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I think for big orgs there could be a two-man rule system like they use in minuteman missile control, two designated members have to both agree to delete a repo or anything seriously irreversible.


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Which would likely go alongside it; the only thing MAYBE it would allow is everyone to continue to play "in one big agreed-on world".

I suspect it's unlikely and better handled by just using a database and a trusted group but it's the only idea I have been able to come up with.


Sounds like that would enforce Conway's Law a lot and make cross team collaboration more difficult.

Yes! But in a way that works via consensus and that doesn't establish unnecessary hierarchies. For example, you could have people coming in voluntarily agree to the penalties and have the primary stakeholders vote on penalties.

That seems reasonable. I can think of many human/organizational/rule reasons that would force the breakup of a monolith representing many separate-but-related concerns.

Wow, that's crazy! I didn't even think about that, but I can totally see how it could be possible. I imagine that the only reliable way to prevent it would be to have multiple redundant systems that operated via consensus.

Surely you would need a lot of rules and enforcement to prevent things simply aggregating?

Try again without the facetiousness. I don't mean like a piece of paper saying 'thou shalt'. I mean by implementing systems where, by design, the decisionmakers over roles that police each other have no way to influence one another. For example, those who are in charge of policing the police shouldn't also be in charge of working with the police on policing other people. I don't mean auditors, I mean those who then receive the information from internal audits and are responsible for making judgements based on it.

Just now occurs to me: Adjudication could be escalated to arbitration or mediator.

Governance is the evergreen crisis. Was part of an org that had a constitutional crisis over conduct not covered by existing bylaws. HUGE drama. HUGE effort to resolve. Basically a mock trial.

Other orgs need more accessible, more lightweight ways to resolve their own slap fights.


Typically a conflict-resolution mechanism will be built into the consensus mechanism, with the rules set by the peers.

But there will always be transparency (even the bad CDRs will be logged) and accountability (you know who said what, so the incentive for fraud is significantly decreased.)


To go one step further, have three, or more, identical fire walled systems running and have them vote on every calculation with the votes sent to a hardwired switch, that prevents the system from advancing if there’s a disagreement, and shuts off power to the RAM if there’s too many in a row. The chances of any compromise happening to all the systems within the same nanosecond would be infinitesimal.

That's why having at least three "heavies" as part of the consortium will enforce good behavior or at least keep it from getting out of control. Well-armed (legal teams) companies are polite companies... (except Oracle, but they are mainly a litigation firm that also sells databases).

What mechanisms would you propose to control bad faith actors?

Nice idea! The 50/50 split is dangerous unless you specify a way to know who has the final decision. A coin flip maybe? :)

Also more specifics about the "take over" part would be nice.


The sky is the limit implementation-wise. Put yourself in their shoes, as an engineer/problem-solver, and see if you can figure it out in a decent manner.

Personally, I'm partial to this concept being a good solution to the problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispute_resolution_organizatio...


Make someone president and someone CEO and split up who has say in what area when you two disagree on something. Somebody needs a veto vote or it won't work and you won't be able to move forward.

There is, you can relatively easily write a txn that put one or more arbitrator in place that are able to reverse transactions if m of n of them agree or something.

Would you mind expanding on this? I thought the role of the arbiter is to decide who's the master at one point in time. And while this is helpful for the whole coordination process, (by the way I think a similar effect could be achieved with smart clients) this impacts availability on not durability per se.

Sounds like some sort of 4-way split is in order. A neutral party could oversee the recovery and inventory of artifacts/loot. Then another neutral party could divide it up among the players.

As you mentioned, the core issue is one of the founders doesn't trust the other.

I think it sounds reasonable to plan work in cycles/sprints which cannot be interrupted midway.

I shall try to put this point across, and see if we all can reach an agreement.

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