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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

We changed the URL from https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab..., which is one of those annoying links that downloads a file, and the title from "Postmortem in finance: How Credit Suisse lost $6B [pdf]", which was editorialized. (Please read the site guidelines! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

A user suggested the Levine article as a better alternative, so we'll use that for now. If anyone knows a better URL, we can change it again.

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A little hopefully constructive feedback:

1. The original link was to the source, which I would think would take precedence over a second-party review of it, even a skilled one like Levine's.

2. The source's actual title is "Credit Suisse Group Special Committee Of The Board of Directors Report On Archegos Capital Management". The editorizialized title ""Postmortem in finance: How Credit Suisse lost $6B [pdf]" isn't bad, includes a [pdf] warning, and is more descriptive of the content for anyone not aware that Archegos lost $6b of CS's capital. And how they lost it is certainly interesting.

3. Maybe if you change a post link from the original source, also link the source back in the comments. Levine includes it in his article below the fold [1][2], at least, but that might not always be the case. Lots of web writers these days like to write about reports and studies without actually linking to it.

[1]:https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us-news/en/articles/medi...

[2]:https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...

> Maybe if you change a post link from the original source, also link the source back in the comments

The originally posted link is in my GP comment, no?

> 1. The original link was to the source, which I would think would take precedence over a second-party review of it, even a skilled one like Levine's.

A 170 page report isn't a really useful thing to drop on anyone especially if they don't already know what's happening. This article has a good summary of what happened and includes a link to the report if you want to see it.

Yeah, I hate to be pedantic, but there seems to be some disconnect with the actual HN guidelines here:

> Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Perhaps this rule needs a refreshment?

I agree with dang that the Bloomberg article is more useful than the report itself, but the moderation action does not seem to be in line with the actual guidelines.

Why do you change URLs instead of submitting the one you like instead as a regular user and let upvotes decide? I appreciate and am thankful to the effort you put into moderating HN, but the user did not submit this URL and changing it from under them is super weird, even with a comment explaining it. Not only that you changed it to a paywalled link which is simply bad form.

Once a story is on the front page, it's in a completely different category than the /newest page, so we can't just "let upvotes decide". Even when there's a strictly better URL, by far the most likely outcome is that it would languish unnoticed on /newest. If it did get noticed and lead to a front page discussion, we'd then have the problem of two separate front page discussions (i.e. dupes). The upshot is that improving the URL (hopefully it's an improvement!) on an existing front page post is one of the important things that mods do here.

"Changing [the url] from under them" is standard moderation practice on HN - we do that every day. Ditto for titles. So I'm not sure it counts as "super weird"?

The paywall issue is orthogonal to this one. If there is a workaround, a paywalled URL is ok. If there is no workaround, it's not ok, no matter how "good" the URL is.

It was weird to find out that it's done in the first place! I didn't know moderation took a post that hits front page to become HN's more than the author but can see now how it makes sense. Thanks for answering and for keeping a great community going for so long!

HTML version of the original PDF: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001159510/000137036...

The new URL (at bloomberg) seems to be paywalled. Is there an alternative link?

you can usually get one read out of it through incognito/private

Sorry - it's not always easy to predict what is paywalled where.

How is a browser downloading an html file any different than requesting a PDF other than size? If anything it's useful to be able to pop it over into the Documents app and read later.

I guess it's not responsive but to be honest that's a feature not a bug lol. I guess the editorial concern is the bigger issue.

    $ curl -SsfI https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/about-us/investor-relations/financial-disclosures/results/csg-special-committee-bod-report-archegos.pdf | grep -i disposition
    content-disposition: attachment

"Downloading" here means that it sends something to your downloads folder and doesn't participate in the normal browser UI. When I use a browser, I generally expect to use its UI. If it transferred a PDF but showed it in the normal UI (colloquially not referred to as "downloading," although yes, it still is an inbound transfer of data), it'd be less annoying.

geofft has it - I wasn't saying pdfs were annoying, but rather that it's annoying to click on a pdf (or html or anything else) and have it save something to my hard drive rather than displaying the damn thing. First, I want to see it, not save it; and second, I want to decide for myself what to save locally. Anyhow, no big deal! just a pet peeve

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