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Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

If you liked the original post, you will probably LOVE this DEFCON talk about elevator hacking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHf1vD5_b5I

It also gives a lot of fascinating information about elevators in general and specific operation modes.

e.g. there is a "riot mode" where the elevator goes to every floor except the first (or ground in EU) floor aka to the lobby. The idea was that, during a riot, a luxury building in NYC would lock the stairwell access from the lobby but people could still take the elevator to the other floors to visit their neighbors etc

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Sort of similar: elevators in Israel may be programmed to stop at every floor during the Sabbath, as riding the elevator is permitted according to the talmudic definition of "work", but summoning the elevator is not.

Except if it’s summoned by a kosher switch? ;)

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

>The basic idea is that the switch activates only sometimes, and only after a delay, making the action indirect and uncertain. Several Orthodox poskim have ruled as thus makes the device permissible for general consumer use.[5][6] Others, however, have reached the opposite conclusion.[2]

Wow. Well, loopholes are loopholes I guess.

Surely, pushing a button frantically constitutes “work”.

I've always found it fascinating and delightful how Jewish people in particular seem to treat loopholes like that in their religion as features rather than bugs. Christians (the only other religion I've got much exposure to) seem to either ignore their rules entirely, or interpret them more according to a vague vibe of intent.

The rabbinic explanation goes, if god didn't want his people to show cleverness in exploiting the loopholes, he wouldn't have put them there.

While the Judaic God definitely seems more good-natured than the Catholic one (at least in this one regard), as an Atheist, to be so close to the point and still miss it is some /r/selfawarewolves level rage.

> he wouldn't have put them there

Yes...that's right....he didn't.

Fascinating, tell us more

Maybe God gave Moses specific guidance on elevator use on sabbaths, it just got lost in translation because Moses had no clue what God was talking about

"Thou shalt not... elevator... buttons may not be... oh whatever, just put something in there about adultery."

That's a weird take. For the little I know about most religions, intent and the spirit of the law is what's important. God doesn't need evidence or justification, it just knows. Allowing workarounds is encouraging trickery, which seems at odds with the function of religion as moral guidance and social cohesion.

I personally don't have any problem with the idea of exploiting loopholes, I mean, it is Hacker News, and cleverness and exploiting loopholes is pretty much the definition of being a hacker. But from a religion perspective, it looks more like an atheist, or even satanist value.

It's not a weird take, it's an accurate characterisation of some schools of thought.

I've seen that in New York City too. Probably common in other cities, or at least parts of cities with large Jewish populations. A condo I lived in had a malfunction that put it into a similar mode, and it was over a long holiday weekend so he had to suffer with it until the next business day when elevator repair could come out. Even in a ten-story building, it really adds a lot of extra time to your ride when it has to stop at every floor.

If you’re in reasonably good shape, stairs are a deceptively fast mode of transport. Easy to win a race against slower elevators over smallish distances.

Also exercise benefits, but I make myself take the stairs under the guise of saving time.

In Madrid the subway is deep, I had to climb 180 steps to home. I did it running, it’s actually much easier than walking. Best shape I ever was in my life…

You may want to avoid that if you go to St Petersburg. Deepest station is 80m down. I’m not sure all the stations even have stairs, all I remember are endless escalators (though it dates back 25 years now so…)

Meanwhile, on the London Underground, the lengths of all sets of stairs down to platform level are described as "equivalent to 15 floors" irrespective of how high they actually are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBTvmrRGlbE&t=41s

Similarly, Shabbat mode on kitchen appliances (1).

I do wonder, however, whether there are dedicated individuals within religious organizations that assess a given spiritual framework and consider workarounds for things that might be dangerous to the health of their religious community.

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbath_mode

Wow. That's pedantic.

It strikes me that if you're deriving whether an action is safe for your religion based on a technicality like "a signal light turns on", then either:

1. Your religion needs to lighten up a bit. I doubt any deity cares about small technical details like that.

2. You're in violation of rules anyway. The intent is still there, so even if you're using a loophole, there's no practical difference between those two actions. Both you and whatever deity know you're committing an offense.

There are religious scholars in Judaism who deal with these issues -- you aren't the first to question it and your concerns are enumerated and addressed thoroughly.

The Jewish belief is explicitly contrary to that: whether you obey the letter of the rule is what matters, not the intention of it, and this is as God wills it.

I don’t think there are many Orthodox Jews out there who haven’t heard some variation of those two points countless times in their lives. I think your apparent belief that there’s any amount of novelty in what you wrote is actually a lot more telling here.

This whole discussion strikes me as pure insanity.

You can see this at Cedars-Sinai hospital every week.

Although I respect the cleverness of workarounds like this... come on! You're still violating the spirit of the "law!"

I used to write software that used the third-party interface into elevator controllers. I am still unclear what “Korean lunch mode 1” and “Korean lunch mode 2” in Otis controllers do.

korean lunch mode 1 only takes you to the cafeteria on the bottom floor. it does not take any passengers up. lunch is sacred

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27776830

In buildings with many floors, it's actually usually more clever. E.g. the elevator might stop at every second floor on the way up, assuming that you can always go one floor extra and go down the stairs or something. And it might not stop at all floors on the way down in apartments buildings, since you're usually going out of the building and rarely just changing floors.

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