Hacker News Reader

Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

I read this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2157281

While anyone who invests money and gets nothing in return has my sympathy, I don't see the relevance of a private business transaction to HN.

You will sometimes find someone plastering notices all over the city. These notices have a picture of someone and the warning not to date them because they are a lying, cheating low-life. Is this a public service intended to save other people from an unhappy fate? Or is it someone trying to get revenge by naming, blaming, and shaming someone else?

Unless the "scamming" in question is happening on HN, such as someone spamming HN with fraudulent posts, I have trouble thinking this kind of thing meets the HN guidelines.

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Hacker News is the specific means by which this scammer is finding his victims. That, specifically, is what makes this relevant, IMO.

HN is not a match-making service for founders or consultants. If keeping track of the worst-of-the-worst is relevant, why not keep track of the best-of-the-best? Why don't we track business karma?

Services for vetting people in business already exist, starting with LinkedIn and going on to other sites, many of which are specifically designed for web programmers to showcase their work and show off their reputation.

The situation is unfortunate, but I still don't see it as HN business if one HN user decides to do business with another HN user and things don't work out well. HN is not responsible, we're a "common carrier" so-to-speak.

p.s. JM2C, of course, carry on, I'll be over here coding...

How is HN not a common-carrier if its users decide to police themselves to a certain extent? This wasn't posted by 'HN Staff.'

The post you linked went out of its way not to identify the person in question, but to limit itself to a description of the circumstances and ask for general advice. To equate this with 'name and shame' graffiti is neither accurate nor helpful.

You'd not be so opposed to the submission if you were a lot less cynical. I see this as a genuine warning to the community. Nothing more.

I'm not cynical at all about HN in its context, namely as a site for sharing news about startups and hacking. It does a very good job of those things, and the mechanisms on place like moderating posts and karma all work towards that.

With respect to people going off together and starting companies based on "meeting" each other on HN, I'm not cynical about that either, I just have no opinion of it one way or another. It's as if you told me that two people met at a bus stop, fell in love, got married, but one had an affair and now they are in a bitter custody dispute. I feel very sorry things didn't work out for them, but as far as the bus stop is concerned, my interest is in when the next bus arrives, and I think the interior of the shelter should be devoted to the schedule, not to their story.

All I am saying is that there are established places for entrepreneurs to meet each other for the purpose of doing business, and such places have mechanisms for resolving and/or publicizing such disputes.

p.s. That being said... Perhaps this is a one-time thing and will blow over. Unless the front page starts picking up a few stories like this a day, HN is not in any danger of losing its focus, so I don't have anything really to worry about. Carry on!

A warning to not send money to people you met on an open internet forum? Really?

If someone can help lrm242 great, but I don't think anyone else has delusions that HN is anything but an open forum on the web and therefore entails the most basic precautions.

There are thousands of other bad-actors waiting even if you manage to round up a posse to track this guy down.

So lrm242 has my sympathies but this is definitely a personal problem because making any assumptions based on the fact that someone entered news.ycombinator.com into their address bar (which is the only barrier to membership) is frankly, stupid.

Having read the entire original post, I'm somewhat inclined to agree with you.

HN doesn't purport to be a programmer/money matching service, in this case it's pretty unclear what the original payments were for, and what either party expected from it.

In all reality, you're better off with dedicated outsourcing sites rather than informal relationships created between usernames found on this site.

So the warning stands, but it's pretty irrelevant as someone who has seen fit to create multiple identities would have no problem creating another clean identity to work with. However, I think this post (and the others) are a bad precedent. I'd hate to see an avalanche of 'so and so did me wrong' type posts.

The only thing that people should get from this is that you can't trust anyone you 'meet' over the internet until you have gotten to know them better. Trust no-one, verify everything. Don't do business on the basis of IM conversations. Make it clear and understand what you're delivering. A contract doesn't have to be written by a lawyer (although lawyers make better contracts) but any contract should at least state the terms of the agreement. You make x for y$ and ownership belongs to me. Anything else is just he-said she-said complaining.

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