[gills]

Why would this be less than relevant to Hacker News? Put the metaphor in a context you care about.

Right now: Are you allowed to hack code in your living room? Can your buddies come over and help you out? Can you host your business on a server in your garage? Can you use Lisp? Can you build a mashup and earn revenue from widgets other people produce?

What if government regulations told you this: * All code must be written in government-certified office space. * All code must be written by professional degreed programmers hired at a minimum government-defined wage. * All code must be Java. * Hosting must be done by government-certified shared hosting providers. * Your application must support at least 100k simultaneous users.

Would you be happy with that sort of regulation? Would you bother with a startup? Would you accept it all on the premise that it keeps your children safe from evil unregulated websites?

Or do you prefer to have a choice?

[hobbs]

Hell, if this is the criteria for what constitutes relevant news, we may as well have articles that debate the relative merits of different world religions. After all, the debates would help shed light about how to think about our own religious wars within the hacker community.

Honestly, I have just as much of a laissez-faire libertarian philosophy as the next hacker, but there are plenty of other forums that are better suited to spreading the word. (cough reddit, cough digg)

[sofal]

I don't think a discussion about this sort of thing on digg or reddit would even begin to approach the high signal/noise ratio of this comment thread. For this reason, I'm not terribly disappointed with the topic digression.

[hobbs]

True enough. I guess my point is that there were previous debates about banning TechCrunch, which has articles that are spot-on topic but of questionable validity, and then we get an article about farming regulations shooting to the top spot. I mean c'mon guys, do you want to be picky or not?

[edu]

Don't say it loud!