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Comment by insonable | Hacker News Reader

A friend in grad. school would put obvious glaring errors in his preliminary drafts of write-ups so the prof's would then be happy to correct these, feel they'd done their work, and move on, avoiding any actual substantive criticisms requiring actual work on his part to fix.

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"just remove the duck"

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/06/05/duck/

I learned this lesson dealing with auditors many times. These people whose job really should be collaborative in nature (internally) still feel the need to find something, because if they don't, then their bosses say "did you look hard enough?"

So yeah, sometimes as we presented our security policies or documentation, we would highlight an existing problem for which we had a solution or proper executive backing to justify, so that when it was called out, we would haggle and then say "okay, let's fix that". Everyone had done their job.

Off-topic: I was blocked from reading that site using Proton's TX datacenters, but it worked as soon as I switched to Sweden.

Stop blocking VPNs, Rachel.

Same with mortgage applications and other gatekeepers. No matter how much you have your ducks in a row they will always ask for something to show they did their due diligence. It's helpful to leave out something obvious and easy to produce.

I don’t think that’s what gatekeeper means

That's exactly what gatekeeper means: entities that control access to something (in this case financial capital on terms suitable to buy property, but equally it can be social capital to access in-group acceptance, etc).

This control of access to resources is where the name comes from, and its broader use (rather than the highly specific social use we see online) is recently exemplified in the EUs Digital Markets Bill describing large search providers (like google) and social media (facebook) as gatekeepers.

Makes sense to me. Is a mortgage officer not a gatekeeper of the bank's capital?

Is a police officer not a gatekeeper to doing whatever one pleases?

It’s known as Atwood’s Duck. https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/

"When preparing a defense, the good Samurai doesn't leave any weakness. The great Samurai leaves one weakness, so he knows from which direction the enemy will attack."

I was given that advice when preparing for my Ph.D. defense. :)

Hairy arms: https://www.npr.org/2014/11/17/364760847/whats-with-all-of-t...

Though I believe the technique has been given many other names as well.

>A friend in grad. school would put obvious glaring errors in his preliminary drafts of write-ups so the prof's would then be happy to correct these, feel they'd done their work, and move on, avoiding any actual substantive criticisms requiring actual work on his part to fix.

There are people that believe Elon can do no wrong and is always playing 8d chess.

The worst is when they can't find anything and make shit up.

Had this happen during an audit very early in my working life - "where did this excess income come from?" The books I gave them were clean. Fortunately the accountant made an obvious math error that was easy for me to spot, and the next round went smoothly.

Or was it an error? Hmmm ...

That's pretty much a designer/web dev trope, turning in mistakes to the boss that are easy to fix so he can put his stamp on it.

it works the same way in construction as well. Before inspection of something like electrical, you go introduce an obvious error that is easy to observe, doesn't take long to fix, and doesn't require additional materials. The inspector can write a report indicating the work is substandard and later gets to write another report indicating the work is corrected and the sign off is complete. Everyone gets to go home happy at that point.

Inspectors aren't wise to this? They see everything done right except for this one obvious flaw? Or they see the glaring flaw immediately and they stop looking at the rest of the work? Imagining myself as an inspector, if I see something simple that is clearly done wrong, I am now going to go over the whole job with a fine-tooth comb.

So this sounds like "urban legend" to me, but maybe there is a grain of truth in it?

If you get the book thrown at you, you will lose without exception.

It's real, and inspectors are wise to it, but I guess the subtle acknowledgement that perfection is impossible goes a long way. A lot of "lower risk" inspections are very old-timey/human. You won't get away with it in an aerospace inspection, but somebody looking over the job site or kitchen is playing by different rules.

My health inspector (restaurant) says she can't really turn in perfect reports. Her boss says "nobody is perfect"

So she tries to find something very minor, like an unlabeled item, to put on our report, if things are otherwise good.

Same with the fire department. They ignore obvious violations and nitpick small ones, and then never follow up to make sure a change was made.

> if I see something simple that is clearly done wrong, I am now going to go over the whole job with a fine-tooth comb.

not if you have a mountain of work to do and hate your low paid thankless job.

I'm thinking of rock stars and candy; stuff like this, even when deliberate, is proof that some attention was given:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/

I do not think you would make it very long as a government employee with that kind of attitude

Is this a US specific thing? Or specific to certain types of society?

I saw an interview with a movie producer from the code era of movies. He said they dealt with the Hays Commission and the Catholic Legion of Decency by including a risque scene in the preliminary cuts they submitted. They censors would reject them, and they'd resubmit with the scenes cut.

Are you implying that SpaceX purposefully failed in order to give the FCC something to critique?

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