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Comment by JSDevOps | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Why is this comment so similar to this tweet: https://x.com/peruvian_bull/status/1866213955687022656

Are you a bot?

Yeah, we can't have people doing this kind of thing, so I've banned the account, at least until we have some reason to believe it won't happen again.

could be the same person?

Or someone who read the tweet, liked it, and wanted to share on a forum where they more actively participate.

Doesn't look like it

Probably not a bot. Just reposting content from twitter over here.

It's quite entertaining though that this particular conspiracy theory is catnip to HN users. Perhaps it's for the same reason it's blowing up on twitter: vague enough to capture the imaginations of people who might be imagining wildly different concrete scenarios?

I've banned this account for reasons explained in the sibling subthread.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you won't do this in the future.

Putting on my tinfoil hat for this: It sounds like parallel construction to me. I wonder if the FBI doesn't want it to get out what kind of technology the US government can use to track citizens in real time. Something like 24/7 facial recognition running in major chains like McDonalds.

The police showing up for a random tip in the boonies in PA fast enough to actually catch the guy at McDonalds and he just happens to have method and motive on him 5 days later seems too convenient. I think they ultimately got the right guy, but I don't think the 'tip' was a phone call from a McDonald's employee.

The guy's face has been plastered over the news for several days and there's a $60,000 reward. Getting a tip from a fast food worker is very plausible.

More plausible in my opinion than the FBI having some kind of agreement with McDonald's to access their store surveillance network in real time.

People vastly overestimate the ability of giant bureaucracies to keep secrets. It only works if a few people are in on it (that's part of what compartmentalization is for). I'm always suspicious of claims that federal agencies are colluding with companies for the purposes of mass surveillance because while I trust those agencies to keep secrets, I absolutely do not trust the vast majority of companies to do so. There are narrow exceptions--defense industry, telecommunications, aerospace industry--but mostly secrets like that are hard to keep unless your org is built around keeping secrets. The orgs I've worked for are the opposite of compartmentalized. I doubt McDonalds' software engineering org is, but I'd be curious to be surprised!

Now I'm feeling really paranoid about finding a McDonald's ordering kiosk broken mid-software-update on Friday 6th: I bet that was when they were updating the facial recognition tech to spy and track everyone walking past. :p

It also seems like there might have been some "regular police work" going on at the beginning but when that didn't work fast enough, some bigger tools were called in.

Yeah I think it's very easy to forget we live in a surveillance state. Periodically something happens that lets us see it but we somehow, as a society, stop talking about it and next time something like this happens we're surprised.

We have the DEA and other three-letter agencies stashing cameras all over highways and even in residential areas.

We have mass surveillance of communications.

We have license plate readers everywhere.

We literally carry tracking devices everywhere we go.

Our cars also have their own tracking devices.

Facial recognition(and probably other recognition tech like gait) is widespread.

We have systems that can mass surveil entire cities from the sky.

And these are just the confirmed systems that we know about.

Parallel construction is frequently used and it's not even a secret at this point.

That said, don't underestimate the ability of a criminal, even a smart one, to screw up. As a group of smart engineers, we all know too well that even smart people make mistakes. They make even more mistakes when they're operating outside of their domain and under pressure/nervous. It shouldn't be surprising that the perp got caught.

No need for conspiracy here. I'd be surprised at this point if McDonald's wasn't running that type of software on all their cameras 24/7 and using to better profile their customers. Is there actually a law against it? There should be, but is there? It likely isn't hard and I am positive the data could be useful to them in many ways so if they aren't then it would only be because they thought it wasn't legal.

I don't think they should tell people exactly how much tech they have. Why give people intelligence briefs on your capabilities? The point is to catch criminals and terrorists. If those criminals and terrorists believe that Palantir or whatever is the most they need to worry about, then society has the advantage.

Why even have public trials or juries then? Just slows down the process.

Right. Transparency is a really important aspect of a functioning democracy. Without it, there’s less and less separating democracy from authoritarianism

Most important is the appearance of transparency.

The point is to define who a "criminal" and a "terrorist" is and use that as justification for mass surveillance. Palantir is far worse for me as a US citizen than any "terrorist".

yet 50% of murders go unsolved

This has been my thought over and over as this. has been going on. So many people are murdered in this country and this one murder probably got 1000x the resources applied to it compared to the rest. Justice should be impartial so this case makes it look like some people's lives are more important than others.

With justice and healthcare, people are absolutely, explicitly, and intentionally treated differently based on their position in society. If you’re a CEO you get treated 1000x better.

> makes it look like some people's lives are more important than others.

Sorry but they are. That's not me saying that. That's pretty much the entirety of human civilization. It's nice to think otherwise, but we as a species have made it clear that people are far from being equally important.

They only care about certain murders.

If they solve every murder then they make it obvious. Maybe they just solve the ones involving millionaire victims and let the murders of the poors go unsolved.

Maybe? Thatʻs fairly obvious.

Is it? I thought I was sounding like a bit of a conspiracy theorist. Thanks for validating me :)

If you’re interested in such statistics, there’s a related data set at https://linzmacd.github.io/Final_Project/

Much simpler explanation: he wanted to get caught to increase coverage of his political views.

He took his mask off at the hostel, the kind of place that often requires its employees to verify that a photo ID matches the holder’s face. “Let me see you smile” is a common thing that service employees learn to say to get strangers to take off their masks without angering them

Exactly. I don't think anyone in the media commenting on this ever worked in the service industry and therefore doesn't understand the obvious.

Where’d you get that IQ? His GitHub isn’t active either.

He went to a selective school.... but 130 isn't particularly high. It's common in engineers.

Sharing a fact as a defence of someone (he has an IQ of 130 but did X) without having any basis for that fact is worth calling out.

Same way they said an active GitHub while the repo is the opposite of that.

If your argument is "This is weird because of X and Y and Z" but Z is false and Y is unsubstantiated then it breaks the argument.

It's in the 98th percentile, lol. Yes, it's very high.

High, but not particularly rare. IF you see a movie, there are probably several people >130 in the audience with you. When you filter by education and other factors, it goes up quickly. Depending on your line of work, a majority of your coworkers might be over 130.

Very few people understand this. It's why it's very hard to understand how normal people think wrt politics.

While "normal people" often have crude political opinions, the stupidest political takes often (usually?) come from high IQ, well educated, people.

And among those are also the ones with real influence and power to promote and/or enforce them.

> Depending on your line of work, a majority of your coworkers might be over 130.

This seems pretty reasonable, but once you start to get to know people a bit...

Then you realise that trying to quantitatively test intelligence only goes so far :D

The road to hell is paved with smart people who think they can become experts in something just by reading some blog posts and thinking about the subject for a few hours. As one example, see successful poker players who become amateur economists, geneticists and virologists.

30 points higher than the average person on HN!

Ha ha. If anything, HN skews quite high.

I don't know that means anything, I score well above 130, yet I will likely make ton of mistakes even if thought it about it and planned for months.

IQ tests are a single dimensional psychometric measurement tool that when if administered correctly only measures some attributes of what would be considered intelligence.

While those skills correlate to your ability to perform as a engineer it doesn't always translate to aptitude towards this sort of crime.

There are plenty of people who will score poorly in IQ tests but are "street smart". the good criminals (i.e. those have a long successful run or never get caught) are of this category.

For example Al Capone never got caught tied to any of his actual crimes, he had intimate understanding of the legal system and how not to get tied to evidence, he wouldn't score over 130 in IQ test probably

> While those skills correlate to your ability to perform as a engineer it doesn't always translate to aptitude towards this sort of crime.

A smart n00b is still a n00b.

Al Capone had the police working for him.

I am sure the various other parts of judiciary too, bribing takes skill, knowing who to bribe, how to make them vulnerable to bribery and so on, all these are important street skills that a criminal of his stature has to have. IQ doesn't teach you those

Well, "very high" according to what comparison group?

The overall general public? Sure.

People with STEM graduate degrees? Maybe not so much.

Not really. Half of people are barely literate. Maybe the top 10% have writing and language skills cogent and coherent enough to hang out on a website like this. So realistically we're talking about maybe 20% of the people you're interacting with. Possibly more, since this is the modern USENET where all the shape rotators hang out. People who can rotate shapes at all probably score at least that on tests.

Shart taters

Unless he went to a tiny high school it's unlikely that he was the smartest person in the school. Possibly in his year.

There are two people that smart in every NYC subway car during rush hour.

And what percentage of the world do you think are engineers/STEM?

Sometimes people do crime to be famous, this pattern would fit that.

Since when did making small talk become "flirting"?

I agree. The media seemed to have jumped on the flirting angle because he was smiling. Isn’t that a little insulting to the hostel employee? I smiled at my barber today. Definitely wasn’t flirting.

>Isn’t that a little insulting to the hostel employee?

Why would that be "insulting"? HE was supposed to be flirting, not necessarily her.

Plus, even if both were flirting, there's nothing insulting about that.

If I am the employee, I don’t want my employer to think I’m flirting with customers when it’s just small talk. And..uhh..if I’m married, etc. Anyways, we don’t know for sure either way

As I've heard it, it was characterized as flirting by the employee.

Filtered through the police and then through the media. It's a game of Chinese telephone and a lot gets lost in the translations, which leads to a huge amount of misinformation. Case in point b and t 9.

Since when is it "chinese telephone" and not just "telephone"?

It’s a mixture of Chinese Whispers and Telephone, two names for the same game.

Pick a common language in a different language family that results stilted translations. It was always Chinese telephone.

Since the Millennial generation, pretty much, at least among the (over-)educated. It kills me; I'd prefer to pretend we're all participating in some shared project called "civilization".

But, as the shooting in the street and the cheering on the Internet have shown (and the price gouging before that), our society has been coarsening along a great many dimensions.

This post is dumb in many ways not worth listing. And because of that, I realized I just read something nearly word-for-word on twitter (@peruvian_bull). Is that you or is this just copy pasta?

https://x.com/peruvian_bull/status/1866213955687022656

Some criminals want to get caught.

Or push their luck to the limit because they think they’re invincible. To be fair I was losing confidence they’d ever find him until today.

lol, those videos of the NYPD ‘searching’ Central Park look like my kids looking for a homework assignment they don’t want to turn in. Until the FBI got involved I thought he was pretty much off the hook.

Probably a kind of "boundary-pushing" personality type.

The Unabomber case was more complex to track [1]. I'm not suggesting it was because he had a higher IQ, as someone with an average IQ could have executed similar actions successfully.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

It was also in a time where not everything got recorded. You have to think that having cameras everywhere and much more complex package tracking systems like we do now would have made staying hidden quite a bit harder.

If you were a murderer on the run and there was a manhunt for you, wouldn't you still be carrying a gun?

That's the sort of thinking that helps them get caught. McVeigh was initially caught because his car didn't have a license plate and he had a concealed weapon. If he'd had an ordinary vehicle with a tag and no weapon, he wouldn't have been found so quickly and might have even evaded capture for years (even if his identity as the bomber were discovered).

He was always going to be the fall guy. The groups he was involved in was full of federal informants and agents. Why such elements didn't try to stop him is another question for a FOIA that won't be returned for 100 years.

A gun perhaps, not the same gun used in the murder, that would be dumb to be caught with evidence directly connecting you with the murder. This is America, getting guns is not that hard. Gun owners tend to usually own more than one.

Also you would want to carry a weapon in a manhunt only if you intend not to be caught alive, because firing your weapon in a manhunt would only end in one way for the hunted.

The weapon used in the murder? I've seen enough movies to know to get rid of it as soon as possible.

The reason it's been made common knowledge is because it's what they want you to think.

</tinfoil>

This would seem though to be a case in point that hanging on to it was not a good idea either.

Hell no. Try to blend in as much as possible and book it to South America via Mexico or something.

No, not at all. You're extremely unlikely to win a shootout in the event law enforcement catches you, and having a gun makes it much more likely you get arrested and convicted. But even if a gun seems worth it, it should absolutely not be the famous murder weapon you just used! I mean, JFC, keeping the distinctive murder weapon on himself was either incredibly dumb or something shady is going on with the story.

A smart person like that would now it would have been a matter of days until they were caught.

It's just too high profile, everybody would be on the case, all the experts in everything.

He actually flirted with an employee at the hostel he stayed at, probably days before the murder. But yeah, the rest seems about right.

Nit

https://github.com/lnmangione

...."Active" GitHub?

..And he was smart enough to ditch the burner phone, clothes, and the backpack but he kept the untraceable weapon and the fake ID? Seriously what..? I hope we'll learn something that brings this all to a sensible narrative but here and now it seems like completely incoherent behavior.

sounds like bs. it's parallel construction

Yes, he's not acting rationally because he's having a mental health crisis.

If you look at his Twitter account, he disappeared a few months ago and all the replies were friends asking where he went.

(Also, he's a tpot poster, which is a kind of tech bro that likes tweeting about how great it is to do psychedelic drugs. This is bad for your mental health!)

ahhh mental health humans have figured out how to read and rewrite neural pathways

Ever seen white lotus season 2? Stanford grad falls for a prostitute. Italians cannot resist.

>Inactive GitHub profile

>how did you decide his iq was >130?

he threw his life in the dumpster and will spend the next 30 years in a 2x2 cell. smart guy indeed.

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