[ZoFreX]

I figured it out! The name of the thief was "James Sanderson", whatever you do do not start a company with this person.

And if I'd ended the post there, you might have actioned my advice.

It's terrible that this person has lost out, and more terrible that the person that wronged them got away scott-free. That's not fair, it offends my sense of fairness and justice, and even though I have no connection to the author I would be happier if justice was served.

But what would be far more terrible is if someone else, completely innocent, was caught in the cross-fire amongst our demands for justice. This could happen lots of ways. Someone with all good intentions could make a mistake when snooping, and post the wrong name (in this example, I used my own name). At the other end of the goodness-of-intentions scale, the submitted post could be a complete fabrication, designed especially for people to snoop out and target a specific victim.

Acting based on the say-so of someone on the internet that someone else did them wrong is a very bad idea: you have no reason to trust this person, and if you do believe what you hear on the internet then whether or not justice prevails comes down to which party submits their story to Hacker News first - not ideal.

[diziet]

Where is the evidence? Searching for that person's name in quotes along with either the author's name or the startup name does not seem to return any evidence.

[zbruhnke]

clearly you only read the name not the entire post. the original commenter mentions that it is his own name and was just pointing out that by doing research you could post the wrong name and adversely affect someone who was otherwise innocent.

[blindhippo]

I find it enlightening that the post was not read (which takes very little effort to complete), YET google was opened up and queries commenced.

Not only that, but you were able to successfully determine that this was the action that took place.

I do the same thing myself far too often - skim something quickly, pick a key word and then google it myself out of context. Wonder how many things I misinterpreted because of this behavior.

[ZoFreX]

> I find it enlightening that the post was not read (which takes very little effort to complete), YET google was opened up and queries commenced.

This is exactly what terrifies me when the mob starts baying for personal information. I've seen it go wrong too many times now (personally I think HN should follow Reddit's example and add a rule about posting personal information)

[diziet]

Thanks for pointing it out -- I'd glanced over the post and missed that