Because it is super-risky to consider these things on their own merits if you are not the kind of person who regularly interacts with judges and juries. Laws are something that are applied within a particular kind of, ah, culture. You have to be familiar with the body of work of that culture and how they will likely interpret the law. Trying to interpret laws in ignorance of that culture is likely to lead to interpretations contrary to those with the power to enforce the laws, and land you in a lot of trouble.

In other words, laws aren't code or mathematics. They're not pure exercises of abstract thought to be considered in isolation. Trying to treat them that way is going to lead to trouble.

Does everyone downvote all medical speculation in the numerous health threads on this site?

No.

It's fine for people to speculate about medical ideas, legal ideas, etc. Especially on a forum like this where there is no pretense that people are offering genuine legal advice.

Or maybe we should express less confidence in our assertions about medicine?

After all, most of the time, people are writing about things they don't know all that much about.

To be honest, one or the other should be the case.

Either wild speculation on medicine and law should be fine (this is my position).

Or, people should fear medical speculation as much as they do legal speculation (I think this is the more pathetic option).

Personal attacks are not ok on HN. I appreciate your concern for the quality of the site, but doing this is one of the worst ways to destroy itt. So if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

carbocation is right about the underlying point, btw. This is an internet forum, the purpose is good conversation, and speculation is a normal part of conversation. It can of course be dumb and low-information, but it needn't be.

EDIT: Taking the L on this one.

You might take a second to click on 'carbocation's name and see what his background is. I think you've missed some subtext.

EDIT: Taking the L on this one.

"Legal hacks" are rarely, if ever, as clever as their proponents think. Scepticism is natural and warranted.

Judges aren't complete morons and will take a dim view of "hacks". There could be loopholes somewhere but you'd need a lawyer to spot them.

One of the most famous "legal hacks", Richard Stallman's copyleft, had to be rewritten by a lawyer. rms wrote GPLv1 by himself and you should never use it. GPLv2 is the version that was actually vetted by a lawyer.

A similar thing happened with Perl's Artistic License. Its version 2 is basically also a lawyer-approved rewrite.

In other words, hackers, don't try this at home. There are professionals who can do this for you.

I find it somewhat sad that law is basically a guild where arcane language is used to gatekeep what should be a much more straightforward exercise.

It's not. It's the equivalent of saying "I can do this better" and producing unreliably, buggy code. Sure you can, but a more experienced professional can point out all the corner cases you missed.

Then when it fails, you blame the programming language rather than your experience in programming.

I find it somewhat sad that programming is basically a guild where arcane language is used to gatekeep what should be a much more straightforward exercise.

Hahaha, actually at some point in the future, I suspect 25 years or so, our programming guild will likely have taken over and replace the legal guild.

This would make an interesting entry on http://longbets.org/

I mean, if you pay attention to the names of the kernel API functions, you'd probably end up with the same conclusion.

Very relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1494/.

Probably because anyone who isn't a lawyer has no hope of considering this reply "on its merits".

My gut feeling is this "legal hack" wouldn't work, because if it did someone would have used it by now against some other law that provides for damages, and someone else would have figured out how to neuter the hack. Which is to say, there's probably an existing law that prevents this hack from working. But you'd need a lawyer to be able to say whether that's true or not.