Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time (2024)

A near-total ban on the whole thing is easier to implement and enforce than trying to make online discussions of politics not suck, when their natural state seems to be to suck big time.

Is it impossible to maintain a civilized discussion of hot topic political issues? No. But it's not a solved problem, or anywhere near. I respect the "keep the incendiary stuff off the front page" policy.

Since the status quo is inherently conservative, that has a stifling effect on innovation - which is inherently liberal. Which is ironic for a site dedicated to disruption. Hence the cognitive dissonance.

I try to entertain opposing viewpoints in all of my comments, even if I don't always agree with them. So while I find it most practical to live conservatively, that doesn't mean that I wish that for the world. It's important to remember that FDR - a liberal - was one of Reagan's heroes. I think that we can imagine a Star Trek style post-scarcity geopolitical reality without abandoning the ethos which got us this far.

Now, regardless of all that, I still think that HN has the best ranking algorithm around. So I would say that if it wants to get serious about getting back to meritocracy, funding real work on hard problems, setting a positive example through intellectual honesty, etc, then it should consider revising its flagging policy.

A proof of concept might be to move flagged posts below the fold past slot 31, rather than removing them completely. Then they could bubble back up on their own merit. Or maybe each flag costs 10 slots, something like that. And all flags should go through human review to prevent gaming, if they don't already.

Let https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news be your inspiration. Put out the tip jar, I will tip!

(Firefox first class citizen in this regard pls if possible)

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Related: HP Offers 'That Cloud Thing Everyone Is Talking About’

https://youtu.be/9ntPxdWAWq8

He was forced to a buy-out, kept as a VP, intentionally forced out, and accepted cash to settle their violation of terms.

My hackles rose when he made the name change, but... not my business. Sad to see how quickly my intuition was validated. Would his company have survived else? Dunno, of course. But hopping onto the fad wave was, in retrospect, far more dangerous than simply navigating with the assets he had.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher

I'll defend the political stories though. For me, all the other places out there that vend politics are truly awful. While a political post lingers briefly on the HN front page, I find I actually learn something from the comments. If there are shit-posts in the discussion, they are quickly "dead". More often though there are (seemingly) reasoned debates about the issues in the comments.

I appreciate (what I am embarrassed to call) a more intellectual discussion on politics than I have been able to find anywhere else. (Embarrassed because I'm walking a fine line trying not to appear to cast the discussions as "elitist". Or maybe I am an elitist, who knows.)

Thanks, @dang! keep up the good work.

Less party partisan stuff being sneaked in then (I think it's the parties themselves sometimes doing it now), but more meaningful discussions on politics, especially/primarily having to do with how they crossed with tech.

But everything crosses over with tech: finance, the current state of the market, importing and exporting, taxes, surveillance, censorship, encryption, copyright, patents, freedom to tinker, wars, weapons, government contracting, military contracting, corporate structure, etc. etc.

There wasn't this random immigration outrage bait pointing out 1 of the 80 people in a particular month who were shot by law enforcement for no good reason, but there was plenty about immigration because techies are immigrants and hire immigrants, and outsourcing, and working with a remote team in the middle of the night, etc. etc.

The only thing that was absolutely deemed "politics" and excluded eventually was discussions of women and black people in tech.

AI is just the new Rust, is the new X in javascript, is the new concurrency/Erlang, and so on. All of those things are still important; none of them went away or are going away.

I think heavy moderation serves to keep some variety, and to simply throw away the 9000th iteration of the same thread that never goes anywhere. AI stories aren't bad; it's the same AI stories, again, that are bad.

Discussions about open drug use and Bay area housing policy and California highspeed rail are political.

Discussions about Snowden and the NSA are political.

Discussions about the FSF and copyleft are political.

Are you spending your time patrolling /newest and upvoting good submissions, then? There are relatively few people doing this and it's easy to have an outsized impact.

Open any thread on these topics lately and you will see the same thing written for the 14,000th time as if it’s novel discussion.

LLMs have their uses but it isn't as great as everyone makes out to be nor is it as bad as others make out it is. Every week its X model has new SWE bench and is the best in class frontier blah blah - yet its actually just much the same as the week before. Quarter to quarter you could argue there is more of a diff between capabilities and performance but the LLM news cycle is much shorter than that.

Yea, I see these people on HN all the time. How they've written 45 billion lines of code without ever making a mistake and they put their life and dedication into being the best programmer that never sleeps and is available 24/7, and I'm like "How come I only see you people online and never see you working in the field".

Now, don't get me totally wrong, there's probably a few people out there like that, but trying to use 1%ers, or .1%ers as an example for anything is rather useless as supply and demand would make them a mythical creature with mythical pay. More often than I like I end up thinking ""I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question," after asking about the latest feature and the spaghetti .

It’s probably somewhere in the middle with both of us noticing the examples we find annoying more often than we notice the ones we agree with.

Usually mentioning anything about doing proper epidemiology (e.g. analysing COVID numbers), or anything modern about atmosphere physics and climate-modelling gets taken down everywhere within 24 hours - by humans.

Mathematics and physics is something a lot of people don't like and really love to take down. Idiots censoring experts is a real problem. This place here has less idiots, but outnumbering experts with stupidity is something that works everywhere.

This still does a huge disservice to how the degradation can happen in discussions when now Everything is becoming more political so much so that one side of the party needs to flag what the other party says and this division is running deep creating a large seperation.

I so much agree with this being one of the biggest issues in Hackernews in my opinion. (I love hackernews but this has genuine impact where genuine posts can get flagged just because it might be negative but that just feels like very much so censorship in some part) and whenever people mention why flagged? people say the moderation's bad and everything (I admit I must have said this once or twice too when getting angry why posts are getting flagged left and right) & then people mention how moderation's not the fault and its always been this way or similar & we just get really tangential.

The real reason probably seems to be this instead.

We probably need some net negative in case someone intentionally flags something like if they flagged a post (>4 hours) and moderators find that they flagged incorrectly, just have it be visible that they flagged such post.

If there was a genuine mistake, I am sure that moderators will be able to do so but we won't really go around then with people flagging anything or everything that they don't like (some of which might be political news)

I've seen the moderators (tomhow specifically) explicitly encourage people to use the flag option on posts which are low quality. I believe that the behavior you are complaining about is working as intended.

The same goes for technology's use of government, be that in the form of subsidies to tech firms or golden presents for politicians. This has to be talked about since the intersection with product lines or tech pricing etc. is converging on 100% (hyperbole, but still).

I fully understand that this is a legitimate preference of a lot of people. But it is revolting.

My point is not a left vs right one, it’s that topics like DOGE are worthy of discussion on HN. They are absolutely tech relevant. Many other topics with a tech angle are left up, but those are not. It’s not difficult to see why.