Isn't this fact obvious to any hacker worth their salt? This doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity (per the guidelines). Flagged. Please keep these articles on Slashdot/Reddit.
"What to Submit
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."
Clearly the community has spoken in submitting and then voting this up to be the #1 story on HN. However, I'm having a hard time finding what is intellectually gratifying about these kinds of articles other than in a Slashdot YRO-style basis where different people chime in on censorship, arguments over linking vs hosting, morality of piracy, etc.
Maybe having been a long-time Slashdot reader I've seen these arguments played out ad nauseum. When I started regularly participating in HN over a year ago I found HN to be refreshing in that these kinds of stories didn't make it to the front page. If anything, I'd expect a good hacker would find a blog post detailing lesser-known aspects of the bittorrent protocol interesting. Or a blog post discussing technical workarounds were such a block to be implemented. As I've been around long enough, I'm officially qualified to say that I'm saddened to see HN turning into Slashdot/Reddit.
What can be done about it? It's so easy to upvote and comment "this won't stop piracy". The only way I can think is to have an enormous human capcha that is having to repeat the guidelines before being allowed to vote, but that would of course be ridiculous.
