Untitled topic

Of course. It has been a constant topic of geek conversation ever since Dawkins's seminal work: "Spanking the monkey: masturbation's role in evolution".

Subsequently rms retorted that only Free animals masturbate, while Linus weighed saying the ideals of masturbation didn't matter, just the pragmatism of cranking one off to avoid blue balls.

Edit: whoa there is a strange suicidal gene in this post's ancestry. I was replying comment on whether http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=708679 was relevant

I don't think it's crazy, and I don't think it's completely ridiculous either. The shaming part is what bothered me. The idea that these companies belong on wall of shame is (just a little) ridiculous.

I kind of wish it hadn't been flagged too. I didn't catch it until this second posting. Now that I look back at the HN post, it looks like I'm rehashing some of that conversation.

The TechCrunch story is fascinating and relevant to this community on so many levels. It's made me actually check their blog, which I haven't read in awhile otherwise.

It's fascinating from the standpoint of ethics and journalism. Internet journalism to boot. It's fascinating from an IP law perspective, something people here tend to deal with a lot. It's fascinating from the computer security/social engineering perspective. And it's just a fascinating look into Twitter's deepest darkest secrets. It's possibly unethical (I don't think so, but that one's above my pay grade) but even if so it's still very interesting.

The wall of shame link is just a political rant reducing a complex First Amendment issue to a diatribe. It's mean-spirited (though perhaps warranted, depending on your viewpoint, but that's irrelevant here). It's not more interesting or relevant than if it were asking us to boycott Rush Limbaugh's advertisers. It's unlikely to be fruitful. And it's not in any way relevant to the tech topics usually discussed here.

Are we really debating this with 23 points?

It wasn't exposing anything at all. You can go to techcrunch.com and find the advertisers. It amazes me how fast all of you criticize TechCrunch as being a piece of shit, yet it is the top domain here which everyone constantly upvotes: http://top.searchyc.com/domains . Feel free to criticize what they did with the twitter docs, but people are justifying it with silly comments like "TC is Perezhilton" or "Fuck techcrunch". It's also a site that most startups here would love to get on. Lastly, as a whole I'm quite sure TechCrunch has made the startup world a better place, and we'd rather have it than not have it.

Hacker News isn't a place to bitch and whine about things, especially those with minimal merit. I enjoy coming here because there's tons of intelligent conversation and amazing information to consume. That article brings none of that to the table.

I'd say that aggressive flagging and downvoting are the price of HN not becoming like Digg and Reddit. I'm really happy to pay that price, even when I get downvoted.