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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

Get over yourself.

There are plenty of fields where "it won't work" if you lie. Law? Surgery?

Let's leave aside for a second the enormous number of programmers who aren't actually engineers (with an engineering degree) who still use the Engineer title.

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Sorry, I had to chuckle when I saw you include law as one of the fields where lying "won't work." For many parties, lying in court does "work" for them if they can get away with it. Recent case in point: the DEA using NSA intercepts to launch investigations, then lie in court about how these investigations originally started. [1]

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...

Litigation/trial law is but a small part of the Law profession.

Perjury is also a felony, despite the fact that your country's justice system doesn't seem to enforce it.

Although I agree that "There are plenty of fields where "it won't work" if you lie." But Law? Surgery? are not the examples you should choose, both had plenty of cases where lying did work.

I believe both fields have formalized codes of eithics, tho. you can be disbasrred or struck off the list of licesed practitioners for 'lying'. That being said, their is a continuum on considerations, even professionally. Physicians need to maintain a diplomatic bedside manner; counsel needs to advocate adversarially the strongest position, etc. In these examples, the notion of black and white is best not clung too strenuously. Perjury, negligence, and fruadulen billing, etc of course are at the othe end of the spectrum.

> There are plenty of fields where "it won't work" if you lie. Law?

The field of Law is based on interpretation and persuasive authority.

This ( http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/manifesto.html ) is part of what made me like computers:

>I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I'm a smart ass.. Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...

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