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It's ridiculous this is the top trending submission when the president fired the FBI director that was investigating his ties to Russia. If political stories ar

• paulddraper 10y ago
  (1) It's been known since forever that Trump and the FBI director didn't see eye to eye, and the former employs the latter. Still significant, just not surprising. (2) This story is tech related and way more on topic for HN then pure politics (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). I'm sure Reddit is having kittens, if politics is your thing.
  • bdrool 10y ago
    > It's been known for a long time that Trump and the FBI director didn't see eye to eye, and the former employs the latter. Still significant, just not surprising. The president firing the FBI director is huge news. The story is currently at the top of every single message board and news outlet except this one.
    • fphhotchips 10y ago
      Precisely why it doesn't need to be here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. (emphasis mine) Fact is that submission this is the sort of thing that could be interesting to the HN community and will probably get lost in the mainstream with news of Comey going. Comey going is huge news - there are other places to discuss it.
      • yeukhon 10y ago
        Disagree with this rule. This forum should not be a place for just showcasing freakin personal tech project only. Yesterday I read someone asking the community share how they spend their work day. One HNer said he works as a professional firefighter. Now I am not sure if he has done any programming or not but that's unexpected for a technical forum like this. I think technolgists like us have the same obligations as everyone else to particpate in civil matters professionally. We don't want to yell out the f word here but marking politics as off-topic is obsurd given privacy is a hot topic we almost never escape from politics. If neutrality has been covered on the news, dont't allow it. But hey I don't run HN so someone is going to tell me read ToS. HN should embrace submissions either directly or indirectly related to politics. I feel our tech leaders are so silent today to the White House so silent on Trumpcare. Where the heck are they?
        • chefandy 10y ago
          I come here specifically because it's not one of the million billion other places where all other stories get steamrolled by alt.gov.trumpdrama. I can think of two dozen places in less than 10 seconds where political news, analysis, and all of the related stone-throwing get top billing, and I utilize many of them regularly... my 1337 dev skills don't somehow make those political resources less useful to me. If there are government related stories with a technical bent, they do just fine here. Just because tech people have a civic duty to be aware of what's going on in the government doesn't mean that all tech communities should be political.
          • yeukhon 10y ago
            It's called finding people with similar interest. Knowing other technologists are interested in solving social issues isn't something we easy can get on othet sites which are overpopulated. HN is in a good size and the folks are mostly friendly and can the capacity to discuss professionally and openly. I am disappoited that many of the tech leaders don't speak out hard enough. If I were as powerful as they, I wouldn't stand back. The fact our Congress is a disgrace when it comes to passing the new health care bill, we shouldn't hold back. There is no reason to. Because while that bill may not hurt thousands of Google/facebook employees, it will have impacts on their users and many of their own employees' families.
  • throwaway5752 10y ago
    Who cares if they didn't see eye to eye. The FBI director was investigating his ties to Russia which could have been criminal. Close to a dozen FSB agents or people with ties to the agency died in suspicious circumstances after Steele's Trump dossier surfaced. Saying "the former employs the latter" grossly understates this - they serve 10 year as a compromise to prevent the accumulation of excess power (Hoover) but to insulate them from exactly this type of thing.
    • deleted 10y ago
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    • sbierwagen 10y ago
      The director of the FBI serves at the pleasure of the President, as evidenced by the fact the latter just fired the former. If you don't like that, then I suggest you work on passing a law preventing it. Obviously an employee of the President isn't going to police the President very effectively. Historically, that's what special prosecutors have been used for.
      • paulddraper 10y ago
        Yup. From a different branch of government.
    • moduspol 10y ago
      How many months or years must he remain employed for a witch hunt that likely will never end? The dossier had been unsubstantiated for months when it was first reported, and it's been months and it's still unsubstantiated. This despite the media being decisively against Trump and it being the juiciest imaginable story. It's time to move on.
• Spooky23 10y ago
  Why? This is a far more important story than Comey.
  • c0nducktr 10y ago
    Why do you feel this story is more important?
    • adamsea 10y ago
      Are you so politically uninformed you don't know the answer to your own question?
      • deleted 10y ago
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      • deleted 10y ago
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      • dang 10y ago
        This breaks the HN guidelines. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
    • Spooky23 10y ago
      Appointees serve at the pleasure of the appointing authority. Firing one is a story, but ultimately not earth shattering. The Census is something that is critically important to all sorts of "backend" processes in government. For example, your county probably apportions sales tax based on census figures. It's sort of like the criticality of the employment and inflation statistics from the Department of Labor. Many processes assume that these tasks are completed correctly and with integrity. When senior people like his who are cogs in the wheels of government resign at the prime of their careers, that means that something is broken or is about to be broken.
• sbierwagen 10y ago
  You can't downvote submissions. Some of the things that affect submission ranking is number of points, (increases) age, (decreases) and number of comments. Somewhat surprisingly, having more comments will penalize the ranking of a story, to push flamewars off the front page. This is to prevent HN from being Reddit, where r/all is a constant rolling flamewar. (The FBI submission has 5 times as many comments as this story, and has already fallen off the front page)
  • throwaway5752 10y ago
    1) It happened 3 hours ago, 2-3 hours after the story in this submission was filed; 2) You can flag submissions, though, and you can downvote comments - and both lower the story's rank; 3) You can also spam a story with critical/spammy comments to provoke downvotes, also pushing down its rank. Easy peasy.
    • mark-r 10y ago
      I managed to push a post off of the first page the other day, because my finger is too big for my phone - I clicked the Flag button instead of the actual link. I immediately clicked Unflag, but it took a while for the post to recover.
    • sbierwagen 10y ago
      1) Okay, so the comments penalty is especially strong. Sorry. 2) I don't think that downvoting a comment on a submission will affect that submission's ranking. If you leave a bunch of spurious flags the moderators will disable the flag feature on your account, though. (Happened to me) 3) Assuming a pool of colluding users, this would actually be a plausible attack-- except that HN's userbase is tiny, and the moderators are active. Voting rings show up easily, but I don't know if they're looking for "comment rings". An easy technical solution would be to ban users with "throwaway" in their name from commenting on submissions.
    • dang 10y ago
      Downvotes of comments don't lower stories.
• danielvf 10y ago
  Just an FYI - this story is as much, if not more, an IT story, than it is a political one. HN rightly favors discussing this.
  • ubernostrum 10y ago
    As I keep saying, "politics" is a subjective description. When people see something as personally relevant/interesting to them or affecting them or people like them, then it's fair game for HN. When people see something as personally not relevant to them or not affecting them or people like them, it's "politics". Which tells you some things about HN: the only way you get widespread agreement on what's "politics" and what isn't is by having a monoculture.
    • lucio 10y ago
      It seems to be that the criteria for HN posts is not "personally relevant/interesting to smbdy or affecting smbdy". The criteria is IT related or scientifically interesting.
      • yeukhon 10y ago
        Not true. Plently of submissions about books and arts.
• sergiotapia 10y ago
  Are you people _still_ driving the Russia narrative despite there being ZERO actual evidence? All of the news I've seen posted online are just opinion puff pieces and people having gut feelings. No tangibles.
  • foxylad 10y ago
    So "you people" who drove the Obama birth certificate narrative for ten years (not only with no evidence for, but concrete evidence against) are criticising a different set of "you people" for driving a narrative? And a narrative with a lot of clear evidence of Russians in the same place at the same time as Trump team members, and probably a lot of evidence that the FBI, CIA and NSA have but can't release... hardly ZERO (in caps!) evidence. I'm from New Zealand so I don't have a dog in this fight, but it stinks to high heaven. But both sets of "you people" should read this: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe http://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
  • dgllghr 10y ago
    Yes, because there are red flags and smoke. Not to mention known economic ties. We aren't driving a narrative, we are concerned for the state of the US.
• dang 10y ago
  Neither story is a good fit for HN. HN is for the gratification of intellectual curiosity, not the other more intense forms of curiosity (or gratification). Like most political stories, these fall out of HN's scope. > so trivially hackable That's a misunderstanding of how HN's system works. Hot political stories typically get tons of upvotes. That happens first. Then they get flagged and/or moderators penalize them. That's routine, and it's what happened to both of these submissions—the only difference was the several hours' gap between them.
  • throwaway5752 10y ago
    It's going to be a really hard summer trying to thread that needle. Having seen politics ruin plenty of good forums, though, I sympathize. Appreciate the consistency.
  • hackuser 10y ago
    There seems to be a wide variance in the way political stories are handled; for example, political issues not involving Trump seem more accepted. I suppose consistency in this matter isn't that important, except that it's a bit frustrating to spend time on comments or submissions that are (effectively) solicited, and then have them (effectively) discarded. It would be helpful if the standards were explained in a little more detail, perhaps in the Guidelines (so people can find them), so we know what to expect. As I said in another comment, I feel like I'm trying to reverse engineer your policies and intentions. While personally I wish there were more political issues discussed intelligently on HN - we shouldn't imagine that we live in an enclave safe from the very serious political situation - I will say that the recent discussions have been the most uninformative, valueless, wastes of my time that I've seen on HN in a long while. It's not hopeless; around the time of Trump's travel orders, for example, they seemed much better (and were allowed on the front page).
    • dang 10y ago
      A lot of this is probably random. The system has a wide range of fluctuation, and trying to pin that down, clean it up, or make it consistent would likely just generate more noise.