Hackers are interested in more than just hacking. This is an interesting new phenomenon. The fact that the title has some words you'd see in a reddit title doesn't automatically make a story politicized flamebait.
If you think something is offtopic, flag it. It gets boring when people use the comment threads to complain about stuff they think is offtopic, just like it's boring when people complain about being downmodded.
This might qualify as hacking, for a very loose interpretation of the word: the defendants have stumbled across an input that the legal system is not prepared to handle. By neither cooperating with the system nor refusing representation, they maintained the case in an appealable state, which made the legal system move too slowly to make a judgment.
IANAL, but I'm surprised this worked. I assume a significant factor is the degree of rigor needed for death penalty cases.
I upvoted you but I don't think pg agrees with that flag philosophy. I think the goal of that feature is spam only.
The rule I use: If an article isn't interesting to me (user guidelines), then I don't upvote it or write a comment on it since both actions increase the attention other users would pay to it. Soon enough it will either pass out of sight or it will be interesting to other users. Even then, it will soon fade to the background archive.
For a flag: If it looks like spam - useless product link - and the user has no karma built up, I flag. Otherwise, I leave it alone.
If I knew what was and wasn't off-topic, I would. in this case there was something that smelled faintly of hacking the justice system, so I didn't immediately jump to the conclusion that this was inappropriate. But OTOH, it did seem irrelevant to hacking computers and starting businesses.
That's why I asked the question instead of simply ignoring it. HN is an evolving site, and many things that would have seem very out of place six months ago are on the front page today.
I'm not interested in retarding progress, I'm just trying to understand where we are going so I can play well with others.
Except I substitute "me" for "one's". If it gratifies my intellectual curiosity then maybe it will other users' as well. That said, I think it's personally important to use votes as community feedback for my future posts.
If anything, I worry about a community that becomes too homogeneous because interestingness involves variability. All I can do here is submit links. Whether it's interesting to the community is up to the community to decide (expressed in votes and comments). For instance, I'm often provoked by David Brooks (NY Times columnist). But he doesn't ever really talk about computers or business. Initially, I was skeptical about posting one of his columns. But it was received well and so I posted more.
This article was borderline for me. But what's the worst that can happen? It doesn't get votes? So I'd rather shade toward posting than not while still keeping the guidelines firmly in mind. I've often been surprised that the community appreciates some links that don't "belong" on a superficial analysis. Similarly, I've enjoyed science, law, art, and even political articles linked here (the last in small doses). I think that's a good thing. A uniform community is a boring one.
Because the legal system is as complex as any software or hardware specifications, and an attempt to break the system by using a bunch of valid but illogical statements, is very similar to actual hacking.
We don't want to learn about law, but we are just as interested in how people apply systems knowledge to bypass the security mechanisms of the system.
