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As interesting as this article may be, it does not belong on HN.

marshray 15y ago
People I know who have run internet startups have had contact with federal agents on various occasions. EDIT. This response is getting so many upvotes I'm going to clarify it a bit, particularly for people who may be reading this from other countries: Yes, you can start and run a business in America without ever having direct interaction with the US Federal Government, other than mailing off your taxes. It's not like every business one day gets a visit from the KGB and they tell you to do things a certain way (or else). Nevertheless, if you are for example an ISP or provide messaging, as you grow big enough it's probably a matter of time before you'll end up getting a subscriber who's being investigated. You may have a former employee that goes on to apply for some sort of special security clearance and they follow up on his background (or you go out of your way to hire a talented hacker with a mysterious background). You may simply meet such agents due to ordinary shared interests, like say at a trade show or a conference. Of course, you could also meet them when they are also actually investigating something with the aim of prosecuting people. I don't know which of these situations fall under the law described in the article, possibly all of them do.
- BrandonM 15y ago
  > if you are for example an ISP or provide messaging, as you grow big enough it's probably a matter of time before you'll end up getting a subscriber who's being investigated That is not what Hacker News is for. If your company is that big, you should have counsel on retainer, and they should be advising you of the proper behavior in the face of potential federal investigation. Moreover, it's our job as American citizens to be aware of our legal exposure and to know the proper way to proceed. It's a shame that this is not taught in our high school Government courses. It is not the role of Hacker News to educate us on these issues. There are other sites for that. You can tell by the quality of the comment thread that it's not something that appeals to "our inner hacker." An article is not HN material simply by appealing to some (or even a majority) of the members here; it must satisfy other criteria, and this one does not.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
tzs 15y ago
Why not? The guidelines are basically anything that hackers find interesting. You yourself said it is interesting.
- jsdalton 15y ago
  It's "interesting" because it's of general interest to anybody (anybody in the U.S, that is), not because hackers would have a particular reason to find it interesting. I thought it was off topic: > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. But that's just my opinion. Apologies for adding to the noise.
  - kelnos 15y ago
    I would downvote myself for this comment that I'm making, but: I generally dislike this sort of meta-discussion on HN. I believe the guidelines have something to say about this, as well: if you disagree with a posting, don't comment about it, just flag it and move on. Adding a comment saying "this doesn't belong on HN" does not at all add to the discussion. That is why I (and many others) will downvote you for your initial comment. It's not because we disagree, it's because the comment is extraneous noise.
    - BrandonM 15y ago
      This sort of meta-discussion sucks, but when the majority of the people responding to a comment are wrong[0] (as evidenced by jsdalton's numerous downvotes), then the necessity to educate the members outweighs the desire to avoid meta-discussion. The average commenter here has less than two years of membership[1]; many likely are not familiar with what HN is (was?) all about, and some of the longtime ones are likely getting sucked into interesting-but-vacuous discussion. [0] I consider this to be undebatable. This is exactly the kind of submission pg wanted to avoid when he discouraged politics. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196547 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196547 [1] Just to redeem this post, the following code calculated this: import re, urllib2 from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup pg = BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen("http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3005365")) user_re = re.compile(r'^user\?id=(.*)$') users = set(user_link.string for user_link in pg.findAll('a', href=user_re)) created_days_ago = 0 # Some error-handling code omitted for conciseness for user in users: profile = BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen("http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=" + user)) created = int(profile.find(text="created:").parent.nextSibling.string.split(None, 1)[0]) created_ago_days += created print created_ago_days / float(len(users)) # printed 624.666666667 (I've been doing a lot of C programming lately. To be able to do such a high-level task in 9 lines of code is ridiculously sexy.)
BrandonM 15y ago
I came here to say the same thing, and I'm sorry that you're being downvoted. This article is not Hacker News material. It's useful information, yes, but that does not automatically mean it's Hacker Newsworthy. Hacker News is not a funnel for good Reddit submissions. It has a different focus. This article is US-specific, transient, and not intellectually stimulating. It does not belong here, so I flagged it.
- conover 15y ago
  I agree that downvotes shouldn't be used to indicate disagreement. The article satisfied my intellectual curiosity about a small aspect of a system that I find fascinating; that is why I submitted it. It's purpose was not to relay legal advice or make a political statement. However now that I see more than a few people think it's not Hacker News-worthy, I'll consider my future submissions more carefully.
  - BrandonM 15y ago
    No need to apologize for submitting the article. It was certainly interesting, and I can understand why you submitted it. The problem, though, is that there are numerous such articles that we could read and discuss, enough to swamp more scientifically- or technically-relevant submissions. They are easy to digest and weigh in on without adding much. I'm glad I read the article, so thanks for that. I was just surprised by how hard jsdalton got downvoted when he was right. It indicated to me a mismatch between what HN is "supposed" to be and what the commenters/voters here think it should be.

People I know who have run internet startups have had contact with federal agents on various occasions. EDIT. This response is getting so many upvotes I'm going to clarify it a bit, particularly for people who may be reading this from other countries: Yes, you can start and run a business in America without ever having direct interaction with the US Federal Government, other than mailing off your taxes. It's not like every business one day gets a visit from the KGB and they tell you to do things a certain way (or else). Nevertheless, if you are for example an ISP or provide messaging, as you grow big enough it's probably a matter of time before you'll end up getting a subscriber who's being investigated. You may have a former employee that goes on to apply for some sort of special security clearance and they follow up on his background (or you go out of your way to hire a talented hacker with a mysterious background). You may simply meet such agents due to ordinary shared interests, like say at a trade show or a conference. Of course, you could also meet them when they are also actually investigating something with the aim of prosecuting people. I don't know which of these situations fall under the law described in the article, possibly all of them do.

BrandonM 15y ago
> if you are for example an ISP or provide messaging, as you grow big enough it's probably a matter of time before you'll end up getting a subscriber who's being investigated That is not what Hacker News is for. If your company is that big, you should have counsel on retainer, and they should be advising you of the proper behavior in the face of potential federal investigation. Moreover, it's our job as American citizens to be aware of our legal exposure and to know the proper way to proceed. It's a shame that this is not taught in our high school Government courses. It is not the role of Hacker News to educate us on these issues. There are other sites for that. You can tell by the quality of the comment thread that it's not something that appeals to "our inner hacker." An article is not HN material simply by appealing to some (or even a majority) of the members here; it must satisfy other criteria, and this one does not.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

tzs 15y ago

Why not? The guidelines are basically anything that hackers find interesting. You yourself said it is interesting.

jsdalton 15y ago
It's "interesting" because it's of general interest to anybody (anybody in the U.S, that is), not because hackers would have a particular reason to find it interesting. I thought it was off topic: > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. But that's just my opinion. Apologies for adding to the noise.
- kelnos 15y ago
  I would downvote myself for this comment that I'm making, but: I generally dislike this sort of meta-discussion on HN. I believe the guidelines have something to say about this, as well: if you disagree with a posting, don't comment about it, just flag it and move on. Adding a comment saying "this doesn't belong on HN" does not at all add to the discussion. That is why I (and many others) will downvote you for your initial comment. It's not because we disagree, it's because the comment is extraneous noise.
  - BrandonM 15y ago
    This sort of meta-discussion sucks, but when the majority of the people responding to a comment are wrong[0] (as evidenced by jsdalton's numerous downvotes), then the necessity to educate the members outweighs the desire to avoid meta-discussion. The average commenter here has less than two years of membership[1]; many likely are not familiar with what HN is (was?) all about, and some of the longtime ones are likely getting sucked into interesting-but-vacuous discussion. [0] I consider this to be undebatable. This is exactly the kind of submission pg wanted to avoid when he discouraged politics. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196547 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196547 [1] Just to redeem this post, the following code calculated this: import re, urllib2 from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup pg = BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen("http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3005365")) user_re = re.compile(r'^user\?id=(.*)$') users = set(user_link.string for user_link in pg.findAll('a', href=user_re)) created_days_ago = 0 # Some error-handling code omitted for conciseness for user in users: profile = BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen("http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=" + user)) created = int(profile.find(text="created:").parent.nextSibling.string.split(None, 1)[0]) created_ago_days += created print created_ago_days / float(len(users)) # printed 624.666666667 (I've been doing a lot of C programming lately. To be able to do such a high-level task in 9 lines of code is ridiculously sexy.)

BrandonM 15y ago

I came here to say the same thing, and I'm sorry that you're being downvoted. This article is not Hacker News material. It's useful information, yes, but that does not automatically mean it's Hacker Newsworthy. Hacker News is not a funnel for good Reddit submissions. It has a different focus. This article is US-specific, transient, and not intellectually stimulating. It does not belong here, so I flagged it.

conover 15y ago
I agree that downvotes shouldn't be used to indicate disagreement. The article satisfied my intellectual curiosity about a small aspect of a system that I find fascinating; that is why I submitted it. It's purpose was not to relay legal advice or make a political statement. However now that I see more than a few people think it's not Hacker News-worthy, I'll consider my future submissions more carefully.
- BrandonM 15y ago
  No need to apologize for submitting the article. It was certainly interesting, and I can understand why you submitted it. The problem, though, is that there are numerous such articles that we could read and discuss, enough to swamp more scientifically- or technically-relevant submissions. They are easy to digest and weigh in on without adding much. I'm glad I read the article, so thanks for that. I was just surprised by how hard jsdalton got downvoted when he was right. It indicated to me a mismatch between what HN is "supposed" to be and what the commenters/voters here think it should be.