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How do you advise startups who plan to break laws as part of their business models?

Please don't waste community time and space by posting unsubstantive comments.

Edit: Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait generally? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we've already asked you more than once not to.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.


> Please don't waste community time and space by posting unsubstantive comments.

It's a very genuine question for how an attorney deals with these businesses? There are countless examples of startups breaking the law at mass scale (Uber, etc) and getting away with it. Sorry that asking difficult questions is wasting "community space". Your own profile cites conflict as essential, is asking difficult questions not part of that?

Part of the guidelines you asked me to review is "Assume good faith." Did you assume good faith from my comment?

One of the more recent discussions here was about Medvi, which described many illegal/unethical business practices. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/technology/ai-billion-dol...

Other examples include Airbnb building a bot poaching listings from Craigslist, Stripe not developing appropriate internal rules to enable fraud and drug transactions, pretty much all crypto exchanges and KYC, etc.

Obviously, payment processors like Stripe do not spring into existence fully formed with mature controls. My question relates partially to how attorneys in this domain handle the risks associated with undeveloped compliance, compliance failures, as well as business models that are diametrically opposing the law.

There is an area that many startups believe is "grey" where they operate outside of legal norms, whether it's to enable growth, lack of appropriate risk controls, etc.

Here, startups may knowingly, or unknowingly break the law related to immigration in order to further their business. That's what my question relates to.


While you'd have a point if you were asking in-house counsel at one of the companies in question, you're asking an immigration attorney who works with many different companies. The few times I've tried asking independent attorneys hypotheticals about how to break the law the least, or how to skate through min-maxing the rules the way hackers want to, I've generally gotten a pretty simple answer: "Don't".

Definitely, was interested in what's been happening since the current administration's changes to immigration policy, but you're absolutely correct.

If you read the whole thread there are definitely some responses to specific questions about what's changed.

We advise them to comply with all laws.

This is a very loaded question. I’m not sure what type of answer you expect to get.

Gurman is clearly Apple's preferred go to for leaking info

Which only tells us that it is what Apple wants us to believe, not that it is the truth.

It is most likely both: Intentional leaks of the truth.

Obviously, _what_ someone chooses to leak can still benefit them, even if it's true. You can be selective about what information you share.


Did you verify that? What is the miss rate?

absolutely, a careful eye can discern Apple's goals by examining leaker comments on topics, not that they're consistently truthful

yeah keep voting red and look like Mississippi, Oklahoma and Louisiana...

Really not what my point was, but thanks for showing me how far your thinking skills go, so I know not to waste my time debating further with you.

So a prediction machine chose a particular predicted path, and then came up with phrases to ameliorate it and you're swooning? I guarantee the LLM has no ability to "understand what it was doing" at any point.

Forgive me, I left my opinion open to interpretation: I am mocking the claim that this technology has anything resembling human intelligence.

so after $80 billion spent, they must have an ecosystem of hundreds of millions of users? Right?

Maybe they should have spent that on the facebookphone


> Self-driving had never the amount of compute, research adoption and money than what the current overall AI has. Its not comparable.

$100+ billion in R&D and it's not comparable... hmm


> Its not a statistical next word predictor.

it absolutely is a next word predictor


> Progress is huge and fast

is it? we're currently scaled on data input and LLMs in general, the only thing making them advance at all right now is adding processing power


AGI moved from a technical goal to a marketing term

> That's not quiet or sneaky in any way.

Has any company ever buried such a large acquisition in its filings without disclosing the acquired company prior? I cannot recall any off the top of my head.


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