4 ms·

So to clarify - this sort of political story is okay, but increased white nationalist group activity, Russian interference in 2016 election, and forced separati

So to clarify - this sort of political story is okay, but increased white nationalist group activity, Russian interference in 2016 election, and forced separation of migrant families seeking asylum are not? It's a bit hard to figure out the editorial stance on HN lately. edit: this seems off the front page, which answers my (not hypothetical or sarcastically intended) question.

nerdponx 8y ago
It's at least partly a commentary on black box machine learning, so I can see the additional relevance. But really that's a stretch, and I think all of the above are relevant for "hackers" as long as they don't flood the front page.
- travistravel 8y ago
  Yeah, it's just unnacountable violence wreaked with help of high technology. HN is more for, say, a technical article about reverse engineering details of an old game, and 50 comments saying "I fondly remember playing that game". A real hacker would still not care about this when they themselves end up on a kill list, because politics, the air we breathe, and other things are just totally for lamers.
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  The Russian campaign is a hacker goldmine. AI/human force multiplication for mass social media influence campaigns, hacking social systems, data sovereignty and use of social media metadata...
beaconstudios 8y ago
My understanding is its based on how much it will divide the HN community, causing flame wars and unproductive conversation. Pretty much everyone agrees that US citizens shouldn't be hit by drone strikes.
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  Really? Because in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki I think it's much more of a gray area. edit: agree entirely that the case in the article (Bilal Abdul Kareem) is no gray area. The difficulties interleaving points about the generality of a topic and specific cases.
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    potentially, sure, but I was more referring to the current article. There's no indication that the guy is actually a terrorist in this case.
freehunter 8y ago
I don't think it's an editorial stance any more than deleting articles about Microsoft and keeping the ones about Apple and Google is an editorial stance: HN has a long-standing policy that if a thread becomes hostile and devolves into a flamewar, it's removed from the front page. Unfortunately, any thread about Microsoft quickly devolves into a flamewar. Similarly, any thread about politics, especially one that can be brigaded from other places, will quickly turn into a flamewar. It's not that dang (et al) remove just because they want to, they remove because it becomes toxic. They stay up and in place long enough to know that.
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  Perhaps. It is a shame because it prevents topics of interest from being discussed here when a vocal minority of accounts objects loudly. Someone mentioned the Overton window elsewhere, and this is such a clear example of gaming it.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    If you don't need the moderation, turn on showdead and visit https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active instead of the frontpage.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Yes because dropping bombs based on metadata and AI inferences is at least tangentially connected to tech.
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  Sure. But but those other topics get flagged immediately, and I could make a case they are equally connected. Migrant family separation could be solved by quick genetic testing/facial recognition. The Russian 2016 election story is a tech story. And the current research on the nature of extremism is an addiction story, and the nature of the coordination of those groups (cryptocurrency, tor) and some work against them (NLP, AI driven social campaigns) is just as related. edit: I'm 100% opposed to migrant family separation and think it's vile. I'm talking about how to reunite those families.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    > Migrant family separation could be solved by quick genetic testing/facial recognition The separation of families is an intentionally punitive tactic and could be "solved" by not doing it in the first place.
  - fenwick67 8y ago
    > Migrant family separation could be solved by quick genetic testing/facial recognition If your definition of "solving" this is "figuring out where we put these people's kids", simple pen and paper bookkeeping would have fixed that.
matt4077 8y ago
I always enjoy HN discussions on non-technical topics, because the community here is far better (and slightly different) than others. Which isn't that difficult considering the state of online comments in general, but still... HN (and the tech community) has a libertarian streak, in addition to being somewhat left-of-center. Stories like this tend to unite these fundamentally opposing constituencies, resulting in more substantive discussions than other political topics. It also helps that the story is fundamentally non-partisan, in that both major US parties can be blamed for the situation. I still consider it a blemish on HN's conscience, and a failure of HN leadership's responsibility to the community, that topics where this community is in a prime position to actually affect change tend to bring out the worst in (some) people and have in effect been banned to keep the peace. I'm not just speaking of "diversity in tech", where I can somewhat see how it has the potential of instilling fear in those traditionally profiting from discrimination. There, I can at least understand the mechanism at work, even though I consider it logically flawed. But even summoning all my powers to understand opposing viewpoints I cannot fathom why this community reacts as dismissive as it does to, for example, stories (and projects / algorithms / ...) of algorithmic discrimination in machine learning. It would seem to be a topic that's both interesting from a technological and scientific standpoint, as well as welcome to everyone working in the space and presumably preferring not to do harm vs the opposite. My best explanation is that there is a fundamental disgust in the tech community now of everything coming from, or even associated with, the social sciences. My second-best explanation is that tech has taken a sharp right turn at some point in the last 15 years, which would also explain why I remember only united opposition against software patents, and support for open source, from the first slashdot discussions I read. Whereas today, I see lots of sympathy for software patents in HN threats, and Open Source (and especially the GPL) are often spoken of with disgust.
pandasun 8y ago
>migrant families seeking asylum. If you're referring to the current news headlines: those do not involve asylum seekers, that's not what asylum means. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/asylum https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/asylum
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
fsloth 8y ago
I would say how interesting this topic is from the point of view how much it resembles literary classics like Catch-22 and Kafka's writings, overrides the 'no politics' rule. I.e. first rule is to submit something interesting, the second is to avoid politics, but, apparently if the topic is interesting enough politics can be included. The examples you list are the regular kind of political turmoil. This drone thing, given how far spread it is, on the other hand chips away at the fundamentals of why western societies managed to generate so much added value in the past centuries. Consistent rule of law and functioning judicial system were one of them. Having some black ops teams on ground violating basic human rights is not as bad as having an automated kill system that picks of targets based on metadata and then forwards that to drone targeting team as a daily standard policy. To add to that, there is the generic humanistic cry for basic human rights. After this auto-kill thing with the drones the ground on which to argument for any sort of generic human rights quickly becomes really fragile, getting all sorts of exceptions like, well, geneva convention was written when thinking about white people only and besides, the old school democratic process gave equal rights only if you were a male and ranked among the landed gentry or higher. To be blunt: it appears as if brown people in far away countries still in 21st century are not considered as important as people of... other complexion... so it's ok to kill them every which way is more convenient.

nerdponx 8y ago

It's at least partly a commentary on black box machine learning, so I can see the additional relevance. But really that's a stretch, and I think all of the above are relevant for "hackers" as long as they don't flood the front page.

travistravel 8y ago
Yeah, it's just unnacountable violence wreaked with help of high technology. HN is more for, say, a technical article about reverse engineering details of an old game, and 50 comments saying "I fondly remember playing that game". A real hacker would still not care about this when they themselves end up on a kill list, because politics, the air we breathe, and other things are just totally for lamers.
throwaway5752 8y ago
The Russian campaign is a hacker goldmine. AI/human force multiplication for mass social media influence campaigns, hacking social systems, data sovereignty and use of social media metadata...

beaconstudios 8y ago

My understanding is its based on how much it will divide the HN community, causing flame wars and unproductive conversation. Pretty much everyone agrees that US citizens shouldn't be hit by drone strikes.

throwaway5752 8y ago
Really? Because in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki I think it's much more of a gray area. edit: agree entirely that the case in the article (Bilal Abdul Kareem) is no gray area. The difficulties interleaving points about the generality of a topic and specific cases.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  potentially, sure, but I was more referring to the current article. There's no indication that the guy is actually a terrorist in this case.

freehunter 8y ago

I don't think it's an editorial stance any more than deleting articles about Microsoft and keeping the ones about Apple and Google is an editorial stance: HN has a long-standing policy that if a thread becomes hostile and devolves into a flamewar, it's removed from the front page. Unfortunately, any thread about Microsoft quickly devolves into a flamewar. Similarly, any thread about politics, especially one that can be brigaded from other places, will quickly turn into a flamewar. It's not that dang (et al) remove just because they want to, they remove because it becomes toxic. They stay up and in place long enough to know that.

throwaway5752 8y ago
Perhaps. It is a shame because it prevents topics of interest from being discussed here when a vocal minority of accounts objects loudly. Someone mentioned the Overton window elsewhere, and this is such a clear example of gaming it.
- yorwba 8y ago
  If you don't need the moderation, turn on showdead and visit https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active instead of the frontpage.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

Yes because dropping bombs based on metadata and AI inferences is at least tangentially connected to tech.

throwaway5752 8y ago
Sure. But but those other topics get flagged immediately, and I could make a case they are equally connected. Migrant family separation could be solved by quick genetic testing/facial recognition. The Russian 2016 election story is a tech story. And the current research on the nature of extremism is an addiction story, and the nature of the coordination of those groups (cryptocurrency, tor) and some work against them (NLP, AI driven social campaigns) is just as related. edit: I'm 100% opposed to migrant family separation and think it's vile. I'm talking about how to reunite those families.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > Migrant family separation could be solved by quick genetic testing/facial recognition The separation of families is an intentionally punitive tactic and could be "solved" by not doing it in the first place.
- fenwick67 8y ago
  > Migrant family separation could be solved by quick genetic testing/facial recognition If your definition of "solving" this is "figuring out where we put these people's kids", simple pen and paper bookkeeping would have fixed that.

matt4077 8y ago

I always enjoy HN discussions on non-technical topics, because the community here is far better (and slightly different) than others. Which isn't that difficult considering the state of online comments in general, but still... HN (and the tech community) has a libertarian streak, in addition to being somewhat left-of-center. Stories like this tend to unite these fundamentally opposing constituencies, resulting in more substantive discussions than other political topics. It also helps that the story is fundamentally non-partisan, in that both major US parties can be blamed for the situation. I still consider it a blemish on HN's conscience, and a failure of HN leadership's responsibility to the community, that topics where this community is in a prime position to actually affect change tend to bring out the worst in (some) people and have in effect been banned to keep the peace. I'm not just speaking of "diversity in tech", where I can somewhat see how it has the potential of instilling fear in those traditionally profiting from discrimination. There, I can at least understand the mechanism at work, even though I consider it logically flawed. But even summoning all my powers to understand opposing viewpoints I cannot fathom why this community reacts as dismissive as it does to, for example, stories (and projects / algorithms / ...) of algorithmic discrimination in machine learning. It would seem to be a topic that's both interesting from a technological and scientific standpoint, as well as welcome to everyone working in the space and presumably preferring not to do harm vs the opposite. My best explanation is that there is a fundamental disgust in the tech community now of everything coming from, or even associated with, the social sciences. My second-best explanation is that tech has taken a sharp right turn at some point in the last 15 years, which would also explain why I remember only united opposition against software patents, and support for open source, from the first slashdot discussions I read. Whereas today, I see lots of sympathy for software patents in HN threats, and Open Source (and especially the GPL) are often spoken of with disgust.

pandasun 8y ago

>migrant families seeking asylum. If you're referring to the current news headlines: those do not involve asylum seekers, that's not what asylum means. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/asylum https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/asylum

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

fsloth 8y ago

I would say how interesting this topic is from the point of view how much it resembles literary classics like Catch-22 and Kafka's writings, overrides the 'no politics' rule. I.e. first rule is to submit something interesting, the second is to avoid politics, but, apparently if the topic is interesting enough politics can be included. The examples you list are the regular kind of political turmoil. This drone thing, given how far spread it is, on the other hand chips away at the fundamentals of why western societies managed to generate so much added value in the past centuries. Consistent rule of law and functioning judicial system were one of them. Having some black ops teams on ground violating basic human rights is not as bad as having an automated kill system that picks of targets based on metadata and then forwards that to drone targeting team as a daily standard policy. To add to that, there is the generic humanistic cry for basic human rights. After this auto-kill thing with the drones the ground on which to argument for any sort of generic human rights quickly becomes really fragile, getting all sorts of exceptions like, well, geneva convention was written when thinking about white people only and besides, the old school democratic process gave equal rights only if you were a male and ranked among the landed gentry or higher. To be blunt: it appears as if brown people in far away countries still in 21st century are not considered as important as people of... other complexion... so it's ok to kill them every which way is more convenient.