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Comment by jkern | Hacker News Reader

When he was doing the same work by hand he was producing data with errors in it. All he's done is achieve the same error rate he had before. I don't see why the fact he could trivially reduce the errors to 0 is relevant when from the employer's point of view the exact same result is being produced.

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It seems hard to claim making a mistake and deliberate sabotage are the same.

The product being bought and sold is the same, by objective measure; and that's what counts in a business transaction, rather than a personal relationship.

So if -for example- you knew the details of fabrication of your car: you consider that you'd still buy a car with a chassis that was deliberately weakened by an employee, instead of just buying a car with an -unknowingly- faulty chassis?

Why would you accept something that, if not tampered, would be better than the alternative? When there's bad intentions or tampering, you'll have a result that is broken to some degree for sure. If everyone does their jobs as good as they can, you'll only face a chance of something being broken. You can always improve over mistakes, not so much over bad intentions.

Your car example is flawed. If I knew that a given car has a defect, I simply wouldn't buy it, period, regardless of how and why the defect was introduced.

Isn't this close to how computer proccessors are sold?

I never checked this, but I always thought that slower CPUs are just CPUs with some 'production faults' in it. Basically, the manufacturer always tried to make 300mhz CPUs, but sometimes they didn't reach that speed so they sold them as 233mhz, 166mhz.

Now I was under the impression that most people didn't know this, so most people were buying CPUs which were just designed to be slow, but in fact they were accidentally slower.

This is exactly your car example, and there is nothing unethical about it -- either way.

I still don't see the analogy. The lower quality was not intentional and, what's more, they clearly labeled it as an inferior product. This seems more akin to designing a processor so that it will fail just out of its warranty period and you need to buy a new one, but not mentioning that to anyone.

Because it shows willful deception. In a court of law, this would likely be a significant point in the case.

What law would he be breaking?

Probably either fraud or breach of contract if it came to a court

Depends on if the errors are material to the value produced. Like let's say I produce a report in an automatic way but have all the page number misaligned and occasionally insert incorrect punctuation then that does reduce the value of the report.

It would be a tort.

Could using printed fonts that look like hand-writing to advertise count as willful deception?

You're trying to trick the consumer into thinking a human made the sign (and by extension the product as well), which was actually made my machines.

I don't see a difference. When I buy a product, there is no disclosure of the manufacturing process.

I could only see a good lawyer losing this case if OP signed a contract that explicitly stated the process in which his work must be produced.

In your scenario, I don't see a correlation with the facts you presented vs the previous example. In the previous example, they provided evidence of a potential (IANAL or a judge or on a jury for the case, thus potential) crime, I merely stated that I believed the willful deception would likely be a significant point in the case. Without knowing the "case" in your example, I can't know if the font used would be significant or not.

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