don't want you to become a strong competitor, and have indoctrinated this imaginary, soft, cushiony world into everyone's brains so that it's easier for them to come in and take what they want, and their constant empty blathering draws attention away from their dirty deeds. There's no need to allow ourselves to be victimized like that."

Simply brilliant!

>This ethos from some of the other commenters that you shouldn't do something because it might make your competitors unhappy is absurd.

I'm not sure that's what these other commenters are really saying. It seems to me that this sort of competition actually ends up being bad for the consumer. Good faith competition where you make your product better is what we hope our markets will do. When companies like uber instead try to hamstring the competition that's bad for consumers and should be discouraged.

>I'm not sure that's what these other commenters are really saying. It seems to me that this sort of competition actually ends up being bad for the consumer. Good faith competition where you make your product better is what we hope our markets will do.

Why should you not be able to use your competitor's public offerings to gather information that will be used to improve your product? Seeing the other guy's moves is a massive motivating factor to improve your own product, and provides useful feedback as much as modifications to your own product.

>When companies like uber instead try to hamstring the competition that's bad for consumers and should be discouraged.

Uber isn't trying to hamstring the competition. They're just trying to compete by learning about their competitor. This is how competition works. As far as I know, they didn't do anything that impeded Lyft's ability to operate (other than outcompeting them).

It sounds like the problem people have is just that Uber is the larger company right now. If Lyft had gotten into Uber's API (and there's no reason to necessarily assume they haven't), this thread would be much different.