Hacker News has a silent majority that works tirelessly to keep this site relatively free of ads disguised as articles and political news. I hope it stays that way. I'm just completely tired of those political echo chamber articles, even when I happen to agree with them.
What if there was a way for the “silent majority” (or something like it) to discuss political issues free of the impetus to polarization? Surely that would be a lot better than echo chambers.
Hackernews style apoliticism strikes me as wanting to chameleon to whatever side is perceived as winning the political game. I think it’s a nihilistic stance.
We need to be able to be political without the zealotry. Politics, of all things, is not a zero sum game.
All my social media feeds are filled with political rage bait. Yes, tech is political, and yes, techies implicitly take sides; but I really don't need another source for all the political headlines of the day.
That is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about escaping that.
I’m frustrated with how narrow of view people here are taking on politics.
Partisan politics has grown into a nasty oppositional quagmire.
But, Politics in general is defined as “The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its internal and external affairs.” From a duck duck go search. That is pretty broad.
Open your minds! There is more out there than you think.
But Hacker News is full of "hackers" and computer science grads. Why would you expect to find nuanced discussion of governing here? I don't come to Hacker News for discussion of surgical procedures either because the surgeons are not on here.
This might be heresy, but a CS background doesn't make you an expert on government, governance, or politics. Just as politicians seem woefully uninformed on computer science topics. So a political discussion on Hacker News will naturally lean towards popular conceptions of politics: that is partisanship, slogans, and the other stuff that makes social media politics so toxic. "The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation" is not going to enter the picture.
I guess I’m making the mistake of assuming others have taken a similar intellectual path as I have.
I’m an Elecrical and Computer Engineer (ECE) by schooling. But I did pay attention in my mandatory liberal arts class. I took a Political Philosophy course, and a 400 level History of US Foreign Policy, where I was the only non-history major.
People inevitably opine on government/politics. And because of that I think they should delve deeper. I think that delving deeper and having civil conversation are how we escape the toxic mess media currently dishes out.
> I guess I’m making the mistake of assuming others have taken a similar intellectual path as I have.
Oh, come on. I know a lot of people who are highly educated and intelligent but fall for the same outrage bait as everyone else... we're bombarded with so much political talking points that we don't carefully consider every headline, verify every source, and then publish nuanced takes on social media where the stories change every hour.
The bottom line is that, with all respect, I absolutely don't care about the political hot takes of people on HN. And I'm sure they don't care about mine. I know where to go when I want to talk politics. If I want measured takes from scholars, I can read their columns or blogs. If I want to argue, I'll do it with family and real-world friends.
I think the danger with political discussion is that the expression of an idea is as important as the idea itself. This means that to have a productive political discussion you either need:
1. Very very high verbal skills so that each person can communicate their idea in a way that doesn't leave (much) room for interpretation or a bad-faith reading.
2. A community that "steelmans" each-other's ideas and consistently chooses the best-faith interpretation of what the other person is saying.
(1) is impossible in a forum that accepts folks from a range of backgrounds and abilities. (2) is generally impossible in a public forum on the internet. Even if everyone on Hacker News stuck to this principle, outsiders would not. You'd get posts on reddit about how "Hacker News is a haven for Nazis". Or posts on X about how "Communists are invading the tech community" and ultimately a lot of bad press for Y Combinator that I'm sure they'd rather not have.
Failure of 1&2 is why there are flame wars yes, but I thought the motto on here is often "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."
> (1) is impossible in a forum that accepts folks from a range of backgrounds and abilities.
This by itself doesn't account for why there is significantly
less low-value political comments on here than reddit, to which (1) also technically applies. For (2), taking the best-faith interpretation is already in the HN guidelines. I'm also guessing that the mods let many flagged politically posts by users stay flagged because from experience they "know" which posts will trigger flame wars or low-value comments from the community because of the "past performance predicts future performance" thing. (ie, the unsaid thing is they don't trust the community to obey 1&2 on those posts due to past track record).
I for one would love to read past discussions of historic political events as they happen live from a community that includes industrialists of the past and their well-paid or high-skilled employees as well as people from academia in related fields. So why limit posterity's ability to do the same?
I agree, but I don't know of a better place to discuss current events on the internet. I can at least expect that the people are educated and intelligent (relative to the average internet user) and there's a cultural of thoughtful discussion.
Every Reddit thread I see on politics these days is just... rabid seething. At this point they remind me of how my elderly far-right relatives posted on Facebook circa 2010. I broadly agree with them (orange man bad) but there's so much misinformation and sloppy thinking that it's useless. There are probably some smaller and more thoughtful political subreddits out there, but if so I haven't found them
EDIT: Now that I think about it some more, I disagree with your sentiment that we should leave the politicking to the politicians. Democracy requires a population that has some idea of what's going on. I think discussion and disagreement is a great way to sharpen one's thinking
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.
"No Politics on the front page" is itself a highly politically charged policy: One that favors the status quo and favors hiding wrongdoing. I wish HN users who want "no politics" would admit that they are just asking for a different kind of political bias from the site.
That seems analogous to the "atheism is a religion" fallacy. No, not wanting to see politics in one very specific location is clearly not a political stance.
Where does "politics" end, then? What about articles pointing out a tech company's ethical wrongdoing? Or about their legal troubles? How about the technology behind war fighting drones? Or software's role in mass surveillance, war crimes and ethnic cleansing? Are these all off limits because they are inherently political? By banning these and similar topics, HN's purpose becomes more and more about whitewashing the industry and less and less about honest discussion.
I wish HN users who want HN to be about politics would be honest about simply wanting HN to be a political echo chamber of their preferred flavor, instead of hiding behind the flimsy excuses like "everything is political actually".
Every place on the internet where discussion on politics is "encouraged" is a heavy handed echo chamber. I think people wanting to discuss politics here specifically want to engage in a reasonably unbiased moderated venue, and people not wanting to discuss politics either want to focus on hacker news (very reasonable) or keep their politics over at [echo chamber X/Y/Z] (bad for society by isolating people in self reinforcing bubbles and not engaging outside of them). I don't envy Dan's or Tom's job, but am thankful for the balance they strike.
I don’t think people actually want yet another echo chamber. Anyone who has been exercising even a modicum of critical thinking sees where echo chambers lead.
I think a forum where bad faith polarizers are downvoted and good faith open minded discussion is rewarded would go a long ways.
Do you understand the magnitude of the thing are you asking for?
Trying to maintain a civilized discussion about modern politics is like walking a tightrope. You can say "anyone who knows what a tightrope is sees that falling off it would be bad", and it's true, but, does saying that mean that you'll avoid the fall? The failure mode is extremely obvious but not at all easy to avoid.
If you don't have an intuition of "partisan politics are inherently corrosive to human minds", I suggest you get one. It's not impossible to have a civilized discussion of politics, but it is unlikely and unnatural and unstable. It's very, very, very hard to set up and maintain an environment like this in practice.
Does your same argument not also apply to people who want HN to be 'non-political'? Since just from your post history recently I can see that you've leapt into some particularly political posts of your own [1] [2]. I'm particularly open about what I believe and post in, but usually people that say they want something non-political actually indicates that they precisely want an echo chamber.
> I wish HN users who want "no politics" would admit that they are just asking for a different kind of political bias from the site.
You're asking for them to admit something that isn't true. There's nothing political about recognizing that political discussions are a complete shitshow and wanting them to not crowd out everything else.
I wonder if the push for "no politics" is actually a consistent principle, or if it's just a reaction to how much the current news cycle challenges the community's comfort zone.
Someone should look at the flagging rates for political threads from 2012, 2018, and today. It would show whether our definition of a "distraction" is based on content quality, or if the appetite for "apoliticism" fluctuates depending on which side of the aisle holds the megaphone.
Has anyone done a sentiment analysis on flagging patterns versus administrative shifts? I suspect the "politics is a mind-killer" argument is a lot more popular when the headlines don't align with the reader's own worldview.
It seems to me you think of politics as being the politics of the sensationalist 24 hour news cycle. Sure, that is a mind killer.
But I encourage you to take a look at politics as a broader thing. Read some academic, foundational political philosophy works. Politics in its broad sense is inescapable. Better to know it and be an active participant than to leave it up to others.
You start by allowing "politics as a broader thing", flash forward a year, then you notice that at any given time, at least 20% of the frontpage is occupied by people screeching their throats raw with some incendiary hyper-partisan rhetoric.
The failure mode is rather obvious, and also extremely hard to avoid in practice.
"If putting rat poison in the burgers would cause people to die, what does this say about the quality of the burgers?"
Very little.
I've been told most hackers are humans - not machines or some kind of alien species. So I fully expect hackers to have the flaws people tend to do.
Partisan politics have a nasty habit of capitalizing on human flaws, and bringing out the worst in people who engage deeply in them. Which, in online communities, can have a self-reinforcing effect.
And yet we are talking about partisan politics. Because it's the lowest common denominator of politics. Because it's the failure mode.
You can say "not all politics are actively toxic to human minds" and point at 18th century philosophical works all day long, but we both know that 18th century philosophical works were never the concern.
You are persistently referring to partisan politics in your comments. I am not.
I have repeatedly distanced myself from partisan politics in this discussion. I believe I have not made a single statement supporting partisan politics, much less a particular party, in this entire discussion. If you disagree, perhaps you can quote an example.
A 'near-total ban' would involve basically banning the entire site of HN, and also tends to expose the inherent hypocrisy in any platform attempting to be 'non-political'.
For example, HN had massive threads years ago dedicated to glazing everything Elon Musk did. Now, conveniently, any discussion of Elon Musk, Grok etc is now flagged and considered political as the winds have changed to be largely negative. Same goes for a lot of stuff people took for granted in tech, because now that stuff was made part of the system that makes our lives worse.
Tech and finance have wedded to each other and finance has lobbied for politics so hard.
So I don't think that tech and politics can be seperated from each other and this shows why.
Earlier, I don't think that appreciating Elon Musk was considered political for the most part (well I read his biography and I thought he was just interesting guy) but his recent acts on twitter (I refuse to call it X) etc. just show how bubbly even I or people who read his biography were.
After some new reports on him, I feel much more in disdain of man than not. My cousin still glazes Elon tho.
I feel like there is some dunning kruger effect at play here. I read his biography -> I feel smart -> I say Elon's smart previously on HN -> elon acts dumb as mouse with ketamine fueled addiction -> but I supported Elon earlier -> most people don't want internal contradictions so they will try to justify it -> Gets into glazing elon -> Flags people who give genuine criticism of the guy now -> gets to the far alt right
I feel like the problem is more so the extremism.
There are some real issues happening in the world and news is covering it but some hackernews users definitely flag anything that they find not fitting in their world order.
I just want to say that its okay to have internal contradiction because we are all human and we can evaluate people wrongly. Doesn't mean we have to stick with that.
I remember watching pirates of silicon valley when I was in middle school (it was in a pendrive connected to TV so whenever satellite connection got lost, I used to watch it), I even went ahead in school and gave a speech on steve jobs, next and everything so much so that the teacher (he was a teacher for such extra activities started calling me steve jobs)
Anyways, my point is that it was only later in life where I realized that althoguh steve jobs was a good businessman, how valuable steve wozniak and other underrated people are and how ethically questionable xerox's decision was and his personal life too...
I just want to say that there is a nuance about steve jobs as well, he was pretty rude to his employees.
Like I feel like there is just nuance to the whole situation that people forget in HN
Seconded. Another way of saying this is that avoiding politics benefits the status quo.
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.
>silent majority that works tirelessly to keep this site relatively free of ads disguised as articles and political news.
And just like the other "Silent majority", this is utter tripe.
Every other submission is an ad FFS. Nobody is doing anything to remove ads. HN Itself is an ad.
It's not "Silent", as these people love nothing more than reminding you that topics they don't like are objectively "politics" and "Don't belong on HN" even though HN tried that once and it was terrible
And they aren't "Majority", because the flagging mechanism requires shockingly few flags before a post is knocked off the front page, and if anyone tries to plead any case in the comments, that also knocks it off the page, as a "flamewar", because apparently on a place that insists it is curating thoughtful discussion, high velocity discussion is impossible?
I like significant LLM news and even well-justified opinions.
I don’t like seeing essentially the same LLM opinion and justification again and again. This happens with both pro-AI and anti-AI opinions. And some of the justifications (on both sides) are poor. For example, I don’t want to read “LLMs have improved my productivity so much!” without evidence; show me a mostly AI-generated program and code, and explain the (AI-augmented) development process. On the other side, I’ve seen the “LLM inevitablism” argument multiple times, and…I don’t agree with really any of it. It ignores that LLMs are useful (to some extent), so they’ll probably be part of the future no matter what an average reader does; and if LLMs aren’t useful enough to replace everyone and everything (currently they aren’t), they won’t be all of the future, which even the people claiming inevitability are saying (and those who do claim that future LLMs will do everything, you can point to current LLMs and the CEOs of AI companies who, even in their position, are lowering expectations).
This actually looks really cool! Especially the dark mode and the feature of showing the comments reply to which actually is something that I wanted as well!
Honestly this is how Hackernews should look haha!
It does take some time in firefox/zen tho in the start so its not really instant (especially the bars which are shown next to the comment to indicate who they are responding to)
For some reason also, Hackernews stopped working when I installed this extension, my wifi may have glitched and I reconnected to wifi so its working now.
Should have made it more clear. These are keyword exclusion filters and the link I provided was to hide llm-related stuff. You're free to add more keywords to the filter.
There are, Dang has talked publicly about some of the mechanisms they've used to try and deter bad posting. Most of them are gone iirc (such as shadow banning and artificially slowing down the site) but rate limiting is still one of the mechanisms they have in place.
Depends on what you mean by hidden restrictions. If someone's ability to vote is disabled without notifying them, and they can still upvote or downvote but it has no effect, would you call that a hidden restriction?
We've been doing Bayesian content (aka spam) filtering for over 20 years, based in no small part on Paul Graham's essay "A plan for spam". According to HP [1], a home computer at the time had a single 1.5Ghz core and 256Mb of RAM.
Using LLMs would achieve essentially the same while requiring a couple orders of magnitude more resources.
Would those filters be keyword-based only? One benefit of an LLM-based filter I can imagine is that it has a much better understanding of the meaning of text.
I guess that if I could I adapt to cleartype when I ditched my 16" VGA Philips CRT, I'll be ready for "AI-powered Immersive Experiences", whatever that means in Visual Studio Code.
I have a buddy who was a young entrepeneur, during the Dot-Com era. He renamed his company to Company Name Dot Com. A few months later the bubble burst, and those last two words were a smelly fart to potential investors.
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.
I'm tired of the hype too. Yes, coding agents are useful but the bubble seems primed to pop. Agents are not profitable enough to justify the billions of investments in data centers and chips.
Looks like a majority of it’s all politics and LLMs. I think we’re all as a collective tired of both and want something ‘interesting’ for once to post.
I get that. And if an LLM story disappears from the front page—oh well.
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.)
It’s not that the quality of politics posts here are very high (you get plenty of “engineers outside their domain” type stuff). Just, it is hard to find sites with
* Active political discussion communities
* That haven’t swung dramatically to some extreme and eventually worn down the local “opposition” party
I’ve got boards I go to for politics but the ratio is so lopsided, and the one or two remaining posters that disagree with the consensus seem to be more or less sticking around out of contrarianism (which unfortunately decreases the quality of their posts).
I think if HN let too many political threads stick around, that would destroy the whatever quality the discussion has.
I always agree with a good-faith, well-reasoned political argument. And HN generally seems to have a much more educated base than most of the other stuff out there--but agreed with the other person that I think it's probably best to keep that content off of HN, unfortunately.
> That used to be possible with a carefully curated Twitter feed, then a series of bad decisions made that impossible
But you wouldn't know from reading HN that X, the tech company, has become a shitshow, as all discussions about this are "political" and flagged by users.
I feel the same way. I crave high quality political discussion about what's going on in the US and this is one of the few places I can get it. Most places just offer memes and hot takes.
The low quality posts and low quality responses and them being flagged makes the users affected, to use the moderators' terminology, "activated". It's not conducive to maintaining the HN we know and love.
Also the site moderators have plainly said that moderating these controversial political threads is a strain on them. You may be enjoying yourself but someone else is paying a hefty price.
Far less concerned about ThE StReSs Of MoDeRaToRs and more concerned about legal citizens getting drug out of their home at gunpoint in front of their children.
Hand-waving everything as "politics" is not healthy. It's necessary for us to be able to make collective decisions on societal questions which is what "politics" are.
So I, as a software engineer, have to deal with the impacts of this administration both making my employment harder as well as terrorizing the city I live in. Where do you suggest I would go to share these issues other than the site that is specifically for hackers and tech workers?
I get that people want to make the place 'non-political', but a lot of us in the US live in major metropolitan areas and are very directly impacted by all of the shit going on.
No. It means "sick to death of hearing about politics everywhere I go and I am desperate for the occasional respite from that madness". Your interpretation is extremely bad faith.
This is what the biggest names in the VC class want you to think as they continue to enrich themselves, while (in the USA at least) they support a regime that is growing in its authoritarian output.
Thiel, Musk, et. al., support, for example, Curtis Yarvin, who believes that democracy is a failed experiment and should be replaced with an all-powerful "CEO"
> Thiel, Musk, et. al., support, for example, Curtis Yarvin, who believes that democracy is a failed experiment and should be replaced with an all-powerful "CEO"
These guys all benefit when the No-Politics Purity Brigade drives by and flag-kills every article pointing out their wrongdoing as "political." By flagging this stuff, they're actually making HN more political: They are defending billionaires, their agendas, and their status-quo politics.
This is such a weird idea. Everything is political because there are no universally agreed upon values. Humans literally do not always agree on what the purpose of society is, what is good and what is bad, how much power we should have over one another and nature. And, as far as I can tell, neither god nor philosophy seems willing to descend from heaven in order to resolve our differences. Thus, we are stuck discussing things amongst ourselves and deciding how to move forward, a process called politics.
No, just because there are no universally agreed upon values does not make everything political. People can, and frequently do, agree to live and let live when they have differences of opinion rather than wage bitter wars over those differences. We can, and must, have spaces where we can enjoy things in life rather than having division fostered between us 24/7. There is no idea more toxic to the well being of society than the idea of "everything is political".
"Live and let live" is a political philosophy. I don't see what is so hard about this concept: human beings typically don't agree on everything. They have to decide what to do. That process is called politics, whether it happens to result in a live and let live attitude towards many things or the oppressive politics of the Soviet Union. When you tell me that in many contexts people should not feel pressure to adhere to a specific political line you are, in fact, expressing a (non-universal) political ideal, one which you don't need to search much to find counter-ideologies to.
I happen to agree with you: my preference is one in which dogmatic and performative adherence to a specific ideology is discouraged but that doesn't make me non-political, especially if I happen to live in a society where (for example) religious fundamentalism is the main cultural artifact.
At a deeper level, assertions that we should "remain apolitical" are, in the end, simply assertions that the status quo is "sufficient" or even good and that people who have some difference of opinion about how human affairs are managed are "bothersome" for bringing it up. Sometimes this is motivated by a misapprehension or genuine (if incorrect, in my opinion) belief that the status quo reflects some obviously "correct" view of things and thus questioning it is pointless, bothersome, or even dangerous.
I think political differences should (for the most part) be tolerated, resolved through discussion and democratic processes, and that a healthy society is one in which people are (to the extent possible given other goals) allowed to live as they please, but I do not think of this as a non-political goal. I mean, just look around, plenty of people want to take that sort of society away from you.
Its a tired trope, but you are wrong. The haves and the have nots define everything about our society and Not Addressing The Situation is a very active choice, thus politics.
I started coming here in the early 2010s, and honestly I like its mix now better than the late 2010s, when SaaS was stagnating and every new company was Uber/AirBnB for X and people were trying to hype crypto constantly. It's still worse than the early years though.
> AI, politics, and discussing how HN isn't what it used to be. That's all that's here now. HN isn't what it used to be.
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.
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.
We live in a society, the government provides (or provides permission for) roads, utilities, housing and a boatload of other rules & regulation to protect people.
Virtually any discussion around anything will always lead back to politics because it is the central body that allows us to live the lives we want, this is why voting is important!
It's like returning the shopping cart at the grocery store. Other people have more work to do because you chose to do less.
The action may not matter, you are free to choose, but not doing it does make you a bad citizen. Personal importance doesn't factor into it, this is an external designation.
> Other people have more work to do because you chose to do less.
Not voting in America does not increase the burden of other people. My state has voted the same in Presidential elections for two decades. Local politicians almost always run unopposed and I don't think anyone in my lifetime has won here without an endorsement from the party in favor, so they are picked behind closed doors. Our state governor elections can swing, but ultimately one vote is a vanishingly insignificant portion of that.
I vote every year out of habit, but putting the "I VOTED" sticker conspicuously on a trash can probably makes more of a difference than casting my ballot. The two party system is designed to give people an outlet for feeling like they made a difference without any risk of change for the people in power. See how people like Musk and Zuckerberg cozy up with Trump just as easily as Obama.
I would be more amenable to political discussions on HN if they weren't almost guaranteed to turn into flame wars. But as it is, every single thread I see on current events in the US turns into an absolute train wreck. No insight is generated there, just culture warriors flinging hate at each other back and forth through the comments. I flag such posts because they are so reliably low quality, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
I’m guilty of some political debates here no doubt but man it seems like there have been a lot new accounts lately coming in red hot and starting fights
It’s tiring for me because it seems like everyone is just spitting mad about AI, and at every opportunity they breathlessly make sure to let us all know how useless AI is, and how they are indeed the one true programmer who has no need for such base and depraved additions to their workflow. There they are, standing (or maybe hunching over?) bold and proud, on the shores of Algorithmia where no LLM could despoil that one true paragon of software engineering, as if the Platonic forms themselves deigned to come out of the realm of legend merely to demonstrate to us mortals how software ought truly be written.
Anyway, I think AI is pretty neat and use it every day.
The opposite is true for many of us. Having used various models, tools, agent orchestration etc.. All of these sensationalist posts of 'When I use Model X with Tooling Y I can build the world!' just don't resonate and it becomes draining to constantly have all this pushed through my eyeballs and having to filter it out.
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 .
Feels the opposite for some of us. Lots of angry takes about people critiquing it, endless praise of how Claude code makes folks 1000x more productive, etc.
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.
Ok, so let's think about this. If we were to make a "hacker news for politics", how would we do that? It would have to be moderated, what would be the rules? Who wants to do it?
It sounds like HN relies on automated flamewar detection and not-immediately-moderated flagging and voting that doesn’t work that well for hot threads or poor user behavior.
I’ve been visiting since the late 2000s and have felt for some time that HN was really ADHD in its topics in the frontpage and that things frequently are unfairly flagged or voted down.
PG used to say something to the effect of “use humans to scale until you automate properly”; obviously the moderation needs human help.
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.
A random sampling of humans might be better. The problem with people that want to take things down and cause problems is they are not random. Brigaders, marketing agencies with an agenda, nation state propaganda teams, groups with religious motivations, idiots that have been propagandized to and think they are fighting the good war, all of these tip the scales away from user voting being useful on forums.
Current systems are indeed very vulnerable to professional manipulation - there is no real defence yet - and there are powerful players. But democratic sampling won't help much. Only the wrong guys are interested in voting - and once mass hysteria has set in any democratic majority will vote to censor anything that brings them out of their panic loop. Witch hunting lasted for hundreds of years.
I think just tagging things accordingly would be a lot better than raw censorship. In good old places of Usenet just tagging things as Spam worked quite well. Just filtering out some tags and putting some guys in a kill-file was good enough. But it required manual labour - and eventually that was too much. But with AI now I think tagging could be done efficiently.
If people like to filter out all the tags (sarcasm, math, physics, ...) they can have it - but the way how things work now is that a lot of important information just gets censored by stupid people everywhere. Just hiding information from everybody is quite harmful - being seriously uninformed already killed a lot of people...
One problem with tagging is how much false tagging bullshit happens. You can't trust the posters to put correct tags, but you cannot also expect malicious users not to put false tags to hide stories from others.
I've also always hated binary up/down voting systems. Slashdot had it better with meta moderation where you had a few options to choose from.
I suppose now with AI I could mock up a UI concept I call orange slice voting. Instead of a singular up/down vote, you get what looks like a orange sliced across its equator where each segment has a series of positive and negative vote options and the user gets one selection per post.
"I like this content", "I believe this is true", "Fits this thread", "Good post", and "Misinformation", "I don't like this content", "doesn't fit this thread", "etc"
These can be adjusted for a site as needed and gives more dimensions for people to search and filter by.
I wouldn't trust users for tagging. Let the AI tag things and let the users select what flavour of AI they want to use. The biggest problem are the people.
Especially people interested in tagging are really bad. Sane people have a life and don't have time for things like that. Web forums with a reputation system have proven that power users with a lot of reputation usually are the worst. After Usenet died it was like the trolls went to web forums, and as power users they were granted admin rights.
(I feel like "everything" is now "political" and thus not wanted here. Since Musk for instance now is a political figure, one cannot discuss X even when not a partisan topic about X. Or when some guy does big swoops that affect tech world wide, it's also not possible to discuss here. And I miss it, because I think HN is full of great people and I would like your take on these events.)
basically anything DOGE gets automatically flagged by someone, even though it's very much in the realm of technology. yes it intersects with politics, but most tech discussions do these days
Old tech nerds area surprised that technology took over the world and drives politics and want to hide their head in the sand.
Now, every article being political does suck, and we should probably drip feed it on the site, so the technology itself it what is primarily talked about, but ignoring it all together is dangerous.
Yeah, a bunch of Randian anarcho-capitalists-turned-fascist gain immense amount of power through tech, but any mention of "Hmm, maybe this is a bad idea??" gets "SSSHHHH!! No politics, please!!"
In a sense, "everything" is "political", and always has been. It's practically a given, since politics is literally about governing our lives, technical standards, industry regulations, etc. A ton of news, especially that worth discussing, happens within this lens. Now, if, for example, HN allows stories about twitter to be killed opaquely and selectively, this is a political act in and of itself & the selection is telling.
> In a sense, "everything" is "political", and always has been. It's practically a given, since politics is literally about governing our lives, technical standards, industry regulations, etc. A ton of news, especially that worth discussing, happens within this lens. Now, if, for example, HN allows stories about twitter to be killed opaquely and selectively, this is a political act in and of itself & the selection is telling.
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.
"An Unfolding Scientific Revolution in Cosmology" seems to be uncontentious in itself but that it is on economicsfromthetopdown.com raises a question about why it is there at all. Also there seems to be little that is newsworthy in it.
Yes, the moderators are in effect editors of a news media site with heavy social elements. Editorial decisions about articles should be handled differently from content moderation of user comments. There is a lot of editorial involvement (tweaking titles, hand placing articles on the front page, flag removal) but almost no transparency or communication. Sometimes a pinned comment from dang but that's it.
These actions aren't nefarious or anything but like, is there a policy? Or is it just if a mod happens to see something and they happen to feel like tweaking it, they do. There are actual (varying, but something) standards professionals follow on this stuff, or at least convincingly pretended they did until pretty recently. HN's editors don't take the site as seriously at it deserves or needs for its stature, influence, and subject matter.
I never understood the "flag" option on HN. Usually "flag" means to flag as inappropriate - porn, obvious spam, etc.
But, is it meant to be used as "downvote"? i.e. "I don't want to see this topic" or "I disagree with this opinion?". I guess the equivalent here is just lack of an upvote?
There seems to be a variety feedback that mean different things... e.g. sometimes I would like to say "I strongly disagree with this opinion", but I don't want to say "This shouldn't be on HN".
That's the biggest problem here: People using "flag" as a mega-downvote to eliminate things they don't want other people to read from the front page.
HN has a little "| hide |" button under each article that you can click if you don't want to see the article. I wish people just used that and moved on. The only reason you'd flag is if you don't want other people to see the article.
> I don’t think I have ever downvoted or flagged anything. I actually enjoy reading stuff which is controversial or against the grain, even if I don’t agree. Unfortunately voting here seems to be like reddit where you are really voting if you agree with the opinion, and then power users can just nuke your post/comments if they don’t like what you say.
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 don’t think I have ever downvoted or flagged anything. I actually enjoy reading stuff which is controversial or against the grain, even if I don’t agree. Unfortunately voting here seems to be like reddit where you are really voting if you agree with the opinion, and then power users can just nuke your post/comments if they don’t like what you say.
> That's the biggest problem here: People using "flag" as a mega-downvote to eliminate things they don't want other people to read from the front page.
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.
I agree this has recently been heavily abused by certain people who don't want to see articles from a particular topic (usually a controversial one). And I've seen HN comments where someone will say "I don't come to HN to read about XYZ, so I'm flagging all XYZ posts I see." Some of these do get reversed by the moderators (who do a good job all things considered), but by that time they're gone from the home page and fall into oblivion.
So what, that's just a single curated view of a wealth of submissions and comments. There are many people who rarely look at "the front page" and suffer not from frontophilia.
> and fall into oblivion.
Hardly. the /newcomments and /active pages clearly show where the actions at, if that's your thing. Many [flagged] and not-the-front-page submissions have huge comment conts and go back and forth for days.
You can see an alternative listing at https://hckrnews.com/ , you can also subscribe to the RSS feed.
I’m glad the flagging system exists on HN but I think it could do with improvements. I think it would be interesting to be able to see how many flags an item has gotten and who has flagged it.
There’s a clear pattern to items that get flagged (those that are critical of right wing causes in particular, Musk, DOGE, ICE etc) despite those topics generating a lot of discussion. It would be interesting to have clearer visibility into whether this kind of thing is spontaneous or whether there is a core group of power users censoring topics they dislike.
> There’s a clear pattern to items that get flagged (those that are critical of right wing causes in particular, Musk, DOGE, ICE etc)
Have you considered that it could be that left wingers are more likely to submit political posts on a technology forum rather than right wingers only flagging left wing posts?
Your faulty assumption is that any criticism of DOGE, ICE etc is automatically “left wing”. Not true.
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.
Agreed. While I really value HN's commitment to not becoming Reddit, the intersection of politics and tech (and their effects on our lives) is indisputable. If we can't talk about the government's use of technology as a tool of the state without it being considered a 'hot button' topic - especially considering the relevance that politics have always had to 'hackers' - then this is really just a site for discussions about technology fluff.
If we can't talk about the government's use of technology
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).
The biggest example of this is on military stuff. You can literally post northrup grumman placed articles from military trade journals fawning over some new weapon system and that's fine, that's technology. But any comment about the applications of that technology, who it will be used on, by whom, for whose benefit, with what consequences, all of that is off limits. That's political.
I fully understand that this is a legitimate preference of a lot of people. But it is revolting.
You must also understand this is hacker news, not politics news. Sure, this may be a comfortable area for many users and one of the only forum/news sites they browse, but nonetheless it's not a politics site. I, for one, would rather not see politics on this site. If I want to partake in that discussion, I'll go elsewhere to a place more "built" for it
But the definition of what counts as "politics" is entirely arbitrary. A thread complaining about, say, homeless people in SF will remain just fine. We'd all be better off with meaningful guidelines.
Different caliber, but same thing happens with Grok.
New Grok release? Fun, exciting, let’s all talk about it.
Well-researched articles describing Grok’s alignment with far-right/white supremacist politics and clear evidence of Musk’s thumb on the scale? Nothing to see here, flag flag flag.
Oh look, it’s Grokipedia! Surely this will be a font of well-sourced information!
Something I've been trying to work out the last couple years is how much is this a nazi site now, that we are reputation laundering by continuing to participate here in good faith. These moderation policies may not have been intended to create this outcome but they have, and they are not being changed in light of that.
Thank you Dang and team for your moderation efforts.
You’ve done a remarkably good job maintaining the quality of the community - we appreciate you.
+1 This. Consigned.
Somehow it got better over the years as typically moderation gets worse.
Maybe Dang got sick of Apple too, because there was a heavy hand on anything anti-Apple at one point.
+1, I would pay for HN because of Dan, Tom, et al.
Concur
Thank you for your service!
Where do I send my $?
Hacker News has a silent majority that works tirelessly to keep this site relatively free of ads disguised as articles and political news. I hope it stays that way. I'm just completely tired of those political echo chamber articles, even when I happen to agree with them.
What if there was a way for the “silent majority” (or something like it) to discuss political issues free of the impetus to polarization? Surely that would be a lot better than echo chambers.
Hackernews style apoliticism strikes me as wanting to chameleon to whatever side is perceived as winning the political game. I think it’s a nihilistic stance.
We need to be able to be political without the zealotry. Politics, of all things, is not a zero sum game.
All my social media feeds are filled with political rage bait. Yes, tech is political, and yes, techies implicitly take sides; but I really don't need another source for all the political headlines of the day.
That is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about escaping that.
I’m frustrated with how narrow of view people here are taking on politics.
Partisan politics has grown into a nasty oppositional quagmire.
But, Politics in general is defined as “The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its internal and external affairs.” From a duck duck go search. That is pretty broad.
Open your minds! There is more out there than you think.
But Hacker News is full of "hackers" and computer science grads. Why would you expect to find nuanced discussion of governing here? I don't come to Hacker News for discussion of surgical procedures either because the surgeons are not on here.
This might be heresy, but a CS background doesn't make you an expert on government, governance, or politics. Just as politicians seem woefully uninformed on computer science topics. So a political discussion on Hacker News will naturally lean towards popular conceptions of politics: that is partisanship, slogans, and the other stuff that makes social media politics so toxic. "The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation" is not going to enter the picture.
I guess I’m making the mistake of assuming others have taken a similar intellectual path as I have.
I’m an Elecrical and Computer Engineer (ECE) by schooling. But I did pay attention in my mandatory liberal arts class. I took a Political Philosophy course, and a 400 level History of US Foreign Policy, where I was the only non-history major.
People inevitably opine on government/politics. And because of that I think they should delve deeper. I think that delving deeper and having civil conversation are how we escape the toxic mess media currently dishes out.
> I guess I’m making the mistake of assuming others have taken a similar intellectual path as I have.
Oh, come on. I know a lot of people who are highly educated and intelligent but fall for the same outrage bait as everyone else... we're bombarded with so much political talking points that we don't carefully consider every headline, verify every source, and then publish nuanced takes on social media where the stories change every hour.
The bottom line is that, with all respect, I absolutely don't care about the political hot takes of people on HN. And I'm sure they don't care about mine. I know where to go when I want to talk politics. If I want measured takes from scholars, I can read their columns or blogs. If I want to argue, I'll do it with family and real-world friends.
I think the danger with political discussion is that the expression of an idea is as important as the idea itself. This means that to have a productive political discussion you either need:
1. Very very high verbal skills so that each person can communicate their idea in a way that doesn't leave (much) room for interpretation or a bad-faith reading.
2. A community that "steelmans" each-other's ideas and consistently chooses the best-faith interpretation of what the other person is saying.
(1) is impossible in a forum that accepts folks from a range of backgrounds and abilities. (2) is generally impossible in a public forum on the internet. Even if everyone on Hacker News stuck to this principle, outsiders would not. You'd get posts on reddit about how "Hacker News is a haven for Nazis". Or posts on X about how "Communists are invading the tech community" and ultimately a lot of bad press for Y Combinator that I'm sure they'd rather not have.
Failure of 1&2 is why there are flame wars yes, but I thought the motto on here is often "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."
> (1) is impossible in a forum that accepts folks from a range of backgrounds and abilities.
This by itself doesn't account for why there is significantly less low-value political comments on here than reddit, to which (1) also technically applies. For (2), taking the best-faith interpretation is already in the HN guidelines. I'm also guessing that the mods let many flagged politically posts by users stay flagged because from experience they "know" which posts will trigger flame wars or low-value comments from the community because of the "past performance predicts future performance" thing. (ie, the unsaid thing is they don't trust the community to obey 1&2 on those posts due to past track record).
I for one would love to read past discussions of historic political events as they happen live from a community that includes industrialists of the past and their well-paid or high-skilled employees as well as people from academia in related fields. So why limit posterity's ability to do the same?
Great points, I absolutely agree.
I agree, but I don't know of a better place to discuss current events on the internet. I can at least expect that the people are educated and intelligent (relative to the average internet user) and there's a cultural of thoughtful discussion.
Every Reddit thread I see on politics these days is just... rabid seething. At this point they remind me of how my elderly far-right relatives posted on Facebook circa 2010. I broadly agree with them (orange man bad) but there's so much misinformation and sloppy thinking that it's useless. There are probably some smaller and more thoughtful political subreddits out there, but if so I haven't found them
EDIT: Now that I think about it some more, I disagree with your sentiment that we should leave the politicking to the politicians. Democracy requires a population that has some idea of what's going on. I think discussion and disagreement is a great way to sharpen one's thinking
Politics is the mind killer.
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.
"No Politics on the front page" is itself a highly politically charged policy: One that favors the status quo and favors hiding wrongdoing. I wish HN users who want "no politics" would admit that they are just asking for a different kind of political bias from the site.
That seems analogous to the "atheism is a religion" fallacy. No, not wanting to see politics in one very specific location is clearly not a political stance.
Where does "politics" end, then? What about articles pointing out a tech company's ethical wrongdoing? Or about their legal troubles? How about the technology behind war fighting drones? Or software's role in mass surveillance, war crimes and ethnic cleansing? Are these all off limits because they are inherently political? By banning these and similar topics, HN's purpose becomes more and more about whitewashing the industry and less and less about honest discussion.
I wish HN users who want HN to be about politics would be honest about simply wanting HN to be a political echo chamber of their preferred flavor, instead of hiding behind the flimsy excuses like "everything is political actually".
Every place on the internet where discussion on politics is "encouraged" is a heavy handed echo chamber. I think people wanting to discuss politics here specifically want to engage in a reasonably unbiased moderated venue, and people not wanting to discuss politics either want to focus on hacker news (very reasonable) or keep their politics over at [echo chamber X/Y/Z] (bad for society by isolating people in self reinforcing bubbles and not engaging outside of them). I don't envy Dan's or Tom's job, but am thankful for the balance they strike.
I don’t think people actually want yet another echo chamber. Anyone who has been exercising even a modicum of critical thinking sees where echo chambers lead.
I think a forum where bad faith polarizers are downvoted and good faith open minded discussion is rewarded would go a long ways.
Do you understand the magnitude of the thing are you asking for?
Trying to maintain a civilized discussion about modern politics is like walking a tightrope. You can say "anyone who knows what a tightrope is sees that falling off it would be bad", and it's true, but, does saying that mean that you'll avoid the fall? The failure mode is extremely obvious but not at all easy to avoid.
If you don't have an intuition of "partisan politics are inherently corrosive to human minds", I suggest you get one. It's not impossible to have a civilized discussion of politics, but it is unlikely and unnatural and unstable. It's very, very, very hard to set up and maintain an environment like this in practice.
Does your same argument not also apply to people who want HN to be 'non-political'? Since just from your post history recently I can see that you've leapt into some particularly political posts of your own [1] [2]. I'm particularly open about what I believe and post in, but usually people that say they want something non-political actually indicates that they precisely want an echo chamber.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46614467
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46419993
> I wish HN users who want "no politics" would admit that they are just asking for a different kind of political bias from the site.
You're asking for them to admit something that isn't true. There's nothing political about recognizing that political discussions are a complete shitshow and wanting them to not crowd out everything else.
> I wish HN users who want "no politics" would admit that they are just asking for a different kind of political bias from the site.
I won't admit that, because it's not true. You saying that it's true doesn't make it so.
I wonder if the push for "no politics" is actually a consistent principle, or if it's just a reaction to how much the current news cycle challenges the community's comfort zone.
Someone should look at the flagging rates for political threads from 2012, 2018, and today. It would show whether our definition of a "distraction" is based on content quality, or if the appetite for "apoliticism" fluctuates depending on which side of the aisle holds the megaphone.
Has anyone done a sentiment analysis on flagging patterns versus administrative shifts? I suspect the "politics is a mind-killer" argument is a lot more popular when the headlines don't align with the reader's own worldview.
It seems to me you think of politics as being the politics of the sensationalist 24 hour news cycle. Sure, that is a mind killer.
But I encourage you to take a look at politics as a broader thing. Read some academic, foundational political philosophy works. Politics in its broad sense is inescapable. Better to know it and be an active participant than to leave it up to others.
You start by allowing "politics as a broader thing", flash forward a year, then you notice that at any given time, at least 20% of the frontpage is occupied by people screeching their throats raw with some incendiary hyper-partisan rhetoric.
The failure mode is rather obvious, and also extremely hard to avoid in practice.
You’ll note I never suggested that hackernews was the forum for this.
If that failure mode is inevitable in hackernews culture, what does that say about the quality of the technical & business content?
"If putting rat poison in the burgers would cause people to die, what does this say about the quality of the burgers?"
Very little.
I've been told most hackers are humans - not machines or some kind of alien species. So I fully expect hackers to have the flaws people tend to do.
Partisan politics have a nasty habit of capitalizing on human flaws, and bringing out the worst in people who engage deeply in them. Which, in online communities, can have a self-reinforcing effect.
I’m not talking about partisan politics.
Do some reading about political philosophy and you’ll see how terribly shallow partisan politics is, and how deep the foundations of politics are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_philosophy
And yet we are talking about partisan politics. Because it's the lowest common denominator of politics. Because it's the failure mode.
You can say "not all politics are actively toxic to human minds" and point at 18th century philosophical works all day long, but we both know that 18th century philosophical works were never the concern.
You are persistently referring to partisan politics in your comments. I am not.
I have repeatedly distanced myself from partisan politics in this discussion. I believe I have not made a single statement supporting partisan politics, much less a particular party, in this entire discussion. If you disagree, perhaps you can quote an example.
My observation is a lot of people who claim to be apolitical, suddenly become very political whenever China is mentioned.
A 'near-total ban' would involve basically banning the entire site of HN, and also tends to expose the inherent hypocrisy in any platform attempting to be 'non-political'.
For example, HN had massive threads years ago dedicated to glazing everything Elon Musk did. Now, conveniently, any discussion of Elon Musk, Grok etc is now flagged and considered political as the winds have changed to be largely negative. Same goes for a lot of stuff people took for granted in tech, because now that stuff was made part of the system that makes our lives worse.
Tech and finance have wedded to each other and finance has lobbied for politics so hard.
So I don't think that tech and politics can be seperated from each other and this shows why.
Earlier, I don't think that appreciating Elon Musk was considered political for the most part (well I read his biography and I thought he was just interesting guy) but his recent acts on twitter (I refuse to call it X) etc. just show how bubbly even I or people who read his biography were.
After some new reports on him, I feel much more in disdain of man than not. My cousin still glazes Elon tho.
I feel like there is some dunning kruger effect at play here. I read his biography -> I feel smart -> I say Elon's smart previously on HN -> elon acts dumb as mouse with ketamine fueled addiction -> but I supported Elon earlier -> most people don't want internal contradictions so they will try to justify it -> Gets into glazing elon -> Flags people who give genuine criticism of the guy now -> gets to the far alt right
I feel like the problem is more so the extremism.
There are some real issues happening in the world and news is covering it but some hackernews users definitely flag anything that they find not fitting in their world order.
I just want to say that its okay to have internal contradiction because we are all human and we can evaluate people wrongly. Doesn't mean we have to stick with that.
I remember watching pirates of silicon valley when I was in middle school (it was in a pendrive connected to TV so whenever satellite connection got lost, I used to watch it), I even went ahead in school and gave a speech on steve jobs, next and everything so much so that the teacher (he was a teacher for such extra activities started calling me steve jobs)
Anyways, my point is that it was only later in life where I realized that althoguh steve jobs was a good businessman, how valuable steve wozniak and other underrated people are and how ethically questionable xerox's decision was and his personal life too...
I just want to say that there is a nuance about steve jobs as well, he was pretty rude to his employees.
Like I feel like there is just nuance to the whole situation that people forget in HN
Seconded. Another way of saying this is that avoiding politics benefits the status quo.
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.
HN also has a hide feature. If you don't want to see something & have it replaced by the next story, you have agency here as well.
There's almost always some political post on the front page about China/EU/Russia bad. They only get removed if it's about America.
>silent majority that works tirelessly to keep this site relatively free of ads disguised as articles and political news.
And just like the other "Silent majority", this is utter tripe.
Every other submission is an ad FFS. Nobody is doing anything to remove ads. HN Itself is an ad.
It's not "Silent", as these people love nothing more than reminding you that topics they don't like are objectively "politics" and "Don't belong on HN" even though HN tried that once and it was terrible
And they aren't "Majority", because the flagging mechanism requires shockingly few flags before a post is knocked off the front page, and if anyone tries to plead any case in the comments, that also knocks it off the page, as a "flamewar", because apparently on a place that insists it is curating thoughtful discussion, high velocity discussion is impossible?
It's a heckler's veto is what it is.
> it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
Not hard to believe at all. While I don't flag any posts. I have no interest in LLM related content.
I also actively use AI tools btw. It's just tiring seeing everything with AI suffix including monitors.
I like significant LLM news and even well-justified opinions.
I don’t like seeing essentially the same LLM opinion and justification again and again. This happens with both pro-AI and anti-AI opinions. And some of the justifications (on both sides) are poor. For example, I don’t want to read “LLMs have improved my productivity so much!” without evidence; show me a mostly AI-generated program and code, and explain the (AI-augmented) development process. On the other side, I’ve seen the “LLM inevitablism” argument multiple times, and…I don’t agree with really any of it. It ignores that LLMs are useful (to some extent), so they’ll probably be part of the future no matter what an average reader does; and if LLMs aren’t useful enough to replace everyone and everything (currently they aren’t), they won’t be all of the future, which even the people claiming inevitability are saying (and those who do claim that future LLMs will do everything, you can point to current LLMs and the CEOs of AI companies who, even in their position, are lowering expectations).
I wish hacker news had filters, ... if LLM, AI, or other hyped tech... make it hidden
I made a bookmarklet for that back when ChatGTP was introduced - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33890678. It needs updating, but the gist should still work.
javascript:(function() {function match(text) {return text.match(/((chat\s?g[pt]{2})|claude|llm|gen\s?ai|((^|\s)ai(\s|$))|anthropic|mistral|gemini|open\s?ai|prompt\sengineer|prompt\sinject)/i)}; if (document.getElementsByClassName("comment-tree").length) { Array.from(document.getElementsByClassName("comtr")).filter(elt => match(elt.innerText)).forEach(e => e.parentNode.removeChild(e)); } else { Array.from(document.getElementsByTagName("a")).filter(elt => match(elt.innerText)).forEach(a => { const tr = a.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode; const table = tr.parentNode; const details = tr.nextSibling; const spacer = details?.nextSibling; table.removeChild(tr); if (details) table.removeChild(details); if (spacer)table.removeChild(spacer);});}})();
Build it! Show HN!
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)
This actually looks really cool! Especially the dark mode and the feature of showing the comments reply to which actually is something that I wanted as well!
Honestly this is how Hackernews should look haha!
It does take some time in firefox/zen tho in the start so its not really instant (especially the bars which are shown next to the comment to indicate who they are responding to)
For some reason also, Hackernews stopped working when I installed this extension, my wifi may have glitched and I reconnected to wifi so its working now.
It's pretty cool fwiw.
I'm fairly certain I've seen someone create RSS feeds of HN, in which case your RSS client should be have filtering options.
You don't need to "create" an RSS feed, HN has RSS. See:
https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
and/or
https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss
Someone made one a while back
This should do the trick for you: https://hcker.news/?exclude=llm,vibe,openai,anthropic,claude...
Top result on that is currently "Show HN: ChartGPU – WebGPU-powered charting library" so maybe it's not as robust as it sounds.
Should have made it more clear. These are keyword exclusion filters and the link I provided was to hide llm-related stuff. You're free to add more keywords to the filter.
I’d like to see social credit score mechanisms hidden. Reputation systems reinforce cults of celebrity and turns nerds into tyrannical hall monitors.
A lot of it is hidden. If you offend the moderators they put restrictions on your account.
No they don't. There are no hidden restrictions on HN.
There are, Dang has talked publicly about some of the mechanisms they've used to try and deter bad posting. Most of them are gone iirc (such as shadow banning and artificially slowing down the site) but rate limiting is still one of the mechanisms they have in place.
I guess you've never been greeted with "You're posting too fast!" on your first post of the day.
Depends on what you mean by hidden restrictions. If someone's ability to vote is disabled without notifying them, and they can still upvote or downvote but it has no effect, would you call that a hidden restriction?
Ironically, LLMs would be perfect for implementing such a filter.
No, they wouldn't.
We've been doing Bayesian content (aka spam) filtering for over 20 years, based in no small part on Paul Graham's essay "A plan for spam". According to HP [1], a home computer at the time had a single 1.5Ghz core and 256Mb of RAM.
Using LLMs would achieve essentially the same while requiring a couple orders of magnitude more resources.
[1] https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/specifications-pers...
Would those filters be keyword-based only? One benefit of an LLM-based filter I can imagine is that it has a much better understanding of the meaning of text.
> AI suffix including monitors
What now ?
My quick google-fu brought me this : https://www.samsung.com/ca/monitors/smart-monitor/
I guess that if I could I adapt to cleartype when I ditched my 16" VGA Philips CRT, I'll be ready for "AI-powered Immersive Experiences", whatever that means in Visual Studio Code.
I heard of some gaming focused one, one of the examples given was AI highlighting of enemies...
tiring seeing everything with AI suffix
Reminds me of when everything was e-something. Then i-something. Then net-something. Then my-something. Then cyber-something.
You can tell the age of a tech product by which naming trend it attached to itself.
Don’t forget about cloud-something!
Related: HP Offers 'That Cloud Thing Everyone Is Talking About’
https://youtu.be/9ntPxdWAWq8
On the web 3.0 blockchain.
Or somethingr, crypto-something, somethingify, somethingly, something.io, sommmething / somettthing / somethingg, sqmething, somethyng, etc.
something.io is still going strong
Poland is still stuck in the "e" era, with a little bit of "cyber" thrown in...
I have a buddy who was a young entrepeneur, during the Dot-Com era. He renamed his company to Company Name Dot Com. A few months later the bubble burst, and those last two words were a smelly fart to potential investors.
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.
Whoever finds the next interesting trend to talk about after AI is gonna get a lot of upvotes.
crypto, AI/LLM... what's next in this progression?
Genetic programming, new life forms built for specialized tasks (eating plastics, growable solar panels, etc)
Space and Robots.
It could be 3D printing if the manufacturing economy collapses
With modern day clankers, you never have to wash your dishes manually ever again! /s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher
I'm tired of the hype too. Yes, coding agents are useful but the bubble seems primed to pop. Agents are not profitable enough to justify the billions of investments in data centers and chips.
Looks like a majority of it’s all politics and LLMs. I think we’re all as a collective tired of both and want something ‘interesting’ for once to post.
I get that. And if an LLM story disappears from the front page—oh well.
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.)
It’s not that the quality of politics posts here are very high (you get plenty of “engineers outside their domain” type stuff). Just, it is hard to find sites with
* Active political discussion communities
* That haven’t swung dramatically to some extreme and eventually worn down the local “opposition” party
I’ve got boards I go to for politics but the ratio is so lopsided, and the one or two remaining posters that disagree with the consensus seem to be more or less sticking around out of contrarianism (which unfortunately decreases the quality of their posts).
I think if HN let too many political threads stick around, that would destroy the whatever quality the discussion has.
I always agree with a good-faith, well-reasoned political argument. And HN generally seems to have a much more educated base than most of the other stuff out there--but agreed with the other person that I think it's probably best to keep that content off of HN, unfortunately.
Please, point me to "Wonk News" then so I can get a reasoned discussion about what the hell is going on in the world.
That used to be possible with a carefully curated Twitter feed, then a series of bad decisions made that impossible.
It's no longer even the case that reason helps. Wonkery has got run over by mass emotion.
> That used to be possible with a carefully curated Twitter feed, then a series of bad decisions made that impossible
But you wouldn't know from reading HN that X, the tech company, has become a shitshow, as all discussions about this are "political" and flagged by users.
I feel the same way. I crave high quality political discussion about what's going on in the US and this is one of the few places I can get it. Most places just offer memes and hot takes.
The low quality posts and low quality responses and them being flagged makes the users affected, to use the moderators' terminology, "activated". It's not conducive to maintaining the HN we know and love.
Also the site moderators have plainly said that moderating these controversial political threads is a strain on them. You may be enjoying yourself but someone else is paying a hefty price.
Far less concerned about ThE StReSs Of MoDeRaToRs and more concerned about legal citizens getting drug out of their home at gunpoint in front of their children.
Nah, politics is a cancer that's infected everything. Let the addicts get their fix someplace else
Hand-waving everything as "politics" is not healthy. It's necessary for us to be able to make collective decisions on societal questions which is what "politics" are.
I remembered when politics used to be called “current events”.
HN is the wrong forum for this.
So I, as a software engineer, have to deal with the impacts of this administration both making my employment harder as well as terrorizing the city I live in. Where do you suggest I would go to share these issues other than the site that is specifically for hackers and tech workers?
I get that people want to make the place 'non-political', but a lot of us in the US live in major metropolitan areas and are very directly impacted by all of the shit going on.
"non-political" == pro status quo
No. It means "sick to death of hearing about politics everywhere I go and I am desperate for the occasional respite from that madness". Your interpretation is extremely bad faith.
It may not be your intent, but it has the effect of supporting the status quo.
The idea that hackers are non political is very silly and very unbacked up by evidence.
This is what the biggest names in the VC class want you to think as they continue to enrich themselves, while (in the USA at least) they support a regime that is growing in its authoritarian output.
Thiel, Musk, et. al., support, for example, Curtis Yarvin, who believes that democracy is a failed experiment and should be replaced with an all-powerful "CEO"
> Thiel, Musk, et. al., support, for example, Curtis Yarvin, who believes that democracy is a failed experiment and should be replaced with an all-powerful "CEO"
These guys all benefit when the No-Politics Purity Brigade drives by and flag-kills every article pointing out their wrongdoing as "political." By flagging this stuff, they're actually making HN more political: They are defending billionaires, their agendas, and their status-quo politics.
"Let the addicts get their fix someplace else"
Open to suggestions from anyone.
Seeing the kind of discourse you get here, how about Reddit?
Everything is political. Including ignoring politics.
Only if you make it political.
This is such a weird idea. Everything is political because there are no universally agreed upon values. Humans literally do not always agree on what the purpose of society is, what is good and what is bad, how much power we should have over one another and nature. And, as far as I can tell, neither god nor philosophy seems willing to descend from heaven in order to resolve our differences. Thus, we are stuck discussing things amongst ourselves and deciding how to move forward, a process called politics.
No, just because there are no universally agreed upon values does not make everything political. People can, and frequently do, agree to live and let live when they have differences of opinion rather than wage bitter wars over those differences. We can, and must, have spaces where we can enjoy things in life rather than having division fostered between us 24/7. There is no idea more toxic to the well being of society than the idea of "everything is political".
"Live and let live" is a political philosophy. I don't see what is so hard about this concept: human beings typically don't agree on everything. They have to decide what to do. That process is called politics, whether it happens to result in a live and let live attitude towards many things or the oppressive politics of the Soviet Union. When you tell me that in many contexts people should not feel pressure to adhere to a specific political line you are, in fact, expressing a (non-universal) political ideal, one which you don't need to search much to find counter-ideologies to.
I happen to agree with you: my preference is one in which dogmatic and performative adherence to a specific ideology is discouraged but that doesn't make me non-political, especially if I happen to live in a society where (for example) religious fundamentalism is the main cultural artifact.
At a deeper level, assertions that we should "remain apolitical" are, in the end, simply assertions that the status quo is "sufficient" or even good and that people who have some difference of opinion about how human affairs are managed are "bothersome" for bringing it up. Sometimes this is motivated by a misapprehension or genuine (if incorrect, in my opinion) belief that the status quo reflects some obviously "correct" view of things and thus questioning it is pointless, bothersome, or even dangerous.
I think political differences should (for the most part) be tolerated, resolved through discussion and democratic processes, and that a healthy society is one in which people are (to the extent possible given other goals) allowed to live as they please, but I do not think of this as a non-political goal. I mean, just look around, plenty of people want to take that sort of society away from you.
This is coming across to me as "things I don't like are 'politics'" if I'm being honest.
"I'm not political, I stay out of politics and I don't vote"
... time passes ...
"What do you mean the people that I didn't vote for are sending me to war to die?!, I'm not political, why am I involved in this" --Modern day Russia.
Its a tired trope, but you are wrong. The haves and the have nots define everything about our society and Not Addressing The Situation is a very active choice, thus politics.
When is the last time that ignoring cancer has stopped it from metastasizing?
I come to HN to escape endless ragebait and political drama. HN is for me what places like Ars Technica or Slashdot used to be.
Thanks, @dang! keep up the good work.
If the world around you isn't "interesting" right now you are extremely lucky.
AI, politics, and discussing how HN isn't what it used to be. That's all that's here now. HN isn't what it used to be.
I started coming here in the early 2010s, and honestly I like its mix now better than the late 2010s, when SaaS was stagnating and every new company was Uber/AirBnB for X and people were trying to hype crypto constantly. It's still worse than the early years though.
> AI, politics, and discussing how HN isn't what it used to be. That's all that's here now. HN isn't what it used to be.
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.
Nah, we occasionally spice it up with a thread of [Apple/Electron/Mozilla] bandwagon hatred.
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.
HN was 10x more political 15 years ago.
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.
HN has always had political discussions as long as I've been here.
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.
We live in a society, the government provides (or provides permission for) roads, utilities, housing and a boatload of other rules & regulation to protect people.
Virtually any discussion around anything will always lead back to politics because it is the central body that allows us to live the lives we want, this is why voting is important!
Voting is not important to me. Never have voted, never will.
Including on HN?
It's like returning the shopping cart at the grocery store. Other people have more work to do because you chose to do less.
The action may not matter, you are free to choose, but not doing it does make you a bad citizen. Personal importance doesn't factor into it, this is an external designation.
> Other people have more work to do because you chose to do less.
Not voting in America does not increase the burden of other people. My state has voted the same in Presidential elections for two decades. Local politicians almost always run unopposed and I don't think anyone in my lifetime has won here without an endorsement from the party in favor, so they are picked behind closed doors. Our state governor elections can swing, but ultimately one vote is a vanishingly insignificant portion of that.
I vote every year out of habit, but putting the "I VOTED" sticker conspicuously on a trash can probably makes more of a difference than casting my ballot. The two party system is designed to give people an outlet for feeling like they made a difference without any risk of change for the people in power. See how people like Musk and Zuckerberg cozy up with Trump just as easily as Obama.
I would be more amenable to political discussions on HN if they weren't almost guaranteed to turn into flame wars. But as it is, every single thread I see on current events in the US turns into an absolute train wreck. No insight is generated there, just culture warriors flinging hate at each other back and forth through the comments. I flag such posts because they are so reliably low quality, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." -- Heraclitus
I’m guilty of some political debates here no doubt but man it seems like there have been a lot new accounts lately coming in red hot and starting fights
It’s tiring for me because it seems like everyone is just spitting mad about AI, and at every opportunity they breathlessly make sure to let us all know how useless AI is, and how they are indeed the one true programmer who has no need for such base and depraved additions to their workflow. There they are, standing (or maybe hunching over?) bold and proud, on the shores of Algorithmia where no LLM could despoil that one true paragon of software engineering, as if the Platonic forms themselves deigned to come out of the realm of legend merely to demonstrate to us mortals how software ought truly be written.
Anyway, I think AI is pretty neat and use it every day.
The opposite is true for many of us. Having used various models, tools, agent orchestration etc.. All of these sensationalist posts of 'When I use Model X with Tooling Y I can build the world!' just don't resonate and it becomes draining to constantly have all this pushed through my eyeballs and having to filter it out.
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.
>the one true programmer who has no need
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 .
Feels the opposite for some of us. Lots of angry takes about people critiquing it, endless praise of how Claude code makes folks 1000x more productive, etc.
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.
Ok, so let's think about this. If we were to make a "hacker news for politics", how would we do that? It would have to be moderated, what would be the rules? Who wants to do it?
Look no further than to your parliament / congress / senate debate. They probably have a +5 hour session from today for you to listen to. Enjoy!
yeah, but where can the fine minds of hn comment on these debates other than the void?
You just have to get yourself elected first in order to post or comment in parliament.
(2024)
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230513
Reading that, I feel bad for dang.
It sounds like HN relies on automated flamewar detection and not-immediately-moderated flagging and voting that doesn’t work that well for hot threads or poor user behavior.
I’ve been visiting since the late 2000s and have felt for some time that HN was really ADHD in its topics in the frontpage and that things frequently are unfairly flagged or voted down.
PG used to say something to the effect of “use humans to scale until you automate properly”; obviously the moderation needs human help.
The question is if humans are any better.
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.
A random sampling of humans might be better. The problem with people that want to take things down and cause problems is they are not random. Brigaders, marketing agencies with an agenda, nation state propaganda teams, groups with religious motivations, idiots that have been propagandized to and think they are fighting the good war, all of these tip the scales away from user voting being useful on forums.
Current systems are indeed very vulnerable to professional manipulation - there is no real defence yet - and there are powerful players. But democratic sampling won't help much. Only the wrong guys are interested in voting - and once mass hysteria has set in any democratic majority will vote to censor anything that brings them out of their panic loop. Witch hunting lasted for hundreds of years.
I think just tagging things accordingly would be a lot better than raw censorship. In good old places of Usenet just tagging things as Spam worked quite well. Just filtering out some tags and putting some guys in a kill-file was good enough. But it required manual labour - and eventually that was too much. But with AI now I think tagging could be done efficiently.
If people like to filter out all the tags (sarcasm, math, physics, ...) they can have it - but the way how things work now is that a lot of important information just gets censored by stupid people everywhere. Just hiding information from everybody is quite harmful - being seriously uninformed already killed a lot of people...
One problem with tagging is how much false tagging bullshit happens. You can't trust the posters to put correct tags, but you cannot also expect malicious users not to put false tags to hide stories from others.
I've also always hated binary up/down voting systems. Slashdot had it better with meta moderation where you had a few options to choose from.
I suppose now with AI I could mock up a UI concept I call orange slice voting. Instead of a singular up/down vote, you get what looks like a orange sliced across its equator where each segment has a series of positive and negative vote options and the user gets one selection per post.
"I like this content", "I believe this is true", "Fits this thread", "Good post", and "Misinformation", "I don't like this content", "doesn't fit this thread", "etc"
These can be adjusted for a site as needed and gives more dimensions for people to search and filter by.
I wouldn't trust users for tagging. Let the AI tag things and let the users select what flavour of AI they want to use. The biggest problem are the people.
Especially people interested in tagging are really bad. Sane people have a life and don't have time for things like that. Web forums with a reputation system have proven that power users with a lot of reputation usually are the worst. After Usenet died it was like the trolls went to web forums, and as power users they were granted admin rights.
I browse HN too much, I recognised most the removals as simply recent duplicates.
In the january archive [0] I can't find this flagged story [1]. Was it already fallen off when flag-killed? Or doesn't it catch these?
So many important tech related debates lately being silenced by mass flagging. Luckily they remain in https://news.ycombinator.com/active
(I feel like "everything" is now "political" and thus not wanted here. Since Musk for instance now is a political figure, one cannot discuss X even when not a partisan topic about X. Or when some guy does big swoops that affect tech world wide, it's also not possible to discuss here. And I miss it, because I think HN is full of great people and I would like your take on these events.)
[0]: https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals/blob/ma... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46503199
basically anything DOGE gets automatically flagged by someone, even though it's very much in the realm of technology. yes it intersects with politics, but most tech discussions do these days
>everything" is now "political"
Old tech nerds area surprised that technology took over the world and drives politics and want to hide their head in the sand.
Now, every article being political does suck, and we should probably drip feed it on the site, so the technology itself it what is primarily talked about, but ignoring it all together is dangerous.
Yeah, a bunch of Randian anarcho-capitalists-turned-fascist gain immense amount of power through tech, but any mention of "Hmm, maybe this is a bad idea??" gets "SSSHHHH!! No politics, please!!"
In a sense, "everything" is "political", and always has been. It's practically a given, since politics is literally about governing our lives, technical standards, industry regulations, etc. A ton of news, especially that worth discussing, happens within this lens. Now, if, for example, HN allows stories about twitter to be killed opaquely and selectively, this is a political act in and of itself & the selection is telling.
> In a sense, "everything" is "political", and always has been. It's practically a given, since politics is literally about governing our lives, technical standards, industry regulations, etc. A ton of news, especially that worth discussing, happens within this lens. Now, if, for example, HN allows stories about twitter to be killed opaquely and selectively, this is a political act in and of itself & the selection is telling.
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.
Publishing to GitHub using git is a very interesting mechanism, crafty and hacky, love it!
Somewhat related, I use this script to see which posts are new on frontpage. Also shows rank change but I don't look at that anymore. https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/e7c9ed3936ba69e522f8cb38...
"An Unfolding Scientific Revolution in Cosmology" seems to be uncontentious in itself but that it is on economicsfromthetopdown.com raises a question about why it is there at all. Also there seems to be little that is newsworthy in it.
> there seems to be little that is newsworthy in it.
Newsworthiness is not a criteria, officially; it's intellectual curiosity. A FPP could talk about Newton's Laws, which would not be newsworthy.
And yet it’s an excellent article and shatters scientific dogmatism some what like Nietzsche took a big dump on c10y.
I wish HN would add something in the page that indicates that flags were turned off for a post.
Yes, the moderators are in effect editors of a news media site with heavy social elements. Editorial decisions about articles should be handled differently from content moderation of user comments. There is a lot of editorial involvement (tweaking titles, hand placing articles on the front page, flag removal) but almost no transparency or communication. Sometimes a pinned comment from dang but that's it.
These actions aren't nefarious or anything but like, is there a policy? Or is it just if a mod happens to see something and they happen to feel like tweaking it, they do. There are actual (varying, but something) standards professionals follow on this stuff, or at least convincingly pretended they did until pretty recently. HN's editors don't take the site as seriously at it deserves or needs for its stature, influence, and subject matter.
I never understood the "flag" option on HN. Usually "flag" means to flag as inappropriate - porn, obvious spam, etc.
But, is it meant to be used as "downvote"? i.e. "I don't want to see this topic" or "I disagree with this opinion?". I guess the equivalent here is just lack of an upvote?
There seems to be a variety feedback that mean different things... e.g. sometimes I would like to say "I strongly disagree with this opinion", but I don't want to say "This shouldn't be on HN".
That's the biggest problem here: People using "flag" as a mega-downvote to eliminate things they don't want other people to read from the front page.
HN has a little "| hide |" button under each article that you can click if you don't want to see the article. I wish people just used that and moved on. The only reason you'd flag is if you don't want other people to see the article.
> I don’t think I have ever downvoted or flagged anything. I actually enjoy reading stuff which is controversial or against the grain, even if I don’t agree. Unfortunately voting here seems to be like reddit where you are really voting if you agree with the opinion, and then power users can just nuke your post/comments if they don’t like what you say.
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 don’t think I have ever downvoted or flagged anything. I actually enjoy reading stuff which is controversial or against the grain, even if I don’t agree. Unfortunately voting here seems to be like reddit where you are really voting if you agree with the opinion, and then power users can just nuke your post/comments if they don’t like what you say.
> That's the biggest problem here: People using "flag" as a mega-downvote to eliminate things they don't want other people to read from the front page.
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.
I agree this has recently been heavily abused by certain people who don't want to see articles from a particular topic (usually a controversial one). And I've seen HN comments where someone will say "I don't come to HN to read about XYZ, so I'm flagging all XYZ posts I see." Some of these do get reversed by the moderators (who do a good job all things considered), but by that time they're gone from the home page and fall into oblivion.
> by that time they're gone from the home page
So what, that's just a single curated view of a wealth of submissions and comments. There are many people who rarely look at "the front page" and suffer not from frontophilia.
> and fall into oblivion.
Hardly. the /newcomments and /active pages clearly show where the actions at, if that's your thing. Many [flagged] and not-the-front-page submissions have huge comment conts and go back and forth for days.
You can see an alternative listing at https://hckrnews.com/ , you can also subscribe to the RSS feed.
Flag is to disappear stories that are inconvenient.
Ie democracy is burning to the ground in the US but we need to hear more about LLMs and raising a funding round.
I’m glad the flagging system exists on HN but I think it could do with improvements. I think it would be interesting to be able to see how many flags an item has gotten and who has flagged it.
There’s a clear pattern to items that get flagged (those that are critical of right wing causes in particular, Musk, DOGE, ICE etc) despite those topics generating a lot of discussion. It would be interesting to have clearer visibility into whether this kind of thing is spontaneous or whether there is a core group of power users censoring topics they dislike.
> There’s a clear pattern to items that get flagged (those that are critical of right wing causes in particular, Musk, DOGE, ICE etc)
Have you considered that it could be that left wingers are more likely to submit political posts on a technology forum rather than right wingers only flagging left wing posts?
Your faulty assumption is that any criticism of DOGE, ICE etc is automatically “left wing”. Not true.
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.
Agreed. While I really value HN's commitment to not becoming Reddit, the intersection of politics and tech (and their effects on our lives) is indisputable. If we can't talk about the government's use of technology as a tool of the state without it being considered a 'hot button' topic - especially considering the relevance that politics have always had to 'hackers' - then this is really just a site for discussions about technology fluff.
If we can't talk about the government's use of technology
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).
The biggest example of this is on military stuff. You can literally post northrup grumman placed articles from military trade journals fawning over some new weapon system and that's fine, that's technology. But any comment about the applications of that technology, who it will be used on, by whom, for whose benefit, with what consequences, all of that is off limits. That's political.
I fully understand that this is a legitimate preference of a lot of people. But it is revolting.
You must also understand this is hacker news, not politics news. Sure, this may be a comfortable area for many users and one of the only forum/news sites they browse, but nonetheless it's not a politics site. I, for one, would rather not see politics on this site. If I want to partake in that discussion, I'll go elsewhere to a place more "built" for it
But the definition of what counts as "politics" is entirely arbitrary. A thread complaining about, say, homeless people in SF will remain just fine. We'd all be better off with meaningful guidelines.
I think my last paragraph addressed your position already?
in some cases you can't disentangle the two
Different caliber, but same thing happens with Grok.
New Grok release? Fun, exciting, let’s all talk about it.
Well-researched articles describing Grok’s alignment with far-right/white supremacist politics and clear evidence of Musk’s thumb on the scale? Nothing to see here, flag flag flag.
Oh look, it’s Grokipedia! Surely this will be a font of well-sourced information!
Sigh.
Something I've been trying to work out the last couple years is how much is this a nazi site now, that we are reputation laundering by continuing to participate here in good faith. These moderation policies may not have been intended to create this outcome but they have, and they are not being changed in light of that.
uh, found several mines :)
sometime I have the feeling having a username that ends with "xx" does not help much :)
I feel like if you are not making this page at least once or twice a year you are not trying hard enough to think outside "da box".