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

Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds

https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/

Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source

https://futurism.com/sam-altman-energy-breakthrough

Avoid Async Rust at All Cost

https://blog.hugpoint.tech/avoid_async_rust.html

(Perhaps that last one could be renamed to be less hyperbolic, but the content was still an interesting opinion piece)

I don't think this is being done by the mods, by the way. It's more likely some spam filter with false positives, report brigading, or an anti upvote ring mechanism.

That told me all I needed to know about the moderation of this site.

Thankfully someone captured a screenshot: https://merveilles.town/@cancel/111834048502040552

Really? A NASA report, on the official .gov site? Maybe the comments were horrible but that seems right in the middle of what HN is interested in.

It's pretty clear to me that any online forum needs good moderation to be healthy long term. HN has been good about this with a strong community providing upvotes/downvotes and a moderation team that seems pretty light handed but not afraid to say no when necessary. Please keep doing what you're doing.

However, I do see a few decent posts in this list that probably warrant a second chance.

Another way to look at this is that the mods have the same biases you do. Depending on how you’re feeling on a given day, you could call that an echo chamber.

plural ?

Meaning if someone were to theoretically get a real time feed of HN submissions, and flagged articles that they didn't want seen as well as messaging a group of friends to do the same thing. Do you have protections for this type of behavior that would prevent this person from having undue influence on what can and cannot have a chance at being seen by others?

What kinds of user flags are there and why are they not public? People should know. Shadowbanning belongs in the 2010s.

How can he/we verify it's wrong? The down-weighting you describe is not visible to users. Even OP won't know.

You can say that down-weighting happens, but we're asking to see where down-weighting happens.

It's also why I don't like the "free speech at all costs" meme that gets thrown around when $corporation bans $person_i_like. Every community needs moderation and it's often a thankless job that feels like nothing is being done at all when it's being done right.

For sure many are. This happens with every Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) and LLMs are way beyond a MOT [1]. The hivemind tires of repetition extremely quickly [2]. The trick is to try to separate wheat from chaff, where 'wheat' means the stories that bring Significant New Information (SNI) [3] and 'chaff' means the follow-up and copycat stories, which are legion [4].

It's important to understand are that there's a wide spectrum of opinion about this stuff. If you imagine a slider with "allow zero posts about $TOPIC" at one end, and "allow all posts about $TOPIC" at the other end, pretty much every user would slide it to a different position. This is true for every $TOPIC and especially for the biggest ones.

Frontpage space is the scarcest resource HN has [5] and every reader has a different 'signature' of preferences that they would like to see (or not see) there. This means not only that it's impossible to satisfy everybody, but that it's impossible to fully satisfy anybody—because nobody's 'signature' is perfectly matched on the front page, and (lest any of you be thinking of this quick riposte) certainly not the mods'!

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I am the biggest local ML advocate you will find. My 3090 is either running Yi 34B queries or other experiments all day, my job is with local LLMS... But I am totally OK with heavy handed AI-related moderation. I dont want the sea of AI grifters to have a single second on the HN front page.

Does the source code include moderating tools, or is it just a bare bones aggregator with a default ranking algo?

> We didn't flag the post; users did. When it comes to submissions, that's nearly always the case - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39169622

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

IMO this happens because fundamentally people have "The reddit mental model" about how moderation works here, as if moderation is some privileged, limited position. It's just wrong.

Yes, there is dang, the single admin who posts publicly, and I guess it's possible/probable there are other HN admins who assist him. But 99.9% of the time when I hear people complaining about "the mods" or "power tripping mods" or "censorship", it's basically that other users saw what you had to say, and we just don't want to see it here.

It's also weird that occasionally people think there is some sort of "rule" about what can be flagged. There are obviously guidelines, but as this power is held by any normal user, it's basically whatever they want it to mean. For example, I frequently flag stories where I think the topic and article is totally valid, but where every single time I've seen the topic debated on HN it becomes a useless flamewar or is filled with the lowest quality commentary. At least for me, flagging isn't a value judgment on the "worthiness" of an article, it's simply about stuff I don't want to see on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055

Looks like you should? Is https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re... wrong? You need to be on a comment's page; click its timestamp to get there.

If it gets algorithmically deranked for user flags, but but not hidden, is that explicit?

I assume "explicit" means manual moderator intervention, but I don't really see anything that suggests that.

Perhaps in TX you don't realize it, but it's a big national story, implicating the Constitution, federal authority, even the Civil War.

It's political, for sure; but it's not local.

(1) if the top comment is indignantly rhetorical or generic, downweight it; otherwise go look at another thread;

(2) refresh the page;

(3) goto (1).

If I'm feeling diligent, I might do this for the top few subthreads, but that's about it.

This simple intervention turns out to be the highest-leverage thing we've figured out in recent years:

ttps://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20highest%20leverage&sort=byDate&type=comment

Half the comments on Reddit really do seem to be made by bots, you can easily tell when you look at their post history.

So what did you learn ??

If you see examples you're welcome to ask us at hn@ycombinator.com.

It's interesting to see the comments sometimes, but since part of the reason these things get removed is because of the flamewar detector, I feel like I can't be that surprised or edified when I open the bag labeled "manure" to find it is full of shit.

If there are specific examples I haven't addressed yet, post links and I'll take a look!

He could have phrased it a little better but the people calling for his removal from YC are just plain silly.

This is just another way of saying that a critical numeric threshold of users didn't like something. Framing the opinions/actions of groups of people on the internet as conspiring or dog-piling is a fallacy. E.g. if a person Tweets something that a million people read and a hundred of them reply to disagree, you'll often see that person follow up with something like, "wow, now all these people are attacking me", even though everybody acted in complete isolation and did nothing strange or harmful individually. Nobody rang a bell in the town square and handed out pitchforks. The internet breaks human psychology.

1. "Breathing 101" is an uninformative headline. I correctly guessed that it was literally referring to the human act of breathing, but it's still a bad title (I know it's not your title, and that HN encourages using the original source's title; it just sucks).

2. You submitted the link with no comment or context about what the article was or why it might be interesting. If a headline grabs my eye, I always click on the "N comments" link and the article link to open two tabs, and I look for additional descriptive text from the submitter, or a comment from them about what they found interesting. Sometimes I read the actual article first, but if the title is ambiguous or the topic is contentious, I'll usually start with the comments tab and see if I'm going to be wasting my time before I read an article. This alone wouldn't be a reason to downvote, but if I was leaning that way, it would factor in.

3. The word "wellness" in the link's domain is a huge red flag. To me it means "this is going to be a bunch of hippie crap". Not a primary factor, but seeing that would be enough to make me dig farther and find evidence so that I could Angry Downvote something I don't want to see on HN ever, if we could downvote. Yes, this is petty.

4. The very top of the linked article says "Click here to make an appointment". This indicates spam.

5. The article is just bad. There's not much information. It's not scientific. It touches lightly on some potentially interesting things but doesn't dive into them at all, or link to better sources, and it ends with what appears to be advice and encouragement to incorporate breathing exercises, but without much information about how or what the benefit is.

It looks like spam. It's the kind of clickbait that floods my Facebook feed.

source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172045

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

You may or may not agree with the conclusions of the post, but its a technical topic with at least some specific exploration of the (performance/code writing) issues, that links to quite a few further topics for exploration.

https://blog.hugpoint.tech/avoid_async_rust.html

That said, I noted more than a few typos in the article, so I wonder if there is generally a spell check filter for article quality.

https://trunk.io/blog/git-commit-messages-are-useless

I also found this one interesting. I don't agree with the article, but its an interesting viewpoint and I learned a bit about what some people are doing with git. I couldn't tell you why it dropped (unpopular)?

Which is where its possible that this (new) tool falls short, it can't actually tell what was censored, just what wasn't popular.

Unpopular things sometimes are so because they fly in the face of conventional wisdom, but aren't actually wrong or invaluable, which might be the real value of this tool.

Unfortunately those stories often turn into flamewars. That's probably why people are flagging them.

I don't think it's wise to draw so many inferences about why people vote the way they do. Frequently I see comments where someone makes a reasonable point, but also drops a bunch of flamebait, and when they're inevitably flagged they edit their comment to claim that the flags prove their point and that the problem who disagree with them are overly sensitive and censorious. But in reality a lot of the people flagging them probably agree with them, but don't want them to start a flamewars. I flag a lot of comments like that, even when I am agree with their overall point. (I actually did that with a comment just now.)

It's a form of self fulfilling prophecy and further entrenches you into your position, which is antithetical to curious discussion.

Lots of Musk stuff, including positive stuff, on the front page. Yesterday there was a story about petabytes of data on the Starlink laser network, based only on Starlink PR afaict.

It would be ultra-cool to have rough topic filters here, so I could just go to settings and hit a checkbox to ignore all the LLM-this and AI-that articles. Easier said than done, I'm sure.

And then you get those of us who are simultaneously left-of-left and right-of-right...

Replace "HN users" with "most HN users" (it's common to use general language when one's intention is to point out a trend in a population) and, as another person tired of AI/LLM news, I would also be surprised given how much popularity (upvotes, comments) HN users tended to give to those stories.

The subthread your comment generated here already answers your question. (<-- not a criticism! just an observation.) People are flaming each other about the inverse square law, droplets vs. aerosols, who is refusing to face reality, and sundry other nastinesses in the comments below. It demonstrates what a shitshow a frontpage thread would have been.

It's not that the topic itself is "untouchable". HN had quite a few threads about the lab leak hypothesis for example. But these things are sensitive to initial conditions, and something about the way that headline frames the story feels doomed to me, from an HN point of view. The good stuff for HN is substantive, thoughtful conversation driven by intellectual curiosity. That's what the site is for. We don't always get there by any means, but I only want to turn off user flags when the odds give us a fighting chance. I remember seeing that story get flagged and thinking: it'll never work.

Another aspect of this: like it or not, curiosity and repetition have an inverse relationship. After the mind has been hammered with the same hammer enough times, curiosity gets sick of it and goes "ugh, not that again". That means that on a topic like all-things-covid, which we all got hammered with, the majority of the audience, who don't care that much, check out at first mention of the topic. Who does that leave? The ones whose motive is more intense than mere curiosity.

From an HN point of view, that's a ticket to hell. Curiosity can only operate within a certain range of nervous system activation. If the needle sinks too low, the topic is 'bleh' and nobody cares; but if the needle goes into the red, people will care—my god will they care—but they'll no longer be functioning out of curiosity. That's a failure mode for HN.

When it comes to divisive, heavily-covered topics like that one, the thing to watch for is some kind of interesting new information that isn't entirely reducible to existing battle lines. The same forces driving the thread into flamewar will still be present—but at least you'll have some current running the other way.

1. I think for anyone that has been on HN throughout pandemic knows it is extremely unlikely for topics like this to produce any sort of valuable discussion. I almost never see any sort of humility on the topic (to be clear, from many/all sides) that admits that people (individuals, experts, literally everyone) were doing what they thought best with the information they had available at the time. It always devolves into portraying the other side as evil. I'm tired of it, I don't want to see it on HN, there are literally pages and pages and pages of place on the Internet where you can have that debate if you're so inclined.

2. Are you honestly purporting that specific article is well tailored to "an overwhelmingly science-minded audience", as opposed to just having a particular political axe to grind, given the title is "Anthony Fauci Fesses Up"? Honestly, if the article was written with an intent to encourage an actual understanding about where the 6-foot rule came from, and about whether the evidence for it was lacking, I probably wouldn't have flagged it.

> it bothers me that an important topic like that is deemed untouchable.

I think the mistake you are making there is thinking because a particular article is flagged by a lot of users that "an important topic like that is deemed untouchable." I can't speak for others, but for me that is absolutely not what I think, and it's not why I flagged this particular submission.

If you demand precise scientific rigor in all aspects of everyday life, public health is probably not the career field for you.

Like someone above pointed out, a rule of moderation on HN literally is, that stories about HN or ycombinator companies itself are moderated less [0].

[0] - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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