This is, to my knowledge, the first time a crowdfunding platform has been used as a way to raise money in an attempt to buy a video of alleged misconduct by a politician from a drug cartel.

This political story is at the top of HN despite the guidelines for the same reason that your remarks are at the top of the comments... despite the guidelines urging us not to comment on why something doesn't belong on HN.

Not all the guidelines make sense in all situations.

They are "guide"lines.

If someone doesn't believe this story belongs on HN and politely gives valid reasons, I see no problem.

I think we are agreeing with each other.

It's an interesting, if potentially worrying, development in crowd sourcing - I think that makes it tangentially related.

HN frontpage sometimes strays rather far off-topic on weekends (today is a holiday in the US).

Despite what others may say, on balance, there really isn't a good reason for this to be on top of HN.

Also, it's important to recognize that the fundraisers have lost contact with those in custody of the video. It's likely that we may never see that video and, rather than contributing to original intent of the fundraiser, the donations will instead go to fund Gawker's arbitrarily chosen charity. Crowdfunding's double-edged sword strikes again.

Don't know if anyone knows, but is Gawker allowed to use the donations as a tax write off? Always been curious about that.

Forbes had an interesting article about some of the tax implications of crowdfunding - http://www.forbes.com/sites/suwcharmananderson/2012/05/23/ki...

As far as using the donations as a tax write off, I don't think I understand your question. Are you asking if Gawker could take the money they received from crowdfunding, turn around and donate it to a registered charity and then claim a deduction??

The plan is to donate the money if they can't buy the video(and it looks likely they won't be able to buy the video) so yes that's what I was asking.

Only if they took the money as income and, possibly, paid taxes on it. I presume they would be very careful to never take custody of the money, even in trust.

I'm from Toronto and have been following this story closely. But even I am surprised to see this at the top of HN... You know, it only take a small amount of votes in a short period to get to the top...

That's not all that HN is. If that's what you want, then hit up https://lobste.rs/ it's got the same articles as HN, but without the cruft.

True true. But, while we're at it, can we stop posting articles about how higher education sucks, and how veiled libertarian ideals rule? Politics belong somewhere else, or, there's simply no membrane careful enough to prevent this.

We have vote/flag links for a reason.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that it's here because a large majority of HN users voted it here... because they found it to be of interest... Just guessing...

I posted it because of the implications for crowdfunding. I've never seen anything like this before and it's extremely interesting to me and I work in the tech industry.

Shows how tech is shaping the world around us? I don't think anyone has ever crowdsourced a black mail video before, have they?