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Comment by jm4 | Hacker News Reader

This is vaksel's second submission this week about Mark Cuban and insider trading. The last one was Mark Cuban's one line response to the insider trading allegations and also pointed to his blog.

Just what, exactly, does Mark Cuban have to do with hackers or HN? Why is this stuff getting voted up? Not to mention, even just from a news standpoint these articles have very little substance to them. Can we give this a rest, please?

Those of us who are interested in Mark Cuban and insider trading can go to his blog on our own without having these off topic posts plastered all over the front page.

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Perhaps because Cuban is a fairly prominent angel investor within the community?

Just because it's not relevant to you, doesn't mean it isn't interesting and relevant to the rest of us. If no one found it interesting, then it wouldn't get voted up.

Point taken.

Great... I've got the hacker equivalent of Britney Spears-type celebrity news to look forward to for the next few months.

Add this to your /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com

I found the article interesting, but didn't really understand why it should be on HN.

Is an article supposed to be relevant to hackers or entrepreneurs simply because it is written by an angel investor? By this logic, why not just automatically post every article Cuban has ever written?

That's basically what has happened. Most of the articles are interesting, but these essentially content free posts about his legal battle really aren't.

Hacker News is supposed to be about ideas. Mark Cuban is a person who has ideas. Many (including the NYT) have suggested that the government is targeting Cuban because of his ideas. It's not entirely clear what's happening, but it seems like something that's worth following.

Oh geez... Better go get my tinfoil hat...

I'm not going to waste my time with any conspiracy theories, but I do think insider trading is kind of a bullshit crime in many cases. Only an idiot would fail to act on a tip that happens to be passed to him whether it is inside information or not. No one is going to sit idly and watch $750,000 dissolve. Of course, it's a totally different story when it's a deliberate attempt to acquire and profit from information unavailable to other investors.

If I remember correctly, they went after Martha Stewart because she was the CEO of a publicly traded company and also once had a stockbroker license. In other words, she definitely knew better and should have handled the situation differently. Is or was Mark Cuban ever an executive for a publicly traded company?

I think it's pretty obvious. Cuban is a majority owner in ShareSleuth.com, a website "aimed at exposing securities fraud and corporate chicanery": http://sharesleuth.com/about.html

Cuban also funds bailoutsleuth.com which is supposed to track the government's use of the $700 billion.

You can't expect to put yourself in such a visible position of moral status and think that others won't try their hardest to bring you down. I'm sure Cuban knows that and hopefully he keeps his slate clean.

The story is about a public startup and insider trading. It seems very relevant to a startup CEO, for example, to know what information his investors can trade on, or not, and under what circumstances.

The involvement of Mr. Cuban is just coincidental :).

I'm not buying that. Any startup whose CEO relies on HN and blogs for legal advice is going to fail.

There's a difference between relying on and being able to spot possible red flags.

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