This program specifically fines businesses with fleets of commercial vehicles (delivery trucks, buses, et cetera) for illegal idling, and escalates the fines for repeat offenders. You can't report random individuals, nor would I really want to build an app for that. The point is to get businesses to stop polluting.
I see where you’re coming from, but the alternatives are either that the law isn’t enforced, or the state ramps up its own surveillance, which is more dystopian to me.
I see this as in the same vein as SEC whistleblower awards, which I’ve never heard described as dystopian. Businesses just don’t have the same expectation of privacy that individuals do.
you have like 50 comments in this thread whining about the law and desperately wanting businesses (not private individuals!) to idle their trucks next to schools.
Please don't try to game HN like this. We can easily turn off the flamewar detector when the topic warrants it, and users who post excessive numbers of low-quality comments can have rate-limiting turned on.
There seems to be a whole lot of drama about this project and from what I can see there are reasonable arguments for and against.
How about just respecting the merits of open debate about a topic and let other readers decide for themselves, rather than going to war on the project and on HN to try and swing things in favour of your own argument?
I'm sorry that my project caused you this much distress. If you live in NYC and hate the idling complaint law, lobby your representatives to kill it. I didn't make the law or even the service that lets you file reports under it. I just wrote an API client.
People have filed idling complaints for years, long before this app existed. Even if your comments somehow convinced me that publishing Idle Reporter is an "evil" act (as you claim), and I decided to take it down and go become a Tibetan monk, people would still file complaints as they always have.
> I will absolutely act in good faith and not game the system, but only as long as the mods do that too. As soon as the mods do that in a thread, all bets are off. Could not care less if I get banned for defending myself in such a situation.
Yep and I got an upvoted comment dissenting against all the authoritarian bootlickers in every single thread on this post. People agree with me. Even on the comments of mine that got flagged lol
It even pissed people off enough that one of the mods started commenting about my own personal projects that have nothing to do with this lmao
Oh and I guess it did work because now it's down to 28, almost off the front page. Much lower than where it was before
Being about businesses only and no individuals makes all the difference in the world.
Otherwise it should be seen as dystopian also the fact that you can call the police on your neighborhood because "you heard noises".
I bet that the friction in the submission process was deliberately added to avoid abuses, but maybe it's just incompetence. Depending on the reason, this app can be either good or against the spirit of the rule.
it normalizes the process and app though, and reinforces reporting your neighbors to the government. Not something I like to see. It's one thing to report domestic abuse or a crack house; another to report someone double-parked for a couple of seconds or an idling truck via "a simple click on your phone, thank you citizen"
