It was flagged by users and set off some software penalties.
I'm not convinced that this story belongs on Hacker News. The mandate of the site is "stories that gratify intellectual curiosity", and it seems pretty clear that both the curiosity and gratification here are more voyeuristic than intellectual. Arguably the appropriate scope for the story would be the smaller online community of people who are personally and professionally affected by it.
On the other hand, the HN community is clearly interested, Tor is a longstanding topic here, the discussion has been better than it might (edit: though it has now gotten significantly worse), and if we're going to have it at all we shouldn't have only one side of it. So I've turned off flagging on this post and reduced the software penalties.
While I agree with your hesitancy, Daniel, I submitted this post because I’d seen two (but I was wrong – there were probably three: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11845351) submissions on the front page in which Jacob has been accused of crimes (outside any legal system) and I believe letting readers get his side of the story is only fair at this point.
But this doesn't have anything to do with Tor. A story that says "X is no longer working for Tor" would be fine, but this is clearly just dragging out the Paparazzi nature of famous people in a scandal.
If you go back to the submission where it was just the "X is no longer working with Y" story, then a good portion of the commenters on that story felt that it wasn't a good story for HN and if there was a real story to share it would be in follow up posts.
I can't imagine what a story on this topic would look like for everyone to agree it belonged on HN.
Maybe that means that none of them do, but I'm not sure that conclusion is right. I think it is best to generally prefer sunlight to silence, even when the sunlight doesn't produce as much value as we'd like to see.
In my experience, some people routinely believe any statement that takes this form, so it's good to be factually careful when making them.
There have been three major discussions of this story, and two of them spent many hours on the front page, including yesterday. Those were flagged, but not "flagged off the front page".
I'm not convinced that this story belongs on Hacker News. The mandate of the site is "stories that gratify intellectual curiosity", and it seems pretty clear that both the curiosity and gratification here are more voyeuristic than intellectual. Arguably the appropriate scope for the story would be the smaller online community of people who are personally and professionally affected by it.
On the other hand, the HN community is clearly interested, Tor is a longstanding topic here, the discussion has been better than it might (edit: though it has now gotten significantly worse), and if we're going to have it at all we shouldn't have only one side of it. So I've turned off flagging on this post and reduced the software penalties.