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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

Similarly, the question asks "does it violate the rule" not "should the vehicle be allowed in the park". Of course driving an ambulance into the park violates the rule - but it's ok the break the rule for emergencies!

Which of course illustrates that in the real world there are always multiple conflicting rules that apply. Especially in content moderation.

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The instructions explain that, so it shouldn't interfere with the decision making, but the thing that the instructions don't talk about is whether the park extends indefinitely into the sky. One need not even consider the legal aspect of this (airspace rights: historical versus modern) but merely consider what it means to be in the park! Personally, I think that if the vehicle is making contact with the ground then it's "in" the park, but if it's not making contact with the ground then it's "above" the park.

When you jump, do you leave the park? If you jump really high? Or are flung via trebuchet?

That's absurd generally, but for purposes of this rule specifically, I think it works out totally fine, yes. Because if you replace the human jumping with a vehicle jumping (being that the rule is regarding vehicles, not humans) then the answer to the question of whether a violation has occurred is "yes" -- repeated violations does not matter when answering. For flying vehicles, only taking off or landing in the park is a violation.

How about hovering? at what height does it become not the park? 10 centimeters above the park is one thing and space is at 100 kilometers, but there's a lot of room in between those for disagreement.

At what point is a helicopter hovering above the park in violation?

This is why you need a lawyer familiar with the local regulations, which clarify these things. Thus this test is invalid because there should be an “there is not enough information to answer” answer.

I think getting lawyers involved is more for if you want to know what the law is. For this, we just want to know what is. It's very common for legal definitions to differ from normal definitions.

> in the real world there are always multiple conflicting rules that apply

I think it might be worse than that, there are sometimes rules which aren't actually rules which can still (sometimes!) override rules which are.

Dunno about other jurisdictions but the written Polish law actually has some quite prominent references to unwritten, socially defined rules, both in the civil and the criminal law.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, ..."

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