zlacker

Hacker News has pretty clear guidelines, and reasonably clear subject matter:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Although a lot of people are (IMO) intellectually dishonest in what they really consider intellectually gratifying, rather than simply find themselves strongly agreeing with, or angry about. For instance, US immigration/border policies are something that I feel strongly about, but are they interesting from an intellectual point of view? I don't think so, particularly.

>>davidw+(OP)
I definitely think jurisdictional issues can be interesting from an intellectual point of view. Especially since the Internet has made many such concepts far less obvious. One could of course argue that discussions (especially outside of obscure technology) rarely reach a level where they become interesting.

>>subsys+m2
Most people here have a lot of domain knowledge about some combination of startups, hacking, and design, meaning they are quite qualified to comment about those things in an interesting way. Domain knowledge about legal issues is limited to a much smaller subset of people here, so discussions have a lot of strong opinions, but not a lot of basis in established laws.

>>davidw+53
Domain knowledge about legal issues is limited to a much smaller subset of people here

This is true, but often times we learn quite a bit from conversations digging into eg IP law. The bigger (and unfortunately) more nebulous area is who writes the laws? That is a question of politics, why discussions have a lot of strong opinions.