Comment by milesrout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by milesrout | Hacker News Reader

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I don't see how this kind of story is on-topic for HN. Yes, we all appreciate that HN is more than just a website for discussing garbage collection algorithms, graph algorithms, javascript frameworks, etc (i.e. computer science and programming) but isn't it meant to be about things that hackers would find interesting by virtue of being hackers?

My understanding of that broader topicality was that it was intended to capture things like science news ("Feynman's lectures have been published online for free" or "The Higgs Boson has been confirmed"), interesting posts and articles of other kinds (e.g. that series of posts of horror stories about dangerous chemical compounds - "why I will never work with supernitroglycerin" etc) and occasionally general news stories of such significance that ANYONE would want to discuss them (eg. Russian troops have invaded Ukraine).

That isn't what I am seeing here. There is now almost always general American political "news" on the front page. It isn't particularly newsworthy. It feels like the only reason it is here is that people here don't have anywhere else to discuss it because HN is one of the few decent forums left on the Web. But that doesn't make it on-topic, surely?

I often see you remove flags from posts. What's the point of having the flagging mechanism if you just remove them when people complain? You say there's interesting new information, but is everything that is interesting on-topic? Or is the test narrower: it should be interesting to hackers by virtue of their being hackers. I am sure this is interesting to many hackers that are also US political junkies (which I mean in a neutral way) but not because they are hackers.

Do you see what I mean?

This is a (very) well-explored issue on HN and the solution we arrived at has been stable for many years: most stories about politics are off topic, as the guidelines say (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but some stories with political overlap are on topic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

Here are a couple recent posts to look at if you (or anyone) want to understand the principles by which we decide which ones get to count as "on topic":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011

If you read those and follow the links there, and still have a question I haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

> What's the point of having the flagging mechanism if you just remove them when people complain?

I made precisely the same point a few minutes ago! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993906

The answer is that we don't "just remove them when people complain". We only remove them sometimes, when doing so seems in keeping with the principles by which we moderate HN.

I don’t know how many flags it takes to flag kill a whole article, but the threshold for comments is two or three flags. It doesn’t take a lot of people to kill an entire topic of discussion by flagging related articles, especially for users who only peruse the front page. Brigading on this site is almost trivial.

Dang’s anti-flagging mechanism is the human factor that balances that very blunt automated system. People don’t seem to vouch for articles as much as for comments.

I don't see how this isn't hacker news: "What is the technical education of the teenager with security clearance to the network of the org that is responsible for nukes"

That sounds *literallyf like the plot for any 80s hacker movie out there. You know, when hacking was political and hackers were people interested in undermining structures of authority and bending the rules.

That is the origin of hacking, and as such it is totally in order to discuss such topics here, IMO.

I'd rather read stuff like this than another CEOs musings that are entirely marketing and make believe (cue Sam Altman). Just because it affirms billionairs viewpoints of the status quo doesn't make it apolitical. If it feels apolitical to you that probably says something about your political biases.

I mean hacker in the proper sense not in the colloquial/black hat sense.

I agree that content marketing posts are not the best but they can be interesting despite the underlying motivation for the posts being marketing instead of curiosity. Sometimes the result is interesting regardless. Removing content marketing means having to try to guess the motivations of authors which is fraught. Yeah sometimes it is obvious but not always.

Oh, so the CCC aren't "proper" hackers now? Where can I see that memo?

https://media.ccc.de/

Lots of political stuff, in context most importantly https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-correctiv-recherche-geheimplan-g...

Whereas any old thing that "might be interesting" is fine when it comes from a rich person? Make a poll at the CCC, or Defcon, about the value of such posts, I'd be very curious.

This site is called hacker news… the article is news about hackers

Ignoring the US politics angle, would this post have been flagged? It's Brian Krebs, back after being DDoSed yet again, reporting on hackers hacking. doxing and swatting people. hacking. That's not of interest on hacker news? If, then, the subject without the political angle, would have been of interest here, then why does adding, yes, a highly contentious topic on top of that, make it of less interest to the community?

The answer is repetition - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 for a longer comment in that vein.

Basically, how interesting a story is varies with its position in the sequence of related stories.

I think the fact that we keep hearing about DOGE grey-area accessing of computer systems run by the US government and not about whatever else the Trump administration is currently doing is pretty good evidence that HN maintains a bias towards stories of interest to hackers. Like it or not, I think most of the hackers here are also US citizens.

> It isn't particularly newsworthy.

I disagree. Krebsonsecurity has regularly delivered HN salient and interesting frontpage material, and this is currently the most flagged submission they've ever had on HN. We've discussed security assessments very similar to this in the past, even political ones, with technical curiosity and good faith discussion. The constraining factor is now people who unconditionally idolize Elon Musk. It's easy to see who's in the wrong when flagging relevant, well-written and objective reports like this one.

My personal view is that HN shouldn't promote political content at all. It should just be moderated out or flagged with no opportunity for recourse, whether it's Syrian independence or the invasion of Ukraine. But I abide by the exceptions made in HN's guidelines and consider this a technically imperative article that most can tune out if they dislike. It's very easy to see the title and decide for yourself whether you're comfortable reading and discussing the article.

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