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Comment by hilux | Hacker News Reader

That guy will be a great entrepreneur. Serious creativity and guts. They should just have let him fly.

Hmm - flouting regulations cause the rules only apply for others, selfish with seeming no regard for any negative impact to others…sounds like a future executive indeed

How though? the airplane was full.

You are "resulting," i.e. you're judging the correctness of a strategy by how it turned out THIS time.

Read Annie Duke's book.

You're doing the same thing, "resulting" because this time he almost got away with it. In reality, a scheme like this would work maybe one in twenty times. "Think in bets" on a 5% chance of success.

You are “not reading”. They couldnt have “let him fly” as you suggest because there were no seats left on the flight.

Na, I'm saying they literally can't do the thing you want them to.

But let's use a reference on ethics a little more sophisticated than a poker player: Immanel Kant. Would this strategy still be a good idea if everyone did it?

Clearly not. Setting aside how few people can hide in one water closet, if nobody pays for tickets there won't be an airplane to hide on. Frankly, anyone encouraging this behavior is suspect and reflects poorly on the HN community, which is likely why your post is being greyed out.

Re: your last sentence, this tells me that "the HN community" skews toward programmers who are happy to collect big paychecks while turning a blind eye to where the money comes from, e.g. what their founders and CEOs did to successfully startup.

Airbnb, Facebook, Microsoft, Uber - off the top of my head - all very prosperous and genteel now, but all came from hardscrabble rule-breaking backgrounds.

Also would make a pretty decent terrorist, by the same criterion.

Yeah, he should totally apply to YC. Probably graduated from Stanford and part of the Forbes 30 under 30.

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