Hitman hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman

[peterkelly]

Exercise 2b: Hitman recursion

Given a predicate is_insulting_price, write a recursive function which determines the minimum amount for which a target may be killed without risk of the plot being exposed to the police by an individual receiving a lowball offer. The function will be passed an arbitrarily high value, and should recursively call itself with (1 - epsilon) * price whenever is_insulting_price returns false.

For bonus marks, quantify the tradeoff between error range and stack depth, the latter representing the number of people who need to know about the plot.

[hluska]

Great comment - I came here to brainstorm how this could be turned into an exam question and you beat me to it.

[bjornsing]

Stack overflow...

[whack]

> Tan, who hired the original hitman, was jailed for five years, while Xi, the first hitman, was sentenced to three years and six months. Yang Kangsheng and Yang Guangsheng were sentenced to three years and three months, Mo was sentenced to three years

5 years seems grossly insufficient for premeditated attempted murder. If the man was actually killed, I'm assuming the sentence would have been far more severe, such as 20 years. It seems ridiculous that someone can get a 75% reduction in their sentence, just because they were incompetent in their execution.

[z92]

Analogy with software development : you hire a contractor, who outsource it to a local developer, who hires a development house in India, who hires a programmer, who hires some college kids that actually do the job.

[ericol]

> who hires some college kids that actually do the job

Sounds about right, except that

> hitman number five was so incensed at how much the value of the contract had fallen, that he told the target to fake his own death

the job was actually not done, but faked.

The last developer from India that my company hired (2009 or so) left us with some sub par script, which had some 500+ lines of code for some data validation that was actually never executed.

We then switched to people from the Eastern Block, and we never looked back.

[einpoklum]

Possible morals for this story:

1. If you want something done, do it yourself.

2. If you pay below-market rates, you'll get below-par execution.

3. There's much to be said for direct employment.

[temporalparts]

Alternative headline from "fish fish fish eat eat eat" [1,2]:

Hitman hitman hitman hitman hitman hires hires hires hires hired

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231097

[2] https://jakubmarian.com/fish-fish-fish-eat-eat-eat-is-a-gram...

[GavinMcG]

You can't infinitely nest those.

Fish [that] fish eat eat [food].

That works because the second "eat" is in the present indicative. But you can't stack those. With three "eat"s, the second one needs to be followed by an object, not another verb.

That's why the buffalo sentence works: Buffalo(n) [that other] buffalo(n) buffalo(v) [themselves] buffalo(v) buffalo(n).

[nshepperd]

This is an example of center embedding, which is generally considered grammatical but difficult to process with more than a few levels (to the point where people don't naturally produce such sentences).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_embedding

[prvc]

Not convinced by that sentence; I get stuck on the second "eat".

[sib]

Ship shipping ship shipping shipping ships?

https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ACYBGNSVOGMnms9RKigZTLds...

[jwilk]

Did the 5th hitman contact the police himself? Or did they find out some other way? The article is unclear about this.

Also I wonder why the 5th hitman sentence is almost as harsh as 2–4th ones.

[yorwba]

The (much better) BBC article says it was the victim who called the police: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50137450

[retsibsi]

The version I heard was that the fifth hitman contacted the victim-to-be, who agreed to fake his own death. That plan was foiled, leading to everyone in the chain getting caught. I have no idea if this is actually true, though; I think my source may have been a tumblr post.

[craftyguy]

> Did the 5th hitman contact the police himself? Or did they find out some other way? The article is unclear about this.

It's literally right there in the article..

> The contract finally came to the fifth hitman, Ling Xiansi, who eventually told the police.

[spodek]

Once the price got too low, the bottom guy could have

blackmailed the guy above

to blackmail the guy above

to blackmail the guy above

to blackmail the guy above

to blackmail the guy to make more money.

(was that too many levels?)

[slowmovintarget]

Blackmail is hard. Each one in the chain, decided to defraud the earlier one, because it was easier. The target pretended to go along, but as an already wealthy businessman, neither blackmail nor fraud would be appealing.

Let the whole chain go to jail, though, and the target gets to sleep better at night.

[megaremote]

Blackmailing a hitman might not be the best idea.

[kolinko]

„ Tan, who hired the original hitman, was jailed for five years, while Xi, the first hitman, was sentenced to three years and six months. Yang Kangsheng and Yang Guangsheng were sentenced to three years and three months, Mo was sentenced to three years, and Ling was sentenced to two years and seven months.”

A bit funny how the sentence gets lower for every next hitman in the chain, even though technically they all commited the same offence :)

[einpoklum]

But all the last "hitman" did was con his client - and his client wanted him to _kill_ a guy. Sounds like "time served" material to me.

[ky738]

Pressing/swiping "back" on iOS/Safari loads another article but doesn't actually go back. Amazing

[StavrosK]

It's because the other article was written by the first one for half the price.

[tomerico]

I’m surprised that the penalty for attempted murder in China is only 3 years in jail.

[Laforet]

They were actually all acquitted by a lower court years ago and the prosecutor had to appeal to get a guilty verdict this year.

I believe there was some technicality that made proving intent difficult - the original contract was vague enough that the defence could argue that killing was never the plan and they only wanted to intimidate the victim enough to drive him out of town, and somehow the message got distorted down the chain of outsourcing to become a hit which was never carried out anyway.

[zhangeru]

I guess the difference here is that none of them actually attempted it, maybe it was a conspiracy charge.

[spraak]

Hitmen all the way down [1]

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

[trhway]

many layers of middle men each taking a fat cut is an indicator of huge inefficiencies in the given sector of the market and a sign that that sector is ripe for disruption.

[jfk13]

Your new startup is Assassination As A Service?

[onetimemanytime]

True, but when he offered $250+K he must've figured that killing him is worth it that amount. Considering that you cannot put in on eBay or Fiverr he took the offer.

Why does it take much to kill e person in China, cameras and surveillance ...?

[CapricornNoble]

Just seems like he was going about this ALL wrong. US Spec ops guys moonlight as "security contractors" basically doing assassination missions in Yemen for ~$25,000/month[1][2]. You mean to tell me a Chinese guy with $250,000 to throw around couldn't find a recently-retired Chinese Special Operator to do this job reliably? I would think that anyone with that much money would have at least SOME Communist Party connections or People's Liberation Army connections. Hmmmm, unless his intended target was the one with such "protection".......that would make more sense actually.... maybe nobody in good standing with the CCP would take on such a contract, hence the above-market-rate compensation offered, and the fact that only unreliable, desperate, two-faced idiots accepted the job.

[1]https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/mercenaries-...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear_Operations_Group

[crimsonalucard]

The entire finance industry in the united states is like this.

[cm2187]

Only 5 years for ordering an execution? I expected a harsher sentence in China.

[_-___________-_]

Generally citizens doing things against other citizens doesn't seem to be dealt with all that harshly (as opposed to citizens doing things against the state, or - worse - encouraging other citizens to do so).

I've seen domestic violence dealt with in China by putting the victim and perpetrator in a jail cell together and telling them to talk it out.

[namelosw]

That's for failed execution. If the execution succeeds it would be death sentence for sure for all these people.

[chrischen]

I feel like if you are a hitman, you should shop around the offer first, including from the person you're supposed to hit.

So if you're planning to murder someone, you better be sure you can out-pay the other guy.

[austhrow743]

When committing crimes the less people who know the better, as this article should make clear.

[pmontra]

I'm not in that business but it seems that behaving like that doesn't build up a good reputation. It could get difficult to find customers, or survive vindictive prospects.

[tzs]

OT: look at the chairs in the back area of the court in the second photo, where spectators would sit.

That is way fancier than I've seen in US courts. In US courts, it is usually just plain benches. I have seen pictures of US courts with chairs, but the kind of chairs you'd expect to find in a doctor or dentist waiting room--adequate but not something you'd want to sit in for a long time.

Those chairs in the Chinese court actually look comfortable. Is this normal in Chinese courts?

[yorwba]

The interior decoration in Chinese courts seems to vary. I found one that looks like it has benches: http://www.hbjc.gov.cn/ssjd/201709/W020170901659907496686.jp...

If you want to see more examples, try this image search: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%E5%AE%A3%E5%88%A4%E7%8E%B0%E5%9C%...

宣判现场 means the place where the verdict is announced. It's possible they use fancier court rooms when a larger audience is expected.

[austincheney]

I was most amazed by the short prison terms for what would, in the US, be the capital criminal solicitation of murder.

Here is the definition in Texas law (15.03) https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/docs/PE/htm/PE.15.htm

And the definition of murder in Texas is section 19 https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.19.htm

I am having trouble finding the sentencing guidelines for this crime, but I am quite certain it is analogous to a conspiracy to commit capital murder in the first degree and treated, and as such is punished similarly to capital murder.

[m0xte]

This would make a good film.

[curiousgal]

"Snatch" is close to that.

[webwielder2]

Sounds like someone’s been reading The 4-Hour Workweek.

[billsmithaustin]

Sounds like an opportunity for the gig economy.

[journalctl]

Killr: it’s like Uber for hitmen!

[bitwize]

This is like the crime version of those "software contractors" who farm the actual work out to an offshore team.