The HN guidelines say: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a

The HN guidelines say: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. 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." IMO one could justifiably say that it doesn't meet the "gratifies [hacker]'s intellectual curiosity" bar to be on-topic and runs afoul of the "crime" example in the off-topic guideline but ultimately the decision as to whether the story is sufficiently off topic to merit a flag is up to readers' personal judgement.