OK, I know we've ventured a little more into politics lately with the SOPA thing, but this is not in any way germane to Hacker News. It's pure political outrage. Please flag this kind of story if you want to keep up the level of discourse here.
"What to Submit...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."
Also from the guidelines...
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.
Also from the guidelines: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics … If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
How do you think this gratifies anyone's intellectual curiosity? This is not an intellectual topic. It stirs up feelings of political outrage, sure — but those are actually harmful to the status quo we try to maintain here. I'm not saying don't talk about it — I'm just saying that there are better forums.
And I would not have complained except that there has recently been a large influx of users to the site and it seems to mostly be these people, in the double-digit and low-three-digit membership times, who are upvoting this. So do you have a better suggestion that doesn't boil down to "Just sit down and let the lowest common denominator float to the top"? Because I'm sorry, but I would rather Hacker News not become yet another repository of cat pictures.
The US law, especially all the parts that deal with foreign countries and citizens, are commonly discussed around hacker circles everywhere in the world. It is not uncommon at all for hackers to travel to US, ship goods to US or provide services to US users. All these things will get you get you in contact with the US customs. Knowing things like the one in this submission can spare you from a lot of trouble, for example now I know that it is not safe at all to travel to US wearing an Occupy London t-shirt.
Talking about new HN users submitting or upvoting non-interesting stories, I think it would be easy to count votes of new users like me (with less than four-digits of karma or membership days) as half or quarter votes.
One can confirm it pretty easily by glancing at the profiles of the people commenting. For example, the top two comments are by people who have been here less than three months.
