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Comment by bvod | Hacker News Reader

This article does not belong on HN.

Actually it does revolve around a guy who essentially hacked the laws around tenancy through extreme cleverness, and social engineered his way through a very peculiar life. This story is really wild and it looks like you and many others didn't actually read it before commenting. It's one of the best longform pieces that I've read in a while.

Actually I read the whole thing - it was written really well. But it's far from extremely clever what he did. Anyone who's studied tenancy law for more than a few days could do the same. The only difference he had was being sociopathic enough to do so - a point which the article makes in the end when he turns out to be a murderer. Furthermore, none of the above are in any way related to engineering or hackernews, and it's completely off topic for this site.

Eh, I've been on HN a long time and you are definitely on the wrong side of the consensus on this issue.

From the HN guidelines:

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.

[...]

Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

Variants of this comment pop up a lot. HN is a democracy. By definition, if it makes it to the front page, it belongs there.

HN is an oligarchy, the mods have a lot of arbitrary and invisibly operating power, they're not elected, not subjected to popular control.

I'm not necessarily complaining, it's what make the site what it is, but it's definitely not a democracy.

The mods don't place things on the front page, but they can remove them. It's democracy with some control.

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